Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)
Shrink an arrow
bend it back upon itself
strip it of feathers
give it a lead sinker & a cork
& a small steel eye
to aid its introspection
let the quarry do
all the travelling
drawn by flash or flicker
lure or wriggling bait
let it exhaust itself against
this irrevocable stillness
At lunch in the Chinese restaurant: couples with salt-and-pepper hair (the women in modest pumps and tweedy jackets and the men just loosening their ties), babies in high chairs, teens in tunic tops not even teetering in their absurd stiletto heels. A veil of sesame oil in the air, the clatter of dim sum carts. The child says— I wonder what you’ll look like when you’re older? On the way here, we passed the Woodlawn Cemetery and I couldn’t remember if that was where the writer who was a diplomat in his other life, was buried. Many years ago I spoke with him a few times, over a crackly phone connection; me in graduate school, acorns pinging from the trees as autumn in the midwest made the branches ready for a long sheathing in ice. He must have been in that nursing home where he died. I did not know then about the daughters they said had left him there then disappeared, the nurses unable to trace them to any forwarding address. He told me he walked to the local library as often as he could, a yellow legal pad under his arm. In the latter part of his life, he scoured the shelves for poems, copied them out by hand. He complained he could not find anything by René Char. I think I might have sent him a book, translated poems found in one of the used bookstores up on Clark. le Poème pulvérisé? I can’t remember now. I knew about his hasty exit from Cambodia just before the fall, he and his wife with one suitcase each. The former dictator’s government never made up for his losses, those years of faithful service. I must repeat, I never really met him. He was a voice on the phone, a voice I imagined when I read his stories. Often I wonder if he ever thought this would be a place as good as any, in which to die.
In response to Morning Porch and Via Negativa: Drinking Companion.
There comes a point, toward the bottom of the second pint of beer, when every passing thought sounds like a line from a poem — something about the evening light, perhaps, or my falling intonation as I address my pronouncements to the praying mantis beside me, who turns her head to follow the glass as I raise & lower it, & when I set it down empty beside her, rocks slowly from side to side on her four hind legs. Her people are more recent immigrants than mine. She hasn’t yet learned all the rules about when to open the green umbrella on her back. It’s a good thing I’m not drinking cocktails, I tell her. Her fighter’s form is impeccable as she retreats to the underside of the table, though she does tremble a bit. The decor here is a little rustic, but I think she’s thinking this would be a good place to die.
Every story says, The bottom line
is death. Or fear. Or grief. Or
loneliness. Or bodies turned to bone,
to minerals, to ash. Which is the same
as death. But a blind man takes your hand
and urges you to draw, eyes closed, as if
from sight before you lost that sight—
Each gargoyle on each pediment, each
pillar flecked with salt and glinting
in the votive light; each buttress loosed,
as if from gravity, in brave reproach.
In response to Via Negativa: Salt.
This may be too literal and/or droll a video for the poem, but I couldn’t resist. Rachel encouraged me to make a shot list this time, so I did. It looked like this:
I used the Extract effect in Adobe Premiere to make it look vaguely like an animation.
In my last dream before waking, I was trying to explain why I felt that coherent ideologies, religions and philosophies do more harm than good: somehow, in trying to make the world make sense, they flatten out experience & dull the mind. It’s like salt, I said. Imagine if everything you ate had to be salty, to the point where you couldn’t taste anything else: no sweet, no sour, no bitter, no umami, no thousand subtle flavors.
Yet salt is so easy to worship, its crystals so translucent, such perfect little cubes. Ah, salt! I said, losing sight of my argument & waking up. When I used to watch sumo wrestling, my favorite part was the ritual tossing of salt, little guessing that this show of purification hid a culture of corruption. Meat that is already rotten can’t be cured.
Going to the shower, I thought of Grettir Asmundarson, the strongest man who ever lived in Iceland, done in by sorcery and a gangrenous infection that climbed from his foot to his intestines, decapitated by his enemies & his huge head stored overwinter in salt, the whole story captured in a saga’s unadorned prose. Perfect cubes, inviolable rooms.
The world does mostly taste of salt, because much of the world is ocean, even our bodies, I said to myself as I got dressed. Then I fixed some breakfast — two fried eggs — & found myself reaching first for the pepper.
Fractal, fracas, frisée. I’m reading through
the Fs. But then, from there, a short frisson
away to other worlds. In the shade, the quiet
makes the letters squint. Or have I fallen
down a rabbit hole? I see myself among
the curly ferns— I’m still as small
in many ways as in that first rupture;
and everything thereafter, its adjustment.
The key has always been in my skirt pocket—
how could I have forgotten? The pages
bookmarked, I shrink, I crawl; I grow toward
the garden’s checkerboard of grass and roses.
In response to small stone (146).
Light-emitting diode,
baleful regardless of color,
our passport to a firefly future
of light without heat:
how it glows in the darkness,
like the wood-rot fungus known as foxfire.
I reach for it & startle
at the apparition of my finger—
clearly the finger of an alien
from some planet with a distant sun
& too many moons.
“… & thus the place/ we occupy/ seems all the world.” ~ David Wojahn
Tonight I rinse the dishes and the cutlery
with which I’ve fed my living and my dead
(their spirits hovering on the rims of orange
plastic until I shelve them in the cupboard)—
While I work, I listen as a famous poet reads
on TV a litany of names and how they paper
the walls in the dim warehouse of memory—
And I think, as many as there are names, there are
poems and days, and tasks that will not end.
Fragments flutter out of the sky, down from the trees,
which we are left to gather or to count. They’re far
too many, the task so formidable— often, the only
respite: on that hinge that swings the door of days.
In response to small stone (147).
Mouthpiece
for the body’s instrument.
Its silence is another language.
Mountain peak.
It makes its own
wet weather.
Mouse-pink
& sensitive as a newborn
through old age.
Missed bit
of a continent submerged
in the unconscious.
Mouthpiece.
The scuba diver
can’t speak.