Hit the Lights

This entry is part 22 of 29 in the series Conversari

 

As long as the lights
stay on, we’re stuck.
You can’t sprout wings
or rake me with sudden claws.
I can’t turn into
a storm-tossed tree
or an otter slippery as sin.

In the light, we are
smaller than life.
Our cries are nothing
but failed words
& our sighs & gasps
might just as well
have been emitted by some
tired engine.

Light always wants
to pin us down,
to make nakedness into
a mere absence of clothes,
a sleight-of-hand devoid
of actual magic.
It strands us
in our separate flesh.

Hit the lights
& let’s get out of
this walled garden!
Let our bodies return
to their original habitat.
There’s a rusty gate
at the end of the path,
& the whole dark forest
just beyond.


See Rachel’s photographic response, “At the junction.”

Visitations

This entry is part 20 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

 

Late afternoon, coming back from the store and planting three-dollar solar lights along the walk, we hear the night heron again from its nest in the tree: harsh, high-pitched squawks, yips almost like a feisty puppy’s at the end. We’ve seen four of them: skulking around our trash bin, or hanging around the fish pond in the neighbor’s yard. They bend their heads to the water, fluff out their wings, ripple them. And the river’s close— so we know they must forage for snails, small fish, fiddler crabs, along the shallows. Directly underneath where they roost, the pavement’s splattered grey and white like a Jackson Pollock. One of them comes so close, so suddenly, to the fence by the kitchen window— You look up and at first, there’s nothing there but the overgrown ivy; then one dark eye, glittering like a thieved ruby.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Goodreads

I finally got around to joining Goodreads, the social network for readers. If you’re a member, please send me a friend request. Here’s my author page.

Hard to say yet how I’ll use the site, but I don’t want to use it just to promote my own books. That would be really lame. So I’ve taken the time to add some favorite books to my virtual shelves there, identify a few favorite authors (some of whom, by sheer coincidence, also happen to be friends or fellow bloggers), and I hope to link to all my book reviews here at Via Negativa going forward. (It’s no longer a good idea to cross-post the full content of anything to multiple sites — the latest Google search algorithm penalizes that kind of behavior.)

I also imagine I’ll be using my Goodreads author blog from time to time to post stuff directly relating to the site or to my books. In fact, I have a post there now announcing that Breakdown: Banjo Poems is due out in September. As publication time nears, I’ll probably do a giveaway with a few of my 50 (!) free author’s copies. Pre-release book giveaways are apparently a pretty big deal at Goodreads, and they seem like a much cooler way to promote a new book than (for example) paying for an ad on the site.

Intro to Lit

Then there was the semester when it seemed nothing we read or wrote or did or said in class, could move this one student. He always sat at the end of the first row in a sprawl, arms crossed, feet thrust out so others filing in or out of the room would have to take care not to stumble over them. When called on, either he refused to speak, shrugged or mumbled Beats me or I thought we were reading another story today so I don’t know about that one, causing much eye-rolling among his cohorts in the room. Until the afternoon we were discussing Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and we had gotten to the part toward the end when Akaky, coming back from the office party, loses his overcoat to thugs on the bridge; and the months that follow, when the clerk languishes from illness in his poor rooms and dies. In the general discussion, this kid in class said, almost blasé— I don’t see what the big deal is: it’s just an overcoat— and something snapped in me. I can no longer remember exactly what I said, only that I flung words I’d hoped might— what? cut to the bone? move a stone? Perhaps I cast on lines about privilege or empathy, something about the way stories are knitted to real life. But in every new class, with every new student, he’s there and we are all Akaky’s ghost: the story’s his, the story’s ours, from its collar of cat fur down to its tailored hems. The casting-on, the fitting isn’t where it begins, but in some prior intention we don’t often know until we rip the parts back to the rib to see how the toothed patterns helix and grow.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Reading the Icelandic Sagas.

Reading the Icelandic Sagas

This entry is part 21 of 29 in the series Conversari

 

The difficult syllables clash
in my mouth. Your knitting
needles make short
work of the yarn,
like the dream-woman
who gave An Twig-Belly
his nickname, filling
his disemboweled gut
with a tangle of twigs
until his intestines could
be put back where
they belonged, in all
their tortuous windings.
We puzzle through
the genealogies, struggle
to picture the raw land
rising behind the words,
yet somehow these grim stories
bring us closer together.
Young men described
as promising will end up
wallowing in each other’s gore—
we know this.
Beautiful women will goad
their thin-skinned mates
into horrific acts.
A shepherd boy is smashed
against the ground so hard
his spine snaps, & two years
after his miraculous rescue
An Twig-Belly dies
a quick & needless death,
split by an unheroic sword.
You frown at your knitting
& decide it too needs
to be unraveled. I watch
the dark garment which was
to have been mine dissolve
in your expert fingers.
You smile.
I feel light as air.


See Rachel’s photographic response: “Seed.”

