john darnielle is my prometheus

Everyone wanted to be the young man jumped up on cocaine
shouting into the body of his electric violin
over a recording of his own shout
everyone in pricey flannels
and no one who'd really read Malraux
though everybody claimed to

I've had few moments of adulation I can remember
but when the god with the guitar came out "Next"--
oh I'd wept over his EPs since I was fifteen
and dreamed myself into his hundred songs--
I forgot those dozens in their bleach-washed jeans
shredded on thousands of shredding machines
there was the dark head of the god nodding erupting
with song his body half-soiled with darkness
and half the folds of his tour clothes shot through with light

tall tale poem

I sat on a red rock
brittle with sun. A man
with a face the color of a cooked prawn
came up holding out gnarled fists.
A big sycamore hissed
in a little wind.
Sometimes it seems
the whole mountain lists
on days like this.
A big man with a scar on his jaw.
He turned to me.
He said how'd you like to see
a rock that knows everything.
Sees everything.
Can tell you
everything you need to know.
I said all right.
I said tell me.
It was polished and blue
and pierced through
with light.
Something big licked down
electric veins of calcite.
He dropped it in my palm.
Roused calm
coursed, receded.
The reeds dark flues
on a whole earth seeded
and new.
I staggered through.
The sycamore curled
its hundred spiky tongues.
The whole world
poured into my lungs.

i have to start writing at a reasonable hour.

Your damp hocks pellucid in the late-afternoon
through the blinds and a tender arm at right angles
under the budded auspice
of a livid drawn mouth
and all your joints sweet cups like profiteroles
the shuttling fingers finally still
and if the sun darts at the holly
and dies in the deepening cloud what is it to me
your belly tender in downy vesture
and the soft haunch I return to again hollow-lipped hungry

for so many years I've turned a timid face up
to crowds of stars & the yellow moon sifting down leaves
and now in a broad afternoon studded with onyx I am red and keen
with fire in my two broad palms

drunk thanksgiving poem

I am twenty years on this earth
And seen boys turn to men
And men emerge again in their boys...
It was my luck the eaves of this house should bless
A new womanhood threaded in lust,
The glazed pots and Jansen's history of art,
The ember-figures coursing whole into ash...
I will soon grow old,
still I am pale with ardor; leave me here
under the catkins livid red,
the veined rose at my head.

ummm it's thanksgiving

...that's my excuse for this
love you guys
please bear with me.
i am uneven.
t


I was watching those daisies blanched
nodding characters at the roadbank
lightning struck here not too
long ago and char makes a lace
edge on a gardening manual flipped to “the ever
popular geranium” the earth lumped to slick
greenish knobs of glass
the ever popular geranium reveals itself
hot and full in the grey air
and moving along ruminous heavy
I want to make a universe from scratch
out of zinc lead and outrageous soul

newyorknewyork

I am coming out a train that hisses
and tips on its pneumatic ankles
the girl on the billboard greets me solemn
and deft in a little black muslin
the old man with a crown of pins
round his brimless hat says stop it charley stop it charley
pulling at his compendium of rags
stores full of smoke and rosewater
colored glass under my heels
that woman dark hair on her neck like a wimple
that rough cloud bushy with rain-stuff
and all over steam gusts out the pipe-hewn earth
over the walk perpetually grim
with settled smog, dark
gums, I am ready
for the two white thighs the columns that rise
in a humor of light high above the street

hebrew kick today.

obviously rough and unedited, so i apologize for my sins against this noble and ancient language.

מתחת לצפצפות אני מנסה ליצור דבר יפה כתמיד
וירח נח כתום ועצום מעלי
ממנו כרגע שמענו חדשות של מים
נרדמים הלומים בקר החלל
איך הייתי רוצה לישון דומם קפוא בלחיי הלבנה
ולא לשבת בשולחן עשוי מפורמיקה
שומעת סריטת כוסות
ושמה מחוץ לחלון המערפל
תיפות רכות דופקות בצמרות


rough translation i will polish tomorrow:

under the poplars I am trying to create something beautiful as always
and the moon rests orange and enormous above me
we've just heard news from it of waters
sleeping smitten with the cold of space
how I would have wished to sleep silent and frozen in the cheeks of the moon
instead of sitting at a Formica table
listening to the scratching of cups
and outside the foggy window
soft drops on the crowns of trees

