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.

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.

Late night.
The Babylon line out past Long Island City.
“Lena, I think I’m ready for God to die.”


We cut through a smokestack’s milky gash
in the bright expanse.
A little moon like a smudge
wolfed up by a hungry city--
it’s taken the sun through its teeth,
housed the homeless pieces.

All night I dream of men
with peeled potatoes for heads.
Worse than dreams are rumors
and newspapers.

But my mother houses saffron
in a cut-glass box.
One thread yellows the pot.
Our bellies are heavy.
In this light your mouth is like Brodsky’s mouth,
violent, rapt with praise
and small singing.

You say dobrie vecher.
Me, I’m frying livers in pork fat
plump pills, they smell hot,
scattered with translucent onion.

But you’ve been married for ages.
You brought gin under your arm.
A book that snows dust down your coat.

You kept your father’s trophies,
remember dreams you had
when you were eleven—ice, a steep hill,
lights—I make you kasha.
You pinch it with your fingers
and hold it on your tongue like caviar.
Dobrie vecher,
the snow settles between stems,
under the roots like hollow bones, set and white.

All we did for years was listen to the Sex Pistols
And drink Bombay gin while our parents were sleeping.
I spoke Russian, you spoke Ukrainian--
We were so close, as if we lived in the same family
but not the same body.
We liked to pretend alcohol ran in our veins
Instead of blood,
A clear soup, held in a great still
until the moment of birth.
We were restless.
But when we holed up between the redwoods
we didn’t have anywhere we wanted to go.
We thought a sloth two stories high might lumber past us –
“Friend,” we would say,
“we have seen your bones in a museum.”
“That’s all anyone could hope for,”
he would reply, through his mossy snout—
he never came.
But your belly was tight as a drum
packed in with cardamom
and your skin white as skimmed curd.
At your lips always a ready word.

101

The fish drain down the channels of the sea
like silver clots in innumerable veins,
down to the dark wells and cataracts
that open endlessly, like mourning mouths,
slight bellies doused
for a moment with sun, then gone,

as a bird-flock cleaves in two at sight of a hawk
and rejoins, a black mass like a grain-sack,
ripening under the hissing husks of wings.
Swift patterns that collect and die
seething with light.

Beside the cormorants drying
their wings at the riverbed
dusk carries me in like a paper fan.

CENTENARY

I have written one hundred poems
to Damocles, my brother,
to spikenard doused in dew.
To lintels, bones, and trophies.
The wind that slouches through.

I will write one hundred more.
I will hang them in the cellar.
I will pack them in with camphor.

I'll add another hundred
like the kisses of Catullus.
Deck the figures on the mantle.
I will gird their necks and ankles
like my heart, girded by Lowell
and Guillaume Apollinaire.
As dew sloughs off my garden
into the earth and air.

new hope avenue.

All the time we lived on New Hope Avenue
we watched winged shadows
through tinted windows.
The gourds we hung caved in
and showed their pale teeth.
Ripe as grenades, the spiked chestnuts - low.
The sage held on under mounds of snow.
You told me your dreams but I forgot them.
You handled me like an old gun.
It was right to—I spat fire,
grease. And you a yellow oilcloth
draped on the divan,
paper-thin man,
a hollow glass.
I wanted to drink you and break you
and swallow the shards.

All August my father held a flashlight in his mouth
like a bobbin or pearl, and gathered crabs with his hands,
the dark, mealy beach, frigid sand,
the serge waves lapping in the strait.
Father, with my hands I only write poems.
Out in the night the buds furl in
and the wind pitches fits against the roof.
The moon, a child with catarrh, wanes
plaintive and white.
I strip spruce canes
down to their split green hearts.
The black boxer pods furl
like so many skeins of film,
I want to remember everything I can.

notes from the jewish autonomous oblast

On the roof of our house
a shingle breaks like an old tooth.
I light up on the porch.
Wind knocks at the balustrade.
In the summer my father grows creepers here
the sun's bright hair.
This time last year
he buried an ear
of corn whole under ice.
My sister gets drunk
and carols to our snowman's homely ears.
When she slips
she puts a bruised hand to her hip
and her mouth lolls in a pink O of surprise.
I dipped my russet ears in the bath
to dim the shouts.
Dusk crouches like a beast
with our house in its mouth.

something a little different. thanks leelee!

