Salt Lick

Preserve a body in brine
and dry it in the sun.
Lay it alongside others
in a shallow basket
on a hot roof, or strung
like laundry on a line.
Keep an eye on the cat.
I am talking about fish,
of course. Be patient:
this may take a few
days; this too
involves transformation
—from scale and fin
in flashing water,
to leathery skin
crisped on a heated
pan. Afterwards,
avid again for what
it spurned, the mouth
turns to any source
of water.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Medicine.

The Continuance

“…I cannot tell

if I hunger, or am hungered for.” – seon joon

How can I take this light in both
my hands this morning, this skein
of cool air that doesn’t sting;

how can I fill this mouth
that stumbled, parched,
from seeming oasis

to oasis through the years?
The canopy beads with heathered
sound: small, tufted bodies

call to each other through the trees.
And I imagine they are sure the notes
will fall on their intended ear,

certain the vines that screen
the other from view will lift
with the next wind. And so I face

the window where the light looks
kind: is there to be an accounting?
There are so many more questions

I have not found answers for—
But what could it do with me now,
that it hasn’t done before?

 

In response to Morning Porch and thus: Devour.

The flaying of Marsyas

The Myriad Things:

One of the reasons this myth exerts a pull over me is that I cannot help but feel there are contemporary resonances not only of the myth itself, but also of the rhetoric that, since Plato, has surrounded it, a rhetoric that all too often translates naked brutality into the high-minded language of moral justification. I cannot help finding echoes of Plato’s ‘not at all strange’ when I hear government ministers announcing the latest cuts to services that are there to help those who need it most; and I cannot avoid seeing the same rhetoric at play as the gods of international monetary system sharpen their knives for austerity measures that strip away the livelihoods and hopes of ordinary people.

And it is the rhetoric that chills me most. It is one thing for Apollo to run rampant with his flaying-knife: but it is quite another to drown this out with the sweet, reasonable music of the god’s lyre, to cover over the brutality and the horror that comes from assigning others to ‘truth’ with soothing justifications. Sometimes when I listen to the news, it occurs to me that in those calm and reasonable debates, everybody is playing Apollo’s tune, whilst meanwhile—somewhere out of earshot—Marsyas is screaming in terrible agony.

Ad infinitum

This entry is part 8 of 31 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2013

 

Proverb: “If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.”

What if a covey of quail skitters into the marsh grass?

What if the spider weaves a ladder that spans the distance plus half?

What if the egg yolk rises and does not settle in the bowl of water?

What if the tree lowers its one fruit but I don’t want to eat it?

What if we made a crepe paper limousine and burned it down to ash,
but father insisted on walking all seven hills to the other side?

And what if the messenger was mistaken, and delivered
the letter to the wrong house? What then?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Hone

In those days we left doors open
with no thought to danger. Anyone
could wander in— the neighbors,

their children, chickens in the yard,
the woman who came by once a month
to ask if we had old newspapers

to sell. The boy who walked past
with tin pails of duck eggs or bean curd;
the man who repaired umbrellas and offered

to sharpen garden shears and kitchen knives.
When did we learn to let them in, answer
the door, but keep an eye open? I have

a drawer full of blades, gleaming,
not yet dulled from daily use— I cleave
the onion from its stalk, fillet gristle

from bone, gut gills from limp fish bodies.
Here are points that could whistle past your ear,
thread a swift line thin as a hair to the opposite wall.

 

In response to small stone (232).

Spring Evening

This entry is part 7 of 31 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2013

 

It’s raining again, and cold.
The herons we saw return to their nest
want their tree back, dry and green.
The neighbors cleaning ivy overgrowth
from their fence have long gone in.
But the hired girl stands in the yard
tying up leaf bags; she does not mind
the rain— Every so often she tips
her chin up, drinks from a can of soda.
.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.