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Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Twenty Questions

This entry is part 21 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Has the darkness lifted?
Is the round bud of the maple not filled with longing?

How close can a room hold two, not speaking or touching?
Does every thought glint, is every fire stolen?

Is everything in the world immersed in the petroleum of desire?
Have the clocks been wound, has the coffeemaker been unplugged?

Has the crying from behind the keyhole subsided?
Do you see where the fabric holds the shape of shoulders?

Do you feel how the music rinses us clear?
Has the rain fed you with riddles?

Have I not been permeable to everything that has come?
Would you tell me where to lay this burden down?

Do you love the sweetness that precedes decay?
Do you love the light behind every green blade?

Do you love me homely?
Do you take me plain?

Have I not met you at every detour?
Can you tell me what it is that brings you back?

Each time, have we bent our heads to drink the water?
Would you lie here with me beneath this ceiling of stars?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Buying Meat from the Afghans

I am with two other tourists at a village market in Afghanistan, buying a slaughtered animal for a feast. I bring up the rear with my dad’s old deer rifle slung over my shoulder, imitating the other men. Everyone is twitchy about even the suggestion of an insult, but who knows what constitutes an insult? Fortunately, the sky doesn’t mind having guns pointed in its direction.

Our guide develops a sudden stammer. Oh great, I mutter. He leads us down alleys so narrow we each have to turn sideways — like cattle through a chute. The guy in front has the meat; we just need to get back to our vehicle. The vegetables that were thrown in for free as an incentive to buy mysteriously disappear, and I want to go find them, but the guide says no, forget it, keep moving. I meet each bearded glower with my own, trying to remember from high school how to say Don’t Fuck With Me in body language.

Night falls with appalling speed. We climb a steep bank to the road, and the guy with the meat trips and scatters it in the grass and dirt. We fumble for it in the dark, exclaiming over each little wet cube, ready for a gritty stew.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Household of Water, Moon, & Snow: The Thoreau Poems by Todd Davis

Household of Water, Moon, & SnowThese poems with their clear music and cool, unexpected depths are the perfect palate cleanser after yesterday’s rich fare. Here, for example, is the beginning (minus the epigraph from Walden) of “Thoreau Surveys the Ice,” in which the naturalist comes out before dawn to witness the break-up of the ice. Read it out loud, if you can:

In late March he tromped over rotting snow, hardened
edges, knee-high holes that held the leg until the weight
of want and momentum broke through to the next,
and the next which led to the pond’s scalloped ledges,
the distance between piled winter and spring’s wanton
wedge.

The chapbook arrived in today’s mail, unsolicited, inscribed with a note by the author too flattering to reproduce here. Todd Davis is a friend and sometime guest writer at Via Negativa, and it probably won’t surprise anyone who remembers those contributions, or our conversation on the Woodrat podcast last year, that he’s now written a cycle of 22 poems about or in the voice of Henry David Thoreau. The chapbook is from Seven Kitchens Press — the featured publisher here last April — which means hand-sewn, beautiful design and typography, everything a traditional poetry chapbook should be. Plus it’s small enough to fit in a large pocket, which means I could’ve taken it into the woods to read deliberately, as it deserves, had it not been pouring rain all afternoon.

Several things occurred to me as I read this. One is that it’s cool to see an author of six scholarly works and numerous journal articles bridging the divide in his own work (and Lord knows in university English departments) between scholarship and creative writing. Harold Bloom once made the point (at the beginning of The Book of J) that every reader forms an image of the author in his or her mind, and that conscientious scholars should at least acknowledge this inevitable quirk or skew. In Household of Water, Moon, & Snow, Todd brings this mental construct into the foreground and makes him speak in a voice that is at once Todd’s and also recognizably Thoreauvian — and at times sounds a bit East Asian, too. And that’s the second thing that occurred to me: any well-educated modern poet trying to reimagine Thoreau can’t help but be influenced by translations of classic Chinese and Japanese literature, a body of work Thoreau almost certainly would’ve loved had he known it. The book begins, as it should, with a deft reference to Transcendentalist belief in “Thoreau Casts a Line in the Merrimack”:

