"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.