You will have to do things you have never done before

Recalculate the seasons. Rewrite The Farmer’s Almanac. Research new forms of lightning vanes for multi-forked strikes. High, thin and cold cover of cirrus clouds: find out how to thin them more. Falling sunlight, melting ice. The pull of gravity reaching deep into the bones. And yes, there are days when nothing seems to work, and I don’t know how to comfort you. I try to remember what my grandmother said about herbs and hallucinogenics: which leaves, when chewed, bring on a clammy sweat and which, when pounded into paste, lead one briefly to clear water in the middle of a lake. Lying beneath a black sky you might feel the tremors beginning again under the earth. It is a hundred degrees, close to midnight. A fig tree at the edge of the field has put forth a few small knobs of fruit. Swelling out like hips, not quite ripe yet; but how sadly erotic they are. Winds like knives slash at the topmost parts of trees. Months ago, most of the water found exit hatches. Silvery rivulets drained into the ground, leaving their dry calligraphy behind.

 

In response to small stone (110) and What the Night Horse Said.

Throttle Ghazal

This entry is part 19 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

 

In the heart of the downtown section, a stretch of cobblestone streets:
they stop motorists from gunning through them at full throttle.

Don’t put the cart before the horse, don’t jump from the frying
pan into the fire: in other words, don’t go at full throttle.

Who finds caution in the wind? Who gleans the stitches
from the timid rhyme? Not the young, going at full throttle.

In the school parking lot, I skirt the second speed bump when I can. They’re there
for a reason
, says the youngest daughter: to keep you from going full throttle.

On my bookshelf is a History of Doubt, filled with stories of ancient thinkers and
medieval cynics: anyone who might have said Not so fast, not at full throttle.

Who pays heed anymore? Three birds in succession thunk against the glass. Which
one is pursuer, which pursued? Danger and excitement. Dance at full throttle.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Pandora

This entry is part 20 of 29 in the series Conversari

 

for RR

Pandora was a doll with a plastic head
& a boneless fabric body full of give.
Her eyes were a smiling blue
you scraped with a thumbnail one day
to see what lay beneath: blank plastic.
Pandora was a doll with plastic arms
that could be bent into the semblance
of a hug. From a high perch
she watched the bears multiply
on the bed, expert listeners,
burly avatars of comfort. When
the circus master’s mad wife
came to give them all away
to charity, Pandora alone
with her hopeless eye was spared.
You wept until you couldn’t see
& wailed until your voice turned
to a whisper; the bears stayed gone.
Your sad box of a room
held only Pandora.


See Rachel’s response: “Eye (seeing, being)

These are the leaves we are hearing now

The kitchen boy comes out of the restaurant door, swinging a bag of trash. On the way to the dumpster he pauses under the crepe myrtles in full and premature flower, under the magnolias and their profusion of heavy blooms. It’s nearly midnight but the heat is thick as a double velvet drape in an old-time movie theatre, and the sounds of rasping in the trees are like instruments being tuned in the orchestra pit. The cooks have gone home, and the sushi chef. Only the waitresses are still inside. The security guard with the name of a crone comes out of his car and walks around the parking lot, peers into the lit windows of the sports store. The Pho restaurant’s been closed since nine; the sign in neon-colored chalk advertising their new bubble tea has muted to one shade: that of a rusty hinge. Hidden from view, a hundred forewings translating texture; tymbals rasping along the insect’s abdomen, to make the sound of the leaves we are hearing now.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Leaf wings.

Leaf wings

katydid wing
Pterophylla camellifolia

These are the leaves we are hearing now: a kind of dry crepitation. Shall we believe the old folk wisdom, that this means it’s only six weeks now until the first frost? The real leaves are already yellowing, some of them, but from drought rather than from any intimation of an early fall. The katydids stay green as April right up until they die sometime in November.

This “testy little dogmatist,” rendered familiar by the verses of Holmes, is one of the loudest and most persevering of our native musicians; silent and concealed among the leaves during the day, at night it mounts to the highest branches of the trees, where the male commences his sonorous call to the noiseless females. The sound is produced by the friction of the taborets in the triangular overlapping portion of each wing cover against each other, and is strengthened by the escape of air from the sacs of the body, reverberating so loudly as to be heard a quarter of a mile in a still night.

Thus the venerable American Cyclopedia from 1879. The referenced poem is Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “To an Insect,” which is fairly dreadful, managing to be sexist and factually incorrect at the same time:

Thou art a female, Katydid!
I know it by the trill
That quivers through thy piercing notes,
So petulant and shrill;
I think there is a knot of you
Beneath the hollow tree,—
A knot of spinster Katydids,—
Do Katydids drink tea?

Meanwhile, something with enormous, filmy wings has somehow made it through the screen and launches periodic assaults on my reading light, flopping awkwardly about and startling me each time. I think it might be a species of lacewing. It rests now on the yellow wall, and I notice that its wings, too, somewhat resemble leaves — the kind that have been eaten away by leaf miners until only the veins remain.