In the wild spots where few or
no people live, the places blow
about, blurred. The desert shiftssome of its cells. Water lifts a little,
sinks. No pine needles fall, then,a pine needle falls, four more. Here
no one knows what truth is escaping.
Nostos
Leave it; you don’t want to dwell there, you don’t want to know what might have happened if it didn’t happen the way it did.
At times it is impossible to tell intention from intervention, the thorny stalk from the hedge, floss from the papery husk. In the dark, you might think it hardly matters, but it does, it does.
And the bud? It might have been white, red, or yellow; a bird might have plucked it from the stalk.
Say happenstance, say accident, say unthinking. But no matter, someone decreed that you had to pay.
Sentiment costs; nostalgia’s a big cottage industry, especially when there are poets locked up in cells, beasts that pace the ramparts worrying about deflation and capital gains in the real world.
Under the eaves, wind mingles with the sounds of haunted things: mouth harp, train whistle, gypsy cutting through the woods.
Once, at a writers’ retreat, I slept in the tower room. Toward the end of the week, near dawn, a weight, a shape, sat on my chest and refused to move. For a few seconds I struggled toward the light-pull. Was it a dream, or had there been too much salt on the baked salmon at dinner?
I cannot live your lives again, o ghostly ones. But I can walk to the balcony and look down at the river where your faces occasionally swim up under moonlight. I can collect your delicate ululations like pearls, one by one on a line.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Jole of Ling
[In the morning I drank at the Sun,
at the Swan in Fish Street,
at our Goal Feast,
at our Jole of Ling,
and after a good cup of ale I shot a scholar.
I drank at the burial of a young bookseller,
drank to his going.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 20 January 1659/60.
[Skype haiku]
LCD screen:
when I touch her face
there’s a ripple
Snowed
We’re unused to this. There are no cars moving on the street, and very few pedestrians. Into the silence, the radio announces that the Pope will tweet in Latin.
Jam session
From time to time, people show up my house for a jam session.
My cousin Tony Bonta, a member of the up-and-coming Bald Mountain Band, and his fellow Baltimore-area musician Terry McBride stopped by Tyrone to pick up my brother Steve on their way to a Hillbilly Gypsies concert in northern Pennsylvania. They had just enough time for a quick jam session in Plummer’s Hollow.
This is a true jam in the sense that we hadn’t practiced anything together, and a couple of us were less than expert. Terry (who also plays a very credible banjo) is still learning the fiddle, and said he felt somewhat abashed about playing it in front of others but forces himself to anyway. Steve is an great frailer but hadn’t played some of these tunes in that style before, so was picking it up on the fly. I wasn’t going to join in on the harmonica but couldn’t help myself. (Note that I wasn’t intentionally hiding from the camera; there just wasn’t any way to fit us all into the frame without being a camera nazi and ordering everyone about.)
Regular readers will remember a podcast feature I did about these same three guys and their thoughts on banjo playing the last time they stopped by.
Because of my slow internet speed, it’s excruciating to try and upload too large a file, so I was very selective here — perhaps too selective. I wish now I’d included more of the two-banjo conversation between Tony and Steve. Because three-finger style players and frailers are in two separate, usually warring moieties (bluegrass vs. old-time), and because most bands only have one banjo player, one doesn’t hear this combination nearly often enough. I could’ve listened to it all afternoon.
Bagatelle
Chipped green,
turquoise, amber
tumbled smooth—
those bits we found
like careless kindnesses
flung, refusing requiem
of swell and surf—
And I cannot part
with strips of drift-
wood tucked into shelves
and drawers, cannot quite
give up the habit
of probing whorled
things for what they hide
of salt or seed—
In response to Via Negativa: Interiority complex and small stone (206).
Interiority complex
[For kindness I stumble
and tell not heart but harp,
give the country of my mind
some night notes.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 19 January 1659/60.
Koan
[Letters from his son, but his son did not come.
Merry was he drinking wine with the key
to her lodging and my lodgings.
What answer to give to a monk
saying be, saying be for?]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 18 January 1659/60.
Consequence
Already, the year cracks its spine further open
and the leaves let in more phosphor, more light—
Already, dreams turn down the alleys and shed
their delirium of pink petals on stone—
I’ve set into motion the ball that strikes
another at the end of a silver string—
And what will be will be, says the poem
that grows word by word into lines—
So eat, grain by pearled grain, of the pulp
that glistens and clings to the rind—
In response to small stone (204).