Blogging now at http://thistenderwind.blogspot.com :) Talia

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