Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)
while sparrows & kinglets
while jays
while aerodynamic oak leaves
I sat inside with
a silence well past the age
when it could ever get pregnant
mouse nests in the furnace
were converted to ash & heat
a silence that sounded
very much like static
white-throated
ruby-crowned
blue
Click to enlarge
Haiku Comment Week continues.
The five-pointed star inside each apple. The pattern of roots beneath the soil. The fetus sucking her perfect, tiny thumb. Blind fish in the depths, the ultraviolet messages flowers send to bees, all the colors hidden in white, the fossils buried deep in solid rock.
This morning
I saw behind the trees
the first bits of sky.
*
somewhere there’s a beard with my name on it
a nest for crumbs and smoke
because life comes at you from all directions
when you’re a man
You can have mine
when I’m done with it — right after
I rob a bank.
*
Lucky Charm and his successors became my ambassadors to the outdoors, drawing me away from my books and literally carrying me into the woods and fields. On Lucky’s back, I chased foxes, watched a snake swallow a frog, and developed my first hostile relationship with an invasive species–bull thistle–due to its impact on bare legs.
Every young dreamer
should be issued a horse
just for the thistles.
*
Often these wisps of spider-silk travel through the air at an angle of around thirty degrees to the ground. This is because the lower trailing end is gripped and weighted down by a small spider traveling to a new home.
To see ballooning spiders,
stand in the trailing shadow
of a tree.
*
The farmer with flowers at Five Corners is parked there looking at them; as I pass through the intersection he pulls away.
The first morning back
on Standard Time, the farmer
checks on his flowers.
*
[photos]
The first fire
sprouts from a pine cone’s cluster
of crackling tongues.
*
Couldn’t stand to look at that miserable excuse for a painting another minute so I changed my position, sat close up to the table, grabbed my palette knife and attacked.
With three empty chairs
and only two apples, this life
can hardly stay still.
I hearby declare October 28th through November 3rd Haiku Comment Week. Almost all of the comments that I leave at other blogs this week will take the form of haiku (which for me means approximately 17 syllables arranged in three lines and containing some element of surprise or grain of insight). I’ll collect them once a day and re-post them (slightly edited in some cases) here at Via Negativa, with links to the posts that prompted them, along with brief quotes.
Why haiku comments? I read a lot of blogs, but rarely take the time to leave substantial or interesting — or any — comments, in part because I tend to do my blog-reading at the end of the day, when my brain is tired, and in part because I’m a slow thinker in the best of circumstances. Also, I’ll admit I sometimes skim even the better blog posts rather than giving them the close attention they deserve. Americans in particular are schooled in unhealthy patterns of consumption, assuming that if a little of something is good, a lot of it must be even better, but in most cases that’s simply not true. I need to slow down. Composing haiku is a way to try and get myself to come up with thoughtful responses to posts I like.
I seem to have had grass on my mind today…
*
How would you describe what a breath of late October air feels and smells like where you live?
Grass blades edged in frost
for the first time since April:
a sharpness in the nose.
*
Landlocked,
she is a continent
without roads, without cities.Maps are redundant:
all directions lead
to polar north.
Are there tides on the moon?
The Sea of Tranquility
looks darker tonight.
*
Jackrabbi
Everyone knows that people write poems, but what’s a little less obvious is that poems write people too.
The keeper of spells
killed & buried in the bog
turns to bitter parchment.
*
With luck and a clear sky, Pablo will be out at Roundrock today, enjoying the seasonal color and the mild weather. Nothing much on the agenda, which makes for the best kind of visit.
I was asked if I had any news to report about the decay of the shopping bags. Alas, I haven’t been out to my woods since the day I placed them. Maybe I’ll be able to report now.
Nothing to do but sit
& watch empty shopping bags
break down in the sun.
*
Lael also seemed rather drawn to this statue, even arguing with another little girl who said it was HER family.
A girl climbs into
the sculpted circle & gazes
at the father’s zero face.
*
I was never sure whether “Kitchener” should be capitalized, or why the seamless grafting technique had that name, but yesterday, while looking for something else, I discovered the answers to both these questions.
The perfect suture
may wear a general’s name,
but was he the knitter?
*
One day after work before we moved, I drove over and parked at the end of our street, got out and hiked up the embankment to see the reservoir — a grassy mound surrounded by a high railed fence. Where’s the water??
A tall fence surrounds
The underground reservoir.
Why not a moat?
*
Where is the Pratyekabuddha?
Where did it get
such a perfect pair of lips?
The grass isn’t saying.
*
…a bound to appreciate,
Rub his face in the sprouting wheat he’ll be
hawking up later…
The cat feasts on grass,
& just like a ruminant,
brings it all back up.
