DONE WITH THIS BLOG

Hey guys. It's been a long, trippy, trip that this poem can't even begin to express. I don't know how much I've grown as a poet, but it has certainly been edifying to sit down and at least try to write for this academic year. And now I have over 200 poems. Which - really, I think that's at least 200 more than I would have written on my own.


I have one request: if you've read even one of the poems, and are reading this can you write a reaction of some kind here? How I've grown, how the poems have changed, your experience while reading them, etc? There have been almost no comments this entire blogging journey, but if you want to, I would really deeply appreciate your reactions.

Thanks!
Talia




The last poem falls into place
in the book, like a raspy seed-case
in the silt-drifts snug to the street.
The road where we meet

is flush with darkness. The amiable stars
turn their faces from us,
but where we go, we are well-met.

Jaroslava Brozek

This quiet girl walks as if
she has a twin joined to her hips.
Her arms thin as stripped
boughs, her hair
like the stub-wheat
of an arid country.
Jaroslava walks between white pines
red
as a severed leg.
Where she walks the night keens towards morning
and sags beneath her like a black wet bread.

ekphrasis 4 lyfe

you can find the painting this is based on here: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/masterscans/sargent-nonchaloir-repose-mid.jpg

On John Singer Sargent’s Nonchaloir (Repose)

Dissolving like spooned sugar
in the hot waves of her dress,
her lips droop towards a recompense
between rich mantle and curlicued desk.
Neck blacked with a kerchief,
locked fingers, pudge-rimmed jaw,
twin arms straitened
by a golden shawl:

Of her feet, under satin
light-brindled as a May sea, we say nothing.
And the eyes drip shadow, and the nose
breathes it. Nonchaloir
thin as the staff of a pennant,
sagged under a cambric boat,
even the shadowed couch
shows more of a glimmer.
Blue-pattern fruits sag down to her knees.

All that is heavy needs a bearer,
all is swollen, gloss.

Open out your pale fingers:
Evening is drumming its palms
against the portico,
fisting your scrolled skirts with its purple hands.

If you laid all the twinned souls
of this earth end to end it wouldn’t span a river bridge.
But the blooms push out like flattened hands
over the whole earth’s span.

Carob blooms bear the heavy musk
of rot, to take the blackflies in;
deadly oleanders lip at my window
white as matrons’ hats.
And each with a stem that mills like Charon's pole
into the dim evening.
All the warships of Thucydides
could not breathe air into such blooms as these.

Hot wind trembles over the bridge, under your
ankles. I could not believe the air could hold
so many as these,
putting their tongues out into the night.

glossy birds pluck crumbs from the grass
swirled like oil spills.
you and i sit lasciviously
stroking petals outside the library.
soon we are going to fall away into our different summers,
our different years, will forget this plunk-
of-butt sidewalk grunt
into the veined throat
of the purple flower,
slender as the neck of a lynx, smelling of vanilla,
spreading its pollen on your hand, your hair,
downy, tear-inducing dream-
residue
touching your sticky lips and cravat
soaked in dew.
legs crossed I dreamed I had buried you
in the guts of Rome
under the heaving Hippodrome,
I shook my head, the magnolias dropped
in spicy drifts
under the buzzard-clear hot, haze-
drenched sky.

I slept in the back of your truck all the way to Hansom Park.
When I woke up, hundreds of miles had passed
and the whole earth severed by snow.
Slick winds still tossed dust at the back of the semis,
all around us the trees held out their brown hands for alms.
You and I, we take one of everything
from the medicine cabinet for all our ills.
Each morning we part the waters of sleep
reluctantly, warring with birth.
We shake a trail of coins as we go.
Snow swallows them up
piling its down all through Hansom Park.
Green pines heavy with nubs of ice
heave under the sky's influence--
restless, wind-girdled things
get away from us over the green crowds.

We are peeling away at life as at a birch
to look at its inscriptions
while cold May rain sinks down beneath the trees.
In the darkness between your lips, something
terrible as the imperative “Bloom!” is
forming itself. Everywhere
even in Lithuania, the rain is falling like this.
You and me, we are both from Vilna
and somewhere in our blood
prayers and cries gutter between dark buildings.
For now, the bloody sun
wanes at the lip of the cloud, a blemish,
all the trees are swollen into
bloom, and our hours,
stopped as the corked heart
of a beech, circle darkly out over the roofs

1.
away like a swan’s neck
the horizon curves over the water

2.
and blacks itself
like a shutting eye
retreating inward

3.
i feel i am tied to you with a rope of the
rustling seed husks that lie
under the oak

4.
i am the cypress
i move up like a flame when i grow

i am the mountain pine
and i break the rock

i am the oak
i wanted you to be surprised
when you pried
each tight-sealed cup
and touched the seeds inside,
fragrant, bearing a bole
of dense cloud.

morning sounds its bells
in the rooster’s throat:
spring breaks like a wave
on my shut mouth

the words in there
empty and cool
as cowrie shells

morning condensing
on the window sill
obliterating
the darkness between blossoms

ALL NIGHTER MADE ME DO IT I SWEAR

What do you got—poetry? Is it the space between a woman’s thighs
that changes shape all the time? Is that—poetry? The space between words
where God and the light are let in? –Poetry? What about the air in a boat’s
hold, the pockets on a shroud, are they—poetry? The little arch between
Baucis & Philemon the pears hung into—poetry? The cup in the palms
of interlocking hands—poetry? The wind that drowns language
and encounters the skin instead—poetry?

Rain scatters like a spilled bag of seed over the walk.
Everyone walks like an old woman under it
holding their hands out for alms,
holding their necks in for secret comforts.
A terrible creature crouches in my belly
baying its shame. I will drown it
in the sheeting rain.
Later, when the rain has made the air
Perfectly clear and still,
I will stand between two banks of burning cloud,
I will drop like a pin
Into the burnished waters.

May arrives.
You spread loosed seed
under my feet, on the goose-pimpled walk.
We go down to the river-reeds
Where cloud hums like a dark mouth
down to the water.
We don’t talk.
If we open our mouths, our hunger
speaks for us. Gently, gently
we watch the boats unmoor themselves like teeth,
wending their way to the sea.

may may may may may // pamplona // eavesdropping // charles river // humid day // cool night

It’s no longer April.
Smoke hits my throat hot as a pulse.
I sit by the river and the skeeters
tremble in the sand,
their minute mouths shudder, an ugly
chord. All weekend my friends bent over pianos,
prostrate towards Schubert and Brahms
while the short lives in these grasses expire in my arms.
A hot spring blooms into tremendous
being. All the boughs spire up with blossoms
towards the coming months, leaden with apples.
Music from passing cars
dies like the heartbeats of bees
while trash skirts the riverbank
and the wind leafs through the trees
briefly, as through a cheap book.
Everywhere tiny things drown
in the beginnings of dew,
dark wings guide themselves by sound
through crowns and spires,
severally the trees open and close their hands,
aroused and still,
not knowing any
of their many names.

Going to Tallahassee

The air simmers over the airstrip
hungering for the landing.
how it pucks and soughs, fried
as writhing dough.
I am going to Tallahassee with a five-foot tin tub
and a tale of sorrow unraveling behind me.
All around me young mothers are shepherding
their young girls
their thighs stammer at their burdens,
so much of flesh. So many stunned hours
when the TV murmurs like a tossed
sea. The pressed air in a convex haze
over the grounded planes,
and I feel the burden at my breastbone,
the ache of something falling into being,
a child’s pain in the mouth,
so many pressures of teeth coming to be,
so many wakeful hours, so many new layers of bone.

Drunk with the Gamut April 2010

On the stereo the song asks me to push it real good
Its true that for weeks I've been aping the songs of the flowers
All stem and need, all saffron that fleed
From the scene, demanding a little rest.
But the light unfolds into little deaths,
Winds strips the petals like unwelcome guests.
Hoe long have I stayed on this earth
Bleary and spitting in the jam?
Sire of unwelcome desires
I am I am I am

Step to the tree
under its spread limbs.
The petals cut free
by marauding winds.

Each one slid to the earth
like a deposed bride:
each stamen a birth
that can no longer hide.

At the prow of your body
Need pulses like a nerve.
And you approach it coolly
In the linden grove.

Lenka Nemec

Lenka Nemec:
a hood of dark hair
brows two black points
hands two white cups
ears two coiled cakes
two lips to scoop grapes
into
two by two:

at twenty Lenka already wept
and lay still among the reeds
for the emptying of her teeming breast
and draped herself in black beads

Lenka at thirty
arrayed in light
shivers between the pews
and out to the east mt wielka
dulls like a shutting book

It’s April and I’m watching videos of dead men
telling their stories. And half-formed ideas
shake their tendrils from the books of dead men
scattering their seeds all over me. Oh people ask me
why do you write all these poems about blooms.
Oh people ask me
what do you do with all these blossoms.
There’s wisdom behind the podium.
Pile the books to the bones of your brow.
And down your handles of black coffee.
If you black your brow with ink
a fine sorrow will guide you through your trammeled nights,
these days fettered by whorled suns.

So I go out to meet the dead in a rumpled sweater
and a crushed dress.
And each day my humble body
longs for an egress.
All day the birds repeat themselves.
What are they saying anyway?

I drink fragrant coffee and feel it swill
into my bones, something is coming
unstuck at my seam, falling
open, like the night does, parting
for the light at each end, rose
gumming up its spine, a dawn
that fringes the yawning blooms,
and to the little boughs that blossom and shed
and still arc thick up to the light
I ask, how can I swallow my dreams
and keep them still where they are
trembling
in the night's black belly?

January spent its seed
uselessly, against the north hill.
Now a spring gale
resolves itself in a torrent of blossoms.
Look up at the moon
watch it twin itself
on the dark waters:
the year passes by like a man ascending a staircase
in the dark, hand over hand,
step over step,
blindly by fist and heel.

the song of jane pelikopolous.

My ideas are unfelicitous and my skirt too short, as ever, screamed Jane Pelikopolous. I dreamed of a room I owned to myself. I was the queen of it. I lived inside a floorboard, it was my whole world. I drank out of a thimble and I shat in a miniscule can for dolls. I bathed in a pool of water I gathered in the fingernail of a mouse. I was so small, the eye of a needle served for me as a window. How marvelous the earth appears when you are so small! In the mouth of a blossom I could live for a hundred years. Looking at the light that came into the cup. I could live on the memory of our love for a hundred years, like the aromatic smoke from a powerful flame.