yesssss

I had a heavy hand of dimes
and dollars to spend
on books pilled with spittle
pears soft at the stem
and a train ride to Connecticut
up to your demesne
I am a man hopped-up on luck, wrought-up with knowing
limbs flushed with gusts of blood
I hum along the tracks a roused tom in the thrum
ready to greet you where the day spills on your windows
your little split teeth hard kernels
in a lush husk that holds a body gorged on light
with yellow Latin on my lap I pass
through sheaves of beard-weed pierced with quince
specked with must and rip-seamed, I endure
pressing toward you little avid machine lucid and sure

this blog is now a pensioner

but... no signs of retirement yet!
This poem kept wanting to be an indie song. I wrote a tune for it, too. Then I changed the line breaks. Cuz I'm a sneak.

Also, this blog has inspired someone! Check out my friend Asher's brand-new blog, "A Joke Every Day" (pretty self explanatory): http://ajokeeveryday.blogspot.com
:)
Love,
Talia
--


I've been watching Leonard Cohen on Internet TV
his doggy candid face
his books of noveau poetry
since I begged you love me

I wanted to be half-mad decked out in feathers
pulling books out of the trash by their slipcovers
watching the light go still in the guts of the harbor
I wanted to bring you down there with me

poem after the lotos eaters

I order lotus root by the plate in Chinatown,
sugared heavy and shrunk,
little wheels, wide hollows.
Dowdy, thick and dreamy
I have gone through my days--
under pink crinoline lanterns.
The little shrimps swivel their eyes at the glass.
Heavy and high I hold myself
on the chair, the air trembling
with foreign syllables.
The noon sun finds me here
on dim blue porcelain, on glass,
in little darts that pierce the lotus root.

an encounter

“I am hung on the handle of a great idea
like an apron” you said smelling of onion
scrubbed clean at the jaw as always
a high sallow color a pale wet neck like a cucumber’s
pink sowbelly mouth gaze whetted with loss
I was busy in the grips of a hard-toothed sorrow
you who had earned a living saying mourner’s prayers
were silent too at the feet of a grand thing
bared teeth face inclined to the pavement
whistling godfullofmercy-
dwellingintheheights
your jaw a clean line a disappearing angle
the sky full up with yellow mealy cloud

poem because i miss new york

I am an American, New-York-
born, and rubbing the faces off wheatpennies
as so many hundreds of greasy thumbs have done,
watching a pure greyhound piss in the street,
long neck, expensive stride,
while the sun hops fences and shimmies pipes,
wild racket of engines,
solemn ardor in the eyes of those who pass me,
grim riots of vines in chain-links and at Madison
where the storefronts throw my own face
sharp with light at me I am aching
for a marble pool a meeting of gold fins
mouths open in splendid blue gas
while the bearded men pass
murmuring with shrouded mouths
opening their fists suits bunched at the hips
furling their valises, waiting

leonid shower 2

you and I hoped for meteors
meteors like that lithograph 1833
the whole village arrested under barbed rain
darting almost to the roofs down
and down outrageous pins of light
but even under this sky a magnesia-milk
of dim light a sulfur of cloud
I felt still and full as a reed bowl

poem to the leonid meteor shower

On a night filled with bells and starshowers
I am anointing myself with silence,
my blood a pool the black boatman ferries
Hebrew letters across,
to reach out their arms
and drip from my mouth like a musk;
I will go out under the sky,
a broad neck cowled in cloud;
at its center matter burns
in a breathless void;
I will beg for boundless stillness,
streaks of vavs and zayins
scattered supernal and rough
on the dull klaf.

river words.

Sitting at the river I feel at the nape of a sky
riddled with fire. The little boatman passing
issues a long luminous wave,
breaks up archipelagos of drifting leaves.
The water is dense with lucid cloud.
A jet's bright wake curves into that shelf,
scatters to beads. In a spider's jaws
a minute wing breaks. All around me
the sky burns darkening blues,
the buses in the distance half-lights, half-bodies,
propelling themselves under lucent spires,
clouds in their arched windows.
The spider seeks with blind limbs
at the black spindle. The damp path throbs with runners' feet.
Seeking for Utnapishtim with his white hands
the little oarsman levers himself into the bridge's dark mouth.

