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.