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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.