Thursday, December 18, 2008

straying . . .

Since there doesn't seem to be much conversation here, I've decided to start a new blog to showcase some of my recent works and thoughts. If you are wondering why I call it "the autobiography of flapjack sally," well, you'll just have to come investigate:

http://flapjacksal.tumblr.com

I hope you will read and comment. It was nice.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

It begins quietly; it goes unnoticed

It begins quietly; it goes unnoticed
for a long time. Oh, these little deaths
that come to us in dreams, what cabinet
is there to hold them? Even the silkworms,
who are sensitive, I’m told, to human emotions,
go on spitting their strong fibers in mulberry trees.
And if the birds seem preoccupied and restless,
isn’t it always so? The insects all going without
knowing where they’re going to?

Now, the sirens are only heard going elsewhere
with their unmistakable slackening of pitch and panic.
No one notices because they have forgotten the word
here. There is only there. No one comes to visit,
as everyone is going, or else waiting to go.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

revision

Antiope

I found a road that walks me to the sea,
and no one stops me. They know
my shame will keep me
from running.

I find a high rock to stare from—my heart
beats “distance, distance”, out
over the uninterruptible,
hushing waves.

But the nearer waters are so clear. How
can the water bear it? To be seen
straight through to her purple
spines, to every tossed
stone?

Friday, September 26, 2008

Something anyway

Trying to catch up, trying to write. Any thoughts at all are appreciated. Many thanks and hello



And then the discovery that to keep going is the thing itself.

The sun spreads out over
morning buildings.
Yesterday was the kind of day
where the moon showed up
in the afternoon
and made friends with the clouds,
so that a translucent strip of gauze
ran across its cheese-pie face.

All day we were identifying
the major world continents in loosely
formed bodies of air that shifted
between the greater ruling powers of earth,
and caused a stir in the park
when Russia covered up the sun
for a whole 5 minutes.

Oh these days, when
the manifestations of summer
saturate everything so that the moon
was just a beautiful pale rock
floating like a fingernail in the sky.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Maurice Manning reads for the Cortland Review



Have you heard of Maurice Manning? If not, I hope to convert you with fifteen minutes of pure pleasure dipped in an accent that sounds like a dream.

Monday, September 1, 2008

The wristwatch of Casey Jones

or,

how the earth learned to tell time


Like the first blood to flow
through the delta’d veins
of a giant slumbering dream:
the first trains

carried prayers—
let me never be found
to be falling down—cannonball
between far-flung towns;

afternoon could be so wide
it gave no sign
of breaking;
before we had watches

nights be so unbroken
we knew no more
than earth knew
what course our globe was taking.

The engineer
of the iron horse
rode high behind
the sweeping pilot,

into the darkness
his six-pipe whistle like Orpheus
sounded; we set our watches
by it.

In loco moveri:
Aristotle’s phrase, describing movement
by change of position
in space;

in time
we call it progress,
unreeling a schedule clear
to the horizon-crease,

and up the skies:
Casey Jones
always got her there on the
advertised,

outbellowed cows
to clear the track. His whistle,
familiar Tennessee to Mississippi,
began softly,

rose, then doubled back
to a whisper. His own watch
stopped at the time of
impact

Skull crushed,
the coroner said,
his right arm
sundered.

Suddenly,
at 3:52 AM,
the 30th of April,
1900.

Reports begin to sound
both too much
and not enough like strings of
numbers.

Ole 382 approached
the town of Vaughan;
26, 72, and 83
waited on the siding

but a scorpion tail
of four cars curled
onto the main line;
a flagman

at 3,000 feet
went by unseen or unheeded,
flares at 800, 500,
at eighty

miles per hour,
the airbrake and whistle as Casey
glimpsed the No 83’s tail
just three hundred feet shy.

