Late night.
The Babylon line out past Long Island City.
“Lena, I think I’m ready for God to die.”


We cut through a smokestack’s milky gash
in the bright expanse.
A little moon like a smudge
wolfed up by a hungry city--
it’s taken the sun through its teeth,
housed the homeless pieces.

All night I dream of men
with peeled potatoes for heads.
Worse than dreams are rumors
and newspapers.

But my mother houses saffron
in a cut-glass box.
One thread yellows the pot.
Our bellies are heavy.
In this light your mouth is like Brodsky’s mouth,
violent, rapt with praise
and small singing.

You say dobrie vecher.
Me, I’m frying livers in pork fat
plump pills, they smell hot,
scattered with translucent onion.

But you’ve been married for ages.
You brought gin under your arm.
A book that snows dust down your coat.

You kept your father’s trophies,
remember dreams you had
when you were eleven—ice, a steep hill,
lights—I make you kasha.
You pinch it with your fingers
and hold it on your tongue like caviar.
Dobrie vecher,
the snow settles between stems,
under the roots like hollow bones, set and white.

All we did for years was listen to the Sex Pistols
And drink Bombay gin while our parents were sleeping.
I spoke Russian, you spoke Ukrainian--
We were so close, as if we lived in the same family
but not the same body.
We liked to pretend alcohol ran in our veins
Instead of blood,
A clear soup, held in a great still
until the moment of birth.
We were restless.
But when we holed up between the redwoods
we didn’t have anywhere we wanted to go.
We thought a sloth two stories high might lumber past us –
“Friend,” we would say,
“we have seen your bones in a museum.”
“That’s all anyone could hope for,”
he would reply, through his mossy snout—
he never came.
But your belly was tight as a drum
packed in with cardamom
and your skin white as skimmed curd.
At your lips always a ready word.

101

The fish drain down the channels of the sea
like silver clots in innumerable veins,
down to the dark wells and cataracts
that open endlessly, like mourning mouths,
slight bellies doused
for a moment with sun, then gone,

as a bird-flock cleaves in two at sight of a hawk
and rejoins, a black mass like a grain-sack,
ripening under the hissing husks of wings.
Swift patterns that collect and die
seething with light.

Beside the cormorants drying
their wings at the riverbed
dusk carries me in like a paper fan.

CENTENARY

I have written one hundred poems
to Damocles, my brother,
to spikenard doused in dew.
To lintels, bones, and trophies.
The wind that slouches through.

I will write one hundred more.
I will hang them in the cellar.
I will pack them in with camphor.

I'll add another hundred
like the kisses of Catullus.
Deck the figures on the mantle.
I will gird their necks and ankles
like my heart, girded by Lowell
and Guillaume Apollinaire.
As dew sloughs off my garden
into the earth and air.

new hope avenue.

All the time we lived on New Hope Avenue
we watched winged shadows
through tinted windows.
The gourds we hung caved in
and showed their pale teeth.
Ripe as grenades, the spiked chestnuts - low.
The sage held on under mounds of snow.
You told me your dreams but I forgot them.
You handled me like an old gun.
It was right to—I spat fire,
grease. And you a yellow oilcloth
draped on the divan,
paper-thin man,
a hollow glass.
I wanted to drink you and break you
and swallow the shards.

All August my father held a flashlight in his mouth
like a bobbin or pearl, and gathered crabs with his hands,
the dark, mealy beach, frigid sand,
the serge waves lapping in the strait.
Father, with my hands I only write poems.
Out in the night the buds furl in
and the wind pitches fits against the roof.
The moon, a child with catarrh, wanes
plaintive and white.
I strip spruce canes
down to their split green hearts.
The black boxer pods furl
like so many skeins of film,
I want to remember everything I can.

notes from the jewish autonomous oblast

On the roof of our house
a shingle breaks like an old tooth.
I light up on the porch.
Wind knocks at the balustrade.
In the summer my father grows creepers here
the sun's bright hair.
This time last year
he buried an ear
of corn whole under ice.
My sister gets drunk
and carols to our snowman's homely ears.
When she slips
she puts a bruised hand to her hip
and her mouth lolls in a pink O of surprise.
I dipped my russet ears in the bath
to dim the shouts.
Dusk crouches like a beast
with our house in its mouth.

something a little different. thanks leelee!

The Tower of Babel rises
like a gold almond cake.
A little sun turns the mortar
to a confit of roses.
Jackdaws trill
beside sweat-slick backs.

The thirstiest tongue of lightning
turns the whole beach to glass.
Like a rain of yellow raisins
bricks scatter in dust.

Above this the head of cloud parts a little way.
The sun, pushed to its seam,
fills the air, a hot phial,
and the sea birds rise.

I go back.
A rusty sun pierces the bus
and it lunges on.
I go back.
Our drive veined with ice
between salt-gutted bricks.
The lamppost a cup of darkness.
Wind playing a rag on the holly
its berries heaped with snow.
We leaf through photos.
I was a kid once
wall-eyed, wild. Then I grew and went.
I lift a bruised gas-ripened peach
up to my teeth,
I go back.

what? last shitty examscused poem.

All the young gentlemen played lyres.
All the young ladies started fires.
The sun stamped on in red boots.
The privets trembled in helmets of ice.
The cobbles rattled loose.
The poplars croaked.
Everybody drank beech rotgut
while the fires licked at letters
on gauzy reels of parchment.
They danced until the day
lopped itself off at the kneecaps
and the night burned clear and dry.

did i mention, onslaught of winter imagery?

I'm trying to have these poems reflect the reality of my days more.
Incidentally, 7 more til 100, 2 more days til I am HOME FOR BREAK WOOT



Dec. 19, 2009

The river white as glazed fat
or frosted glass. The last runners
hot-footing it up the bank.
News of a storm pulled up the east
on a gurney of wind, snarling
planes, sinking its teeth
into the hapless grilles.
The air here clean, slumped grass
hung with frost. You say, “Poor birds,
they're outside all the time!” And point
to the poufed tweed and red tie
of the robin sidling down a crabbed bough.
Shrunk berries draped
over a stone urn. The sky blushes dark
towards a night of rank weather.
Through a window
myrtle canes in a glass vase,
hot light poured
over a woman's palms.

a story of december 18th.

the brighter the lights winked
the slower my heart beat.
even the bricks seemed to shrink
like cold teeth. i ducked into 'india
palace' and sucked handfuls of candied anise
in the foyer of the all-day buffet.
once i boiled tamarinds
into a garnet jelly.
put a dried citron to my mouth,
touching its budded husk.
now i smoke
skullcap and licorice root,
restless for nicotine.
at night you play a jaw harp
you picked up on a whim,
and i wear stripes with stripes.
you cradle my skull with your palm all night.
i kiss your heels
under the flyspecked sheets.

change of pace?

All night I dreamt
I fished the inlets of Corfu. Heart in my throat
I slit a gasping bass, threw
its shorn fins back. Drank ouzo neat
and trilled tis tavlas through my hair.
What a thing! To drink with mes
semblables, hollow a roast potato,
lever a spoonful of caviar into the white gut
and hold it, salty, mealy, on my tongue,
and the clear spirit, burning. I recalled
even in my dream how you rent the cod’s breast
with your tongue, perspired,
kicked out your heels, sang
under the baritone of taxis.
You never lifted your voice, even
to question me, even whetted
with arak rayan
in the bowels of the Spianada.
I wanted to drink with you until an aureole of light
slunk round the city, icy and new,
to half-carry you,
put almond cakes
to your open lips,
while the sun wheeled,
a slim, tender disc,
over the old fortress.

hmm

So I hit poem 90 on this blog... I am having a bit of a crisis of purpose. This is sort of independent of the generally low quality of work I've been producing throughout reading/finals period. Part of it is being rejected by publications both on and off campus, I'll admit. I mean, part of the problem is that poetry is in a lot of ways subjective. I think really good poetry is easy to distinguish and really bad (and even pretty bad or just bad) poetry is easy to distinguish but sometimes it's hard to tell what's mediocre or borderline bad and what's better and what's genuinely good. And what I'm trying to say is being a poet is something intricately bound with having an audience (it's, you know, the bardic art still, even if modern poetry has departed from that in a lot of ways) and so what people think of this stuff matters to me, even if ultimately (given that it's work that's not likely to be published) I am the only one to whom this stuff is really salient. And, you know, I've heard a lot of really harsh judgment of poetic work lately that I thought was pretty good, and it's just made me question a lot of the fundamental assumptions I bring to the table. Picking such an audaciously performative medium to promulgate my daily poetry, a lot of which I will freely admit is not, you know, up to par, means that I feel particularly vulnerable to criticism... which I definitely want, but, like every poet, harbor mixed feelings about... what I'm basically saying is, I'm pretty afraid that this blog is adding up to fundamental suckage &/or worthlessness as a poet, which is something I would very much like to avoid. But at any rate. This is a long introduction to a poem that... does not break the trend of mediocrity, shall we say. Guys, I swear there will be a streak of better stuff -- I have big hopes for J Term.




