Poem for Display in a Housing Project

Memo to the original planners:
this is what the future
actually looks like.
How do you explain
to yourselves our vagrant,
flagrant refusal to fit
into your uniformed vision?
Or perhaps we fit all too well,
making this project
into an efficient projection
of someone’s self-loathing
onto the cosmos?
For surely these highrises
amount to another Babel.
Some aspect of their conception
disrespected the natural order,
& now they are as hollow
as spent shells.
And just as in scripture,
we barely understand
the lingo of our own
flown children,
who say — we think —
that the prison feels like home,
that it has a yard,
that they might be
a little safer there
from stray
projectiles.

Scattered notes

Dear Dana,

Cold out this morning, but
one cricket still managed
a sclerotic chirp. I watched
parallel furrows form
in the clouds to the east,
five lines. A large flock
of grackles flew across them,
accompanied by the usual
scattered notes. If I’d snapped
a photo at that precise moment,
there might’ve been a score
someone could play.
Instead, I sat thinking
how I’d like my own notes
to be so lightly anchored
to the page: an antidote
for all the heaviness
our tribe of meaning-makers
has inflicted on the world.
I am lodged in this body
not like a businessman
in some motel but like
a meteorite at the center
of a target its own impact created,
glowing for a short time
with the heat of its entry.
The truth isn’t out there
between the stars. The cricket
kept chirping in the herb bed,
and beyond, the wild rose
almost leafless now as the color
deepens in its shrinking
wrinkled capsules,
which are said to heal.
__________

UPDATE: We’ve decided to broaden this conversation and invite others to join in, because why not? It’s a world-wide web. See Dana’s response to me, and Lirone’s response to Dana.

Red letters

chicken mushroom 2

Dear Dana,

I climbed the ridge to look for a poem
& came back with supper instead:
five pounds of chicken mushroom,
freshly sprouted from the end of a log
& dripping with moisture.

A couple of rove beetles scrambled
in & out of fissures as I began
breaking off hand-sized fans
& nestling the boneless yellow flesh
in a shopping bag. In this supermarket,

the shelves themselves are edible.
Red letters on the bag said
THANK YOU   THANK YOU
THANK YOU   THANK YOU
Have a Nice Day
.

Looking in at the bright crop, I felt as if
I’d raided the crayoned worlds of first graders
& lifted the sun from the top left
corner of every drawing.
I left a little behind for the beetles.
__________

The beginning of a planned correspondence in poems with Dana Guthrie Martin, my co-conspirator in the new Postal Poetry venture. If it goes O.K., we may branch out and correspond with other online poets this way, too. And we hope to inspire imitators. Weblogs seem like an ideal medium for this kind of exchange.

Bequest

book of coal

My great great aunt Mary, stern unmarried schoolteacher from the hard-coal country of eastern Pennsylvania where all my mother’s people hail from, gave each of us boys when we were small a figurine carved from anthracite. Mine was a book, closed up like a sandwich and unmarred by any words, either on the cover or the spine. One of the others was a three-inch mug; I forget the third. Our parents put them away in the china closet, saying they were fragile and we could have them when we grew up. They therefore took on all the characteristics of a bequest.

Despite these precautions, at some point the book of coal got dropped, I forget by whom, and one of the corners sheared off — a clean break. Dad glued it back together with epoxy. I keep it now in a little shrine I made from an antique cabinet television. It keeps company with a bowl of plastic fruit, an empty syringe, the skeleton of a mouse, and a pitcher full of spent bullet casings. I might like it better for being cracked, and for fitting so perfectly in the palm of my hand. I rap on it now and then for good luck. It was wood once.

Porch 2.0

In case you haven’t clicked through to my mini-blog The Morning Porch lately, it has a new look, a new URL (though the old one redirects), and a few new features, including a search bar in the footer and a random post link up top. I’m still using Tumblr, and after ten months I have virtually no complaints about the service — unlike the frequently absent Twitter, whose 140-character limit inspired the format. (While I still do cross-post to Twitter, I much prefer the open-source alternative Identi.ca, where a growing number of other online writers trade thoughts, links, and occasionally lines of verse. You can read my own miscellaneous brain-farts, in addition to the daily morning-porchisms, here.)

The photo in the header may change seasonally; I haven’t decided. But the new design, which I modified from one by the Italian web designer Marco Giusto, feels almost too elegant for an Appalachian porch-sitter like me. Check it out.