Let me tell you why you have a myth of a young god who dies and will return – I could name you ten, twenty of them. Adonis. Osiris. Tammuz. Baldur. Jesus. There they are, embossed in stone, entombed. Osiris will reassemble himself (but Orpheus’ severed head remains severed, and his lips sing about it). Down in the dark under the earth—away down deep, away from eyes & lungs—the stars are being born. There they’ll flare and die, in the nebula, a star’s nursery. The god who is born and dies is like the meteor that flares in the desert and disappears, like the imploding sun itself. To be born, he informs us, cannot be borne. He shucks his life like the hull of a seed. Then he returns to us, sucking his fingers and licking his lips.

MAN: I am the seed.
WOMAN: I am the cradling husk.
MAN: I am Heracles.
WOMAN: I am the burning dress.
MAN: I am Theseus.
WOMAN: I am the skein of thread.
MAN: I am Sisera.
WOMAN: I am the cup of milk; I am the killing stake.
MAN: I am a furled scroll.
WOMAN: I am a story told in the night.
MAN: You are as you are. I will pin you in a book. Bind you to a rock. To a fear of the sea. You are the moon. Cast from the earth. Shut in a wall. With your hands pressed to your mouth.
WOMAN: I press my hands to my mouth. When I open my palms—

It’s April everywhere.
All on earth is full
to its green brim.
Your curls, flushed husks,
burn down to your shoulders
and the moon,
a rind picked clean,
sweeps over a scene
heavy with bulbs and bric-a-brac.
What you hold between your palms
burns like a lamp in its glass cradle.

the song of oscar rosenberg.

I am Oscar Rosenberg. And when I sink into white sleep it is like falling through a waste of sand. I am not like you, though I have cast my God into the putrid rivers of this city. I am a newly modern man, stripped and base, naked of head, but pure of heart. I will stand as I am under awnings and linden trees. I will seek love as spontaneously as sunlight. In a Laundromat, or in the belly of a train, I, Oscar Rosenberg, with five new liver-spots between my neck and elbow, who forgets the words to songs and whistles them with a flat metallic tone, a bundle of limbs in perpetual motion, will love and die in the streets of this city like a rook that cries out in constant, crystal syllables.

poem

It’s April, barely
April any longer,
the leaves are flushed dark now
no longer pale and new,
and I’m afraid and drug-flushed
on a Monday night,
dreaming of my Alejandro
whose skin the rain washed white
when he stood, dizzy, under it
for twenty years; softly
the night breaks over him, lowly
the eaves and asters bow to him
where he goes on the street
the rent brick summons itself whole again,
he is Alejandro, in his black boat-shoes
whom the night looks wonderingly on
filling his pockets with stones and grasses
with damp odors, with sussurant stars.

I live in a peninsula of stone,
three sides in air,
I smoke like the daughter of a sultan
and I curse three times with each breath
so weary am I of my body
and this love which keeps it soft as it is,
and this self, ruthless as it is,
I want go up over the rocks
and away from Jerusalem, the heart
of my country, I want to call out
like a hyrax or ibex from the grottos
casting my name down and away
where it won’t ever be seen by the sun,
I will shut it
in a hole cut
in the face of the rock,
sealed in ash-earth,
tamped by hooves, by resolute
silence, the ceaseless winds
that peel away the skin
of this desert time and again all spring.

I’ve been breathing in perfumed smoke
all day. I want to grind up the jasmine
and ram it down my throat on a cloud
which shivers and splits, plunging deep
into my lungs.

In the wet air, I get hungry,
uneasy, reading books full of animus
and malice, getting grieved,
dead sweetness in my mouth,
the whole sidewalk gowned
by little wet magnolia’s tongues.

exhausted. maybe hitting the end of these poems. sad.

I fall in to sleep like I’m hungry for it,
Hungry at least to exit my body
Which is too plain, Slavic, heavy,
Held too much to the earth,
And I like my body am comical
And heavy, made of a set of bones
Cast out as if prophetically
Over the raw earth of my lumped soul.
I sit under the stripped magnolias.
Spring is going to do this to all of us someday.

I am a poet from a desert country
and every night I dream about floods
they’ll erase the earth they’ll destroy these cities
like copper etchings washed by acid
like a dime left under a faucet for a hundred years

“night is the province of death, sleep, and love”
wrote this woman who writes poems as dense and strange as mine
all night I stay up listening to the jasmine clapping its white hands
and murmuring its terrible quiet songs
I flick my cigarette stubs into the garden
I dream a cabaret of drowned men
every night is young, and every night is hungry
and every night returns again

response poem for wide sargasso sea [it's really long]

It’s April, and the blossoms are being put out all around us like calves’ tongues. Who knows what kind of strangeness is in them? We shouldn’t forget that, in order to spread out and photosynthesize, the minute new leaves have to break open the waxy scales that shut them in all winter, like hands cupped tightly over a flame. The little blossoms, severed by winds, fragrant, even a little phosphorescent in the sodium lamps that burn down by the river all night, lap at the air and at our hands, desirous of something as strange and terrible and transitory as they. It’s April. I read Wide Sargasso Sea to remind me that sitting in the heart of a blossom like a pretty cat on a lap is a kernel of madness, and each stem is like a little bone plucked out of a defenseless animal. What am I? A woman in love? Where do I sit? By the river? What am I, hungry, dreaming of Caribbean seas, of merciless thunders? Here the year droops blackly through its months, sunk low in cold; it’s so prostrate it doesn’t believe in itself, its presence, just like the mad young woman didn’t believe she was in England. Being in love in spring it’s easy to remember how we bewitch each other, we tear into each other’s hearts like a new leaf into its hard containing scales. And what does it mean to love? What’s the difference between love and enchantment? Mr. Rochester never knew the difference, he sat in the rain-gutted house and when he spoke bronze coins fell from his lips, he didn’t know whether he loved her for her money, her hair, and what the blossoms, white as gold-ore, had to say in the matter. We can gut a chicken for obeah, scatter its blood, hope the drops turn to blossoms that nod in a code we can decipher, telling us what our love is, and where our twinned bodies begin and end.

it’s april
the leaves are breaking open their wax scales
and putting out pale tongues to the light
the slick birches are sloughing off skin
so many flowers too the trees calving these soft-
bodied blooms which flare and die in an hour
and oh my love whose restless hands don’t still,

your mouth is livid
as a branch impelled up by flowers

history is drowning there
and in the sunlight which washes the day pale to nothing
and in the vivid clapping of the pale leaves as they emerge knocked roughly
by the spring wind which takes in its arms a roomful of blossoms

open your mouth
let the wind in which takes all succor and turns it into song

It’s April. I want to build up a dozen white columns and break them again. The stems of the tulips look like bones to me. A field of unbearable bones. Spring, a violent dream, a shudder through all growing things. I feel like one of those waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into the bellies of many countries; where the drops of my blood fall a flower with a new name will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust, will grow lurid as a painted bust, will continue its dense chorus, adding day after overbloomed day like a handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling, trembling.

Today the wind made a hail of petals all down the street. You watch the segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads: Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open doorways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her. You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, slimming the kern of each line, you could make your unruly self disappear. Limb by limb, like a rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl, drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water. The days pass like geese driven backwards by a gale. You want to build your life like an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, black lines of ongoing predictions.

It’s April
I pluck the last toke from the ashes
and listen to Ray Charles singing about America the Beautiful
there’s something poetic about a blind man singing this way
what does purple mean when you can’t see it?
what does a poem mean when you’re too drunk to see straight?
are we done?
I hope we’ll never be done
like the blossoms turned to princes
by the flowering of April
I hope we never get used to all this

It's April
I am falling in love with men in sweaters
with the gold stamen in each flower like the needle
in the brooch with whihc Oedipus blinded himself
and with April herself
a girl who hems her dresses with light
and from whose smoke-seared throat issues
a perpetual song of praise
April: I am listening for the sound of my hungry friends
who cry like ravens for a crust of bread
while in the public park the girls in bright dresses
built out of heat, draped in floral flags
dip whole loaves in fragrant oils

April, the violence on this earth has never seemed as sweet to me
the hot night comes like the crust of a dark bread
pressed deeply with signs
I dream that all night my breaths are turning into flowers
dappling the room, turning the air black with fragrance
I wake having dreamt that sleep evaded me
on a black ship gone over a white sea
April: I sleep and I drink and I smoke and sleep again
dying, like a field of poppies,
for the least touch of sun

It’s April, incantatory April
the warbles of birds rise up like a gas
and reading Marx under the almond tree
drinking a glass of coffee
My whole limbs feel sharp as knives
I want to rend the day open like a toffee
and place this rage, this unsaid
name at its heart
and the spring day strung on a gold thread
with its hungry art
the flowers blazons of sex
with whorled, sprawled limbs
and the sea-tempest of seeds
seeking blindly in
if I could make a blade of my tongue
if I could split the air in two—

So many blank pages
are waiting for a little writ spittle.
So many blossoming trees
are turning white under the full sun.
I feel each leg as if it’s a saber
piercing and black
stumping in the dull earth.
I hear my love cough and toss
in the dark bed behind the door,
the shades are drawn,
I feel the sun licking its bloody lips down
the public lawn
and I want to go out to the white
places on the map.
Maybe I’ve got some Tatar blood
or maybe I’m just going pale with my imaginings
but I want to go where the sun forgets to set
just west of the Urals,
I want to speak the language of horde-tremors
and tents, the kind the glassy cupolas of blooms
blow full as, then collapse,
where the light falls like bone-shafts
and solidifies to mosques;
I want to gather in the calls of ibises
and the teeth of my foes for a wristlet
I want to bring them to my love
and hang them on his bones
letting the drapes fill with a moaning song.

