Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)
First warm day.
I sit in the shade closing one eye
then the other.
*
This phoebeing—
even the pants on the line
seem to get the rhythm.
*
Vicious groundhog fight.
The victor stands still & lets the flies
land on his face.
*
Fur in the air—
the cattails
are shedding.
*
As slow as spring
on the half-naked dead elm,
a fox squirrel’s tail.
*
The vulture’s shadow
travels four times farther—
up & down each tree.
*
This morning
in its vase on the table,
the forsythia bloomed.
Friday the 13th. I sit at home & watch the numbers change on my digital clock. Their economy of form has always pleased me: only seven red bars, but the clock can make any numeral. I keep expecting it to slip & display an upside-down 7 or a backwards 3.
I could be a housesitter, I think. What could go wrong? I’d say to the house, “It’s bedtime,” & sing a lullaby to every empty room. When the man from the bank came to visit, I’d show him the bright yellow sun in the corner of the sky.
The man from the bank would listen so hard, he’d hear the plaster shrinking in the cold. I’d show him the clock on the side of my coffeemaker. I’d ask him where the lucky numbers go.
I remember this one metalhead I used to know, guy
about my age, told me the first time he heard that Quiet
Riot song Bang Your Head on the radio, he was so impressed,
he fell to his knees in the middle of his suburban driveway
& began to smash his forehead against the asphalt
as hard as he could, & it was bleeding something awful
& his mother came rushing out & stopped him, yelling
What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, but little
did she know he’d just been saved. I was a metalhead
from that day on, he said. I almost passed out, but it felt
so good to just let everything fucking go. I saw stars.
Yesterday I watched a gray squirrel out the kitchen window of my parents’ house as it excavated a black walnut. After retrieving its prize, which had been buried at a depth of about ten inches, the squirrel sat back on its haunches and scraped all the dirt off it with its incisors, turning it rapidly around and around in its mouth. Then gripping the walnut firmly in its teeth, it trotted about three feet, dug another hole, and reburied it.
The whole thing happened so quickly, I’m not sure I registered all the relevant details. Had there been, perhaps, a nascent sprout on the walnut that needed to be removed along with the dirt in order to keep it viable as food? Had the squirrel seen or heard something that caused it to change its mind about making the hundred-foot dash back to the woods with the walnut?
Or, given that squirrels retrieve nuts based on memory rather than smell, was I witnessing an act of theft? Had this squirrel witnessed another squirrel burying the walnut, and returned later to move it to a new spot? I don’t know. But one thing’s certain: it would’ve made a damn funny video.
Its nut reburied,
the squirrel moves quickly away
& pretends to forage.
*
Half of the turkeys
run one way & half the other.
I turn in circles.
*
On the night we have to set
the clocks ahead,
the rustle of earthworms.
*
We search the sky
for the whistling woodcock.
Nothing but the moon.
*
In the bathtub this morning,
it’s the first wolf spider
of spring!
A new poem-like thing gave me an excuse to use some video I’ve been hoarding.
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Don’t forget to bookmark or subscribe to the feed for Moving Poems, where I’m posting other people’s videoetry at the rate of five a week, skipping the weekends. I’m having a blast hunting down poetry videos on the web (95% of it on YouTube, of course), and it looks as if it’ll be many months before I run out of material. Upcoming posts include poems by Paul Celan, Nazim Hikmet, Martin Espada, and Gabriela Mistral.
By the way, if anyone has an interest in helping out, I could definitely use help in finding and translating video poems in languages other than English and Spanish (and sometimes I need help in Spanish, too, but I don’t tend to let that stop me). You would of course get full credit and link-love.
A foreign bird sang
in a foreign accent
too thick for anything but the sound
of spitting: puh puhpuh puh puh.
A new mouth had blossomed
in my chest, round and wet
with astonishment, & I wanted
nothing more than to lie back in
the sturdy arms of my captain & have
a heart-to-heart talk with the sun.
Where was I? What did I need
this stick for, so far from any ground?
I let it fall. I would be an epiphyte now —
my fancy boots & spiked helmet
already dangled well enough for roots.
I let out the breath I’d been holding
for so long, thinking its true owner
would return to claim it. Above me
in ragged ranks the whole village
turned out again
to wave & wave.
Photo link (public domain)
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Don’t forget to visit Festival of the Trees 33. I hate to play favorites, but I do think this is one of the most varied and interesting editions to date. Highlights for me included a gallery of silo trees, an illustrated essay on tree asters, and a detailed account of one couple’s adventures learning to climb trees with ropes just like the people in Richard Preston’s book, The Wild Trees.
This is what happens
when you start making up
your own mind:
the tree drops its tantalizing fruit,
sheds its leaves, & the woodlot
shrinks around it
until it stands alone in a line
of fence posts & telephone poles,
trembling neurons sifting the wind for sparrows.
You become as gods,
endlessly bifurcating,
simple as stinkhorns.
In place of paradise
there’s a field, a pasture,
a dishy blankness of sky.
***
In response to an image prompt at Read Write Poem. Other responses are linked here.
Photo by camila tulcan, licenced under a Creative Commons license.
I’ve just been reminded that it’s Oscars night. I was very pleased to discover this afternoon that the Internet Archive has a movies and film section, which includes some classic films (I just re-watched my all-time favorite comedy, His Girl Friday) and a lot of Creative Commons-licensed stock footage. I lost no time downloading some of the latter to illustrate an old poem — which I see I illustrated with snapshots the first time around. (For a straight-text version, see here.)
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Brent Goodman has just dipped a toe into the videoetry waters as well. Check out Meat to Carry Our Minds.
inspired by the work of Luz Marina Ruiz (hat tip: Natalie d’Arbeloff)
I entered a book tall as a clock tower.
Its pages all had timers set to self-construct:
bird, leaf, crescent, an orogeny of stairs.
The seasons were orderly as line dancers.
You can make a book from anything that folds.
Waves & breakers, for example, with
the ocean for a text: the reader bobs
like a boat with a shark’s-fin sail.
Books can be small as wallets bulging with bills,
those go-betweens everyone thumbs through
but nobody reads. (This, by the way,
is why money always smells of sadness.)
Books can be rooms completely taken over
by feral wallpaper, patterns unavailable
in any store. Some books can’t be opened
without changing all their contents.
That’s how it is with dreams, too: they change
in the telling. Night falls, & the words
merge with the black paper. You need
the moon’s red monocle to make out the stitching.
Yesterday’s post was such a hit, I thought I’d follow up with a short video that’s also all about me, me, me.