Sallow kid weeps under a plastic shade.
A man's arm skews in sleep
braced on the pole where the men who dance
on the trains flip with their caps out.
On the platform, frigid wind
scabs my knees. They step out too
still blaring MJ. I huff gusts
of air rough with coming snow.
My mother told me I was too weary
even to weep when I left her thighs--
my sharp-chinned sisters wailed.
The sick odors of the city, lights
dulled by cold,
by heavy waters. Wind
pelting its briars at me.
They moonwalk to keep warm
to dulcet MJ, hats
at their feet,
so the lights of the oncoming train
can drench the brims.

We smoked catnip in wax paper
put our lighters to the birches
said we'd scorch them into paddles
and we'd glide on down the river
so Orion panting swaying
shoots his arrow to the bottom
of the boat where we'll be playing
dirges ballads til the morning
flushed alarmed wavedappled fevered
sometimes singing sometimes baying

The June I was eight I sat under a kumquat tree. Unsettled evening swept a big, unfamiliar sky. I was far from home, white house, perpetually extinguished lamppost, frost-gutted bricks, windows specked with soot. Here the little vans seemed to cave in under the force of the night heat. And during the day, molten plastic seats fierce against my browning calves. This far from home, I felt my wrist often, watched the little blue bead of vein, and my sisters' lips as they bickered and sang. A black bird whooped and sank its beak into a kumquat. Out in the blue salt night paws speeded up, stilled.

oy

The new rain thinned the ice last night.
When I prod the gemmed pool with my boot
down under the black water
I see Pyramus and Thisbe,
white swimmers specked with blood.
Thisbe opens her mouth
into the flood,
and the ice-sheets close.
Somewhere in me
a mendicant soul stirs,
braying for its keep.
The ice rasps as it moves
under hushed stands of pines.

i will revise this in the morning

I see all the women
covering their shorn heads
with wigs or hats. Kerchiefs,
wimples. I want to hold my lips
against the seam of the scalp,
shaven, re-shaven
for the long-fingered God, lifter of cloths.

weak with exams

This morning I saw a funeral procession pass
flanked by cop cars blue
with lights and sirens I was late to class
hot with impatience while the little flags
whipped on the hearses

The rain froze to flat sheets
last night, now the clouds are thin;
the earth clenches itself tight
thin grass in tongues of ice.

all day my breath smoked out my nostrils
as if I were a bull in a dream.
I strike match after match on frozen moss hard as horn
on a flint street fringed with rigid ash.

please please just bear with me through reading period

they'll get better, i promise!!!

-
Winter’s giving out its poor largesse
and I write poems everywhere,
sluggishly, gumming up tissues with humors,
skin raw as new iron.
All the little claw-trees gesture
hung with fitful lights,
and all night I sit in a drafty room
watching the girls pass on the salted street.

"i have never and will never wear loafers."

I am writing a poem for you
and your new-shorn hair,
that mass of fur on the barber’s chair,
And you, sullen, in your plastic cape,
the sun outside
capping your red ears,

letterman jacket
sour with dust,
a hunch, a frayed cuff,
errant arms big with lust,

eyes winsome, neck ruffed
perpetually with three days of scruff.
Sloven in your sweet daze,
I want to see you again
through glens of quilt-down, heart-
wrenching knees, white
slice of gut--
I could beg
for big diadem you with a parched throat
until the white houses folded
their shingles down, opened
their lips, and sang.

i really hate writing papers.

Today I saw the sky dim slow
through the dense florets of snow
in the library window

Shilling for mouthfuls of facile ideas
hour after hour "up against it"
flat teeth
in a paper maw

Give me your burnished red hand
hirsute knuckle pale wrist
knock thrice on the blondwood table
to lead - me - out!

Trembling, sullen
before the goad,
I drag my feet
in stitched skin
over stone,

drenched and animal
through new ice
kindling light
under the trees,

all gunny-sack
thighs, tongue ransomed,
hiding from that slick
half-slitted disc
in cloud,

bleating for you,
hot guts, shorn
fur,
reeking of warm
ordure.

poem. after four hours of studying midrash rabbah for a divinity school seminar.

i'm a belzer granddaughter:
before the war
i would have been a princess
with a gutful of bloody snow
and now my ears and teeth are caught on the jug handles of letters
in dense choirs in dark homilies in you little book
I am a shade speaking
with heavy breasts weak ankles like the women in pinafores
in the photos who brewed up feeselahs and burned by the ton
little book I kiss you when I close you
minefield of axioms and abbreviations
forbidden to me and bidden to me by blood
yours great-uncle meshulum of yeshivat volozhin
and yours little rina who got three cries out and died
under hundreds of thin trees that pricked the moon over galicia
and now the little book hungers for me to stroke its dowdy spine
homely bound like me restless against my palms

You picked up half-price cuff links
spread your stained shirt with baking soda
there we were the provincials
greeting the seasons in darned shirtwaists
our hearts thrilling
with secondhand sorrows
from novels with covers
like wax dolls in embers

we puzzled over a cummerbund
“this clasp is like
the clasp around the Torah”
I was afraid
I wanted to grasp your ankle
and pull it close damp thing full of pulse
the snow just above the street
restless in a horn of light

six line poem. which i cut down! and deliberated over!

like a mother holding
her obese son

so am i
in my two hipped body

under a white sky severed
by murmuring turbines

what

i've been writing a 24-hour play for 6 hours. don't judge me.

-

hey
the moon rabbit is on his way
he is jumping through the orbits
let him kick over our stewpots
let him rummage through our bedrooms
let him eat all the things that sprout
that we could not live without
when he raises his head high
he blots out the western sky
let the big big rabbit come out*
let him come



*this line stolen from the mountain goats song iztcuintli totli days

the lawn spreads a humus
dark and peaty under my feet
i've been writing and writing with my little belly pressed against the table
poems and again poems into the same air
that pushes my limbs close against themselves
writing and writing into this body
crushing my own bones with its heavy stuff
ah if i could sing my way out of it
i could make a chapel out of this gorged earth

blatantmountaingoatsimitation

i packed up my valise
you packed up your bag
you had ten white T-shirts and a black do-rag
we were going to huntington where the snow settles down like ermine
what the future holds for us we are too young and too hungry to determine

you put on your smile like a sable cape
i couldn't help but wonder if i was making a mistake
a little snow starting the sky sealed like a drum
I kick into gear hear the engine hum
when we are inscribed in the book of fate
i hope they glue a photo to the page

i had to wrestle with this one

is anyone still reading this? *crickets*... ... ...

-
I had a dream the lyrebird did a little singing
and retired from my four-foot room. Ten paces square.
I had a dream the blue wolves grasped my hair
in their teeth, and screamed,
and scorched the earth. For what it's worth
I haven't smoked in days, or called you.
I've been eating apples to the core,
swallowing the pips, a little cyanide.
In the pan I disrupt yolks
with my little fork. When I looked last
the sky slumped white at my window,
now it's lustrous, blood-red.
When I take to my bed
I listen to songs by a man
whose lung collapsed last year.
I want to die in a big pile of blow
or smoke until my nostrils sing like chimneys.
It wasn't supposed to get this bad,
the white sheets pressed with yolk-crumbs,
the windows lined with terrible dusts,
like the wounds of the big cement Jesus
fixed above the bargain-warehouse door.
I saw a man there singing to his blistered hand,
white petals of skin glazed with ooze.
The cloudbank hangs like a dark whole bread
scattering the crusts of a few black dreams.

john darnielle is my prometheus

Everyone wanted to be the young man jumped up on cocaine
shouting into the body of his electric violin
over a recording of his own shout
everyone in pricey flannels
and no one who'd really read Malraux
though everybody claimed to

I've had few moments of adulation I can remember
but when the god with the guitar came out "Next"--
oh I'd wept over his EPs since I was fifteen
and dreamed myself into his hundred songs--
I forgot those dozens in their bleach-washed jeans
shredded on thousands of shredding machines
there was the dark head of the god nodding erupting
with song his body half-soiled with darkness
and half the folds of his tour clothes shot through with light

tall tale poem

I sat on a red rock
brittle with sun. A man
with a face the color of a cooked prawn
came up holding out gnarled fists.
A big sycamore hissed
in a little wind.
Sometimes it seems
the whole mountain lists
on days like this.
A big man with a scar on his jaw.
He turned to me.
He said how'd you like to see
a rock that knows everything.
Sees everything.
Can tell you
everything you need to know.
I said all right.
I said tell me.
It was polished and blue
and pierced through
with light.
Something big licked down
electric veins of calcite.
He dropped it in my palm.
Roused calm
coursed, receded.
The reeds dark flues
on a whole earth seeded
and new.
I staggered through.
The sycamore curled
its hundred spiky tongues.
The whole world
poured into my lungs.

i have to start writing at a reasonable hour.