Janusz Bartel

Janusz Bartel is staring at the plums
that hang, still tiny nubs
outside his fourth-floor window.
It’s April
and the whole apartment bloc
feels like a hotel,
the hall
littered with half-smoked butts,
cards, corpses
of mosquitos, green rinds, the cheap perfume
of blossoms.
It’s April, each bloom is a dizzy box of glass…
Janusz wrecks clocks
and rooms, leaving his prints
on the windows,
thinking of Ada while
mangling the shag,
a woman, a strange white
house to move
into, retreat from.
spring baring
its nectar-gutted teeth
through splintered glass:
the red stain in the cup
of the plum bloom pucks
its lips up, calling
an unheard name.

it’s april
we all hop in a van after ingesting too much marijuana to see straight
little cartoon rabbits keep hopping from the vegetation grinning blankly
and we all know their only purpose was ever to die
max calls up his ex-girlfriend and shouts at her
i know that chick her body is like an elongated diamond
i bet mark still wants to be pinned under her and the delicious hair of her crotch
and when he shouts he’s shouting at mark-who-is-dreaming of her pearl-and-anise tongue
i can’t see the lintels of the van through too much smoke
it’s april the magnolias put out their tongues like calves
ryan says each one is penance for each individual hailstone
that dented our heads and our shingles all winter
i myself am preoccupied with the fact that he just licked my knee
and with the poem i’m writing about these shocking experiences
the clouds pulsing round the low sun like a vulva
the narrow road dented by the flat brush of dusk
the miles disappearing themselves from yellow line to yellow line
the several hairs on ryan’s lip that i stare at half the way to daytona
like the feathers on an ibis like the corrugations on a cowrie shell
fuck anyone who tells me this is medicinal
i am going to daytona
i am going to hell in a puce van full of lucid uncertainty

יתכן שהגענו עד הסוף
הכוכבים מקסימים, הנוף מגדירה נוי מחדש
אבל הכל שממה
הרוח בין רגליך נשמע כאגרף דופק בדלת
ומה יבקש
ומה יצתרך
הרוה הזה בלי פה בלי בטן
הוא רוצה לפתוח גופנו
ולשרוק בעצמותנו
הוא תופס מעל התמר ומושך שעריה
והיא מלחישה ייסורה לדמדומים סגולים
היא פעם התאהבה ברוח
נטה ראשיה לשמוע אותו
ועכשיו
יתכן הסוף יבוא לבקר
אותה ואותנו
הוא יפתח פיו לדבר
אנחנו כולנו חרשים
ברוח כזה

Holy days sit around my life
like a circle of aunts, clucking
and singing, cutting chickens
and endlessly speaking. And the children
dancing through the kitchen, pulling fistfuls
of hair or sugar or cards from cabinets
and closets. Somewhere on earth it’s always a holiday
and the name sits on the time, heavily
as a smell of cardamom in the air,
as light on water. Someone bellows a song,
someone holds a glass of tea
poured over sugar cubes,
and while we fill our walls
with a queue of calendars pale as a snow
the sun recalls itself to us slowly
burning its name into the hills.

Let’s blow up all the tall buildings and turn them back into mountains. Let’s whittle the picnic tables into a fine dust, saving only the knots and whorls. We’ll keep them in our pockets for little whistles. Let’s gut our houses and leave the doors open, cool caverns for birds. Let’s cut away our jeans until they’re nothing. Let’s thumb our noses at the wind for the time being and also because we’ve forgotten where our tongues are. Let’s watch the moon slowly turning away from us at the cusp of each April. Let’s celebrate the birth, death and resurrection of Tammuz, the perfect, youthful god. Tammuz, alias Baldor, alias Jesus, alias Osiris is back from the dead. Let’s eat dates on our knees in the middle of a sealed room, on a prayer rug. Then, turning our lips back, clucking with our tongues and dancing, we’ll walk out of the door together, we’ll petrify into crystal on the walkway under an outrage of stars.

It’s April. Chaff-rot boils
downstream, the grapefruits hang
going dry between green split tongues.
They close the Hermon at sunset these days,
shoot to kill at what moves in the night.
Abraham is always stabbing at Isaac
up there in those hills
while Sarah chokes down her bottle of pills.
It’s better than sitting by the TV set
with its rusty horns;
after all, she didn’t ask to come here
where it never rains.
Up there in the hills
maybe it was whiskey
or an angel or the climbing barometer
egging him on. No one expected it,
not since how rich he got—
nor Sarah to fashion a razor
from her compact mirror.
But so it goes. Abe fits a new hose
for the persimmons, pulls at his thumb
where the knife sliced through the web.
Meanwhile, Isaac, the dumb
lamb, is drawing maps in the sand.
He’s looking for a new girl to scoop
And pin up in the dark house.
He’ll take her away, her kerchief streaming
in the wind of the convertible. She’ll scrub
the last pale red stain from the bath,
and sing over the Sabbath candles,
which all April will flare like small, bloody suns.

inspired by dalia ravikovitch

When I was a young girl
I wanted to live in a hanging garden.
How strange, how fun
to live as a rose on top of a roof.
Now that I am older I want to know into every soul
I see, like I know a sentence
if I’ve touched the page to my lips.
But you see, knowing someone’s soul isn’t so different
than watching them from a roof,
seeing where their hair is thinnest,
watching the strangeness of their gait,
just me, fulsome rose,
sentinel with many spines.
I would still want to be this way
if only I could guarantee
that burning dress of petals
would stay on me.
So all night I watch the city
which is still as a city in a book.

poem for march 30th anxiety attack

This evening in March
fear is lighting itself in my belly.
It gutters there
sending up a spined shadow on the wall.
That hungry expanse
dulls the walls of my belly.
A sleepless darkness, mother
of subterranean tremor,
a dessicate mouth
open as if in speech
but black in its silence.

All along the path today
the first flowers cried their lives,
each petal bright
as a sung word.
Now darkness fills each over
and March trembles at its center
like a snapped cord.

poem for passover

My country of many things
was carved out of a book, a bomb.
Here I am, up north, in its fervid army of blossoms.
My sister’s boyfriend balances his Uzi on his lap
and sticks his tongue out fiercely when he peels an egg.
He is just twenty, and ties his boots around his neck
by their laces sometimes, to store them.
I have spent so many hours in houses
of prayer that turn eastward, here
where the light begins, and burns away answers.
All along the road up here,
metal silhouettes of tractors
burned ochre in the highway lamps,
and three scripts, still as three rows
of seeds, lit up green highway signs.
Tonight we’ll sing the story of a book,
a river of blood.
And the moon will peer like a peeled egg
over a hundred cypresses.

I step into the dense air of Ben Gurion Airport.
Stunted trees lean down into the concrete,
guttering, undone, between the baggage carts.
And the Jewish year which burns like a candle
with wicks all down its length
is lighting me all the way up Highway Six.
This earth is gathering its wretched in like a kerchief
folded in at the corners
and a woman is singing through radio static
a ululating song of hunger and praise.

I am Henryetta. I store everything in my girlhood room. I tape my sisters laughing and I keep the tapes in the trunk of my car
which is smooth as a pill. And there are the tape spools. Half melted, all various, like a hundred black hands.
I follow Sam he’s my love. I’ve been following him for years. I say, don’t you know
your Henryetta? I met him in a patch of peach trees. We ground the blossoms to dust. Then we smelled great. Like the best dust. I’ll tell you what I love about Sam. It’s his ankles. I cup them. His pulse is feeble as a moth’s. I follow, follow. I wring his shirts like I would wring my hands. He is a man. Even the sunblacked turtles would come out with illiads and odysseys if they knew Sam. Truthly a man, a whole man. With scooped-white shoulders and an acre of body like a moon. His voice is ten pitches higher on tape but every sentence is a whole song of several paragraphs. Sam is all groomed. His hair is like a cobweb in a shaft of light
and where he is it’s always morning
and Henryetta follows him down the spine of the earth.

when spring comes, my poems get longer and longer.

Henryetta is trying to pay attention on the 12:15 train

approaching afternoon in the firstclass car I speed through humped willows
and sagged tennis nets used cars slumped barns and busted windows
security cameras and stunted elms and parishioners filing churchward
and a whole field of jersey cows sleeping in the sun
on hills that urge wheels on and catch them again
shale dyed electric blue raised pools and filth-caked barbeques
and buds beginning red as lipstick tubes
we blunder through lumberyards and past a house I saw
on an island in the middle of the sea
which is mirror-flat and white on this fat
afternoon…the polarized rainbow of the train
window and the pocked up highway barrier
that guides the trucks along even when they can’t
see it and the hum of the powerplants with their two ton pipes thicker than the span of a man or ten
men the river again shopfronts
and crabgrass and willowvines dry wires
waiting for leaves to bust out and I’m waiting
too—for you and your dull root that catches me even when it ought
not—Sam when I think of you my heart pays attention –
someone astroturfed their roof someone laid out a plot of earth waiting for it to sprout someone knocked over a highway sign someone left out a lobster trap
at which a few swans laugh and Klaff’s Decorative Hardware is framed by
a decorative software of blossoms
who who who who who who is speaking so loudly about their
lost dollars when every minute new trees are supplanting the last ones and new
roofs slope down at me each leading to its own neat
chimney and everywhere mounds of dust
and someday the vines will reach
up to the tracks and my books will revert to pulp
a dam lets the water down uniform as hair
on a schoolgirl’s forehead—power is rising up out of this black river power is rising up out of these black
branches power is opening opening
opening itself
there is a man walking by a river I see him for a moment between two wires
and hungry stretches of road and yellow gossamer
flowers and stationsigns we flash
past express, and everywhere lumber ossifiying in the sun and fedex
warehouses and wrecked baseball diamonds
Sam will you forgive me if I only want to write poems
will you forgive me if I could follow the stream I see deep in the woods and not
come out and write poems as I go in the mud with my hands and my knees
Sam will you forgive me if all I desire is to sit in that deserted
boat and peer into the windows of darkened houses
counting the threads in their carpets and the books on their shelves
I want to write with my body and thrill in my soul
If only I can pay
attention a raised pool filled with lilies if only I can pay
attention a damp holly a sea of ground pines a store
selling signs I am trying to pay attention
I am ending my poem as the train ends moving into the heart of the city
for miles hungry silver roofs drink up the sun and burn
baby if you help me I swear I will pay attention
and filling my mouth with praise I will write til I die

look out for more parts of this poem!!!! i'm diggin the idea. we'll see.