Haunting the bell

Improbable doorways, hello. I’m walking off a drunk — a stagger-stepped and deliberate go at keeping the ground in its place. Down the deserted road two miles, growing steadily more sure-footed, then left through the sleeping village and around the gate into Ikkyu’s old temple, which I’ve explored several times by daylight.

Nothing stirs. The white gravel path is just visible, and I crunch past the meditation hall. I approach the bell in its hillside hanger, an immense shadow in the shape of an inverted sake cup. I stab its three-ton chest with my big finger. Hey! You think you so smart? You come to my temple, at Shao-lin!

No answer. I crouch down, remembering the Noh play where a monk leaps into a bell to escape a serpent. I crab-walk under, then cautiously stand, groping the cold metal.

The ancient bell is noisy with breathing. Startled, I bang my head, and there’s the faintest of reverberations, echoing for several heartbeats. This is not a hat, I whisper. A hat. A hat.

Chew

Chew, chew,
I’ve had it with this chewing,
rat’s teeth on a lead pipe,
a squirrel opening the brain-case
of a black walnut.

I don’t want to chew
like some glassy-eyed ruminant,
bottom jaw going back & forth
in the monotonous rhythm of pestle
against mortar.

Nor do I envy the carnivore’s lot,
so single-minded in its devotion
to messy drippy stinking tangles
of other creatures’ pain, the toxic
rot of its bite.

Chewing is a waste of time.
I want to return to the soup,
a fetus sampling the world
through its belly, a whale
with a mouth like an aeolian harp,
the whole slow song of it fed on krill.

Black Moshannon


If you can’t see the slideshow, or if you’re on dial-up, go here.

Gnarled stumps of pine trees cut down a century earlier jut from the tannic waters of Black Moshannon Lake. Though like most lakes south of the glaciated portions of Pennsylvania it is a man-made reservoir, a smaller, boggier series of ponds preceded it, and descendents of the beavers that built the original dams remain. Last Saturday, my mother and I were admiring the banks of cardinal flowers in the streambed below the dam when a small birch tree beside the trail toppled over less than fifty feet away. We went over to look and discovered that a beaver had chewed it almost all the way through, presumably the night before, but for some reason had left it standing.

Black Moshannon is a pretty special place, home to rare orchids, carnivorous bog plants, and many other strange and wonderful things. Botanists consider the 1,500-acre Black Moshannon Bog Natural Area to be “the largest reconstituted bog/wetland complex in Pensylvania.” The park is surrounded by a much larger state forest on the Allegheny Plateau a few miles west of the Allegheny Front. I won’t give the exact elevation, because I know my western readers will laugh, but let’s just say that it’s high enough to be significantly cooler than most of the surrounding area. So the small swimming beach is always a major draw.

In fact, our main reason for going there on a beautiful, cool summer day was to introduce my three-year-old niece Elanor to the joys of a swimming hole. She’s always been drawn to water, but her fascination has included a healthy admixture of fear. With some coaxing from her father, though, and with the example of all the other kids to follow, she was soon splashing and yelling with the best of them.

My own interaction with the water was solely photographic. Like Elanor, I’m drawn to water and never get tired of looking at it: the plants that grow in and around it, the trees and branches that fall into it, the frogs that sit quietly beside it, leaping in at the last possible moment. By the end of the afternoon, we were each relaxed and besotted from our long immersions.

Old frog, new tricks

ticket booth

This is another postcard that will not appear on the fantastic new site postal poetry. That’s because I’ve joined Dana Guthrie Martin as co-editor, and we won’t be posting our own work. But we’re actively soliciting submissions from anyone and everyone else, and we’ve created a section where artists and poets can connect for collaborative contributions, as well. Come have a look!

Zendo

DANA: The First Perfection

A Japanese-style zendo on a Pennsylvania hillside. I suddenly remember I too used to dream this dream, years ago. How strange to encounter it in someone else’s woods, though. It’s as if I never woke up.

*

After half an hour of zazen, I find the continued presence of the wooden floor with its wavy grain somehow comic: everytime I open my eyes, there it is again! Solid yet wandering.

*

Kettle drum.

Wooden clappers.

Bell.

Rooster.

Cicada.

Airplane.

The growl of a stomach.

A caught breath.

A sigh.

*

Walking meditation: the world’s most difficult dance. So many possible steps, and none of them wrong. We go single file through the woods. If the trees aren’t laughing at us, they should be.

*

At the Dharma talk about honoring the body, I watch a black lab running in his sleep.

*

We are enjoined not to speak throughout the service. The next morning, I feel a cold in my throat.