The Tower of Babel rises
like a gold almond cake.
A little sun turns the mortar
to a confit of roses.
Jackdaws trill
beside sweat-slick backs.

The thirstiest tongue of lightning
turns the whole beach to glass.
Like a rain of yellow raisins
bricks scatter in dust.

Above this the head of cloud parts a little way.
The sun, pushed to its seam,
fills the air, a hot phial,
and the sea birds rise.

I go back.
A rusty sun pierces the bus
and it lunges on.
I go back.
Our drive veined with ice
between salt-gutted bricks.
The lamppost a cup of darkness.
Wind playing a rag on the holly
its berries heaped with snow.
We leaf through photos.
I was a kid once
wall-eyed, wild. Then I grew and went.
I lift a bruised gas-ripened peach
up to my teeth,
I go back.

what? last shitty examscused poem.

All the young gentlemen played lyres.
All the young ladies started fires.
The sun stamped on in red boots.
The privets trembled in helmets of ice.
The cobbles rattled loose.
The poplars croaked.
Everybody drank beech rotgut
while the fires licked at letters
on gauzy reels of parchment.
They danced until the day
lopped itself off at the kneecaps
and the night burned clear and dry.

did i mention, onslaught of winter imagery?

I'm trying to have these poems reflect the reality of my days more.
Incidentally, 7 more til 100, 2 more days til I am HOME FOR BREAK WOOT



Dec. 19, 2009

The river white as glazed fat
or frosted glass. The last runners
hot-footing it up the bank.
News of a storm pulled up the east
on a gurney of wind, snarling
planes, sinking its teeth
into the hapless grilles.
The air here clean, slumped grass
hung with frost. You say, “Poor birds,
they're outside all the time!” And point
to the poufed tweed and red tie
of the robin sidling down a crabbed bough.
Shrunk berries draped
over a stone urn. The sky blushes dark
towards a night of rank weather.
Through a window
myrtle canes in a glass vase,
hot light poured
over a woman's palms.

a story of december 18th.

the brighter the lights winked
the slower my heart beat.
even the bricks seemed to shrink
like cold teeth. i ducked into 'india
palace' and sucked handfuls of candied anise
in the foyer of the all-day buffet.
once i boiled tamarinds
into a garnet jelly.
put a dried citron to my mouth,
touching its budded husk.
now i smoke
skullcap and licorice root,
restless for nicotine.
at night you play a jaw harp
you picked up on a whim,
and i wear stripes with stripes.
you cradle my skull with your palm all night.
i kiss your heels
under the flyspecked sheets.

change of pace?

All night I dreamt
I fished the inlets of Corfu. Heart in my throat
I slit a gasping bass, threw
its shorn fins back. Drank ouzo neat
and trilled tis tavlas through my hair.
What a thing! To drink with mes
semblables, hollow a roast potato,
lever a spoonful of caviar into the white gut
and hold it, salty, mealy, on my tongue,
and the clear spirit, burning. I recalled
even in my dream how you rent the cod’s breast
with your tongue, perspired,
kicked out your heels, sang
under the baritone of taxis.
You never lifted your voice, even
to question me, even whetted
with arak rayan
in the bowels of the Spianada.
I wanted to drink with you until an aureole of light
slunk round the city, icy and new,
to half-carry you,
put almond cakes
to your open lips,
while the sun wheeled,
a slim, tender disc,
over the old fortress.

