Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)
for Rachel
We play a game
called Mouth & Ear:
one speaks, the other listens.
It’s simple.
If your words are trees,
mine are finches,
vagrant & garrulous.
In the nest of your ear
their fledglings
sprout fletching.
If my words are fish,
yours are lures,
marvels of ingenuity—
a water-bound being’s
dream of flight.
I rise to the ring of ripples,
your radiant ear.
I sat za zen,
we sat zen za,
we drank many healths
to Mr. Zan.
There was nothing at all left
of this day’s work.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 25 February 1659/60.
for Rachel
I have four blankets on my bed:
one is the color of a clear winter sky,
one is the color of the river,
one is the color of the Atlantic ocean
& one is the color of your eyes.
Lying under my four blue blankets
I am warm, too warm, I toss & turn —
not like an airplane in a winter sky,
not like a salmon swimming upstream,
not like a buoy riding out a storm
but like a piece of grit
in a drop of salt water
exiled from the blue of your eyes.
See Ten Simple Songs
“Santa Clarang pinong-pino / Ako po ay bigyan mo / Ng asawang labintatlo / Sa gastos ‘di magreklamo!”
(“Saint Clare, most refined / Upon me please bestow / Spouses thirteen in all / As for the expense, I won’t complain!”)
~ traditional lyric sung in fertility rituals; Obando, Bulacan
The shiver in the skin
of fire tree leaves
The smallest tear
in the egg’s membrane
Hot skies in May
blue enough to drop
Cartwheels in the wombs
of skirted saints
In response to Via Negativa: Easy Rider.
I was free as she lay,
we both mounted;
the day and the way we lay
with baited loin
were very merry,
the way my mare lay,
playing at supper:
a breast roasted.
I lay with pie.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 24 February 1659/60.
“Tell me, what shall we do with this hour of abundance?” ~ Deryn Rees-Jones
From between the window
and its screens, I lift whole
insect bodies swathed in webs
like spun cotton: funerary
vestments, or the finished
playbill after dress
rehearsal— Dinner first,
then that other hunger,
sex. Who served, who
waited for the visitor
to dally? In that space—
interstitial, between
entry and egress—
filaments are threshed
the same as time.
Here are jewels it has left
behind: blue vein of tattered
wing, dark prismed eye.
In response to small stone (217).
A rose told my thoughts
and I took to drink,
dined with my troubles—
the money horse,
the rose that brought
a slow hell home.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 23 February 1659/60.
“C’est payé, balayé, oublié…
(It’s paid for, removed, forgotten…)”
~ Je Ne Regrette Rien
On Sunday, the seventh anniversary of his death, she will walk to the Delaware river, light candles, set a little cup of flowers adrift.
Wasn’t this where they dredged for his body, brought it ashore, pockets empty of identification, cleaned-out car found a week later, many parking lots away?
When I first spoke to her on the phone some years after not knowing where she had gone, I heard Gounod playing in the background.
Rain or sleet rattled on the windows; water knocked discordant symphonies against the ancient plumbing.
The years have brought no balm for me, she says; all work is sublimated grief.
I get postcards from her whenever she travels, which is often; a blanket woven from yak hair in Tibet, where she has gone to start a school for women; inks and polished bone.
Jars of grey-tinted salt from France, sun-dried tomatoes from Italy, a tooled leather folder from a workshop in the city where Dante was born.
Just this morning I was explaining allegory to my daughter: the meaning of the wood, the threshold of the crater lake, the circles upon circles of souls; the way station, the bus stop, the climb out again in search of heaven and the muse…
But always, at this time of year, my friend who has been abroad so much circles back, returns.
There is nothing I really want now for myself from this world, she writes on hotel stationery in Amsterdam, or New York, or overlooking a marbled plaza where pigeons descend to fight for bread that tourists have thrown.
Sometimes I wish to just quietly go away.
In my mind, I listen for the plink of coins in the fountains’ shallow basins: their bronze arc in the air, their weight in impossible wishes softened by a film of green moss covering the stones.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
I sang a song to my beard,
overgrown powder
of my neck and altered head,
brown thing of thorn, bridge
to a brave day abominably bare.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 22 February 1659/60.
“They were being taught to thank the sun for their lives and the warmth that it brought, the life that it brought to the earth and they were told to do that right before they did their sun salutation exercises…” ~ complaining parent quoted in 09 January 2013 NPR news article “Promoting Hinduism? Parents Demand Removal Of School Yoga Class”
And why should we not thank the sun
for life and warmth it lavishes on all
regardless of caste or class; why not
thank the mountains that sustain and are
far older than the buildings and townhouses
lining the avenues, older than the giant
letters that have spelled Hollywood
in bright white only since 1923, older
than Grauman’s Chinese Theatre
and its forecourt bearing the handprints,
footprints, and signatures of movie stars?
And why should we not give thanks
for the heart expanding, the lungs filling
with our common lien of breath, the ribcage
hinging open as the body is reminded
how it feels to press its length along the ground
then rises like a cobra, like a tree, like an eagle
balancing upon a rock? And what is prayer
but a way to teach— in any tongue, by any
means— the kind of quiet that extends
farther than comprehension; and what
is wonder but what might link us once again
to vastness, leaf outward as gratitude, no matter
circumstance or clime? Just ask the oldest
giant sequoia— so old it must have started
growing in the iron age, rooted first
as seed before reaching for the sun.
In response to Yoga School Program....