Your damp hocks pellucid in the late-afternoon
through the blinds and a tender arm at right angles
under the budded auspice
of a livid drawn mouth
and all your joints sweet cups like profiteroles
the shuttling fingers finally still
and if the sun darts at the holly
and dies in the deepening cloud what is it to me
your belly tender in downy vesture
and the soft haunch I return to again hollow-lipped hungry

for so many years I've turned a timid face up
to crowds of stars & the yellow moon sifting down leaves
and now in a broad afternoon studded with onyx I am red and keen
with fire in my two broad palms

drunk thanksgiving poem

I am twenty years on this earth
And seen boys turn to men
And men emerge again in their boys...
It was my luck the eaves of this house should bless
A new womanhood threaded in lust,
The glazed pots and Jansen's history of art,
The ember-figures coursing whole into ash...
I will soon grow old,
still I am pale with ardor; leave me here
under the catkins livid red,
the veined rose at my head.

ummm it's thanksgiving

...that's my excuse for this
love you guys
please bear with me.
i am uneven.
t


I was watching those daisies blanched
nodding characters at the roadbank
lightning struck here not too
long ago and char makes a lace
edge on a gardening manual flipped to “the ever
popular geranium” the earth lumped to slick
greenish knobs of glass
the ever popular geranium reveals itself
hot and full in the grey air
and moving along ruminous heavy
I want to make a universe from scratch
out of zinc lead and outrageous soul

newyorknewyork

I am coming out a train that hisses
and tips on its pneumatic ankles
the girl on the billboard greets me solemn
and deft in a little black muslin
the old man with a crown of pins
round his brimless hat says stop it charley stop it charley
pulling at his compendium of rags
stores full of smoke and rosewater
colored glass under my heels
that woman dark hair on her neck like a wimple
that rough cloud bushy with rain-stuff
and all over steam gusts out the pipe-hewn earth
over the walk perpetually grim
with settled smog, dark
gums, I am ready
for the two white thighs the columns that rise
in a humor of light high above the street

hebrew kick today.

obviously rough and unedited, so i apologize for my sins against this noble and ancient language.

מתחת לצפצפות אני מנסה ליצור דבר יפה כתמיד
וירח נח כתום ועצום מעלי
ממנו כרגע שמענו חדשות של מים
נרדמים הלומים בקר החלל
איך הייתי רוצה לישון דומם קפוא בלחיי הלבנה
ולא לשבת בשולחן עשוי מפורמיקה
שומעת סריטת כוסות
ושמה מחוץ לחלון המערפל
תיפות רכות דופקות בצמרות


rough translation i will polish tomorrow:

under the poplars I am trying to create something beautiful as always
and the moon rests orange and enormous above me
we've just heard news from it of waters
sleeping smitten with the cold of space
how I would have wished to sleep silent and frozen in the cheeks of the moon
instead of sitting at a Formica table
listening to the scratching of cups
and outside the foggy window
soft drops on the crowns of trees

yesssss

I had a heavy hand of dimes
and dollars to spend
on books pilled with spittle
pears soft at the stem
and a train ride to Connecticut
up to your demesne
I am a man hopped-up on luck, wrought-up with knowing
limbs flushed with gusts of blood
I hum along the tracks a roused tom in the thrum
ready to greet you where the day spills on your windows
your little split teeth hard kernels
in a lush husk that holds a body gorged on light
with yellow Latin on my lap I pass
through sheaves of beard-weed pierced with quince
specked with must and rip-seamed, I endure
pressing toward you little avid machine lucid and sure

this blog is now a pensioner

but... no signs of retirement yet!
This poem kept wanting to be an indie song. I wrote a tune for it, too. Then I changed the line breaks. Cuz I'm a sneak.

Also, this blog has inspired someone! Check out my friend Asher's brand-new blog, "A Joke Every Day" (pretty self explanatory): http://ajokeeveryday.blogspot.com
:)
Love,
Talia
--


I've been watching Leonard Cohen on Internet TV
his doggy candid face
his books of noveau poetry
since I begged you love me

I wanted to be half-mad decked out in feathers
pulling books out of the trash by their slipcovers
watching the light go still in the guts of the harbor
I wanted to bring you down there with me

poem after the lotos eaters

I order lotus root by the plate in Chinatown,
sugared heavy and shrunk,
little wheels, wide hollows.
Dowdy, thick and dreamy
I have gone through my days--
under pink crinoline lanterns.
The little shrimps swivel their eyes at the glass.
Heavy and high I hold myself
on the chair, the air trembling
with foreign syllables.
The noon sun finds me here
on dim blue porcelain, on glass,
in little darts that pierce the lotus root.

an encounter

“I am hung on the handle of a great idea
like an apron” you said smelling of onion
scrubbed clean at the jaw as always
a high sallow color a pale wet neck like a cucumber’s
pink sowbelly mouth gaze whetted with loss
I was busy in the grips of a hard-toothed sorrow
you who had earned a living saying mourner’s prayers
were silent too at the feet of a grand thing
bared teeth face inclined to the pavement
whistling godfullofmercy-
dwellingintheheights
your jaw a clean line a disappearing angle
the sky full up with yellow mealy cloud

poem because i miss new york

I am an American, New-York-
born, and rubbing the faces off wheatpennies
as so many hundreds of greasy thumbs have done,
watching a pure greyhound piss in the street,
long neck, expensive stride,
while the sun hops fences and shimmies pipes,
wild racket of engines,
solemn ardor in the eyes of those who pass me,
grim riots of vines in chain-links and at Madison
where the storefronts throw my own face
sharp with light at me I am aching
for a marble pool a meeting of gold fins
mouths open in splendid blue gas
while the bearded men pass
murmuring with shrouded mouths
opening their fists suits bunched at the hips
furling their valises, waiting

leonid shower 2

you and I hoped for meteors
meteors like that lithograph 1833
the whole village arrested under barbed rain
darting almost to the roofs down
and down outrageous pins of light
but even under this sky a magnesia-milk
of dim light a sulfur of cloud
I felt still and full as a reed bowl

poem to the leonid meteor shower

On a night filled with bells and starshowers
I am anointing myself with silence,
my blood a pool the black boatman ferries
Hebrew letters across,
to reach out their arms
and drip from my mouth like a musk;
I will go out under the sky,
a broad neck cowled in cloud;
at its center matter burns
in a breathless void;
I will beg for boundless stillness,
streaks of vavs and zayins
scattered supernal and rough
on the dull klaf.

river words.

Sitting at the river I feel at the nape of a sky
riddled with fire. The little boatman passing
issues a long luminous wave,
breaks up archipelagos of drifting leaves.
The water is dense with lucid cloud.
A jet's bright wake curves into that shelf,
scatters to beads. In a spider's jaws
a minute wing breaks. All around me
the sky burns darkening blues,
the buses in the distance half-lights, half-bodies,
propelling themselves under lucent spires,
clouds in their arched windows.
The spider seeks with blind limbs
at the black spindle. The damp path throbs with runners' feet.
Seeking for Utnapishtim with his white hands
the little oarsman levers himself into the bridge's dark mouth.

We’ve been locked in for days,
pale claustrophobes.
The wind pulls at the stays
of the leaves, sullen lobes
motioning to the glass.
All we own drifts up like silt--
a white trail of dust like a sash,
the bedclothes roughed and spilled,
and the two of us twinned as eyes
seeking always some little gain or praise
while the rain drums out of perpetual skies
over all the dark houses slung low as drays.