The fireman,
who at his engineer’s urging
jumped to safety
remembers Casey

quite happy
at the progress The New Orleans Special
Fast Mail Train was making:
making up time

shoveling on coal
pouring on steam Casey said,
“old girl’s got her dancing
slippers on tonight”

Not a passenger was hurt.
The engine later was repaired.
Only the good engineer and
his time-piece

stopped;
in the embankment
on the track’s
east side

the imprint of the headlight,
boiler, and wheels
were visible each to the spoke;
and when these disappeared,

corn,
scattered by the wreck,
grew, each summer, for years
in the memory of the nearby fields.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Invocation

Mike Fink. John Henry. Paul Bunyan. Casey Jones.

As though the wilderness in which these names forged their meanings has now grown

back

over the names impenetrably obscuring paths once cleared by salted rivers of sweat;

or perhaps

the wilderness is all disappeared? Wooded groves which harbored heroes now part,

reveal

horizons, and no figure larger than ordinary; no monsters in the rocky, fjord-like

crenellations

of the coast: sea heaves its sighs and strums its finger along the tight drums of

the rocks,

a tune that summoned the male muses, once, these waves that break their own

hearts.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Questioning room, post-Fall

No, we aren’t what we appear. The dangling
lightbulb yellows us, presses our shadows flat
onto the floor. Leave it to our shadows, then, to be
forgiven for what we cut out of the light. What other
part is there of a living person without pulse? We’ll stand,
here, yes, naked, even, as if that could help. You promised
power over language and animals but every word
calls out your distance, you, who formed us in the image
of a question, but, no, never promised to answer.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Mountain walk, late summer

I walked through the cloud, the cloud walked
through me. It was like this for a long time
called morning.

From the cloud I saw
only what I saw—this step down,
this loose tooth of rock.

Slowing my pace, the cloud
moved faster, peeled back one corner shrouding
the mountain before me,

that I didn’t know
was there. The sky breathed heavy again.
Cold mist hung waiting

to be caught by the wind
that rules changes here.


Each time the veil slips down,
each time
it lifts a little, I wait,
half-expecting to see
a new landscape,
like wanting to fall
back asleep
to enter a new dream.

How silly
to have thought I was alone. Here
come children,
mouths all black
with wild blueberries.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

an excuse

The Time
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.

A fish drifting upside down. 
Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.

The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,
"Sleep Is Life."
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?

Yesterday someone said, "It gets late so early."
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem. 

-----
Every summer I feel this way, though perhaps more than most this year. Travels to Canada and rural Oregon have gotten the wheels turning but my pen is still out of ink (mixing metaphors, even). Any suggestions for how to take well-lived poetic moments and get them onto the page?

Sunday, August 17, 2008

some time ago, I heard from the wrong Greek woman

and since then I haven't known quite what to do with her. thoughts?


Penelope when pressed to speak

Then you tell me what the difference is exactly
between weaving and unweaving when
all I want is him, here, now. The future
makes as little difference as the past unmade.
I need these strings to keep my hands busy,
so that I can say “I’m waiting.” Without
waiting comes terror. Time passing.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

a few more

Euryleia


Who will sing what must be sung
in plain speech? Antiope is dead—
Molpadia’s arrow thudded through
her body— so she exited the embrace
of Theseus, whose face froze, centaur-like,
to marble-carved disbelief,

despair. Do you know what you were
saving her from, Molpadia?
Do you know how we will save
ourselves, now, with nothing to fight for?



Melanippe


All of the answers are sleeping today,
making it the perfect weather to ask why
to these unbearable becauses. Come rain,
erase us, come thunder, make our voices again
useless. Night, come back
quickly, hide us from our bodies,
cover everything that is missing.

The cloth of the sky has been twisted
and twisted, wrung, pulled taut
against itself, by hands whose thoughts
are elsewhere. No rain comes.



Hippolyta (sleeping)


She haunts. Could it be only gods
are allowed to happen once, then rest? Apart
from us, a part
of us, apart, and unconfessed.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

four and twenty

Hi All,

I've been off the gooseberry map for a long time. I was reading all the old post a couple weeks ago and saw the one about Four and Twenty. I submitted a little scrap of a poem and found out today that they accepted it. I wanted to share it, even though it's not my favorite. Hope you're all doing well, I've really enjoyed reading all the posts, despite my silence.

