Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Shh. Say nothing of the racket of jays
in the crown of an oak, commotion
of feathers every which way—
I don’t know either how to find
the way back to the garden; only
now there is everything to say.
Moths lie still on the mesh
of the window, light
being the project
never quite done.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Where is your silver tea set, that gown of fine
embroidered silk, its train of gauze?
Ropes of pearl wound at your neck,
your tiara’s ruby diadem offset by the dark
waterfall of your hair— so self-
possessed, your bearing wrought by mountain
life, cold air, knowledge of the vengeful gods
whose hungers root, white and deep, hard
within the writhing animal’s entrails.
Askance, you look upon the roaring crowd
at carnival, eight thousand strong who’ve come
to gape at such uncommon beauty. You know the fog
will sift and bloom through centuries,
lay cloudy vermeil upon dissolving bones.
And we wonder if, beneath the city streets
breast-plated with garbage, the blood of some
old sacrifice still smolders, slow
flame the rain can’t quench.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Round peg in a round hole:
too cozy! It only needs to relax
the slightest bit & the whole
song fails, like a machine
with one slipped gear.
We hold our breaths then
for the single-string walk,
up up up up to pitch. Ah!
And the tune clatters back to life
with a whoop. (One hates to see
John Hardy get away.)
Rare as an heirloom,
particular as an orchid,
miraculous as spring water
flowing from a tap
& durable as a razor strop
is the banjo player’s ear.
It’s the only instrument
in the band that can’t
break down.
In a dream, an avocado tree in the backyard:
winds in typhoon season hailing fruit too high
to pick— In a dream, fluted shapes beneath
its branches: plumeria and ginger lilies.
Fragrant spikes turn brown at summer’s height,
wings folding back into the tree. Can you name
the shopkeepers all along the road into town,
opening their shutters in the morning?
The bakers have been at their trade
since well before the break of dawn,
pinching the yeasty hearts of bread
before their crusts darken at the touch
of flame. At the intersection, little boys
wait with rags to buff and shine the crowns of
leather shoes, and stray dogs roam the alleys
with hungry eyes. I turn and wonder
how the lake’s four corners have folded
into a handkerchief; how, looking
straight up from the street, the church’s twin
spires are compass points spinning slowly and I
their dizzy fulcrum, planted on the ground.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
If you’ve been following this blog for even a little while, you must’ve noticed snippets from a blog called mole in the Smorgasblog and seen comments from its author, Dale Favier. Dale’s one of my oldest friends in the blogosphere (we’ve even met twice in person!) and he claims it was my example at Via Negativa that first got him to try his hand at modern poetry. (He had been primarily a fan of Victorian and Middle English poetry before that, so I think “modern” means “anything that doesn’t rhyme.”) Dale’s first collection of poems, Opening the World, is due out in September from the U.K.-based Pindrop Press, and I recently had the pleasure of reading it in manuscript. You can read what Luisa Igloria wrote about it on the publisher’s webpage.
With Dale’s book fresh in my mind, a sighting of a hairy-tailed mole in the lawn in front of my parents’ veranda on Monday morning seemed providential: videopoem material for the mole blogger! (See the Plummer’s Hollow blog for the full, 15-minute video and a few quotes about the largely unknown life of this mammal.) But figuring out which poem to envideo proved surprisingly difficult; several were a pretty good fit, but none was a perfect fit, I thought. Finding the right soundtrack was even more difficult, and consumed many hours. I’m not convinced that the trip-hop instrumental I finally settled on was optimal, but I think it works fairly well. A mole out foraging on the surface after daybreak does seem like an apt choice for a poem about mortality. There are a whole host of predators that could dispatch it at any moment — foxes, coyotes, weasels, fishers, feral cats, owls, hawks — especially considering how blind it is, and how close it let the three of us human watchers get.
I hasten to add that lack of awareness is not a characteristic I associate with Dale Favier! But vulnerability — perhaps, yes. I was a little more succinct than Luisa, but here’s the blurb I wrote:
Dale Favier is a new kind of American Buddhist poet, one less concerned with wisdom than compassion and desire, and as comfortable with the fables and paradoxes of the West as those of the East. His poems sing, chant, weep, declaim and delight. Earnest to a fault, yet always ready to indulge in foolishness and absurdity, Favier wears his erudition lightly and takes risks that few professional poets would take: “They have not written this in books;/ they would not dare; they have their suppers to earn.” Johan Huizinga wrote in Homo Ludens that poetry “proceeds within the play-ground of the mind,” and “the true appellation of the archaic poet is vates, the possessed, the God-smitten, the raving one.” Favier is one of the few modern poets I know who seems to fit this ancient mold. Opening the World documents no mere dalliance with ideas, but a life-long, passionate struggle with gods and mortals, love and death.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Note: This poem has been temporarily hidden by the author.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.