Going about in a shredded coat
every man I meet is strange as an imp or eagle
all the men betting in the bars
shiny bald heads and cut-glass tables reflecting the dim light
of warped yellow bulbs
and every face grim as a cuttlefish's
outdoors the buildings go limp outraging their forms
I recall how swiftly Bosch's crowded paradise
gave way to his extraordinary hells

november poem II

Like Itzik Manger's Hagar--
a housemaid in worn patent-leather shoes,
banished with her little valise, her heavy belly--
I am far afield in a world half-stifled with myth,
half-derelict,
paved with little stones, with half-forgotten languages.
Before I was born someone bartered
all our grand ideas for comfort.
Here where the snow will soon sit like so many swollen grain-sacks
I want to swallow those smooth stones at the wayside
and make of my stubborn self a mill.

poem to pablo neruda

A little broke and all
weary I sought at the ecstasy in the heart of everything
like Neruda who could find majesty in a pair of socks
Neruda, all flat hat, immoderate jowl
And ponderous schnozz
Saw in himself a puma hungering for love
Don’t I too see magnificent forests in the legs of dining-room tables
the tremulous vein of graphite at the pencil's heart dreaming of vast gorges
in the electric chandelier outrageous rainbows and dire hearts of sleepless manufacturers
in a passing poodle’s eyes the wolf’s first shock at its own ferocity
window-glass child of lightning smooth sister of ice
At your feet illicit Pablo of Valparaiso
all my words are fruited boughs pecked empty by birds

In every patch of bitumen on the long road from here to Bethlehem on every photon every slat in the blinds every pane of warped glass every ruddy sweating pear every grain in the floursacks drop of saliva on the long pink tongue bitter seed in an orange wedge stomachpain Bible hero in every worn sneaker ill-designed star-chart plumstone pumice stone teardrop cigarette every outmoded children's classic worn filament new nylon jacket hole where a plug should have been I am loving you unbearably and entirely

lunch poem!

not to rip off frank o'hara or anything.


at 11:30 I leave my house at 11:31 an old woman passes with her caretaker grasping at leaves
12:00 I finish an article in The New Leader deploring our homes and schools
12:10 I pry myself up from the lush grass to the sound of bad jazz little white stones like curds at the river
12:30 I eat tom yam kai all by myself at a cut-glass table
a man is whistling on the stoop of the restaurant and hugging his knees
the sun on his bald hair gleams and gleams
1:00 sated and feeling weak and without sympathetic imagination I trudge home slipping on acorns and up to my ankles in a dross of broken spines
the sun adores the flagged peaks of the trees in their last yellows and the sopping coat of a terrier
the boxer trees with snaky pods like cacao
1:30 that bad jazz starts up again with its militant plaintive sound and I wonder who is playing piano with stiff wrists and who's wheezing into the clarinet
looking down once in awhile and clearing with thin fingers that deep black valve with its brigadier's buttons and shaking out weary shoulders who rasps again over the tiny reed

this is a real item in the skymall catalog

A Box of Laughter And Applause

will greet you if you buy it from the inflight magazine. 4 ½”w x 3 ½”h. Craving a little recognition? A three-dollar apple rots in the seat pocket. Coffee creamer swirling less than 2% acid esters. The wing light blinks in a waste of mist. 2 AAA batteries (included). You can see through the camisole of a stern-faced woman in the bathroom line. You recall flying over the sea as a child but dimly. The propeller round as a pupil. The plane impelling itself through dark air. Desktop day-brighter MDF. Magnetic closure. Light through the exit window makes the jump seat blaze. 4 ½”d. Open the Box of Applause. Open the Box of Laughter. Close your eyes and imagine a crowd less hoarse with want and ire. Dark cherry finish. Uproarious guffaws.

dream poem? needs work

I'm a crooked tooth without you.
A field sown in crazed rows.
Livid and sleepless.
Unwilling to dream my own dreams
I would sue at the gates of yours for entry.
You told me you dreamed for seven nights once
you were carrying a rucksack to the sea.
With each step it grew heavier
until suddenly it was a woman singing
the madrigals of Gabrieli.
Around you men dissassembled the hills in great sheaves
and carried them away towards the sea. All the while
“The Chorus of the Phoenicians” rang in your ears.
I would wait for you at the end of the long march.
The men carrying sheaves
would arrive, singing marvelously,
while the sky an upturned bowl of black apples
waited crowded and impure for you
and I too at the sea's brine-soaked shoulder.
At your arrival the least of men would cry his approval,
but even these crude shouts I could not understand,
even these weeping welcomes. You are sleeping away in the world
with no disquiet of shared dreams. I cannot speak this language.
Ill and pale I go about
letting the pin-rain soak me and hungering for sleep.

poem on going to St Louis

My country occurred to me shot through by a river
bent as a sludge-pipe and punctuated by chimneys
by naked trees on the bay islands of this new city
new affect shoddy new arches to touch.
Out of the grim and antic north
I'm greeting you America where you lie on your broad belly
suddenly coming upon new hills
stackhouses for autos an unbearable language familiar
riddled with new slang and angers I can't decipher
slung low under the billboards new vines further along in autumn
than home America I can't believe I too am party to this
rude guile of cities that gather your restless in
like cloths bunched at the corners and mottled with comers-on
if once any man was impelled by the stars
one whiff of your broad flank
puffed-up with traffic cured it America

love poem

Around you the dusk fragrant and dark
as ambergris reassembles continually.
My flat feet on your knees, seeds
of light rolling off the stones
out over the long lawn and away.
To make me laugh you mimic
consternation, like a madonna,
and the new-come moon covetous
of this pale Pieta blanches your black curls,
a plain-hearted thing spun of light who laughs
against all the corrupt settlement of the world.

poem to savenor's market.

Stripped garlic, white peppercorns, meat
ribs-up in ice, trussed tentacles
in obscene embrace, boar jaws
in hooked wild grins, the freezer clouded
with their rapacious breath;
fish-eggs many as berry-seeds
swollen at season, green pears piled ova
warmed beneath some lusty crab,
white cheese, thin lodes like calcite,
waiting for the tremulous hand,
like the nude back
of the belle laide whose mouth perpetually beckons,
but I and my purse shrunken as an old sow's mouth
go out into the black belly of the street,
where clouds heaped like mussels
are rosy at the edge of snow.

november poem

Autumn came on under a cold film of stars
thin as a calfsfoot jelly my grandmother made
and all the trees nodding into sallow ruin
shook their shaggy heads at me
the whole zodiac stamped and howled their names

but I am a four-limbed magnanimous idea
on a privet path the sun washes into marble
laughing at four winds and four thousand telephone cables
strung over the city like catgut guitars

different!

In search of a luminary or a wrought-up age brimming with spirit
I am a well-grown eater of whelks shrimps rose leaves and mosses
indiscriminate bruised in rotten greens and blues
sotted house of all carelessness and ire
who loves ill-met and constantly
wracked with undeciphered dreams
and a metier of irresolvable complaint,
an urge to pick the vast pocket of the night
and tell lies about misfortunes on trains
bare-gutted to the new
frank empty hours like tin cylinders barrelling down
that may yet steam out as I perpetually
hope new light and fine fortune

bermuda. 1997.

The air was balmy and rank
with hot points of rain.
We were taking off
three days before a hurricane was due
and already the palms bared their necks,
genuflecting with long hands;
at the prow of the storm I at eight was waiting
while the blue-gouged clouds
wetted the windows with long tongues.
Somewhere a rented bungalow
hunkered under its pale shingles.
Six beds stood in pale new livery.
And back home our old white house
black-shuttered and doused
in pale light as we'd left it was waiting.
The water moved serge
and deep as a giant's cup
under the pearl-white plane.
Out of the white
brief light new mouths in the sea
huge and solemn were opening.

"write a poem on wanting to swim."

I felt an old urge tear through me to jump in the water.
I hadn't been in since summer
when the whole earth bright--
a glass phial in light--
stood ready, and the blue lake too.
My only water now is tepid showers
or unwelcome rains.
I lusted for the idiot, the drunken
womb, that water, cool on the skin,
and the whole air rasped at me
like felt, and the white columns of the footbridge,
the sluggish meter of the radio-tower blinking,
the white eaves of the earth those clouds that move
tremulous and quick, how they pressed on me;
I wanted to open my mouth into the deep
body that cares nothing for my misfortune.
I want to speak humming and low
into white orbs of air, and echo.
Up here the air whines with too many unseen
radiations.
The yellow-brimmed wood keens to empty itself.

no comment

bout how many drinks i had before writing this.