hmm

So I hit poem 90 on this blog... I am having a bit of a crisis of purpose. This is sort of independent of the generally low quality of work I've been producing throughout reading/finals period. Part of it is being rejected by publications both on and off campus, I'll admit. I mean, part of the problem is that poetry is in a lot of ways subjective. I think really good poetry is easy to distinguish and really bad (and even pretty bad or just bad) poetry is easy to distinguish but sometimes it's hard to tell what's mediocre or borderline bad and what's better and what's genuinely good. And what I'm trying to say is being a poet is something intricately bound with having an audience (it's, you know, the bardic art still, even if modern poetry has departed from that in a lot of ways) and so what people think of this stuff matters to me, even if ultimately (given that it's work that's not likely to be published) I am the only one to whom this stuff is really salient. And, you know, I've heard a lot of really harsh judgment of poetic work lately that I thought was pretty good, and it's just made me question a lot of the fundamental assumptions I bring to the table. Picking such an audaciously performative medium to promulgate my daily poetry, a lot of which I will freely admit is not, you know, up to par, means that I feel particularly vulnerable to criticism... which I definitely want, but, like every poet, harbor mixed feelings about... what I'm basically saying is, I'm pretty afraid that this blog is adding up to fundamental suckage &/or worthlessness as a poet, which is something I would very much like to avoid. But at any rate. This is a long introduction to a poem that... does not break the trend of mediocrity, shall we say. Guys, I swear there will be a streak of better stuff -- I have big hopes for J Term.




Sallow kid weeps under a plastic shade.
A man's arm skews in sleep
braced on the pole where the men who dance
on the trains flip with their caps out.
On the platform, frigid wind
scabs my knees. They step out too
still blaring MJ. I huff gusts
of air rough with coming snow.
My mother told me I was too weary
even to weep when I left her thighs--
my sharp-chinned sisters wailed.
The sick odors of the city, lights
dulled by cold,
by heavy waters. Wind
pelting its briars at me.
They moonwalk to keep warm
to dulcet MJ, hats
at their feet,
so the lights of the oncoming train
can drench the brims.

We smoked catnip in wax paper
put our lighters to the birches
said we'd scorch them into paddles
and we'd glide on down the river
so Orion panting swaying
shoots his arrow to the bottom
of the boat where we'll be playing
dirges ballads til the morning
flushed alarmed wavedappled fevered
sometimes singing sometimes baying

The June I was eight I sat under a kumquat tree. Unsettled evening swept a big, unfamiliar sky. I was far from home, white house, perpetually extinguished lamppost, frost-gutted bricks, windows specked with soot. Here the little vans seemed to cave in under the force of the night heat. And during the day, molten plastic seats fierce against my browning calves. This far from home, I felt my wrist often, watched the little blue bead of vein, and my sisters' lips as they bickered and sang. A black bird whooped and sank its beak into a kumquat. Out in the blue salt night paws speeded up, stilled.

oy

The new rain thinned the ice last night.
When I prod the gemmed pool with my boot
down under the black water
I see Pyramus and Thisbe,
white swimmers specked with blood.
Thisbe opens her mouth
into the flood,
and the ice-sheets close.
Somewhere in me
a mendicant soul stirs,
braying for its keep.
The ice rasps as it moves
under hushed stands of pines.

i will revise this in the morning

I see all the women
covering their shorn heads
with wigs or hats. Kerchiefs,
wimples. I want to hold my lips
against the seam of the scalp,
shaven, re-shaven
for the long-fingered God, lifter of cloths.

weak with exams

This morning I saw a funeral procession pass
flanked by cop cars blue
with lights and sirens I was late to class
hot with impatience while the little flags
whipped on the hearses

The rain froze to flat sheets
last night, now the clouds are thin;
the earth clenches itself tight
thin grass in tongues of ice.

all day my breath smoked out my nostrils
as if I were a bull in a dream.
I strike match after match on frozen moss hard as horn
on a flint street fringed with rigid ash.

please please just bear with me through reading period

they'll get better, i promise!!!

-
Winter’s giving out its poor largesse
and I write poems everywhere,
sluggishly, gumming up tissues with humors,
skin raw as new iron.
All the little claw-trees gesture
hung with fitful lights,
and all night I sit in a drafty room
watching the girls pass on the salted street.

"i have never and will never wear loafers."

I am writing a poem for you
and your new-shorn hair,
that mass of fur on the barber’s chair,
And you, sullen, in your plastic cape,
the sun outside
capping your red ears,

letterman jacket
sour with dust,
a hunch, a frayed cuff,
errant arms big with lust,

eyes winsome, neck ruffed
perpetually with three days of scruff.
Sloven in your sweet daze,
I want to see you again
through glens of quilt-down, heart-
wrenching knees, white
slice of gut--
I could beg
for big diadem you with a parched throat
until the white houses folded
their shingles down, opened
their lips, and sang.

i really hate writing papers.