Love poem for Janice March 25

1
I built you up Janice out of outrage
out of kindness
The drooping crepe of eyelids
The sugar-white of spun bones
Hungry Janice in the field of
stars—lying on her spine in pink
taffeta
and with a whole plate of jasmine rice
and macadamia
there she is, her whole tongue is an edible flower
and her tremulous heart shivers and sings and trembles
Janice, I love you to humble excess
and would take apart my body for you: a headless
doll with a hollow
neck, a pocked
torso, I will cry out for you from out the whirled circle of my limbs
gentle Janice precarious goddess of
glass I will carry you to the other side of the earth
where held from the void by suckers on our feet
we will tremble and sing
and tremble again
open your mouth Janice but don’t be furious with
me—I will fall in on myself like a gutted cottage
murdered warden of a hundred grainfields bowed with seed
Janice come to me I will sing you applesong
and dappledpeachsong
in the myrrh garden
in the fountain
in the imagined country of my life
Janice is queen

2
spring rips the air open
and breathes it full like a paper bag
I took Janice to a house carved out of a blossom and down
at the bottom we sang to each other in Russian in English in
Hebrew the languages lay touching their feet
together like children bathing
in the water of the strand that runs down to the sea
unraveling perpetually naked thread of my imagining
I rode a train with Janice into the heart
of this country up the ridge of its breasts
where the birds are ululating orbs of
blood and I follow Janice through the sleeping cars
up and down the tremulous lip of the sea
rain starts again and again
stuttering like cats’ feet
and the illumined mouths of gentlemen’s
umbrellas are open
and the station waits barren as a smoothed-out
key while Janice small as a pearl onion
moves ceaselessly between the drops

love poem for the river and for you janice

I am thinking about: you, how much more of your scalp is showing than last year. The leaves are opening quickly as if preparing for departure. I want: aspirin, coffee, marijuana, alcohol, a magic mushroom, a protective amulet inscribed with the name of god, a letter of protection, a golden book, a balm, a pool of blossoms in which to bury my head; an arm, a filigree chain, your promise, your constancy. I hear: the hoarse cry of a goose alighting on the river. I remember the river I visited when I was younger. I looked for the bottom but I could never see it. Now when I dream about it there you are. Covered in mud. Stepping out. Weary and cold. Assembling yourself under the elms. I want to build myself into you like the underside of a staircase. Rivets, planesaws, beechwood, bolts. I want to sleep in your hunger. I want to weave your hairs into a net and cast it over me. I want to build myself out of your body, there, under the sodden elms, under the wings of geese, under the yellow lip of cloud that hangs, open, sallow, lowing, over the whole sky, over the river, over the pretty mouths of the willowbuds poised to moan their little song.

poem for the ten plagues and for you, janice

In the rain dye runs out of an old flyer
a car battery sizzles and spits
the shopping cart on the bank shows its rusted
teeth: we are turning the river red
a kind of alchemy
and I wear the path to your door flat as unleavened bread
coming to you hungry
mortar in my mouth
each drop of rain lands like a black
locust on the step: April is hungry as I am
licking at your lintel
with an armful of red blossoms
i am coming to take you down to the river
where god came to do the washing
and hum his old songs in your ear

I sit here in Kirov
like a bird mouthing sedge from a window-pane.
Twilight—young
night gone pale with hunger—drags
its bony fingers on the slate
roof, the clouds are writing the story
of my future comforts, and the hour
of my death, in spiked Cyrillic, a tattoo
down the spine of the sky.
The birds have woken but the trees haven’t,
yet. A bud or two, a frost-seared
crocus, the dead tulips I got you
from a florist’s, murmuring
my penitence. You sit on the couch
with your feet up, watching a woman dance
on TV, trailing her long sleeves behind her.
That spring portentuous wind
is blowing under the door.
April spills light
like a sack of sugar,
while I grow sere
and black as a cigar.

A plateau
With a very large box on it
Or many large boxes. More boxes
Warm boxes. Boxes full of the glut
of udders.

On the beach (in New York City)
There’s a lot of plastic there
In the sand
ground down smooth

How a little plastic jar
gouged out by the mouths of the waves
hangs in the tide!
Ariel is coming
to take it away
if we wait a little while.

Medusa looks over her newest stone lover and shrugs. She sighs. Picks her teeth with a talon. Even a Gorgon can’t always be alone. Even in her superb statue garden. Sometimes she gives Jacob (granite) a shoe-shine. Once she kissed Oleg (obsidian) on the head, but it left a lip-print. She paces. Ahmed (quartz) eroding at the knees, Randall (a cheap, loose shale) at the elbows. There was Eugene, forever melancholy, all in turquoise. Terrible things happen when you look your lover in the eyes, eh, boys? she says. Sometimes she eats a sandwich in Marco’s brindled lap. He took everything sitting down, even the end. Morning breaks on a garden of lovers that don’t have a hair out of place (and have nothing further to add) and slithers on towards noon (her hair appointment).

Wednesday is quiet as a blurry photo.
I gather up armfuls of soiled bedclothes.
How many bedsheets dumped in the water
Does the harbor have room for?
Morning and evening greet each other
like blind men; they shake hands
uncertainly, and light passes through their palms.
I am limping through Wednesday,
the lame knee of the week:
a hunter without a map,
a singer without a mouth.

Late at night you put your ear to my belly,
seeking out its unsettled music.
It’s still there, and so am I,
translating thunder.
All January we sat
like a twinned mollusk in this house,
thigh to thigh. We glued the mattress to the ground
and set the bedframe on the street:
friend, you and I are so much children of the air
we don’t need to hang high.
Like the wind, we often smell of trash.
If we could, we would hover above the country
and prod at the apples, groaning down flues
and up skirts—we are an untranquil music.
Friend, I fear my soul is like my belly,
A round ship without rudder or prow.

I am a house of verse.
Twenty years of hunger built me up.
I sleep on a rag under an arch
on which two thousand verses are written
in two thousand languages.
In each language I am a daughter
and a sister. In all of them my cells split
and my head hammers when I drink too much wine.
A hundred sorrows sit at my side
and croon like old women then.
I cry out: but ‘the Muses
love deep silence’: and I
am like the child Solomon would split:
two feet, one head, a silence
that severs my belly:
each eave I lay down in silence,
I lay each tile, shingle,
I lay down the lintel in silence.
I am a house of verse
and in hunger I built myself up.

From the battle song of Thorlinda Haraldsdottir

‘I held at my side the glitterer.
Scratcher of men, daughter of fire
and the hammer, sister of tempering winds.
In my belly I held a piece of rage
thin as the moon, and it rolled there,
guttering. Then I took it up
and I opened my mouth. My tongue:
a coiled dragon
born on a windless sea.
I will call you to your grave with it.
Your soul is in your body like a boiled yolk
in a stuck egg, I will pierce it.
Your brow, a cliff’s cave, shelters you: I will shatter it
and I will not stain
my golden armlet.
Though your blood scald it,
my sword, raven-beak, burning
hair of a god, will not falter or cease.’

and now for something completely different... PICK A CURTAIN!

PICK A CURTAIN
a poem/play

AUDIO RECORDING HERE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khnZfDMKwv0



GUIDE
Ladies and gentlemen, this way! Please ignore the howls of thunder to your right, and the writhing mass of spiders at your left! Enter please, I’m not taking questions at this time, this way, downstairs, and down this black passage, step sharp, thank you! I ask every gentleman presently to pinch a handful of dust from the ground and cast it over your shoulder, and every lady please to spit on the stones, just a little formality, a little libation, ladies and gentlemen, this way, no questions, thank you.

A MAN (peevish)
Were we supposed to bring pajamas? You never told us if we were supposed to bring pajamas.

GUIDE
No questions, thank you.

(Mentholated smoke begins to fill the passage. Snifters of brandy fall softly from the ceiling, into waiting hands.)

Ladies and gentlemen, brandy’s on the house, and inhale deeply, trust me, you’ll thank me. No questions at this time, ladies and gentlemen, but one more request: if you could write down the names of your children or other earthly heirs on the slip of paper at the bottom of each cup, if you could write them down and swallow them, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. And now we come to the curtained chamber, and here I’ll leave you, ladies and gentlemen. Here’s my brother.

(ANOTHER GUIDE emerges who is identical to the first.)

GUIDE
Gentlemen, may I ask you to please step forward! Ladies, you may remain behind or step forward as you like, but keep your skirts smooth and your noses clean. And now, for your delight and delectation, the game of PICK A CURTAIN! The game where you ab-so-lutely HAVE to pick a curtain!

Behind curtain number one… a lifetime of imperturbable beauty fueled by boatloads of cocaine!

Behind curtain number two… thousands of green plantains with portraits burned into their skins!

Behind curtain number three… a small village explodes in an effulgence of light!

Behind curtain number four … a bottle of wine so big you could almost drown in it!

Behind curtain number five … a fifteen-year-old girl on her knees!

Behind curtain number six… 11:45am at a Chinese food buffet … forever!

Behind curtain number seven… no more war!

Behind curtain number eight … perpetual war!

Behind curtain number nine … tasteful and discounted furnishings!

Behind curtain number ten… all the admonishments you’ll ever receive, given to you now, now, now!

Ladies and gentlemen, the universe awaits your selection in total silence! The time has come to PICK A CURTAIN!

(The sound of heavy breathing begins all around. The loud, bass, cartoonish ticking of a clock begins, thudding time. It gets louder, then crescendos.)

(The curtain falls. Silence.)

What the earth can’t hold the river takes
And bears away in its black arms.
The trees bent under it, or broke
in numbers, severed at the nape,
and bore down on the street with broken joints…

I remember when we sat by the lake
in Georgia, stunned by light,
gorged on sun and wax-papered croquettes--and murmuring vignettes--
Like my mother, I whipped yolks into a froth,
and earnest as a cake-dish, I sat where the waves
lapped at the waves, sanguine,
and fed you from a deep tureen.

Now nothing is as it was,
Even the oaks turned out to grasp feebly
at the earth, and swooned on their bellies,
bled too black even to protest;
wind opens the doors of the old house
forcing a cry out;
turning the dishes up like silver crabs,
turning the kewpie dolls in solo waltz,
turning our letters loose into the air
like a set of dice that will never come down again.

apologies for the missed day!!!

the storm that ravaged the northeast knocked out the power in my house, so I was sadly internetless. Here's the backlogged poem I wrote in the midst of the storm!