Love under 21 is the influence of yellow hair under the yellow elm
A hysterical spiral of light,
the mauve old-new-England houses slung low as bunkers
Where black paint blisters on the doors,
a burnt skin,
a wonder at all this,
the camera that bells out light
an old tulip a hysterical object
clicking like a crab ---
It’s you after all under that gemmed riot,
Stumbling down the main,
too young to drink and with the lines of your corduroy jacket
impressed on your exhausted cheek,
slurring your liquid syllables,
and your mouth a big o under the moon out white all afternoon,
where young boys pummel scatter and toss
tousle pounce and simmer for hours,
until the evening arrives in its shimmering bridle
ready for our next advance.

autumn!

Little spitcurls of light arrive,
blanch and die in the lovage,
and sour autumn olives red
are pendant here.
In this pallid hour, a fallen chestnut
found, mealy and dark, split open,
might, crumpled as an ambergris,
a little pearl of dusk, round as an owl's-eye,
find a new rest in a whorled palm, and I
whose lips pursed for sought mercy
all morning, who's shuddered at clocksvine,
asters, carnations, might perch
at the lip of the new hour as a hand
on a new-set bowl.

it's international dense love poem week!

JK, that week is only celebrated on this blog.

---

The last rhododendrons go filmy with rot
at the edge of the path while the greenhouse roses preen.
All the stone monks on the church wall sing atonement--
perfect new Os of frost in their mouths.
Since I saw Carmen at twelve I've known to look
in the hearts of roses for lascivious intent.
Somewhere too an alabaster girl is weeping.
She lays it at the feet of those musk-flushed bells.
I hark to the keen drawing-in of breath
that's winter arriving, those old leaves
a little silt of paper at my feet,
that trunk like a black cloth
perpetually wrung.
Soon the pavestones will shrink
pitted and starred with salt.
Nodding too I go and wait.
Nodding too my unwept love is stirring.

poem 40!

I have this horror: I hate flags
fleurs-de-lis and that Seine
on the covers of cheap re-editions
and myself as I am a woman mourning her maidenhood
recalling not the thighs themselves white tapers
or the black ruff that idled
round the beignet between them-
but the hand that clenched suddenly unfamiliar
while vendors courted even the sun on the cobbles
where rooks warred for their keep,
and little colors waned at the picture window -
and the galvanized earth under me shook wept and stilled
sorrowed and straitened and slid on
and with two points of bitumen in my eyes I knew
I had earned my keep too.

Poem For Ronnie Belliard

I was drinking canned tamarind milk
and watching baseball plays through the ages,
sluggish men who chaw and fume replaced
with glimmering gods in stark-white trousers.
The milk bit at my tongue.
The neighbor's weathervane crows a long white rasp of light.
Someone in sepia drifts paunchily home
to indifferent clouds albuminous over the diamond.
A little puff of dust some decades gone obscures the frame.
There are the pumpernickel bread uneaten
and unread Aeschylus to be accounted for.
A dozen cans serve as bells at my feet
when assaulted. A fraying kingdom sags
under my bum; something must be altered.
The new champion, holder of the world record,
flashes his lacquered self-conscious grin
while the fan on the big screen coos at herself behind him.
Everyone soon will shout their woe or adulation.
The bronze cockerel that rusts and moans
wheels its fanned tail heavily towards the sun.

what?

The startling red leaves block the whole sky out. We wanted to gather them in our hands. We had seen the night in our mirrors, but it meant nothing to us, the moon idling in the window and never earning its keep. The dirty stoops surged over with steam that belled from the manholes and slipped, softly as sleep, without sorrow or ire, to the hills. But it wasn't so long ago we stood out there ourselves with sorry fistfuls of branches. We wanted to look up at the night, surprised at the moon, which would wash over us like slaked lime. Or go to Goa where it comes down to lap at blue ledges. But carelessly and cast aside, scraped clean, the moon sits in the square like a melon rind tossed in the street.

day means "between when i wake up until i go to sleep." k?

Love, we have all we need,
a raiment of kings falls about us,
a good dusk that comes under the yellow canopies
pendulous with pearly rain;
the long days that ransomed our souls are done,
the streetlamps utter light over the slate-roofed houses;
we lie on the wet down at the white tree's nape,
knowing we have in all our peril blossomed,
and feeling the dusk has filled our bones with darkening air.

i always write poems on the bus

from boston to new york.
thinking a lot about what gives life meaning and where i am headed (literally, in the case of riding a bus).


--

The sun in the wet clouds to the west
stirs in blanched fire over everything
even the billboard ad for cheap cremation
with a breakfast sandwich special on the back.
Appended to a truck cabin
a little heater coil to keep out the freeze that's coming.
A bus hurtles past with its lights on early and the moon out early
stamps itself over the vines
that climbed the highway barrier and die.
Up ahead someone is proclaiming his love
on a vanity license plate.
A clutter of black wings
scatters the air and moves off
and I who love nothing I cannot decipher
howl north through sudden hundreds of trees.

a short one.

Today I am a war-oath in an ancient alphabet
and the sun inscribes me with its thousand arms
over and over on trees and parking lots;
a foreign syllable, an unwanted article of speech,
I speak my ire unheard and alight again,
while a thousand footsteps die to smooth one stone stair.

sooooooooooooo tired

and have been writing Russian monologues all day. so cut me a little slack today, beloveds.


Towards Some Resolution of the Old Questions

I wanted to write some resolution of the old questions,
some Slavic Eden
where the new two sprang up white without patronymics,
and the great commingling that birthed us
was only a measure against the cold,
and far to the east the great powers moved
through huge unpeopled streets--
and the blank steppe hurled its body up
into the sky which never had a name,
to fall into the heavy shapes of plums,
the rigid bones of queens, white teeth,
and roots that flare far enough into the earth
to tap a vein of flame,
burn high, and like a bell
moan a long and acrid note into the wind.

"An obscure darkness passes over me..."

An obscure darkness passes over me...
I feel death is my sister and friend, and I might clasp it to my breast, as I have clasped my sister and counted her breaths. The light presses on me like an insistent lover, dulls me, moves me to a hapless indolence. Death inures itself to me, protesting my life, which seems suddenly to be a stern figure in an ill-lit painting. Murmuring to me and with my sister's pale hands, death moves through a square arrested by snow, and I appalled by light am silent, am, in the opulent light, still.

notes after some violent dreams

notes after some violent dreams

It isn't so I have more limbs than I ought
or fall head-about-heels against a street
red as a charnel-house – it isn't so I pleaded
and scurried from my death –

the path like a deep vein luminous--
and danger a great-toothed ape
hurls its body at speed –

that murderess who wed a snake
spread bones where she went pulled grapes
and howled harder
than the roused-up thunder--
old rite-haunting doggerel,
warm in an insensate warm machine...
all these dreams scour my windows white against the morning
where new rain falls soft as shells on muted news

mehh

I am in a bit of a rut. I also tried for, like, an hour and a half to form some kind of poem about female serial killers (after reading, in one of those horrible Wikipedia-sparked trainwrecky internet binges, tons of stories about them) ... failure for now, but we'll see, maybe they'll crop up. Anyway, 31...! Wish me easier writing from now on, eh, guys?
-T

---


The snow came early this year
and keeps changing its mind.
The headlines crow pith and filth.
Away out west the red sun leers at the dunes,
and women on film with botch-lipped grins
can be heard all day to make terrible confessions.
So many lucid points of rain
deck a thin street curved as a ewer’s handle.
I ate a mealy pear, pulled up the shade, and dreamed
I bared my teeth under a huntsman’s moon.

guys! I made it a month!!!

Today I appealed
to the same god of pearls and condors,
hill-isles, lariats,
peace pacts, mustard gas,
black beer, pandemics, and exercise machines I’ve always known,
and the sky was electric-powder-blue,
a mirror for a blue unblemished world.
Once the sea and sky were two
and the world was blue all through.
Under the sky, a chapel bell
painted by hand,
more music is being sold than ever,
more high-rises, more births, more syllables,
thousands of people who want to sell you coffee
or make your radiators.
Oh the clouds are scudding around in the belly
of a god reluctantly housed.
Something will come out of their restlessness.
Nobody knows what or how.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1980/poems-3-e.html

I saw a crayfish once
out in the cold water old
armored arc in my hand and with eyes
like to pinpricks in size
hapless spiny thing alert in air that steamed
after a cold steel-and-nettle rain
older than I and small
without idea of mercy

high above my head
poplars with their serpent limbs curve slow
spreading leaves as they go

too late at night. in too college-y a state.

