~ after Octavio Paz, “Touch”
My fingers
search beneath your curtains of green,
your leaves broad enough to cover
our original immodesty.
My mouth
closes on your mouth,
dense with seeds and secrets.
All the distinct dialects of silence—
a mirror’s singular translation,
relay of ripples on a pond’s surface.
Voices delivered in static envelopes
as needles sang through cloth: women
whose fingers sewed bead after bead
on my blouse. Intricate blueprint
on a field dark as night, recipe they
never need rehearse. Whereas I
send my arms through each sleeve, stretch
hems across hips— fumble through syllables,
semaphores to spell out what I want most.
In response to Via Negativa: Farewell to London.
Farewell to London
I’m about to begin the long journey back to central Pennsylvania after three months abroad. This last week since our return from holiday in Cornwall has been full of outings with friends and last-minute visits to things we’d meant to see all summer. But I promise some more photos and travel posts after I get settled in at home. My other home, that is.
I’m wondering what I’ll miss most about London, aside from Rachel and my other friends here, and I think it might be that particular, delicious kind of lostness that comes from immersion in a constant stream of sensory inputs and the whirl of cultures, languages and dialects that one can only get in a major city. I’ll miss good beef, street-corner pubs, old Slavic fisherman on the canal path and Muslim families picnicking in the park. I’ll miss sitting like a king in the top level of a lumbering, double-decker bus and watching the endlessly varied streetscapes scroll past.
And what do I most look forward to at the other end of my journey, aside from family? That’s easy: the lush meadows, the forests, and all the singing insects that I’ve missed listening to here — especially the throbbing choruses of northern true katydids that are such a feature of August nights in Pennsylvania. All the distinct dialects of silence.
A dream,
they say, is a horse that has wandered into a thicket. It may have momentarily forgotten its course. It may have abandoned its rider or lost its saddle back in a ditch. It may have surrendered to the lure of the wild. It loves the fog, the way it masks the landscape, the way it colors the air so you can actually see it. It moves like a dancer or a drunk. There is a labyrinth in its legs, two caverns for ears where bats could play laser tag all night. In its nostrils, the scent of apples and hay; the riddles of sex, salt, and water. The skitter of pebbles on shale portends a turn; and the crack in the voice of lightning. A dream is a body that pushes forward through the blue swamp: chest heaving, all senses rippling toward meaning.
In response to Via Negativa: Unmastered.
Mariner
Called up at three o’clock, and was a-horseback by four; and as I was eating my breakfast I saw a man riding by that rode a little way upon the road with me last night; and he being going with venison in his pan-yards to London, I called him in and did give him his breakfast with me, and so we went together all the way. At Hatfield we bayted and walked into the great house through all the courts; and I would fain have stolen a pretty dog that followed me, but I could not, which troubled me.
To horse again, and by degrees with much ado got to London, where I found all well at home and at my father’s and my Lady’s, but no news yet from my Lord where he is.
At my Lady’s (whither I went with Dean Fuller, who came to my house to see me just as I was come home) I met with Mr. Moore, who told me at what a loss he was for me, for to-morrow is a Seal day at the Privy Seal, and it being my month, I am to wait upon my Lord Roberts, Lord Privy Seal, at the Seal. Home and to bed.
The road called me,
a dog followed me,
but trouble came to my house.
Tomorrow I am to wait upon the sea.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 7 August 1661.
The hour in which I lie awake
is the hour that stretches, clock face that warps and bends over the table edge. It is the cliff over which I peer at the river that boils three hundred feet below, not knowing if the brown and green specks on its banks are bushes or huts or villages where families are making dinner over a fire or unpinning clothes from the line. Restlessly I shift from side to side, flipping the pillow over, kicking the coverlet away. From this distance, in the darker than sepia-tinted dark, I cannot tell if the muffled sounds I hear are from coal trains crossing over the ridge or from a nuclear plant exploding; or if a cloud the color of crows has begun to wrap bandages around the moon and now whole nations have begun to panic.
Unmastered
Up early and went to Mr. Phillips, but lost my labour, he lying at Huntingdon last night, so I went back again and took horse and rode thither, where I staid with Thos. Trice and Mr. Philips drinking till noon, and then Tom Trice and I to Brampton, where he to Goody Gorum’s and I home to my father, who could discern that I had been drinking, which he did never see or hear of before, so I eat a bit of dinner and went with him to Gorum’s, and there talked with Tom Trice, and then went and took horse for London, and with much ado, the ways being very bad, got to Baldwick, and there lay and had a good supper by myself. The landlady being a pretty woman, but I durst not take notice of her, her husband being there.
Before supper I went to see the church, which is a very handsome church, but I find that both here, and every where else that I come, the Quakers do still continue, and rather grow than lessen.
To bed.
A lost horse,
I never see the way
by myself, durst not
take notice of being there
or here and still
continue to be.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 6 August 1661.
I never take
no for an answer, the lifetime
guarantee for what it is, the signs
that read Closed or No Rooms
to Let at face value. I never think
I’m not up to the job, not enough
qualified, never doubt I’m the one
who may stand in front of a classroom
to teach you. I never back down, turn
around, roll over, put up when it
just isn’t the right thing to do.
History repeats itself: its lies
about luck, its whitewashes, its dull
prescriptions. I’m tired of being told
to mind my place, defer to some
old boys’ club of secret handshakes;
I didn’t sign up to take the fall
again and again for someone else.
In response to Via Negativa: Things.
War Stories
Uncle still speaks of the little miracles: listening for frog calls at night to find rivulets of water, one dark train track made by ants leading to a bush with overripe fruit.
How they were led away at bayonet point and made to walk for days in the heat, leaving their houses behind: animals cooped in their cages, the goats now free to roam the abandoned villages.
Those that escaped hid from the moon, shining like a giant floodlight in the sky. Night, a leaf under which bodies might shelter.
And the women no one wanted to speak of then: how some of them now choose needlework, stabbing the cloth and embroidering the same dark flower that looks like a hand held over a scream, over and over again.
And I never knew mother’s mother except for the sound of her name: the name that last escaped her mother’s mouth as she lay dying in the dirt.
Watch how the grain is winnowed, how chaff flies into the air: husks of brittle armies indifferent to the small, small sound pearled bodies make when they fall, fall until they’re caught.
In response to Via Negtiva: Harvest.
Harvest
We’re on that train that’s going by in the distance, confined to its track like a blood fluke to a vein. Instead of blood, it feeds on boredom — a green blur. We stop at stations just long enough to read the advertisements and gaze at the litter. One hoarding for a summer movie reads: “How do you catch a serial killer if he’s invisible?” Another, for a bank, promises no card tricks. In the Quiet Carriage, phones vibrate in bags and pockets like cicadas struck dumb by thirst. You picture all this from the seat of a combine harvester, spiraling toward the center of a field of wheat.