Pickerel, pot, eel, salmon, shad, even more
fish than these swim in the waters of the Self

where he casts again…

Over the course of ten lines, the view broadens into a cosmic vision of the Merrimack River. But wait a second, I say to myself, it was the Chinese who referred to Milky Way as the River of Heaven. And isn’t that an echo of Li Bai’s “Night Thoughts of a Traveler” in the last lines?

…flow outward

beneath the stars and the heavens, the other
rivers running through the glistening black.

The next poem, “Thoreau Hears the Last Warbler at the End of September,” reads very much like a Wang Wei poem, and the one after that, “Dreaming the Dark Smell of Bear,” sounds distinctly Daoist as it contrasts the protagonist’s cabin-building with a black bear.

Look at bear’s house: a hole
in the snow where great puffs of lung
rise through the roof of his dreaming.

There’s more than a bit of Zhuangzi in this dreaming, too, of course — and sleep and dreaming form a leitmotif in the collection. Since I happen to know that Todd is familiar with all that literature, it’s no great insight on my part to see it as an influence; I’m just impressed by the seamlessness of the weaving of voices. Todd’s own, typically unsentimental view of nature seems pretty close to what Thoreau also believed. In fact, when I encountered the first two poems written in the first person, it wasn’t immediately obvious whose voice they were meant to be in.

Those two poems, by the way, might be my favorites in the collection, at least after this first reading. “Eating an Apple” and “Give Us This Day” both challenge scriptural authority and widely held assumptions about work and sustenance; the latter is something of a forager’s manifesto. Picking black raspberries, the protagonist wonders:

Who blessed by this dark
sugar could stay quiet?
Ants wander drunk
into my bucket, across
the visible world
that feeds us, that makes
an offering each day:
beach plum or paw paw,
morel or puffball, even
the spider-legs
of purslane
and the sharp
bite of sorrel.

That bite, I decide, is a Davis hallmark: relationships with the natural world in his poetry are rarely one-way, and never purely aesthetic, but transactional, characterized by loss as well as gain and a certain element of risk. A poem called “The Virtues of Indolence” stars water snakes, and is followed by a meditation “On Beauty” that uses as its exemplar a poison ivy vine. Like Thoreau himself, Davis seems most concerned with learning how to live well, with eyes open to death and the perils of beauty and usefulness. A graceful elegy and evocation, this book, and a fine companion on a rainy April afternoon.

Seven Kitchens Press is offering free shipping on all its titles throughout April.

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read just four of those books. Details here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke

Space, in Chains coverPoems clotted with wonder, terrifying as Rilkean angels, fertile and corrosive as volcanic ash. A poetry of grand pronouncements in a minor key, like Charles Wright with a more overt sense of humor and better rhythm. What can you say about riddles that remain recondite? Today, I never drank from the same coffee twice. Not warm enough to keep my furnace from kicking on, but still the bluebottle flies were flying and finding one another with a buzz and a zoom. As I read, I thought about things that were not in the poems but were also new to me: a sign that this book would become my next tuning fork, as the poet and translator Dean Kostos put it in a conversation last month (I had called him up to record him for the qarrtsiluni podcast), talking about those books we read before writing our own poems. Laura Kasischke, where have you been all my life? In Michigan, writing critically acclaimed poetry and novels that are turned into movies starring Uma Thurman, apparently. Why does poetry like this seem so right, even when I don’t fully grasp it at first (or at all)? I think of the way elephants return to visit the skeletons of departed members of their herd, how they are said to pick up certain bones, hold them for a while, and put them back down. There are no elephants in this book (other than a stray reference to the word elephant) but there are quite a few images of someone or something holding something in its arms. In “Time,” for example:

and the soldiers marching across some flowery field in France
bear their own soft pottery in their arms—heart, lung, abdomen.

