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.

posting hiatus!

I am taking a five-day posting hiatus, as I will be in a cabin in northern Maine without electricity, let alone internet access. I will continue writing poems up there, so I'll post a whole batch when I get back.

in the meantime, enjoy this quasi-gospel hunk of crack.

All night I walked heavy on the floor.
Hooted and sang put my palms to my head.
All that I am I pounded with a pestle
and baked into a loaf of black bread.

Pickle me in brine
bury the jar.
Take me to the mountain
where the fireflies are.

I’m gonna drink a jar of holy water
I’m gonna drink a bottle of wine.
I’m gonna sing for my soul, I’m heaven’s daughter,
I’m gonna sing for this soul of mine.

Walking between dense banks of purple heather, I am suddenly terribly afraid. The sun round as a cockle, fetid brush pooled at the roadbank. I am trying to remember the name of an old friend’s husband, a barbed mess with many c’s and z’s. What if I have lost this strange, Polish name, of a boozy person with a coarse nose? Will I then lose the extraordinary purple of the heather here, the corrugations on the first pale birches, the felt-soft snouts of dogs I have known? So much depends on one coarse-haired person. I remember he liked to cook pierogies in lard. The light on Sasha’s forehead, the relentless sound of dice in his cupped palm, the path I am standing on which is tamped and black – all this seems to fade away even as I step. I pinch yew berries until they bleed their glassy juice onto my thumbs. I resolve to be a warrior until death, wielding my memories, scythes made of light. They’ll send me off in a black ship with a broken neck.

The new year rattles in
like an electric train,
baying at seven hundred volts.
Last night I dreamed I was a bat
in Polish caves lined with salt,
or dizzy against obsidian.
I slice open a garlic bulb
to its pungent heart.
I put a dollop of snow in the pot.
The grass is fragrant under its coat,
the horse-chestnuts mumble against one another.
A good evening to be alone
in a body full of so many long corridors.
I can feel the seam of myself—the scar
on my belly—hot and chapped,
the smoke alarm sings
to my sizzling lima beans.
I want to keep dancing, learning languages.
House, body, settling themselves loudly
in half-light veined with the bare limbs of trees.

happy new year's

The new year fizzes in.
A little part of us dies, but we order dessert.
A starlet gives a concert in the snow—
All her limbs show.
Not even the trees look as naked to me.

Me, I’ll be singing the blues til I have no body.
Then—well, they say vocal chords are string—
so I can sing on anything.
A Steinway or a beetle wing.
The wind rushes down like a deep cough.
Forty winters--never enough.