Rain that was promised,
but never fell—
Instead: muggy air,
clouds thick as clotted
cream. Only if you
close your eyes
do crickets sound
like passing showers.
In response to small stone (163).
Desiring Brightness
She touched my jacket admiringly and said we had the same taste,
except she favored black and white, not so much brightness.
I on the other hand was tired of all the overcast shades
in the closet, wanted a shot of lime and vodka, its brightness.
Oh did I say vodka? I meant of course something crisp and light,
not overbearing; something not neon or cloying in its brightness.
The peach and lemony light of summer has swirled away too quickly.
And no one dries their laundry on the line anymore, for brightness.
One-touch and power settings, then time, then start. Then a circuit
shorting, equals a dead microwave. But there’s a stove! Brightness!
Above the clatter of knives and chafing dishes, he said: So when
are you taking me out? That little swell: fishing for brightness.
I exited the hall as the lights were dimmed, and drove toward the water.
The water was all shades of lilac; the street lamps vied for brightness.
In response to small stone (162).
Poetas
Everyone we listened to had such a gift: if not lightness of tongue, then the language of expansiveness so that we sat, rapt, transfixed in our chairs or as if loosed into the suddenly bright highway of sky beyond the library windows, reeling among the birds that must have said among themselves, What drunken fool just hit me? And what of that gift, that beat of song, restless tattoo that lives beneath the ribcage, wheezing and pleating like a bandoneón in the hands of an itinerant musician? I heard it once and then nothing was the same. Light became the space between the saying of a word and the shape that its sound made, flying in the cave of the throat; became a rain-soaked umbrella, became each quickly vaporizing bead begging to be counted, threaded, tasted, forgiven, fed.
In response to cold mountain (63).
Essential
“…rare, singular, unattainable, but:
here” ~ seon joon
Tonight, after the reading,
someone asked the poet
in the red shirt and black
motorcycle boots which writers
had influenced her the most—
and she replied by recalling
how she had gone to school
during a time when everyone
was lionizing all these great
women poets who had killed
themselves: Plath of course;
and Sexton (who was her teacher).
Then one day a substitute came
and turned on this light—
and she realized one could be
a good poet, even a good,
angry, feminist poet,
and still love life.
In response to cold mountain (61).
Own
All this beautiful, heavy hardwood furniture—
the slab of polished mahogany that serves
as coffee table, the long-leaved dining table
and its matching credenza from Spain, the grand
piano in the living room that we are thrilled
to play Bach, Gershwin, “Chopsticks,” or
Sondheim on— belongs to our landlady.
To rent her digs, the deal was that we had to live
with all her stuff. We looked around at what
we owned— six folding bookshelves, three
computer desks, a couch, a few lamps picked up
at Service Merchandise or Target, a microwave and
microwave cart, our daughter’s sleeping pallet;
and many, many bankers’ boxes filled with books—
and said something like Easy come… or perhaps
We can’t take it with us when we go. And one
of the friends who took over our possessions quoted
from song or scripture that part about our cares
being worth more than those of white-throated sparrows
singing in the field, all the while assessing
the quality of a set of china on which he had designs.
But it’s ok, really— We look after the place as if
it were our own, and thank our lucky stars for so many
windows— the upstairs ones are great for reading
our books or writing late, by late summer light. We pay
utility bills when they are due, change the batteries
in the smoke detectors, take the lint out of the dryer
screen. We vacuum and mop beneath the beds and chairs,
in hard to reach corners where hair and dust balls
consolidate the interest they will secure in final lien.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Blastocyst
At first, in the fallopian tubes,
the zygote is little more
than a clump: morula,
named for its resemblance
to a mulberry.
Then fluid fills it
like a balloon, a whole
lot of nothing.
That’s when the mother’s
body moves it
& it takes root in the womb.
This is the call & response
of matrix & matter:
for creative work to happen
you need that opening
without & within.
The stem cells form,
ready for anything.
*
I think this may be the last post in the Small World series. (If you’re reading via RSS or email, here’s the link to the whole series.)
We woke and the world was colder,
We woke and the world was colder,
the season progressing steadily
toward winter— the line of trees
more shorn of green summer cover,
only the ivy persisting over thin-
skinned clover— as if the bones
of earth were chiseled finer,
our cue to take out sweaters
from the back end of the drawer—
And even the tiny moths I saw
alight upon the still-steadfast, still-
flowering clump of sage and lavender,
slowed their wings in the shadow
of the sun’s pale alabaster—
Nights grow longer; so we learn to keep
best what lasts through now and later.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Dead leaf (videohaiku)
I had fun watching and filming a woolly bear caterpillar this morning. The text of the haiku occurred to me as I was filming. The word “frass” may be slighty obscure, but I hope it’s obvious from the context what it means. Caterpillar droppings are hard and dry — not at all the image that “shit” or “excrement” conjure up (though my mother does have a t-shirt with a drawing of a caterpillar and the message “frass happens”).
As with other videohaiku I’ve done, I find that, in contrast to regular videopoetry, a straightforward, “naive” relationship between footage and text can succeed as long as the text is saved for afterwards. The effect, I hope, is to reproduce something of the process by which a haiku is born: close observation yielding a sudden insight (though in this case, arguably, my insight was not especially profound). This is the first time I’ve added music to the soundtrack of a videohaiku; usually I just use the ambient sound, but that was marred this time by the camera scraping against the concrete.
The time equation might be of interest. In all, it took me three hours to make the video and an hour and fifteen minutes to upload it. Of that time, only about three minutes were spent polishing the text of the poem. So the filmmaking took about 60 times longer than the writing. (And then I spent some 25 minutes adjusting the settings on Vimeo and composing this post. Sure would’ve been easier just to post the damn haiku!)
Interiors
Walking or driving past, I like to look
at windows: light-framed, curtained, scrolled,
iron-grilled— and, unshuttered,
their intimations of shared life.
In response to small stone (158).
Lentil
(Lens culinaris)
Until the lentil lent
its Latin name, the lens
went unknown among us,
despite being the apple
of our eyes. Now it is
the legume that lags
in popularity:
we’re more apt to wonder
what microscopic folk
might be peering blindly
up from the soup,
& suspect every
lenticular cloud
of hiding a flying saucer
from the distant bulging disc
of an armless galaxy.