Or “Trees in fog”:

How insistent they are
that they’ve been here all along
holding their tangible emptiness in their arms.

And in “Dread,” there’s

The season in which you carry the dead thing
up the mountain in your arms
only to be given something squirming in a sack
to carry back

This is poetry of immense negative capability. In a poem called “The knot,” many versions of the knot, or kinds of knots, are described:

This cramped signature on a piece of paper. A thickening knot. An egg like a knot. Not a fist in a lake, this knot of a stranger. Not the bureaucrat’s stamp on the folder of our fate. But a knot nonetheless, and not of our making.

That’s how it ends, with not one mention of untying.

Reading this book was especially time-consuming because I had to keep stopping to jot down stray thoughts, such as:

  • What did they mean by miracle on the last day before the invention of science?
  • The color of my shame is shimmer-above-a-hot-highway.
  • I have a looming date with waiting rooms. (This is true.) It’s been too long; I’ll have to practice at home.

Not terribly profound, but again, it’s evidence that the book made my mind crackle. I was led to consider the likelihood that all the odd things I’ve suppressed because they don’t make sense in my particular belief system have their own truth, and I should stop ignoring them. In poetry like Kasischke’s, two or more opposing truths can all be true. This is a strength of poetry generally, and one of the things that leads me to focus on it at a site called Via Negativa, I think, but one rarely finds it in such concentrated form. Here, for example, is a section of “Cytoplasm, June”:

Every morning we wake tethered to this planet by a rope around the ankle. Tied fast to a pole—but also loose, without rules, in an expanding universe. Always the dream of being a child afloat in the brilliant blue of the motel pool falling away, and an old man with cancer waking up on a bed of nails. Please, don’t remember me this way, the world would like to say. And yet…

The book is two or three times too long. It may seem odd to say this about poetry I love — clearly I got my money’s worth. But poems this intense need more space. Reading the whole book in one day with the kind of attention I prefer to bring to poetry proved impossible; some poems only got one, too-fast reading. Not that that wasn’t also pleasurable, however. I found mind-expanding images on almost every page, and after a while overcame my habitual reluctance to mark up books and grabbed a pencil. Oddly, I found that the mere act of holding the pencil with an eye toward marking favorite passages made me much more attentive. The pencil bore the name of our township tax collector, followed by the words GOD BLESS YOU — a prayer for votes.

Death and taxes: the many references to a dying father in a hospital and a mother already dead seemed to come from a mature, almost tender understanding of death, more Cesar Vallejo than Dylan Thomas. I began thinking about immortality, what a strange and repulsive idea it was — and then, inevitably, what I would do if I were so cursed as to live forever. I would get stoned, no question, and stay that way from one eon to the next. I would do my best to annihilate time. But a little while later came a different thought: there are no churches in heaven.

Down here, God just spit on a rock, and it became a geologist.
(“Look”)

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read just four of those books. Details here.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Longing

This entry is part 19 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Eat something, you say to your child.
Dry your tears. And if in the legend the birds
flew over without stopping, building a bridge
out of air to yoke one here to another there?
For years, all that humming overhead.
Every morning, the hard bread you dip
into the coffee and put in your mouth.
You say, It can’t be long now. The firefly
nourishes itself with so very little light.
What does it pine for, all night in the woods?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Boy Returning Water to the Sea by Andrea Selch

Boy Returning Water to the Sea by Andrea SelchThese are, the subtitle says, “koans for Kelly Fearing.” How are the poems koans, and in what sense are they “for” the artist, William Kelly Fearing, whose works prompted them?

for when he’s painting he’s in the ocean
for if the shell had fallen from his hands

for when he grew within her like a Volute or Olive
at first armless

for when the paintbrush fell from his hands
(“Holy Shell Waiting for the Return of the Soul/The Difficult Toy”)

Can we imagine a celebrated 90-year-old artist, one with evident mystic leanings, applying himself to the very non-mystical practice of meditating on Zen or Zen-like questions — questions suggested by a lifetime’s worth of his own paintings, drawings and collages? Wouldn’t that make him, in a sense, his own master?