The moon turns its rheumy eye on me
and rummages, blind, through the tide.
The little bitterns cry over the isle.
All day the sun was a grubby nickel
sealed in cloud. I've lost that pity I had.
Ah, Hector made his flight about the city,
they grasped Cassandra's hair,
trailing her robes in the dust,
and dust filled the mouth making pronouncements;
I move at my own force on the sea's lip
but a dust-throttled word is on my tongue,
and some rough prayer unsure
if begging grace or anger burns my limbs
like the spear thrown down
that finds the breast again.

I realize that calling the series 'nontalia speakers' is kind of silly because it implies that all the other poems are filled with emotions and ideas that correspond exactly to my own. Which isn't true. Maybe I'll just call it the speakers series.
All these poems just prove I have read an awful lot of Kundera. I often think about "The Joke."



Leos Soucek

I wake under feverfew
bound with thick twine. God grant it so!
I have bound it there myself.
So I have stood and waited out the morning
under the moss which hangs
like the heavy brow of Gorky--
Ah, I knew a poet
like him once!
A small man, he stammered
even his own name,
but was fierce and great
when he stood still to listen.
Me--I've seen the great sea move all night,
watched the rain sieve through my roof, and cursed my poverty,
seen my children born, watched the bulls sob in the byre,
and still even the willows speak
better than I do -'the wind plays their hair like a lyre' –
the poet said,
But still God grants I lie all night
down under the yellow eyes of flowers,
down where the moon falls softly on my bed.

every day means... everyday poems too sometimes.

я люблю тебя саша.

--

Once my mother picked lice out of our hair,
the louse's egg white on my thumb,
and sure hands grasped
the terrible comb.
You and I
have picked each other's hair out now
like grouses,
the tenor of happening laughter
similar to remembered laughter,
likewise the pain,
and the killing vinegar
always the same,
and the sullen blue moon
that wearies on the porcelain
has fattened and retired
and looked on all the while.
Oh, go first into sleep, flushed
tousled and clean, don't stray,
and I’ll ward you on your way.

czech bread sounds delicious!

Opinion poll: too many ellipses?
If you are reading this, press 'follow' to your right! You get no emails, you just make me happy.

-T

Dalka Rohlicek

Ah, the days breed into the days,
The brook which fed all summer
stirs against the banks, more hungry even
than that famous miller's daughter
from whom no braided roll or chaste young man was safe--
They say Dalka Rohlicek could take a hive
from a sap-tree without fear,
and lay the combs
on new white loaves
for lovers' gifts,
a woman with flour on her collar,
a mountainous woman...
And who now bears the name
Dalka Rohlicek, unlikely
and pendulous flower,
a woman who bit
my lip, drew blood, and wept,
bewildered, at the wound?
The wind that turns the mill-wheel
calls this name, Dalka Rohlicek,
who bit into the morning like a hoska roll,
and on the mill-wheel works its toothless gums,
and the glutted river
draws its body north...

expanding the definition of day here.

I Record A Conversation About Gliders and Airplanes

“Either type of plane would start to fly, in that— ”
A glider would not start to fly.
It can glide.
“Relative to the air, you are motionless. The only lift you get
is what the engine provides, the airfoil--
the jet engine. Sometimes propeller planes
push air across the wings to create lift.
The speed of the wheels would be continually increasing
When you remain stationary.

“Relative to … the plane is taking off at a speed
Matched to that of the wheels, and the wheels
Are constantly accelerated, at the speed
Of the treadmill. Yeah."
"In France they found a dinosaur runway. A pterodactyl
Runway. The prints they found,
The funny prints of markings
And wings…
My father told me about it…
A retrogression.
In his old age, he reverts to
A time before history. Also we raise giant fish, leviathans,
named Tembo--
He spiked the dumb one who eats all the food.
Nobody answers my questions. They’re all busy talking about planes.
Nobody talks about dinosaurs these days
except my father. A good man.”

speakers series 2

Andel Prochazka

I too have been that drunk who howled at the moon
and imagined the night was appalled,
and all my recompense is illness,
and my mother tongue nearly
forgotten, my country’s name
gained and lost and regained
not by its own hand,
and the mountains black frigates
with my fate in their hulls.
Ah, my life inadequate and still
as the black cup empty on the table,
the black cup
that gave up its contents
unwillingly,
while in the room the cigarettes were brandished
and a woman who had lost her earring somewhere
found it again, cupped it in her hand, and exclaimed softly...
Golden woman, I am your
poorest child, I was hung by my heels
at the mercy of mongrels, find me again,
I am the black cup calling
and I have no tongue at all.

au recherche de temps pendu

This is part of an experimental series of poems wherein I try to write from a speaker's perspective that isn't, well, me. One thing about writing a poem every day is you can do all sorts of experiments and series and series-within-series -- or so I'm attempting to discover. Tell me what you think! Tell your friends.

Love.
T


Poem for Les Poetes Maudits

You stub out your cigarettes and put them in your pockets
with fistfuls of matches
stripped clean at the edges.
You didn’t see me, you were transfixed by something,
maybe the light's coronets on the hedges.
I let my heels speak for me
in perfect meter,
I didn’t call out to you,
but remembered the Cimitière
des Batignolles,
where we admired the graves
of Breton and Verlaine,
and the dirty saint turned her head and clasped
her stone hands in her lap.
Fifteen hundred graves
thicker than spruce thorns,
catching the light on the thick rims of the stones.
We had nothing to leave them,
how could we leave them, the poets, in their stone houses,
enchained by flowers?
But today I can believe Verlaine could die,
and did die, once,
listing splendidly away from the sun,
and on a day Verlaine could die
with his saturnine poems, his excess, I too
can hurry away from you.

crazy.

I don't really know where this poem came from. If you wanna be lenient, say I'm being surreal. Sometimes really epic black moods descend on me and impel themselves into poetry. It is, however, Hoshana Rabbah, a Jewish holiday that translates roughly to "The Great Hosanna." Poem 21. if poems were years, this blog could legally drink.

On The Day of The Great Hosanna

The carob trees burned all night
and burn into the morning.
The sea breaks on brown hills restless
as panting chests.
It was the day we lost our memories
that the flames began like this,
terrible bellows that swell and swell,
some recollection of the molten
origin of the earth.
Under the wrecked
kindled crowns of the carobs
all we can do is gather seeds in our fingers,
breaths shallow
and grave,
while up unseen the terrible eagles wait
darting their secret tongues into the air.

john ashbery riff in the title WHAT

Self-Portrait Without Convex Lenses


I emerged from the tunnels where trains spill air like warm
pneumatic animals,
out into the wind, a perpetual
surprise,
and in the square old women were singing
to protest the war

over the cafe and the travel agency
the clouds draw themselves in like fantastic skirts
when I lower my glasses they ease
like soft shoals the night-pocked sky,
the world illegible, with no edges,
and faces that pass
anonymous pouches of warm darkness

more benevolent?

these were getting kinda glum.

--

Poem Towards Four Words for Earth

I sat on your porch today and taught you the word for earth
in four languages.
I picked them up piecemeal
talking to friends who write in foreign alphabets
all night. Zemlya
is my favorite – it sounds
black as the Russian steppe that steams
pungent and deep with snowmelt, Gaia
gutted with tremors.
We rocked back
against the warming wood,
stammering
again,
the flowers your mother spent so many hours on
recover enough to strain to the light,
and while their tender, pulpy heads
fall open, while the dinner herbs
describe good smells on the breeze,
we are writing the same characters over
and over in the dust that gathers on wood arms
and wicker bodies of sunchairs
while wicked hungers sudden
and unsaid as the deaths of strangers pass
murmuring through our chests.

before midnight what?!

In A Chinese Restaurant

The piled carp gape behind the glass, their sores
a brilliant plumage on their backs.
The king crab works its ghastly mouth; the kettle roars;
the dark eels, supine, blind, and slack,

sway and furl like heated wires.
Outside the clot-gored river moans
against its spilled-in mattresses and tires.
Still the bound claws batter false stones

in the tanks. Candied fruits lie like tongues
on the plates. A man like a mendicant king
sits by the river, and weeping swells his lungs.
An undersea light floods everything.

oh i posted this late late late.

Poem for W.S.