1.
Cats and men caught in their hide-holes under the brow of the storm.
2.
Its brow. Its wrinkled palm. Its sheets of teeth.
3.
Flattened trees gird the street.
4.
Ruins of mailboxes.
5.
Ruins of houses: one slate roof gapes like a toothless mouth.
6.
Making light for hours, we watch the flames rise with gutless avarice.
7.
We fear hunger like a drunk fears the light.
8.
Like a jailor fears an open door.

9. The storm sets its jaw over our house. Swallowed, we light a fire in its belly, so we can see our fingers, our bread.

10. And everyone squabbles over a precious pebble. The catch on a purse (fumbled). A stream of babble.
11.
Later on (or in our dreams) we’ll pray (time to pray then).

I return to the house of my childhood and anger welters up to the seams of my body. I say: who are you, faded posters, to witness my body changing shape—getting bigger, looser? The same mother still offers her wallops upside the head, her Sabbath dishes scraping the roof of the oven’s mouth, but the elms are older, I am more dissolute, my bed is strange, the paintings I made at fifteen watch me with warped grins, my sisters are weary, my lover awaits me, the secret things and the colored glass I kept bundled in a cabinet are dusty; I see everything through my old glasses, they pinch at my ears, I seem to see my name written in a childish hand everywhere: on the windows, the doors, the belly of my sisters, there it is hidden in the hairs under the navel, five letters leering a half-moon leer on doorknobs, on forks, on the veins of the elm leaves.

Driving to the lake, I felt the deep freeze all the way down to my gut. There it stood, pitted like a moon. I drove in circles around the perimeter, eating French Fries at the rim of the world. All night last night there were people yelling on the street. I looked down and under the streetlight there was a boy-man like a young god hooting and curling his body round the post. Perhaps street corners are kinder to young men than stories, where they are always drowned, rent asunder by nymphs, dismembered by enemies; there’s always a river to carry them away. The lake is shut like a stained-glass window. Inside, another battered young man is suspended, but he’s beaming at me. Under the water, thick as blood, under the sodium streetlamp, the young men open their mouths—to sing, to caterwaul love, to check the silence before it can begin (before it can overwhelm).

Sobeska Hlava

This is a woman with skin like an onion’s
and lips closed tight as a preserve jar.
She would darn patches in the clouds
if she could, weave herself a skirt
of straws that hang from the bales.
She disapproves of winter—only because
frost chips at the lindens, their colors grow dull
and meld together. Sister of wool-skeins,
handmaid of the yoke
that keeps the oxen neat
Sobeska wants the whole world under her feet—
Not choked up in her hands like a throttled goose
Or up above her head where the sun hangs loose
Casting its favor carelessly
Over the suffering linden tree.

things fall apart. response poem.

when did the god come down from the mountain?
we used to hear him there
raging at the briars

when did the goddess come up out of the sea?
we used to hear her there
singing like a washerwoman
among her sponges

who was the man who pressed his god between pages,
quiet as a copse
even the bees have fled?
in a rage for silence, this god pins down the hands
of the mountain-god who played javelin with thunder
presses his hands on the mouth of the sea goddes so fiercely
she breaks into foam

the god of silence shelters orphans
but he slew their fathers first

and stamped their yams:
how quickly he moves!
such a god never danced.

he cuts their cowrie anklets
as he cuts the cord

like a wind that dries the jungles
is the word of the lord

Ten days of rain shatter on the holly
that guards my window.
Its lucid buds stay on the points like stars.
I’ve been wishing so long
To be washed out with the tide:
The river will rear up, and call me its sister,
and the geese that gather
in vulgar prayer beside the water
will gather me too;
at first bowed, the misshapen daughter,
I will rise up, borne by the river's arm,
which holds in its palm
a hundred cups of sun.

You can fall in love with the empty air between your palms, knowing it makes the sound of applause. With a brass goose hung on the wall of a stranger's foyer. With the sound of a pane of glass shattering. With a pear on a blue plate. With a ticket to Russia (one way, Moskvu-Kirov). With a cuneiform tablet you saw in the Drashovski Museum. With the foreign grammar of your lover’s body, his sleeping haunches cut off by the sheets like an indecipherable clause. With a desire to roll him in dried mango and clover leaf. With forbidden cigarette smoke on a bookstore stoop. A cephalopod in a glass case. A cassette tape, unspooled. A dirty ewer of rainwater. A hamburger: God bless the intrepid that fall in love with hamburgers! With a murderer in a story. With a burglar at your doorstep. With a set of keys. With a black coat (or the woman in it). The three familiar brushstrokes of an artist’s signature. A half-finished essay. A particular hour of the night you never meant to reach. A hand-press. With the odors of an unfamiliar body. With ten days of rain. You can fall in love: the brass goose will open its mouth and sing to you. The ticket will sit in your hand like a glass dove. The artist will sign your name on his next painting. Your lover's odors will smother your understanding. You will watch the sunset out of a train window and forget your own name, but you will not forget this. A smell of mango and sweat. A dirty ewer of air: your two palms held up, open, ready to take a burden of smoke, of light.

In August
I pressed seeds into the earth
I ground them in with my heel
And the heavy seed-wheel
Hungrily out of the bitter heart
They thrust down without art
sucking the iron earth up
into their yards of gut

Little garden,
I am like a ghost here,
I take what I can from the air
and I go where I would:
without a nettle to my name
or the least idea of good

Who named the river mouth?
Who put a name on it, the place
their fingers touched?
Where did the name come from?
The river itself offered sonorous
suggestions; the clouds, a flock
tenderly husbanded, did they spell it,
the leaves, did they tell it?
The lips pull the name out
and shape it as it comes.
A hundred lands
murmuring names
various as suns.

My grandmother was in love with a dentist back in Kiev:
She carried it with her. This secret. Such a profession,
keeping teeth neat and white!
His smile was like a string of pearls
laid out in a deep-red room.
There was a little cat who walked so prettily—
just so, so prettily, the Lady of Kiev--
and a little white house I saw in the back
corner of a photograph, the window
in which a star-shaped hole was gouged
the first night of the war--
just so. I carry Lady the Cat
and the dentist, his cowlick and
spectacles, and a sack
of the ash that makes Babi Yar
livid with flowers
in my belly or somewhere
deep-—shaking my head
my face caked in grease
flipping burgers all night in a furious
gavotte—coming out
into a night the city has slicked up with spilled
light—and smoking a cigarette—
I think, my teeth, they’re turning
black, I tap the ash, I marvel
I haven’t found a dentist for myself,
though glad for my lack of gold
teeth: the little boys of Kiev
sieved them out the ash
at Babi Yar and sold them neatly
wrapped:
they studded the dust, the nubs
of bone, like the lights of this city
stud the hill--a late-night metropol
of outraged tenor saxophones
and women wailing out and stifled moans,
city that holds a few willows
and a hundred rumpled beds in its belly,
and holds me too--and my memory--
and this cigarette--and this breath
and its fellow--under the streetlamp on
First and Tenth--little cup of light--

A meditation on the names of places

Morocco has two names and two histories:
Al-Maghreb, “the furthest west”
As distinct from the Midwest, and the east
of Arabia.
‘Morocco’ comes from the Latin ‘Morroch’
which refers to Marakkesh, its capital city—
Mur-Akush, the Berbers’ “Land of God.”
To decide between them is like deciding
between the mountains and the desert.
Sister of deserts, Maroc turns eastward
And listens to them murmur.
From the east, over the mountains – that is where God sits;
husband of their quiet, he tends to its keeping,
he does not wipe his brow in the fiercest sun.
In the mountains, the junipers and cedars
put out their hands,
sending the wind away with their scent,
away into the cloud like a black spool reeled with rain.

here's to you, chuck

1.
When I am ill, waking in my body is like waking in a foreign country: a moment of vertigo until I am accustomed to a new, arid climate, one I first came to in the dark, shuddering towards sleep. Sun-dazzled women walk the streets of this city, in white dresses, and with bronzed limbs.

2.
Spring dissolves the ice like a shorn fleece or a tamped breeze. We go down to the river and toast it with goblets of its own blood.

Midnight fits me with its stifling garment;
The moon bit deep by little rings of teeth;
A sour rain, fog’s bilious harvest
Hisses like a kettle when it hits the street.

I loved you, little mime, with your bright mouth, craving
To touch your eyes to mine, those boxed-up pearls,
Caught in the fogs of the black ships leaving,
While the white-capped boys call to the cinder-girls.

15 Haiku in Response to Yukio Mishima’s ‘Spring Snow’

1.
Japan is trembling
Before modernity, as
if before a snow.

2.
Satoko waiting
At the gate, dressed in purple:
Hyacinth in storms.

3.
Leave silence, Kiyo,
Come out from its pallid house,
To the cherry blossoms.

4.
Spring comes: but Kiyo,
Rushing from love and friendship,
Seeks autumn’s silence.

5.
As rain showers pass
So furious passion fades:
Love’s abdication.

6.
Satoko’s obi:
a red serpent, singing
of sweet summer longings.

7.
Honda sees Kiyo
On the beach, in his red cloth:
Seas move in his belly.

8.
The Prince lost his ring,
Then its gem, his beloved:
Loves migrate like birds.

9.
Dead mole in the road:
Cast it away, Kiyo!
Where is its soul now?

10.
Life forms in her belly:
Even by the emperor
Wholly uncontrollable

11.
Blood of a turtle
Passes through unknowing lips
Like a short life’s years

12.
Satoko’s shorn hair
Like a sorrowful monsoon
Falls in thick torrents

13.
Through the early spring
Kiyo moves towards destiny:
A boat of lotus leaves

14.
His heart supplicates
At the feet of Satoko:
Words in weeping wind

15.
Kiyo’s soul is taken
as if by a train in winter:
sleeping migration

I am living in a house of our odors
And our memories,
Our illnesses, our rancors.
The parlor leaks.
The red shelf is sagging.
The basement soaked for weeks,
and the stoop beam dragging;

in the morning your scalp appears
Like a pink shell, showing itself
for the first time; the years
are pulling your hairs out one by one
with pallid fingers
But I am parting the curtains
in perpetual welcome.

drunk. but still writing.