Today I saw the sky dim slow
through the dense florets of snow
in the library window

Shilling for mouthfuls of facile ideas
hour after hour "up against it"
flat teeth
in a paper maw

Give me your burnished red hand
hirsute knuckle pale wrist
knock thrice on the blondwood table
to lead - me - out!

Trembling, sullen
before the goad,
I drag my feet
in stitched skin
over stone,

drenched and animal
through new ice
kindling light
under the trees,

all gunny-sack
thighs, tongue ransomed,
hiding from that slick
half-slitted disc
in cloud,

bleating for you,
hot guts, shorn
fur,
reeking of warm
ordure.

poem. after four hours of studying midrash rabbah for a divinity school seminar.

i'm a belzer granddaughter:
before the war
i would have been a princess
with a gutful of bloody snow
and now my ears and teeth are caught on the jug handles of letters
in dense choirs in dark homilies in you little book
I am a shade speaking
with heavy breasts weak ankles like the women in pinafores
in the photos who brewed up feeselahs and burned by the ton
little book I kiss you when I close you
minefield of axioms and abbreviations
forbidden to me and bidden to me by blood
yours great-uncle meshulum of yeshivat volozhin
and yours little rina who got three cries out and died
under hundreds of thin trees that pricked the moon over galicia
and now the little book hungers for me to stroke its dowdy spine
homely bound like me restless against my palms

You picked up half-price cuff links
spread your stained shirt with baking soda
there we were the provincials
greeting the seasons in darned shirtwaists
our hearts thrilling
with secondhand sorrows
from novels with covers
like wax dolls in embers

we puzzled over a cummerbund
“this clasp is like
the clasp around the Torah”
I was afraid
I wanted to grasp your ankle
and pull it close damp thing full of pulse
the snow just above the street
restless in a horn of light

six line poem. which i cut down! and deliberated over!

like a mother holding
her obese son

so am i
in my two hipped body

under a white sky severed
by murmuring turbines

what

i've been writing a 24-hour play for 6 hours. don't judge me.

-

hey
the moon rabbit is on his way
he is jumping through the orbits
let him kick over our stewpots
let him rummage through our bedrooms
let him eat all the things that sprout
that we could not live without
when he raises his head high
he blots out the western sky
let the big big rabbit come out*
let him come



*this line stolen from the mountain goats song iztcuintli totli days

the lawn spreads a humus
dark and peaty under my feet
i've been writing and writing with my little belly pressed against the table
poems and again poems into the same air
that pushes my limbs close against themselves
writing and writing into this body
crushing my own bones with its heavy stuff
ah if i could sing my way out of it
i could make a chapel out of this gorged earth

blatantmountaingoatsimitation

i packed up my valise
you packed up your bag
you had ten white T-shirts and a black do-rag
we were going to huntington where the snow settles down like ermine
what the future holds for us we are too young and too hungry to determine

you put on your smile like a sable cape
i couldn't help but wonder if i was making a mistake
a little snow starting the sky sealed like a drum
I kick into gear hear the engine hum
when we are inscribed in the book of fate
i hope they glue a photo to the page

i had to wrestle with this one

is anyone still reading this? *crickets*... ... ...

-
I had a dream the lyrebird did a little singing
and retired from my four-foot room. Ten paces square.
I had a dream the blue wolves grasped my hair
in their teeth, and screamed,
and scorched the earth. For what it's worth
I haven't smoked in days, or called you.
I've been eating apples to the core,
swallowing the pips, a little cyanide.
In the pan I disrupt yolks
with my little fork. When I looked last
the sky slumped white at my window,
now it's lustrous, blood-red.
When I take to my bed
I listen to songs by a man
whose lung collapsed last year.
I want to die in a big pile of blow
or smoke until my nostrils sing like chimneys.
It wasn't supposed to get this bad,
the white sheets pressed with yolk-crumbs,
the windows lined with terrible dusts,
like the wounds of the big cement Jesus
fixed above the bargain-warehouse door.
I saw a man there singing to his blistered hand,
white petals of skin glazed with ooze.
The cloudbank hangs like a dark whole bread
scattering the crusts of a few black dreams.

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.