We’ve been locked in for days,
pale claustrophobes.
The wind pulls at the stays
of the leaves, sullen lobes
motioning to the glass.
All we own drifts up like silt--
a white trail of dust like a sash,
the bedclothes roughed and spilled,
and the two of us twinned as eyes
seeking always some little gain or praise
while the rain drums out of perpetual skies
over all the dark houses slung low as drays.

Going about in a shredded coat
every man I meet is strange as an imp or eagle
all the men betting in the bars
shiny bald heads and cut-glass tables reflecting the dim light
of warped yellow bulbs
and every face grim as a cuttlefish's
outdoors the buildings go limp outraging their forms
I recall how swiftly Bosch's crowded paradise
gave way to his extraordinary hells

november poem II

Like Itzik Manger's Hagar--
a housemaid in worn patent-leather shoes,
banished with her little valise, her heavy belly--
I am far afield in a world half-stifled with myth,
half-derelict,
paved with little stones, with half-forgotten languages.
Before I was born someone bartered
all our grand ideas for comfort.
Here where the snow will soon sit like so many swollen grain-sacks
I want to swallow those smooth stones at the wayside
and make of my stubborn self a mill.

poem to pablo neruda

A little broke and all
weary I sought at the ecstasy in the heart of everything
like Neruda who could find majesty in a pair of socks
Neruda, all flat hat, immoderate jowl
And ponderous schnozz
Saw in himself a puma hungering for love
Don’t I too see magnificent forests in the legs of dining-room tables
the tremulous vein of graphite at the pencil's heart dreaming of vast gorges
in the electric chandelier outrageous rainbows and dire hearts of sleepless manufacturers
in a passing poodle’s eyes the wolf’s first shock at its own ferocity
window-glass child of lightning smooth sister of ice
At your feet illicit Pablo of Valparaiso
all my words are fruited boughs pecked empty by birds

In every patch of bitumen on the long road from here to Bethlehem on every photon every slat in the blinds every pane of warped glass every ruddy sweating pear every grain in the floursacks drop of saliva on the long pink tongue bitter seed in an orange wedge stomachpain Bible hero in every worn sneaker ill-designed star-chart plumstone pumice stone teardrop cigarette every outmoded children's classic worn filament new nylon jacket hole where a plug should have been I am loving you unbearably and entirely

lunch poem!

not to rip off frank o'hara or anything.


at 11:30 I leave my house at 11:31 an old woman passes with her caretaker grasping at leaves
12:00 I finish an article in The New Leader deploring our homes and schools
12:10 I pry myself up from the lush grass to the sound of bad jazz little white stones like curds at the river
12:30 I eat tom yam kai all by myself at a cut-glass table
a man is whistling on the stoop of the restaurant and hugging his knees
the sun on his bald hair gleams and gleams
1:00 sated and feeling weak and without sympathetic imagination I trudge home slipping on acorns and up to my ankles in a dross of broken spines
the sun adores the flagged peaks of the trees in their last yellows and the sopping coat of a terrier
the boxer trees with snaky pods like cacao
1:30 that bad jazz starts up again with its militant plaintive sound and I wonder who is playing piano with stiff wrists and who's wheezing into the clarinet
looking down once in awhile and clearing with thin fingers that deep black valve with its brigadier's buttons and shaking out weary shoulders who rasps again over the tiny reed

this is a real item in the skymall catalog

A Box of Laughter And Applause

will greet you if you buy it from the inflight magazine. 4 ½”w x 3 ½”h. Craving a little recognition? A three-dollar apple rots in the seat pocket. Coffee creamer swirling less than 2% acid esters. The wing light blinks in a waste of mist. 2 AAA batteries (included). You can see through the camisole of a stern-faced woman in the bathroom line. You recall flying over the sea as a child but dimly. The propeller round as a pupil. The plane impelling itself through dark air. Desktop day-brighter MDF. Magnetic closure. Light through the exit window makes the jump seat blaze. 4 ½”d. Open the Box of Applause. Open the Box of Laughter. Close your eyes and imagine a crowd less hoarse with want and ire. Dark cherry finish. Uproarious guffaws.