I wandered through her face until
it grew abstract as a map,
with lightly drawn roads
& rivers in faint blue,
blank spaces where hills separated
zones of resource extraction,
quarry-holes for sound & for scent,
the settling ponds
of an unsettling color
& at the bottom of the map,
a beltway in red: here
the skyline of incisors
& the dark & pulsating
inner city beyond.
Certain ticks found on deer harbor the bacterium in their stomachs. Lyme disease is spread by these ticks when they bite the skin permitting the bacterium to infect the body. Lyme disease can cause abnormalities in the skin, joints, heart and nervous system.
—MedicineNet.com
I sat on the ground because
that’s what the boulder was doing.
It seemed only right.
I laid down on my back in the leaf duff
so I could join the giant oak tree
in tracking the sun.
But this was a woods with
a clear view beneath the canopy,
everything but the rocks & ferns reduced
to telltale pellets.
I should’ve kept my distance.
On the way home, three times
I felt something on the side of my face
& couldn’t dislodge it.
Hours later, at supper,
a tiny, red & black barnacle of an insect
dropped from my collar & began inching
across the table: a deer tick.
My thumb came down
& crushed it against the smooth white wood.
Clear views are dangerous here.
Only a sick forest can harbor
such distances.
__________
UPDATES
10/30/07: Lines subtracted from last stanza, and different lines added to third stanza.
10/18/07: Lines added to last stanza in response to reader comments.
Picture a hungry brood of talons making a sudden appearance beside you as you sleep in the cedar tree, beaks without mouths grasping, stabbing, and missing their meal by millimeters. Imagine your blind flight into the dark.
10 p.m. A thump against the window. I open the porch door on a panic of wings.
In a few words, explain what this blog is about.
–Wordpress Dashboard > Options > General > Tagline
These are my thoughts
Engaging in Conversation
A thing about other things
Just another WordPress.com weblog
Where the hell is Poeville?
Joann’s little corner =)
You know you want it.
A source of relevant information.
Crunchy on the inside.
Just ticking along
The long road to literary success
Just another WordPress.com weblog
Capturing the Film World One Frame at a Time
I don’t wanna miss a thing
About me and my thoughts
But texas loves me anyway
Welcome to my mid-life crisis
Where I Open My Brain And Pour It Out On A Metal Slab. Poke If You Must.
More people fail from a lack of encouragement than anything else!
Just another WordPress.com weblog
One man’s gripes against… well, everything…
Unlock the treasures within!
Tacos. Palabras. Espanol. English. Love. Life. Food. Movies. Poetry. Photos. Chicano. Alma.
Spiritual caffeine for advancing the Kingdom.
Life In The Age Of Promise
Pursuing datameaningfulness, online and off
Much study is a wariness of the flash.
Just another WordPress.com weblog
__________
All lines are actual blog taglines, found by surfing WordPress.com blogs. The refrain is the default tagline, which a surprising number of bloggers elect to keep.
Bought a tree in a pot,
took it back to the flat to occupy a nook
where sunlight guttered from a lack of air.
A tree in a pot is an odd thing to see.
Roots are not meant to resemble a club foot,
a wrist without a hand, an unthinking fist.
Grotesque the feelers with no way to grow
but endless recursion, open, shut —
a dead brain in a body automatically fed.
Branches without birds look out at birds without branches.
Only the cat on the windowsill seems lonely
for whatever all of us once were living for.
__________
Written for the special Halloween edition of the Festival of the Trees (deadline October 26 – submit here).
For lots of more cheerful tree-related links, visit the latest edition of the festival at trees, if you please.
Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
–Martin Heidegger
Today I don’t want to write,
don’t want to crowd the cat-house of being
with any more sentences of ill repute.
I want to have that teeming heat
behind me, fretwork at rest
like a sagging porch with one rocking chair
& a view of the woods.
When I was in Honduras back in 1996 for my brother’s wedding, I remember one day in the market how a military helicopter flew low overhead, and I realized I was the only one who wasn’t cowering.
Ten years earlier, I spent a semester in Taiwan when it was still under martial law. We foreigners habituated a couple of bars that operated illegally, in defiance of the law against gatherings of more than a dozen (?) unrelated people. I remember when the mafia started showing up and occupying tables in the corner, how all us Yanks, Aussies and Kiwis treated it as a big joke. Why were the Taiwanese owners so frightened? Couldn’t they see that these would-be gangsters had come straight from central casting?
*
The houseplants sit awkwardly in the garden,
like tourists at some raffish foreign port.
A gust of wind is enough to tip them over
in their ceramic pots.
It rains,
& they hardly know how to drip.
Insects avoid their glossy, odorless leaves.
After dark, under the stars,
they are the only things still shining.
They send up flower stalks
one week before the frost.