Everyone and every thing has already come,
already gone, so there’s no hurry …
(“The Zebra’s Secret is Silver”)

And what of the poet then? Shall we liken her to the disobedient monks who surreptitiously recorded the questions of the ancient Chan masters and the responses of their students inside their voluminous sleeves?

Boys will be boys, but then also men:

His mantle is tattered, his feet torn,
and the handles of the basket are gone.
(“Boy Returning Water to the Sea”)

Why are so many animals here — birds, horse, owls, rhinoceros, zebra, giraffes, three pink fish and a mollusc shell — occupying the place of honor?

The cameo paper is filled
with the noise of a thousand birds.
(“Man Doing Isolation, Horseback”)

If we took our cues from birds or beasts, where would we end up?

Above him, in cobalt-becoming-marine,
the four swallows follow;
wherever he’s going will be home.
(“The Night of the Rhinoceros”)

But what sort of wisdom or enlightenment is being sought here, and by whom?

“Shall I dance for you with my one wing
under two orange suns, counting steps
three, four, five, six, seven,
or back off angrily, screeching,

“‘The secret is number one’?”
(“Owl with the Secret of the Enneagram”)

With the poem on the left and the artwork on the right, and their shared title matching the color of the latter, which is call and which is response? Is it inevitable in a work of ekphrastic poetry that the poem follow the art?

But she has stopped, lop-eared, frowning:
Why couldn’t it be one going one way,
the other, the other? Why?
(“Two Giraffes in Arizona”)

Is the absense of page numbering intended to make each facing pair of cardstock pages, with no bleed-through from their neighbors, feel hermetic?

On the cliff above him, the angel Rafe
also hopes, as angels do, though
with his wings pinned back—impeccable.
(“The Place of Tobias and the Angel”)

Why, aside from the printing cost, are so few books of poetry illustrated in color (or at all), considering the extent to which readers of poetry fetishize books? What might we learn from color that the black type and whitespace alone are unable to express?

Not the heat in the summer,
nor the rain, when it rains, nor the way winter
lets you see miles away in perfect focus.
(“Texas is Much Smaller Here Floating through the Equinox”)

But isn’t there a kind of synaesthesia at work in this wedding?

To the eye, it’s nearly red.

Then close your eyes.
(“Large Bird Listening to the Sounds of Purple”)

If I revisit this book tonight in my dreams, to whom will the visions belong: to the poet or artist, to the painted animal or the animal that was painted?

In the gold there was copper; in the blue, fuschia;
and in the butterflies, flecks of the fallen sun’s last rays.
Little pink-faced owl, if she could choose otherwise,
she’d still choose butterflies.
(“Little Pink-Faced Owl with Butterflies”)

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read four of those books, one a week starting April 3 — or even just one of the four. Details here.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The Beloved Asks

This entry is part 18 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

How do I know you
have returned?

The ruffs that soften
around the necks of daffodils.

The arrogant bees
lording it over the trellis.

Bursts of pollen, tell-tale marks
like gunpowder on sleeves of pavement.

In the dark I hear the frogs again,
whetting their voices on cold creek stones.

Most of all that tendril of clear
uncertainty: knowing what could be lost.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Goatfish Alphabet by Kristen McHenry

Goatfish AlphabetI am reading this book for the third time in as many years, carrying it into the library like a charm to make the other books talk, and into the gourmet section of the supermarket to awaken lust among the cheeses fresh from their caves. The first few pages bear greasy smudges near the bottom — what had I been eating the last time I read it?

