The beginning, or the end
of an affair? Water obeys
the tidal surge. Last night’s moon,
liquid wafer. Coin that pays
for air so clear today, sunlit
leaves green as June again.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
La fin d’une affaire
The sadness of discovering that a poet you’ve loved for years no longer speaks to you, that her lines no longer resonate — how can this be? Could you have been wrong all along, hearing things that weren’t there? (But poetry is always about what isn’t quite there, isn’t it?) Has reading too many other poets with a markedly different aesthetic spoiled you for hers? You keep taking that one book, your former favorite, off the shelf and trying again, to see if maybe you just have to be in the right mood. But if so, that mood no longer comes. How could you ever have found such dull and predictable work exciting?
Even as you wonder this, it occurs to you that perhaps your craving for excitement and diversion marks you as a shallow reader, a poor listener. You try reading a poem as slowly as possible, pausing often to let the words sink in. Nothing. Gradually you begin to realize that, right or wrong, the heart cannot be ignored, and whoever’s fault it may be, this once great pleasure, this astonishment, will come no more.
And then, three books away on the shelf, you notice one you’ve never opened since the day you brought it home from the book sale…
The Lovers
A restless wind turns over leaves
and enters, searching through the house
when we unlatch the windows.
*
Cobblestones emerge from under
veils of water and moss to turn
their eyes toward the sun.
*
What star is crossing rapidly toward another
in the heavens now? So glad for them, I turn
my face toward the light of their passing.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Two-line haiku
A sudden waft of perfume at 1:00 a.m.:
night-blooming cereus.
*
Six hours of broken sleep.
I wake to find a web across my door.
*
I eat the good half of a hairy peach
as quickly as I can.
*
Distant tropical storm.
A small flock of migrants gusts around the yard.
*
Above the blue-and-while dogwood berries,
a blue-and-white warbler.
Goodbye, Irene
Note: This poem has been temporarily hidden by the author.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Charms
What did we hear that morning?
The sound of deer running through the woods;
and from over the ridge, that highway whine.
You said, The left hand is for warding off,
the right for receiving. I tried to remember
the sequence of gemstones looped around the wrist—
peridot, bauxite, rose quartz, crystal, amethyst:
each one strung and tuned to the heart-strings.
So we reverberate to each other’s calling:
silence is a desert hung with midnight stars,
the thrum of quiet waking. Somewhere a wing,
rippling air that the other breathes.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Storm Warning
The barred owl calls, Who cooks for you?
Who cooks for you all? Along the cobbled
streets now clear of cars, the lamps come on
at dusk. Banks of clouds haunch low on the horizon,
waiting for the soup to boil. Where’s the hail
of locusts, the plague of boils, the black
deaths clustered like walnuts on the branch?
Squirrels forage in the quiet before the storm.
Bead by bead they’ll hide their store
of afflictions, enough to eat through the cold.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Hope is the thing
Watch at Vimeo – watch at YouTube.
This is not the video I intended to make. When I contacted Nic S. on Tuesday to ask if she’d be willing to record a reading of Dickinson’s poem, I’d just seen the one hundredth example of someone trying to illustrate the poem with a video of a goddamn bird, for christsake. I’d just shot some good footage of a toad that afternoon, and I thought, why not use that? Then this morning, I got some further inspiration and shot a dandelion sead head (that’s “dandelion clock,” for you Brits) blowing in the wind. It was gorgeous. It had “thing with feathers” written all over it.
The problem is, when I went ahead and made a videopoem with Nic’s reading over-top a recording of a wood thrush with the toad and dandelion clips, it was just too… you know. Too pretty. Dickinson wrote the poem in 1862. 1862! Hope was in pretty short supply that year.
So I took an hour’s nap, and when I got up, the solution was clear. Fortunately, the Prelinger Archives obliged. God, I love the internet! But not as much as I love Emily Dickinson.
Lines from August 2005
The song of the katydids always takes me back to previous Augusts… and in August 2005, when I was 39, I began a prolonged backward look with a series of poems in response to the searing and painfully honest poetry of Paul Zweig. At the same time, I was looking forward: getting ready to launch a new webzine, qarrtsiluni, with a small group of blogger-friends. I took a rare trip through the Via Negativa archives just now and found a few lines that still resonate, six years later. It’s sad to read scattered references to comments that are now lost (curse you, Haloscan and Blogger!). But at least the posts remain in all their sincerity, awkwardness, wince-worthy moments and occasionally graceful turns of phrase.
*
I watch water flowing around a large rock, its translucent body a net of shadows as it folds back against itself. After ten minutes or so, I think I might understand something fundamental about water, its impetus to condense, to fall, to plumb the depths. But then I glance just a few feet to the left & am completely flummoxed by a large drift of foam. I had forgotten about tannins.
Two ways at once
Strip. Lay down your overburden, bare your black seam of heat where the shovels can reach it. Let rains tease your acids from the rock.
Strip, stripe of concrete between gas stations & inconvenience stores, chain restaurants, big box stores, motels, each marooned on its own island of tarmac. We are all strangers here, even the natives.
Strip: supposedly comic, unmoving pictures starring the same faces, day after day. We grimace at the punchlines: Neighborhood Grill and Bar, says the Applebee’s sign. Oh, do let’s take a stroll ’round the Village Square!
Blogging from the ninth circle
Late summer of my 40th year, I catch
an echo of my childhood in the nightly
chorus of katydids, their camouflaged
leaf-bodies falling out of & back into unison
like a concert audience that continues its rhythmic
clapping during a break in the music.
The pure distance
Ten-thirty in the small reception area at Scotty’s Discount Tire and Muffler in downtown Summersville, West Virginia (population 3,900). I return from a walk with my umbrella in the on-again, off-again drizzle and find my brother reading a history of India as he waits for news about the car. A small, white-haired lady in the next seat over is singing about Jesus.
They call it Stormy Monday
In the meantime, I have settled
into my body like a stone
at the bottom of a pond.
Written by the vanquished
I dreamed I drove a sprayer truck
slowly along the berm of a road
in prayerful silence.
Green plague
Sky-blue petals in
the wet grass. I crouch down,
my mind blank as a cloud.
Back home, I look it up, chagrined:
forget-me-not.
That great invention
Since I stopped following the news,
my dreams supply all the missing details
of earthquake, torture, & mass starvation.
Ask me anything.
Advancing into sleepless woods
I have planted myself here like
a yellow birch sapling on top of a hemlock stump
that rots away even as the birch encircles it
with an apron of roots, & a hundred
years later it still preserves, unseen,
the hollow shape of the corpse
that gave it life.
What remains
State of Emergency
Unfixed from inside a whorl of petals,
the rain-drenched eye of each blossom.
Large as the state of Texas, gestures
the weatherman. The hurricane’s blossom
of jagged exclamations whips across the Bahamas.
Each tree’s reduced to a trembling blossom.
First the fires, then the earthquake, then
promise of torrential rain. All things blossom
in their own time. The evening primrose
leaves turn barn-red. Omen or blossom?
Everyone’s panic-buying. Water and dry food.
Or beer. Someone jokes, Where’s the onion blossom?
Stay or go? Save or shelve? Pictures in a plastic
box. Deeds. The child’s first drawing of a blossom.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.