dream poem? needs work

I'm a crooked tooth without you.
A field sown in crazed rows.
Livid and sleepless.
Unwilling to dream my own dreams
I would sue at the gates of yours for entry.
You told me you dreamed for seven nights once
you were carrying a rucksack to the sea.
With each step it grew heavier
until suddenly it was a woman singing
the madrigals of Gabrieli.
Around you men dissassembled the hills in great sheaves
and carried them away towards the sea. All the while
“The Chorus of the Phoenicians” rang in your ears.
I would wait for you at the end of the long march.
The men carrying sheaves
would arrive, singing marvelously,
while the sky an upturned bowl of black apples
waited crowded and impure for you
and I too at the sea's brine-soaked shoulder.
At your arrival the least of men would cry his approval,
but even these crude shouts I could not understand,
even these weeping welcomes. You are sleeping away in the world
with no disquiet of shared dreams. I cannot speak this language.
Ill and pale I go about
letting the pin-rain soak me and hungering for sleep.

poem on going to St Louis

My country occurred to me shot through by a river
bent as a sludge-pipe and punctuated by chimneys
by naked trees on the bay islands of this new city
new affect shoddy new arches to touch.
Out of the grim and antic north
I'm greeting you America where you lie on your broad belly
suddenly coming upon new hills
stackhouses for autos an unbearable language familiar
riddled with new slang and angers I can't decipher
slung low under the billboards new vines further along in autumn
than home America I can't believe I too am party to this
rude guile of cities that gather your restless in
like cloths bunched at the corners and mottled with comers-on
if once any man was impelled by the stars
one whiff of your broad flank
puffed-up with traffic cured it America

love poem

Around you the dusk fragrant and dark
as ambergris reassembles continually.
My flat feet on your knees, seeds
of light rolling off the stones
out over the long lawn and away.
To make me laugh you mimic
consternation, like a madonna,
and the new-come moon covetous
of this pale Pieta blanches your black curls,
a plain-hearted thing spun of light who laughs
against all the corrupt settlement of the world.

poem to savenor's market.

Stripped garlic, white peppercorns, meat
ribs-up in ice, trussed tentacles
in obscene embrace, boar jaws
in hooked wild grins, the freezer clouded
with their rapacious breath;
fish-eggs many as berry-seeds
swollen at season, green pears piled ova
warmed beneath some lusty crab,
white cheese, thin lodes like calcite,
waiting for the tremulous hand,
like the nude back
of the belle laide whose mouth perpetually beckons,
but I and my purse shrunken as an old sow's mouth
go out into the black belly of the street,
where clouds heaped like mussels
are rosy at the edge of snow.

november poem

Autumn came on under a cold film of stars
thin as a calfsfoot jelly my grandmother made
and all the trees nodding into sallow ruin
shook their shaggy heads at me
the whole zodiac stamped and howled their names

but I am a four-limbed magnanimous idea
on a privet path the sun washes into marble
laughing at four winds and four thousand telephone cables
strung over the city like catgut guitars

different!

In search of a luminary or a wrought-up age brimming with spirit
I am a well-grown eater of whelks shrimps rose leaves and mosses
indiscriminate bruised in rotten greens and blues
sotted house of all carelessness and ire
who loves ill-met and constantly
wracked with undeciphered dreams
and a metier of irresolvable complaint,
an urge to pick the vast pocket of the night
and tell lies about misfortunes on trains
bare-gutted to the new
frank empty hours like tin cylinders barrelling down
that may yet steam out as I perpetually
hope new light and fine fortune

bermuda. 1997.

The air was balmy and rank
with hot points of rain.
We were taking off
three days before a hurricane was due
and already the palms bared their necks,
genuflecting with long hands;
at the prow of the storm I at eight was waiting
while the blue-gouged clouds
wetted the windows with long tongues.
Somewhere a rented bungalow
hunkered under its pale shingles.
Six beds stood in pale new livery.
And back home our old white house
black-shuttered and doused
in pale light as we'd left it was waiting.
The water moved serge
and deep as a giant's cup
under the pearl-white plane.
Out of the white
brief light new mouths in the sea
huge and solemn were opening.