Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
From the lowest branches, I can gather
what birds and small creatures leave
after having had their fill.
What the tree has shed
in the dressing room of night
yields barely sufficient cover.
But after the radio dial clicks off,
a small curl of music seems yet
suspended in air— This is how I know
no heart is too small, no plot too shallow
for the seed plucked from its house of flesh
and brought to lie in a field under stars.
In response to Via Negativa: Windfall.
“I am fierce as ivy…” ~ D. Bonta
When the levels rise, it isn’t just the sea that’s changing.
In the cauldron, more things than climate are simmering.
Flex your fingers; open and close your fists while you sit on a cushion,
trying to breathe. Try to keep the green from rising into your eyes.
Try to keep down whatever’s pushing out of the container van of your chest,
each shipping box inside crammed full by volume and not by weight.
When sinews snap their binding threads, what buttons or stays
could keep the linen from tearing? Beneath the moon, the brute
that lived just under your skin lets loose its syllable
of long-drawn-out pain. What manner of stitch, what hot
glue gun could mend the holding cell after the break? Call
it home, make of one perfect tear an amulet for it to wear.
In response to Via Negativa: Displaced.
Summer simmers down, but it isn’t
all gone. So drink slowly, drink
everything, down to the thick,
dark sludge at the bottom
of the cup. Out in the fields,
find what remains when the grain
has separated from the chaff.
Though there might not be much
time left, walk to the end
of the street just to see
how the river is tinged
with colors of fire:
loveliest surface that never rests,
that flares like a beacon in war,
brightest before night comes down.
In response to Via Negativa: War Dance.
This craft is about to criss-cross the most recently identified space fraught with tension and unrest. Do you see where blocks of citizens have formed chains and living fences overnight, and where police lines demarcate the outer limits with banks of tear gas? If any passengers wish to access the fast food counter or the rest rooms at this precise moment, they should know there is a 50% chance of perishing without having arrived at what our limited vocabulary can only hope will approximate sunrise on the rim of a great crater. There is no guarantee of fair trial, or that remains will be bottled and returned to home base. When seized by real panic (as opposed to just your everyday variety of ennui and restlessness), please refrain from mechanically succumbing to the tendency to click on a range of available tactile surfaces wired to digital or electronic outlets. They will fold in on themselves or retract, like language not connected to a visceral source. Some may have been programmed to self-destruct. There are certain things that ideally should be kept close at hand, until the end: first words, last words; our very young, the very old. Your open eyes, the rapidly clicking shutter of the mind; the ability to stand up, look them in the eye, brandish your right to be here and witness.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
~ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.