Outrages of rain
Slide between the bars of the gate
What is coming upon us is a shudder of water and of silence

Kostya
When I loved you
And when you ruined me
Even the white buds bared their teeth at me

Even their stems have sun in their blood
But I am all darkness
Not the loam
That waits in darkness for a life to sprout
And not the potent darkness
That takes the light into its mouth

Only a solemn darkness
Stern and parched with want
Kostya
I have become my hunger
And even the streetlamps
Condemn my hands in suffusions of light

It’s late, Kostya; the street is swept clean
by the sleep of strangers, by continual rains.
The pulp of the evening-paper
Smashed into the curb,
the headlines trickling away by twos; Kostya, I swear
my mother was in that paper once. She was at a protest,
the light was on her braids. I found it curled in an old letter,
I was searching for something to wrap my tobacco in…
Kostya, grant me this, a puff
of smoke, obscuring your eyelids
then taken up by the wind; this is love—
the light on two braids, a yellow paper,
stained fingers, the smell of drowsy incense,
the trees so long dizzy with drought
letting the raindrops slide through their bony fingers.

Who has engineered these drains, the ones that join to the lip of the curb, barbing our city streets, greened over? How precisely they lie at the backs, the waists, of these alleyways; and how streams of rainwater, punctured by persistent drops, urge themselves under my feet. The woman in the orange coat got to this corner by mistake; her face is peevish in the little light; her feet tap like a broken metronome. Under the city, in a realm of silence, water propels itself towards a vast and irreversible descent. The city moves towards spring, the celandine trees will put out their arbors, but the flow into vast and unseen pipes will retain its speed. The pinlights of the city overwhelm me, I who am seeking after a lost gentleness, after a rain that will stop itself up in the hills as words are absorbed in the flesh of the mouth.

1.
I am woken by a sparrow’s loud voice outside my window. Enraged, I say, “Who are you to speak to me? You came out of an egg.”
2.
I too came out of an egg.
3.
Who, then, am I?
4.
A flightless bird.
5.
Cast out of glass.
6.
A plastic sack.
7.
A shibboleth of wheat.
8.
An unpronounceable name.
9.
That is easily forgotten.
10.
More so than the name of a sparrow.
11.
Who learns the name of a sparrow?
12.
What is a sparrow.
13.
A ball of flesh the size of an egg (but warmer, louder.)

ok you notice how i go on kicks with this blog?

Generally they last, like, three to five poems: sometimes it's prose poetry, sometimes it's Czech names, sometimes it's month names or winter imagery. This time, it's a fascination with archaic rhymes and language. This too shall pass. The nice thing about writing a poem every day is it's really liberating? I mean I don't want to be writing boatloads of shitty poems, but it's nice to really able to loosen up and do anything I want to with the form, and 'poem' is nicely broad and inclusive. Writing 200 villanelles would absolutely suck. Anyway, here's my (weird... yeah) poem a day.





I believed in you:
in the wrought gate hooked by two pale hands;
the silences; the reprimands;
embraces during sarabandes.
I believed in you,
And bent at your reproof
Like a vine cut from a cottage roof.

I believed in you, I was beggared;
Pity my shoes! Pity their laces!
Pity the portraits of forefathers' faces
That hang on my mantle, jowly and dire,
Like a hairy, humdrum, hangdog choir.
Pity my waistband, pity my hat.
Give me a little relief like that.

«Я совсем разучился говорить по англиский...»

I turn dust through my palm
as if through a spindle,
I sink to my knees;
sleep, which has scorned me
like an unwanted suitor
takes me now to her fragrant parlor.

A sonorous wind begins, lifting the green veils
That mask the arbor-frame of hollow wood,
A sweet remembrance of my childhood,
and a former language, with great effort acquired
and lost in haste, recalls itself to me slowly
and fitfully, like rain through a hand,
like a love long abandoned; inures itself
as a perfumed gas;
The dovy hours pass
bowing their heads as they go,
hooded heralds of my weal and woe.

And I still as at my nuptial hour
encircled by the cozening sward,
waited in the earth's broad bower,
waited on a bright, reluctant word.

1.
February wakes us, its accidental music,
the hailstones drum a waltz on the roof.
Away in the desert, compact planes
shower their targets in hails of fire.
The geese crawl across the ice,
a splay-foot waltz;
Through salted streets we file by twos
through a pretty promenade of lights,
towards the Imposition of Ashes.

2.
I who have slept beside you for a year,
and swept a year of embers from the grate,
and smoothed your brow of a year of care—
hungry I sit by, and hungry I wait;
craving of you my heart’s best boon:
that I might not spend these darkening years alone.

while the party rages

Darkness draws in uneven from the sea
like a flood of mercury.
We draw in our skirts, we set the bread to leaven,
while dusk comes torpid out of heaven;
some animus oppresses
our forms into our dresses.

Desire, a sudden watchfulness, an urge to scale roofs
and watch the market tumble into the sea.

I remember the first time I heard the story of Orion, and the first time I created him, pointing my finger, out of seven stars. The first time I saw him over the lake, over the hill, between the naked branches of the yew in winter. My first visit to Jerusalem—through the Dung Gate, in rain. Some memories are stories I tell myself and add words each time: the first time I crossed the George Washington Bridge, all the pylons were wreathed in fog, and Manhattan wore puffs of cloud all down its glassy nape. Or: And I cried for an hour, and I soaked the final pages of the book. I couldn’t believe how it ended! It still looks like I left it cooking in steam. Or: We got chocolate ice cream at the diner, and he drove me to school at seven in the morning. And some are remembered impressions - as if looked at through a sheet of doubled glass: the first taste of hot chard, the first wood I watched burn to ember; the first peacock I saw, sidling and crooning toward the hen; the first pains of divided love; the first time I saw a model of an atom, its smooth, bulbous joints; the first time I looked into the face of a supine, dying animal. If I list endlessly, forgive me my lists. My memories click against each other in my palms, like white marbles, and I am trying to play for keeps. Still they contend. They enjoin and pardon each other, but I am hedging my bets, I am filling my pockets: the first song composed, the first watched sunrise, the first rasping wood-frog I caught and let free again, and the way it took off, with a queer, sawing, angular motion, up over the mossy rock.

I’ve worn glasses since I could remember sight. I stare at screens behind glass cups thick as a lemur’s palm. I scuttle about toting a heart the size of a citron, the color of a tomato, my favorite machine; in the cold I seize up, and my teeth begin to tap out their secret language. But I'm talking about an afternoon in February, and yes, I confess I was going to seize up. I sat at a blondwood table. You brought me a cup of soda water. I felt my sorrow settle down slowly, like the agitated air in the cup. You hurt your knee sitting down at the blondwood table and the snow began to tumble past the windows. I took off my glasses and stepped into the welcoming fog. February finishes itself like a glass of soda water, leaving a salty taste on my tongue.

response poem to heart of darkness...

I love that my professor let me do this.




Conrad on his 1890 trip
slid past Kinshasa;
the steamship bayed, panting through its spokes
into the dense mist sweet as a calf’s breath, and close;
the villages invisible; ‘we infer their existence from calabashes
suspended to palm trees.’
Hurtling down, through parti-colored vines,
pressed close by leaves
that gesture like inveighing hands,
Conrad creates a mind to inveigh
more furiously than they;
Seeing, in the spotted hide of the lichee, in the weary panting of his carriers,
A BaKongo’s body riddled like a sieve, some consciousness
girding its loins in steamy emptiness.
Ah, but the river is broad, rapid,
it boils, swiftly, its terrible volume
propelling fresh water miles into the sea;
steaming forward, into the land dark
as under a hood pulled fast; made sleepless by rattling rivets
and distant beasts, Conrad squats and hovers,
his eyelids hot as stewpot covers, dreaming
a mind convulsed, an eye
that, searing, sears itself, which animates the darkness
as the man jerks the marionette;
the heavy fog, pocked by darkness, condenses to a face
as a black skull emerges from a polished knob of wood
under the telescope; but heat warps the lens,
loosens the screws, the whole continent strips the body of vision;
though we persist in seeing the terrible face,
its rows of leafy teeth, as we have colonized the moon,
the passing cloud, with faces;
and when the body dews with sweat, when fever locks his jaw
Conrad dreams of wreathing his wrists in snow,
all along the passage home; his dream moves towards writing itself
as the sea moves, slow.

is this a poem?

"During the Communist era, parents needed a special permission form to give a child a name that does not have a name day on the Czech calendar. Since 1989, parents have had the right to give their child any name they wish, provided it is used somewhere in the world and is not insulting or demeaning. However, the common practice is that the most birth-record offices look for the name in the book "Jak se bude vaše dítě jmenovat?" (What is your child going to be called?), ISBN 80-200-1349-0, the semi-official list of "allowed" names. If the name is not found there, offices are extremely unwilling to register the child's name."


For three weeks Marketa thought she was going to have a baby. Under her print dress, it was working as avidly on assembling itself as she worked on her sums, or at cleaning house. Marketa didn’t tell anyone. After all, words disappeared from her lips as soon as she said them, but the hollow bowl of her belly was filling up to the top. She had devised a secret name for the baby that wasn’t in the name-day calendar. There was no saint behind it and perhaps no history at all. If anyone had ever been named thus, she imagined it was a devil made all of glass, who capered about, quick as a greased whip, and glittered in the light. For three weeks, each motion of her hand—to straighten the shelves, to mark bought bolts in the books with her pencil-stub—recalled to her the pretty motion of the hand of the daughter of Pharaoh, catching up the baby from his reed basket. In her own walk she found a new consciousness, a heavy prettiness of gait, between the beeches, themselves heavy with light. But soon enough she found she was only a reed basket: shedding its pitch lining. Down it came, a thick, blackish tar. Of this, Marketa, too, said nothing: only watched the beeches part, then bend again, into a fragrant lattice, covering the continuous slow progress of the river.

poem for all the shit that's been happening lately

I am sitting and revising a poem about my body:
four stanzas about four long limbs,
a belly-pouch to house a suckling kid.

Every hour the day is revising itself
shifting its lines, its light. The wind swings round
commas of cloud, erasing
whole stanzas the sun etched in the ice,
in polyglot pits and stars.

If I write about my body, will it stay put,
still its wanderings
into forbidden places?
Will its cells cease to fracture
if bound fast in meter?

All winter I end my poems with questions—
Long teats of ice hang from my roof, and drip.
If I write about this uncertain love
will it remain, cooling its heels,
suddenly corporeal? And will all I own on earth
fit between its fingers?

poem for saturday night girl.