Today I cringed at the light like a drunk.
The flowers bared their teeth at me.
I was afraid of bricks in the red towers,
gravestones, and clock
faces. Oh everything used to have a spirit guard once
with a terrible face and hands that gripped their instruments.
The black sea raged for its libations.
Now our only company is death
waiting unpersoned where the lamplight ends.
Prostrate, the black river
licks its banks, dispersing light. I move in close
and disappear.

night poem.

guys, please comment?
on another note, lamprey mouths are the scariest fucking things ever.
-t


----


I can only write poems at night
while the moon looks on like a lamprey's mouth.
The cold light settles at my window.
I want to bake black bread
and scatter the loaves in the street.
The kettle on the range sings like an urge
unspent, the last fruits hang, swollen bellies,
dripping their musk on ryegrass
yellow with seed. The ennobling question
sinks further and further in unseated hearts,
refused by speech,
while the moon gluts itself on the cobbles,
blanched teeth in too many pools of light.

poem inspired by the mountain goats.

"...I said to Endymion":

All I could recall of my dream were the jaws of dogs
waiting. They chased me down the day. And don't we all wait
for the flesh to fall on down?
For the cool night to relieve our hungers?
Baying at the moon lucid as a blenny's eye
up in the tranquil waste,
licking our narrow cheeks.
Everything I told you with my body is true.

grumpy poem.

The cold air rankles at my skin
but my whole blood resents it.
I drank gin for the first time tonight
and liked it plenty,
but I wanted the big
body you have instead
missing its odors and blessings.
The birds are still
as pilcrows on the trees
waiting for the signal
that steels the whole school for the southward stretch.
I wanted to be
a limber being mewling
through the air. A split tailed tern
rasping through space.
But I’m a bound pouched blooded girl
who is losing her patience.

rhyme!

I decided to write a poem in rhyme for a change! Fun times had by all (although come to think of it, it's pretty melancholy). Anyway, the inspiration for this poem is Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" (Der Tod und das Madchen)...it should be a better poem for material that lofty, but one of the downsides to "every day" is a dud once in awhile. Anyway, it would be pretty cool if you guys would sometimes leave suggestions for poetic forms or inspirations as comments. Think about it! :)



Schubert Hits Plympton Street

The cool day slips on
loosing its winds.
The tossed leaves murmur
to the light on their skins.

The sun sweeps out slow
over unmown fields.
The apple trees are shedding
their rotten, brindled yields.

A girl with long hair sings
in a foreign tongue.
She lifts her white legs high
Her voice clear and young:

“Lay me out gently
like a cut rose still red.
And lay the autumn leaves
unturned about my head.”

Sweetly she goes by
murmuring her lieder.
So death recalls itself
to the sapling and the cedar.

feel free to suggest a better title.

also, if you're reading this and want to know when I put up a new poem, will ya press 'follow' on the right hand side of the page? It is a small matter that will make me ecstatic. :)

The Personal World is Universal Now

"There is no such thing as a perfect mirror. There is only a mirror that perfectly matches our expectations." -Orhan Pamuk

A famous author in his sixties said
that everyone, writing
characters, writes
themselves-- how one drinks
a glass of water more fitfully
when it rains and
one’s breath looks white on the window of a night train
and the first unquiet wind of winter stings one's cheek
the page rings true to it each for each

On the grass outside the lecture hall
a whippet was hunting blood alert
to the squirrel stammering his fear
in the dog’s eyes black as marbles
the recognition of ancient habits
the body sketched without wasted flesh
each and each do as they have always done

Every love like the books he spoke of
is small knowledge - a compendium of scars and misplaced hairs
each and each in time forget warm touch
leaving recalled rituals and moods

“I too am Madame Bovary”
I remind Flaubert

when I watch the small snow eke out your brow
I love the furrow of every man’s
every man has written his name in his own breath
on a night train's window
and every man erases each for each

Valor Begins in Sleep

I dreamed you had a wife, dressed
all in goat skins. I didn’t question this
nor the length of her hair which bent girls wove in looms.
She filled the dark tent like a red ember, singing,
pulling plump ropes of bread in her hands.
I wanted to drink water
from her fingers. Grace
is false, beauty is vain,
I loved your fictious wife despite and woke
confused. ‘Who is this woman
your wife?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell me
about her?’
You laughed. In your laughter
was the passage from one world to the next.
Your wife
was singing, “Kindness
is the basis of everything in this world,
but love is brief,”
she was baking new loaves in the ashes,
the girls wove yellow coats from her long hair
for the poor and the widows.
O, love me quietly
into the morning,
don’t laugh too harshly as I mutter
fitful in the pillow. Restive beneath my skin
the women croon, weaving
scarlet garments for their households,
lifting their gentle arms
in a sinuous rhythm of praise.

and now for something completely different

[untitled]

I ma-tri-cu-la-ted in the school of hard knocks
she says drunk dangling her bare feet
black with cheap dye into the steam-belled air
after a harsh rain. I’ve been watching dark water
sluice into dark water for hours.
She enunciates with care
dragging her fingers through her hair
and licking her cheeks where streaked eye-paint streams down.
In the water the pink-finned sea bream swim
muscling on slim tails through the tide.
Down the white foot hangs,
a small life traced in the veins,
and the big night blinks its thousand eyes and dreams.
Everywhere small lives are annihilating themselves.
The rain hammers again into our open palms.
On the hours pile until the darkness dies
and the sun burns like the first brand on the pyre.

sometimes poems help me figure out things I am trying to figure out.

Poem for Erev Yom Kippur 5770

Sourly to penance slumps my soul in autumn.
All year I've shut the call to benediction out
my lips too parsimonious a purse for prayer.
But uncouth on the street I watch my books for signs
no earthly book could hold-
embossed, the solemn hours of my life.

Only when the call to prayer
fills the unceremonied air
we come; the mournful warble
of church bells, and the thin, stalwart voice of the muezzin;
even we Jews have conceived a siren
to yowl the Sabbath into streets filled with the unfaithful.

Dear faith, dear faith I hold fast even now
a book with pages whiter than the robe
my father wears to show the Heavenly Host
a heart pure of misdeeds,
how can I find my soul in a room
when even now under ancient songs
propelled by current tongues I hear
the sun hum down the horizion spilling out
in all plumed gaiety more light
than could fill the arch and eaves of holy rooms,
so crisp and fine in the last days of September
each stone could uncurl into a naked diamond,
each ridge of the river flares like a cup of gold?

late poem Friday.

Hey, so:
I kind of decided (as I was sitting on the bus to Portland, Maine, and realizing there was no way I would get access to a computer by midnight) that the crux of the whole "poem a day" thing is writing a poem a day -- i.e., the most important thing is having the poem written by midnight, and not necessarily posted by midnight. But I realized that having decided to put each poem on a blog entails a performative aspect to the project, indicating that the audience (y'all) might be more important than I give it credit for. I tend to make seemingly firm but ultimately nebulous resolutions -- in fact, almost constantly -- and wind up wavering around quite a bit, but in this case the dimensions of the resolution aren't only in my own head for once. So, what are your thoughts? Should it be an iron deadline of posting by midnight, or is writing by midnight o.k.?

Without further ado, today's poehm:


"Poem for Jeremiah 2:2"

From the bus vestibule come the smells of fries and vinegar
and sweet false fruit. The building is bent on erasing itself
tile by tile from the minds of those who pass through it,
a place fixed firm in grimy placelessness.
From the bus I watch the light-pricked spires rise
high over the river into the hollow sky.
Under the elevated highway
the cars in the lot gleam like packed fish.
The townhouses light their narrow windows
the trees their attendants slim as girls
fanning their hair out wide in the light.
From a dark window peers the God of Deuteronomy
weary with absence, recalling the years of the betrothal,
forty years of fierce love and complaint--
enough years to fade hale youth,
not yet to send a lover to his grave,
a life younger than my father's life.
The fabled God speaks on awhile
muttering under wheels dark
on the dark road, and retreats.
I won't address the sweet subject of love,
two bodies confused in sleep,
the moon on the duvet, a bright marquee,
it is no palliative;
our loves have failed to match the films
in which all men are handsome and strong
and the women clarion as summer mornings
where nothing has yet gone wrong,
and nothing is at stake,
and the sun gleaming on the hills
sits like gold silt on every hair,
recalling to us the mercies of our youth
boundless and fair, and the whole bright earth is our bride-price.

two-poem thursday!