The shoddy design, lack of pagination or ISBN, and other shortcomings of the book as object continue to annoy me, but I find the poems to be if anything more astonishing than they were the last time. I tell myself it isn’t they that are aging but the ripe cheese between my ears. The language is so good, at one point I realize I am actually drooling. I wipe my beard and hastily look around to see if anyone in the cafe noticed. I must be

slug-muffled
half-dead with unspoke
(“The Goatfish Alphabet“)

as I slump

inch by mouldering inch,
Towards the soft enchantment of gravity.
(“Museum”)

The other patrons are like me, I think:

Joined, hushed, we gaze upon
the vibrant core of our loneliness.
Here, for a whole minute,

there is nothing but this hum.
(“Poetry Night at the Shelter: 1”)

It might be largely the effect of sleep deprivation, but

Today I’m transparent—all my buried happiness shows.
(“Jellyfish Dreams”)

This despite my gloomy conviction, as an environmentalist, that

My whole
damn species are fools, always skittering
toward some fresh perfection, always
outgrowing what loves us.
(“Hermit Crab’s Lament”)

But see, this is why great poetry can save us: learn to love it and you will need few other “fresh perfections.” You will ask yourself,

When did this snowy rush begin
to find a place of infinite containment;
to ground itself in the frantic waters
and anchor to the sea with its monstrous beams?
(“Touring the Glaciers“)

The question is,

are you simply willing
to fall out into the open world
with no keys, no mints, no stamps,
not a saltine to your name,
lacking chapstick, phone and change?
(“Baggage”)

And when put that way, I’m not sure I can say yes myself. It’s tough to cut loose, especially (this may surprise you) for us hermits, whose shoes are

limp-mouthed,
sloped with wear, in reusable shades:
beige, black and navy; made for plodding
from coop to kitchen on muscular feet.
(“Inheritance“)

It’s far easier to merely

launder the towels,
lay down upon them and dream
clean dreams
(“Laundry”)

such as:

Meeting the morning, drinking the sun through my skin,
Tanned and wholesome as a granola commercial.
(“Clean”)

The land withholds its blessings, and we feel our rootlessness as a penance. If we “settle in,” it’s

to sit out the landing stage
Of our perpetual half-time.
(“Renters”)

Maybe the problem is we are trying too damned hard. Maybe we simply need to create space in our hearts and wait.

The fact is that in the end, it came on its own
With such ease, and through the tiniest of spaces.
I knew then the difference between choice and grace.
Outside, the rain continued on, and the people.
Inside, my coffee tasted just as bitter,
But I drank it in a different universe.
(“Forgiveness“)

Perhaps every true god is a trickster like Raven, who
wants

your bread, your bullets,
your riddles, the last
dreamy petal
fallen to the night table.
(“The Trouble with Ravens”)

I too remember star-gazing as a child:

Who can feel small in the lap of the galaxy?
(“At Seven”)

Until one day in my early teens I did, I felt our entire galaxy’s insignificance, and was terrified to realize that none of our verities, not one, mattered a hair. After that it began to dawn on me that

Want is a sluggard tongue,
seeking its greasy kingdom. It will tempt you full
to bursting.
(“Perfect Weight”)

One could do worse than seek the grace of an addict, who

will be granted provisions and unused prayers,
Not by the angels, but by those you most despise.
(“A Prayer for Reclamation”)

I’m home now. It’s poetry night at the shelter. Beautiful book in an ungainly package, thank you for this mirror into the soul.

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read four of those books, one a week starting April 3 — or even just one of the four. Details here.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Glint

This entry is part 17 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

What is a little thing like time? Raptor,
captor, still you distress me with your
catalogue of titles: black-mantled, white-
bellied, red-thighed, chestnut-flanked,
collared, sharp-shinned harrier. The edges
of days spread across the land, their span
forming the shadow of a cross. With each
of your appearances, I startle and don’t
completely recover. Deep in the grass, see
where I sift, searching for my own lost names.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.