My body, wide, hungry,
a gourd
with a brittle husk,

a split pulp, bruised flesh
and pungent tenderness,

ready to be spiced
with the customary zeal of my country,
served hot, battered,
in a blue bowl

The sun shines through,
as it shines onto white teeth:
noon will find me firm and fine
genuflected in a sugared heap.

Night marches on, towards uncertain conclusions—
towards waking. I fear I'll die
a little girl in a black dress,
dressed to dance, but already in mourning,
as the black night in its spangled couvre-livre
dies, taking light into itself.

In my dream, a wire--hot, thin,
the color of a peridot--
lacerates the baby in my stomach
who is not yet a baby,
only a month’s worth of days,
a hub of cells.
The pain ends abruptly,
cauterized by the sun, by the dissolution of dreams
into radiant cells.

'I wanted to be a poet
terribly, and ride the train to Montmartre,
at the sun’s behest
the words would arrive on my tongue
slowly, then quickly,
like a rain of coins.
Ah, but the winter is long,
I drape myself in the flag of my country
to keep warm.
A poet is always in motion
and her hands are heavy as heaps of bronze.'

'Tonight, red lanterns deck the street for the Chinese New Year.
Tonight my heart follows its lunar calendar—
swelling to grace, returning to darkness.'

Time passes heavily for me,
like a man who looks perpetually over his shoulder.
I am reading Hobbes: “a well ordered mind
knows the difference between dream and waking”--
but I myself no longer know it.
Order is a man who, setting out,
knows the route of his return.

February:
a woman who holds her hips as she walks.
Knowledge of myself drapes me, a gauze
rustling and listing in wind,
a wet puff of snow
that trembles off the bough.

I got up to watch the sun rise this morning.

My legs felt like heavy putty or molten glass, but I wanted to know the sun rose because I had seen it myself. I perched on the highway bridge. Hidden under a maze of roofs, the sun turned the steam billowing out of the boot factory to a rosy haze. I watched the cars shoot one by one into the open jaw of the bridge and disappear. I remembered: the moment I realized that the words ‘car accident’ meant a moving car hit the body of a man and he died; the moment I realized clouds could move. The febrile sky pulsed with color over heavy ice. For years I have been appealing to the teachers of my childhood, in the hope that they can tell me who I was, who I am. But if once they could recall the first spidery and comical shapes I made, my first letters, these since have fallen to the musty grave of cursive-books, marble composition books, scratch paper, tumbled over each other like leaves in a gutter; the seventh word, the fifteenth step, a customary gesture of the hand.

uh ...

Ill with ardor I hurled my book away,
took to the river; its cracked, frozen breadth,
my steps two knocks on a sealed door
marring and scratching, as at a mirror.
I am scape-graced in a dull body
all of wax-—and the sky a seal
pressing its signs into this cairn of bone.

My dream
took me
to the Skelettküste
“The Skeleton Coast”
between Kaokoveld
and Damaraland

where the whaleribs gape
long teeth
the waves lick through
and the rusting hulls covered
by a bare skin of sand
and dew

in my dreams like pale autumns
I gather you
and shed you again

and your name reverberates
as a lodged bone rocks in a strait

Everything August gave us
The cold took back: the river--
scrub heavy with seed, the sculls, the harbor,
the purple arbor.
My body plays a gentle host to me
lending me its hands.
February – I move through a life lent to me,
disused roads
and leafless poplar stands.

Morning hits Lucerne like sun on a wave,
a hot torrent of light, turning the celandine trees
to yellow beacons.
Here, I am nameless,
A glass cup
without its maker's stamp.
A snail moves through the grass--
its shell recalls to me a home I saw in Cordoba.
Morning finds me and empties its pockets,
I make my way home through a roomful of light.

August. The birds racket towards morning
a grey place the moon left in a one-man bucket plane—
was it the wind in the pines
or a propeller I heard
twinned with you in my bed?

To August’s husks and hot gusts
I speak an old language of prophets, shepherds,
a language in which cisterns were built, kingdoms splintered.
Hebrew envelops my tongue, throat up, like water
through pipes, and it sleeps
when I close my lips.
Like a bird, I keep song on my migrant tongue,
I am building a home of dense darkness
and I pick up a strand each night in my teeth.
So many songs of return jostle for my attentions,
a crowd on a day train with its curtains drawn
heading towards distant cities—
August, thirty-one days without a sleeping car
hungering over rails, between low-slung trees.

February.
The footbridge rises in snow
that brocades the black ice all down the river.
I hold my cigarette up against distant chimneys
and watch it belch cloud into these fogs of Boston.

February, I am heavy, hungry,
I feel for a hold in the sogged plaster of balustrades
but sorrow is sinking its pincers into my hands.

I read in a book so white it pains my eyes
about jackfruit and Tolu balsam that heals wounds with its resin
while the sun makes a lace of the snow on the roof.
My life, a dull heap of small things.

February is perpetually arriving
cold fills its days
like a hand with water;
February, if I see your flank
I will be like the tahina palm of Madagascar
that dies as it flowers
collapsed in heavy bells.

THE ENEMY OF COMPLACENCY IS KNOWLEDGE OF THE INFINITE.

THE ENEMY OF COMPLACENCY IS KNOWLEDGE OF THE INFINITE.

The instant love first manifests itself is incalculable: it can appear in words as they are first spoken, or hidden, smothered in ink, in the barrel of the pen; in blood under fingernails, bruised knuckles, a pocket filled with coins that tremble and knock sides. I myself have fallen in love over and over with the sun, with perfumed chalk, a stuffed oriole, a field, sidewalks pocked with mica and tar. Then the earth in all its extremities seems a blue bell to me, ringing and trembling. In these moments the outcropping of a wall pricks me and I am outraged; I am stunned by the smell of flowers, drugged; I turn a cigarette like a perfumed chalk between my fingers; the earth, a pellucid bell, an open mouth, urges me on, and I am insensate with ardor.

It is an ordinary February morning and I am writing in Hebrew. Beside me, two girls are speaking Russian, and the few words I remember float past my ears: ‘The sun goes… and the moon goes… I go too.’ February, and I pour out my heart in a foreign language.


בכמה חודשים, באמצע טירוף האביב, אעלם, אשב בפרחים, לא אדבר, ולא אקרא; לא אחלום; אף אחד לא אנשק, אפילו לא אאכול, ואשתות רק מי גשם שנופלים בפי... וככה אגור עד שאני שוכחת אהבתי, עד שהוא רחוק ממני כריח פרח אדום שאני זוכרת; חלמתי עליו באמצע ילדותי... אני עדיין זוכרת, גנבתי פת לחם חם מהשיש, אכלתי אותו בחושך הורוד מתחת לוילון תלוי בטרקלין... ובסופת שלגים קטנטן של פרורים נרדמתי. בחלומי צמח פרח אדום: צנוע, ספוג בטל, ורק, פתוח ורק כפה. הרגשתי פתוחה ורקה כפה, רקה חוץ מאפשרות של שירה שאף פעם לא תתממש.*



In a few months, in the midst of the madness of spring, I will disappear, I will sit in the flowers, I will not speak, I will not read; I will not dream; I will not kiss anyone, nor will I even eat, I will drink only rainwater that falls in my mouth. Thus I will dwell until I have forgotten my love, until it is as far from me as the smell of a red flower I remember; I dreamed about it in childhood... I still remember, I stole a loaf of bread from the counter, I ate it in the rosy darkness under the curtain hung in the parlor... in a small snowstorm of crumbs I fell asleep. In my dream a red flower grew: modest, soaked in dew, and empty, open and empty as a mouth. I felt open and empty as a mouth, empty but for a possibility of song that would never be fulfilled .

I hear you whistling
in the other room
the sound pours in like smoke over the floor

I see your lips before I see your eyes
in the mirror hanging on the bathroom door

oh the chickadees sing weary on the branches
and the flint stands mute before the spark can strike it
but standing next to you again tonight, babe
I want a hundred thousand nights just like it.

The sky whistles coldly through its teeth
hunger thrills in my limbs
like a young girl’s urge to dance

little boys in coats throw peachpits in the street
and dance in the hooded guise of Fortune

I go to the harbor
where the schooners murmur proverbs to each other
wind hems the sea’s skirts
white organdy
and blue calico
and the sea-thrushes grown fat and white
hurl their bodies high
against the tarnished moon

January:

I stand on the shoulders
of great-souled men

and love
a banked hearth
a starry ember
refuses to be extinguished in me

even now while the frozen Neva
sends up its winds in hoarse sextets
and the sky is deep as a debtor’s pocket

if in loving I am pressed to my ruin
then let me be as the bitter olive
that expels its heart in light

Lena
let us live our lives
as moral experiments

let us shape them thin
as uzbek loaves
beaten on stones
in the steppe
whose dull mouth is perpetually open

how far we are from the sea

we rubbed out the maps with our tongues

around us Lena for miles
street swallowing snow

poem for weariness

1.
Our bodies are made of compressed radiance. Released,
it would wake a rain of light
snowing out birds, skies.

2.
You hold out a cup of water, drop the cup,
hold out, and drop,
your laugh is like a split seam,
forcing everything open.

3.
Everything is getting weary at the joints—
the lamp, the table,
the bird that hangs its head
hiding its face in my black bread.

1.
Morning: I wake and the sky gives out handfuls of light
one by one, like Kostya scattering seeds.
In the trees, the birds are swearing oaths of fealty,
song is taking them by the throat;
when it takes me, I stammer,
my tongue a heavy pouch of coins.

2.
Waking, I feel I am in the sleeping car
of the eastbound train to my childhood dacha.
A hundred relatives wait for me there;
in their hands, teacups, plates, handfuls of light
the water insists on returning to us.
Kostya wakes into boundless stillness,
he scatters my dreams like a handful of seeds:
it is morning, August, I am still as a reed-bed,
words sleep on my tongue like a pouchful of coins.

The light was big before the train pulled underground
beside me a freckled girl was sleeping
I pulled threads out of my skirt by the handful
and a young man weeping

Into the earth! like a wave in a wire,
dust in a lung, I’m driven deep,
between the new year’s airy belly
and my final sleep

back at harvard!!