Hey guys, if you are reading/following this blog and have a Google account, could you put yourselves down as following the blog? This doesn't mean you have to check it every day or anything, it would just be nice for me to know who, if anyone, is reading what I put up here...

Anyway, sometimes when I get a "stuffy nose," writerly speaking - when I'm not happy with what I'm writing and think it sounds a little off, and everything I write seems to be slightly awry, I try writing in Hebrew... I'm 'bilingual,' which means that I've been learning Hebrew since I was six years old (and my mom spoke it at home a little, although we always made fun of her for it) and I spent a year in Israel with Israelis and I've been relentlessly exposed to it... which is to say I have an imperfect, not very refined vocabulary... one of the good things about writing in a second but comfortable language is that I expect a certain degree of stiltedness and so I paradoxically am much freer to express the concepts I want to. All of which is a very long prelude to saying: I wrote a (clusmy) poem in Hebrew today. Following it is a clumsy translation.


לא נעים לי עוד לשוט בחיי
כספינה קטנה מוטלת ברוחות
לבד במים ומשתוקקת לנגיעות החול.
קשה עלי לסבול חיים בלי פלא.
לאהבה ולשמחה אני כאיש יושב בפתח בית
ובתוך הבית הילולה נדירה וגדולה
עם יין ומדורות...
נמעס לי עוד להרטיב את שרווליי בבכי
ולחלום על עבר מזהיר שלא היה.

עוצמת העולם עבר ממלך לאצילים,
נפוץ והתפזר ויושב עכשיו איתנו...
גם בי קיים כח ההחלטה,
חלש וכמעת נרדם,
לא בטוח, כמו נשמה, בהיותו בי בכלל...
אהה, השעות יורדות בבטן השעון החול! --
בוא אלי, אהוב, ופה נוכיח
שלא נעלמו כל חום וזעם משטח העולם.


I'm no longer content to sail in my life
like a small ship cast about by winds,
alone in the water, dying for the touch of the sand.
It weighs on me to live a life without wonder.
To love and joy I am like a man who sits on the threshold
and in the house is a rare party filled
with wine and bonfires...
I want no longer to wet my sleeves with weeping
and to dream of a shining and fictious past.

Power in the world passed down from kings to lords,
spread and diffused, and sits now in us all.
I also hold the power of decision,
weak, near to sleep,
unsure, like a soul, of its own existence there...
O, the hours descend in the belly of the clock!
Come to me, love, and we will prove
that all heat and wrath have not dispelled
from the surface of the world.



ALSO
this is the poem I was writing and then got discouraged and then wrote a poem in Hebrew and then finished:



Two women passed me in the square
carrying black bowls in their hands.
Outside the all-night market the beggar shakes her cup.
And another woman roared a love song at a stopped car's wheel
and took off howling her rotten joyful rage
like a shout down the great asphalt tongue
of the boulevard into the night.

The numbers gentle on through the belly of the clock.
If I walk long enough,
if the air grows cold enough on my body,
will I shed my husk at last,
will I grow admirable and good?

My soul is busking its desires
on a worn guitar to an indifferent promenade..

two minutes before midnight

i post the poem I should have worked on longer.




The church bells peal in big mimicry of birds
filling the gaps in the hour with clangor.
The sound recalls to me
a past dense with faith, in every hour brilliant
as particles of light,
as plainly filling a room
so huge it swoops in a lucid arch to God.

How firmly the grand endeavors of man
once stood on the broad earth beseeching God,
whose love could fill the static breadth of space.
Now our clangor signifies nothing at all
no vast ire held against us but our own,
a crowd of children ravening for a drying teat,
rending the unwilling womb with our hands.
The orotund guards of the past are calling out
sheathed in a thin spire against the sun.

three short poems with no obvious connecting theme

some days you just ain't inspired.


1.
On the water the loons
crow like cracked bells

the streetlights are dim
as a battery of moons

with gentle love becalmed in torpor
we pass our days


2.
All night the rain beat on the slate.
The statues wept into their hair.

Water sluices hisses in the grate
And shorebirds hurl their bodies through the air.

My body swells, a white and present weight
in fulsome bloom, its rosy breasts are bare.

3.
Like the morning whose lean face hungers between the hills
I am pale and ready to become.

fourth poem :)

(note: I don't know why all I write about is light. I'll work on expanding that. but it was such a pretty day, how could I help it?)


Notes on the Magnanimity of Light

Love is a word written by a girl
in a novelty pen as wide as her ten fingers,
so I ignore the swollen volumes
the light writes on your upper lip
and insteps, clasped like hands on the sulphurous grass.
We could make any riverbank the Seine
if we chose to, but we don't,
though the light compels itself through the leaves
onto your arms,
and the wind moans in the laurel without pause.

Soft love, you can die by the water
with the moulted down of geese
who leave the shorn brown banks in flocks,
cawing at the bellies of their brothers,
webs milling the air, ungainly, unalone.

But even autumn forgets itself
when the sun flares on the water!
Oh, let your lips fall open on a golden phrase
the wind takes up like a catechism through the trees.

third post!

So once again I am writing in the nick of time before the deadline. I had planned to post this before Rosh Hashanah started but sadly the seven (!) hours it took to get from Boston to New York obviated this possibility. Luckily though, that heinous amount of time on the Fung Wah bus gave me a good opportunity to write?

Anyway, here's yet another moody poem about dusk.


[untitled]



Sunset is a venial hour. The stoops
are slick and pink as hams
in crepusculo, and the passersby swing their hips
into the murk helplessly at evening.
Each day in autumn the night rears itself higher
to catch a new hour of light in its teeth
swallowing briefly, bloodily, into the happening dusk...

I am surprised by my own lusts as always.
In the new darkness my limbs are a stranger's.
The sudden clumsiness of those who pass is an appeal to grace,
Even the cars move like half-blind dogs
muzzling hesitantly down the dim
borderless alleys of a hundred cities...

I am stained by light with the millions
who grope through the bowels of my country,
with their mouths open O in unknowing submission
unknowing possession O of the fat
frail soul that haunts the street



--

Also a bonus poem! For a fun project on the bus I memorized Matthew Arnold's "On Dover Beach" - I bought 'The Portable Matthew Arnold' on the way to the bus station, to enjoy what my friend Spencer calls "cantankerous Victoriana." This is just a silly response to that and the biographical essay by Lionel Trilling at the beginning of the book...

Off rhymes ftw!



Love Poem to Matthew Arnold

They say you were an Oxford dandy
Sleek and droll as Tristram Shandy,
And though you mope down Dover beach
I'd gladly dare to eat your peach.
O dour, dire, lettered Arnold,
Meek, upright, and barely carnal,
I dreamt you stepped forth from the page.
(And all the rest is verbiage.)

second poem! half an hour before the deadline.

I am taking a two day hiatus 'cause I'm going home for Rosh Hashanah and want to respect my parents' observance. I may or may not do three poems the day I return to this blog (probably not).



"Biological patchiness is a given..."

It's important to remember the logic of things.
The structure of leaves
piping the sun in dark veins,
twinned at the feet
diving perpetually away into the air --

This in the constant usuries of daily life,
the dereliction of the grand idea,
The sour progress of light into dimness
gouging the features of passing faces.

Strangers with hair like Spanish moss studded with flowers
look at me once and retreat from the light.
It dies on their backs like a pale child
forgetting itself in a crowd of shadows.
But the leaves recall themselves in ascending spirals
that sigh and tremble like moths in the empty street.

A poem a day!

Hey guys!

My name is Talia, I'm a sophomore at Harvard, and my aim is to write a poem a day and put 'em all up here. This may result in some rushed, perfunctory poems, but a rushed, perfunctory poem is better than none. I had to name it "A Poem A Day From Harvard" because "A Poem A Day" was already taken, but rest assured my project will (hopefully) not be limited to self-serving, Harvard-worshipping crap.

Anyway, here's the first poem! I was reading Saul Bellow's "Ravelstein" and he mentions Eros a lot, specifically conflating Eros and the sun, so I was thinking about it.


"Eros is a sniper now in green"

Eros is a sniper now. In green
and proximal to the sun
burning his boots on the hot tar Eros aims,
piercing the serious ribs of the young,
and the light weeps like a cornet in his hair.

In a treble of light Eros fires outnumbered
by the unbloomed bellies of those who pass, ears coiled in sound,
eyes pinned to small lights that do not heed the sun. O love,
the serious jaw of Eros is set
and his young thumb urges the gun.