This post was directly inspired by what was perhaps the best possible first night to a semester. (Although come to think of it, this isn't a very positive poem.) Still: you have to convince people that the world must be changed before you can save the world.
PS:

( 11 To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? saith the LORD; I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. 12 When ye come to appear before Me, who hath required this at your hand, to trample My courts? 13 Bring no more vain oblations; it is an offering of abomination unto Me; new moon and sabbath, the holding of convocations--I cannot endure iniquity along with the solemn assembly. 14 Your new moons and your appointed seasons My soul hateth; they are a burden unto Me; I am weary to bear them. 15 And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear; your hands are full of blood. 16 Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes, cease to do evil; 17 Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. {S} 18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. )


-

What a graveyard God it is,
the bent trees cruciform, and leaves
rent under the feet of those who haunt me
with their hands cupped,
rattling one bronze coin

What a graveyard land it is
how the knucklebones of trees
drag dust on the wrist of the long, grey road
mute under burdens of snow

What a graveyard art it is
incanting on bones under low grey roads
without a hand to extend for another to hold
cupped over one bronze coin
and a ceaseless burden of snow

this morning
like a bird
I give out full-throated promises

how like gold cups
like russet ears
the leaves
lisping and singing

i hold out my hands
brindled with earth
to the world’s vast bounty
& its boundless girth

Sunday morning I realized this love
is like a triple engine jumbo jet to Poughkeepsie:
going nowhere, fast. The towels turn grey and lie
like slack wrists in my pitted bathroom-moon,
and even the tints
in our half-price prints
seem to sag against the walls,
turning Titian into Pollock
and Pollock to split-pea soup.
I want to look like Audrey Tautou
even when I turn fifty,
and sell perfume in a mirrored room,
mouth wide, breasts high…
The years pass so slowly by
as winter did when I was ten.
But the years go still and the days go still
and never return again.

song of tyro

(inspired by The Odyssey, Book 11)

Lapped round by sleep, I lay at the river-bed
and woke with Pelias and Nelias, each minute head
wracked with struggle in the voiceless womb;

I felt myself an instrument of wax;
pressed deeply as I slept, I had grown weak with heat,
and woke to heavy breeze
off the white sea.

How I smote for shelter at the earth’s grand thigh
to set its flesh about me for my bed.
But the great sea howls and the great sea wakes
and the black birds set a wreath about my head.

121

February
My city draws a frozen river deep into its heart

Death, a gold dog with three legs
walks with me
under the bright awnings

in the market
white almonds pour through my hands:
soul, a sieve of fingers

Guys, I am in a rut... and an attendant funk. Check out some really good short-form poetry (senryu) here--they're hilarious and poignant: http://www.scribd.com/doc/24700313/PRUNE-JUICE-Issue-3


My life is shrunk
into one old book
where the same wastrels
meet the same bad ends
and sing fitfully

and every word
like a whalesong seems
to take hours to speak
spreading out
under dark waters

poem inspired by the dream i had last night.

Seventeen
my friends click their tongues against their teeth to drum
for a revolution that has come and gone
and which they hope will come again

August
the whole world seems no larger than my belly
the women fan themselves and gossip about who will get married
one pinches my forearm
‘What I would give to have the years
left in this skin’

the first tears I shed for love
have already come and gone
the camellias, burst red pulps
heady, bright
and no longer surprising

August
I sit half-mapped
like a desert province

I sit at my writing-desk like a dreamer who knows if he makes a sound he will wake, and is silent, content in a dreamed room filled with rain and red-beaked birds. Yesterday I tried to read the work of a famous poet aloud, but the meter barbed my mouth, piercing my tongue clean through. The words of the poet were composed at sea. At dusk, a diffuse and sluggish light, as if filtered through a heavy surf, settles over my desk. The willow branches that brush my window, my half-lit neighbor’s house, seem to me foreign, as if I stared out the window of an inn in Malaga, where drowsy rushroses drug the air. The last light hovers like a woman’s lip the clouds run their fingers over continually. I am caught between sleep and waking, as the window-pane is caught between the warm house, where children sleep, dreaming of cruelty and riches, and the rain that streams, dolorous, into tin gutters.

Ten years passed like the pith of a dream
that sits on my tongue at waking.
Like a strand that drifts
on the sea’s white lips.

We stopped up my uncle’s ashes
in a whiskey bottle, floated it to sea,
watched it tremble with light.
I am surprised by the day,
I get drunk and I hold my belly.
The sun has our blood on its hands
having given birth to us.
I will sit with the moon
until I am ‘glad and dead’
as a poet said.

poem for guillaume de machaut

I am a guest in my own life
a spacious house with many rooms
and though I have wandered it for years
I tread like a thief in dirty shoes

My mother undoes her apron
under the hanging garlic bulbs
My life is a ballade from Rheims
and I have forgotten the words

The river slugged-up with chill,
pitted slabs of ice that caught the crates
drifting on the melt like Baltic freights.

The ivy leaves drenched
to their hair in white light.
A big pipe belching its guts under the freeze.
The white ice seems to me pressed

air, the trees shafts of cork,
the tamped earth scoured grains of rock,
myself a pouch of pipes, my hand
warm as a sparrow, feathered net of veins.
Everything made by compression. In my mouth
the history of my people is pressed in poems,
dense words hung in my dense breath white
as I walk over asphalt
washed pale in winter light.

Today
Lenochka
Asked me what a pearl was made of

a grain of sand
and seven drops of sun

And today
Under the wicks of ice
under the stone flowers of my city
I grew older

Lenochka
the studded city
to you
is a golubtsy

and to me
a hound
how it bays
its poor face only a skull
sobaka
you and i know
our bones are only cups

Lenochka I adjure you
and I implore you
drink deeply

i've been reading garcia marquez, can you tell?

Rain visits the porches
where we’ve sat simmering for weeks.
Our hapless priest
hums old confessions
tunelessly through wet lips,
dragging his cassock in the street.
The rain beats time to this,
the wet myrrh, golden and sullen,
shake coins of water from their necks.

Inside, we strip to our waists,
Pablo who dreams of unborn planets
shows me dirty pictures stuffed in our old books--
faded breasts like round houses
with no one inside,
haunches, a red lip
cut off like the thick sound of noon bells in a storm
like my continual dream of the woman I was born to marry
who dies with her mouth open at the first instant of light
while the sogged orchids rot-hollowed and red
nod again in forced assent under my window
under the seibo tree
under the rain’s black arbor

'xander pope is kind of a douche

“Hope humbly then…” –Alexander Pope

Hope humbly and heap
sugar in the pot.
Fry it up and keep it hot.
In your mouth keep a lemon seed
curling your tongue. A bitter bead
is better than a word.

Humbler heaven sinks
its jaw into the hill.
Slick sod, each foot hooked in
with humble hobbling will.
Curl up in the clover
like a drought-wracked spit of land.
Don’t rise again, or lift your hand.
A hollow cypress at your head.
Rain to flood its mossy bed.

Our city swallows the sun, brick
by brick. Acres of coiled pipes. The carts of wares
gather dust longer each year.
Our fat house bare
And pale as wax under a moon drawn taut,
Laying out its nickel plate along the street.

A hoarse chorus of trains,
black teeth in each hood.
All night I chase a phantom of the good.
I twitch like a dog, crouch, grin.
When winter comes on like a flood
Even the staid rooks thin.

In my dream, it is always Saturday morning—
Always I still the engine.
Always the reeds nod and hum
all along the barrier of south Highway One.

guilty post

Hey, friends...
So it turns out I am definitely not in the Thoreau school of writing - I went to a little cabin in the woods, and I didn't write a word. After a lot of internal debate I have decided to just pick up where I left off, since writing four extra would be deceitful (the idea was a poem a day, after all). And since I don't want to just stop writing this blog, I will just call it a late Christmas/Chanukah hiatus, beat my breast four extra times on Yom Kippur, and go on with it. I know breaks are for real bloggers and not just one-year projects, but... well... I don't know. I lasted for over 100 straight poem-a-days; I think the goal of "until the end of the academic year" means well over 120 more, around 130, I looked it up once, I'll have to again... but at any rate... I'm going to keep going with it, and not sweat the small stuff too much, and not give up. Words of encouragement/rage, readership?
Here's a muddled just-came-back-from-the-woods poem.

When I go to the quiet, I expect to find
poetry—mannered
well-chosen solitude.
Instead a creak mumbles up snow-laden stumps
and fades. Out of the green needles,
howling, out the river, steam,
laughter in its long tongue.
And the four of us tramping
in full gear after a patch-eyed mutt.

To seek silence
you have to press on and out—
the top of the mountain swept with ice.
Even there something sways and hungers,
hungers and burrows,
burrows and dies, with a last heave of the flank.
When we stepped in
the snow hit our hips—we sank.
We bit hard, drummed it into mounds,
didn’t count what we burned to keep warm.
The red-ruffed hound thrust her snout into our palms.

Somewhere here a birch bares its neck
swept clean. Each branch like a wire
red-papered with light.
Here I am fleeced and stout
watching a quiet thing, its skin damp as linen.
The wind is heavy as a mastiff’s breath--
heavy, quiet. In dull boots, in a wild glade,
in sun-gutted snow the cold will clench,
I too, round, restless,
round, easy, am close to death.

back to my czech poems after a loooong while.

Click the tag 'speakers' to see the other poems in this series (zomg, this poem has been going on long enough to have a series!)

Today was a travel day, so right now I am in Portland, Maine at a friend's - hiatus officially starts tomorrow. You didn't think I'd abandon y'all when I have internet access, did you?

Love love,
Talia


Pavel Cervenka

Ah, friend, we all remember you,
we've drunk to your health,
the liquor stung our cut fingers.
Stumble-about, with red cheeks,
you tilt like a hobby-horse
and stay alone for weeks,
a gold silt of stubble on your face,
and your poor eyes two cockles split with ruin.
Friend, we remember you,
and we drink to your health.

How is it that only you
are so pinched with misfortune,
like a pill of dough in the red fingers of Dalka Rolicek,
the baker's daughter?
Our Pavel who swam the channel,
pulled the tails of goats,
gorged on gooseberries,
husked the beards of oats.

Pavel cried, "I shall ride two stallions at once!"
And took Dusana behind the stable--
soon he had a filly and a foal.
The white milk curdled on the table,
the raiska burned on the coals.
And in swaddling the little lamb
howled like a wolf.
Pavel roared awhile even under the yoke--
But to say more is not for a lighted room.
Friend Pavel, I raise my glass
to your health, a wayward daughter
still in her virgin's dress.