Heidi


When the Bass Player Dreams of Playing the Bass

Fingers find flesh in exchange for strings,
And blink out night-hidden rhythms.


Monday, July 7, 2008

another

Laodoke


I dreamt waterbirds and windstorms—
shriek, roar, the image of the world
dismantling itself before our eyes.

Then, alone, I watched my fingertips
fly off as moths, and I fell back into
the nothing that was left of everything.

My body gone, I felt a rising
from within, unalone, we rose
as a great wave to crest but never
crash, never scatter because
there is nothing left to fall against.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Amazonomachy

In my convalescence, I have made some progress pinning down my myth. I've settled on seven voices, and right now I have ten sections, (but I'm not so happy with all of them and so not ready to re-post the whole thing). I know all of their names (based on mythical/historical records of which Amazons were present at that battle), and their roles, both in the Amazon nation and in this particular battle, the Attic war. I know who dies and who survives, and that one voice is a ghost before the battle begins. Now I'd like to introduce you all to Antiope, the kidnapped (?) sister of queen Hippolyta. By the time the Amazons attack Athens to get her back, she has given birth to Theseus' son, Hippolytus, but the Amazons don't know this, or that when she left with Theseus for Athens it was not entirely against her will.


Antiope

I found a road that walks me to the sea,
and no one stops me. They know
my shame will keep me
from running.

I find a high rock to stare from—my heart
beats “distance, distance”, out
over the uninterruptible,
hushing waves.

But the nearer waters are so clear. How
can the water bear it? To be seen
straight through to rock,
to every alga?

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Four and Twenty

A submission opportunity, and a challenge for everyone:
 

Declaration Editing is now accepting submissions for Four and Twenty, an innovative short form poetry journal.

All poems must be four lines or fewer, containing a maximum of twenty words.

Details and submission guidelines are available at www.declarationediting.com 
The deadline is June 27, 2008.


Post your poems here first for comments?

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Unfinished

Titanomachiopolis



A true journey
of the imagination
into the under-
world of the foundry
a drilling music,
a molding music
for those who hear it:
for those who hear it
are changed.

The song: to hear it is
a crossing of the river
at the level of the river:
without the highstrung
bridge, the tunnel
boring obscurity.
There is no tuning out
the river once heard,
crouched over in all
its cold and tumult.
Your attention
Is fallen in the river,
neither will you be permitted
to return.

“What I saw when I arrived
was not protest songs
but the shadows of empty
factories and in those
factories and in their
shadows were a
whole lot of people struggling.”

On the sullen
bulks of islands—
off the shore of time—
what is being made
has pieces larger than you,
rivets longer than your body,
gears wider than your mind.
This is the song of the machine
that coins machines.
It is larger than your ears;
you must hear in parts.

In the subway car, the bodies,
Barely contained,
emenate in flickers like
the stars in space.
An old biddy
looking for the bingo game
is alone in the back of a church:
our lady of unnamed places.
Tell me mother
is there no way
to get from here
to Brooklyn
without the aid of car
or train? Like the human
fly latched on to the vertical
side of a building,
vulnerable, dizzy,
I feel the boundaries of
my animal body:
the muscle span,
the fragile skin,
the world is dark.

The cars on the bridge
drive on metal tracks.
Latched on to the vertical
side of the city, it seems
purchaseless steele,
an impossibly large
mistake: black grease
in person-sized smears
in places a window-washer
cannot reach,
so this is what it must be like
to be a neuron
with no conception of the brain:
the subway cars
drive themselves
down the nightmare tunnels
screaming in pain.

When the Titans gave birth
to Zeus, when his brothers
and sisters were vomited
onto the earth,
I imagine Cronos felt
helpless.
These children had changed
what it meant to be a god.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Fortune Telling

Black birds circle your place
A wake of rain clouds pulling the air
Look! When they land, dust scatters

Where you think you come from?
Think a stork brought you here?

To peck at carrion,
crows step hunchbacked, 
sideways, club-footed

Your Mama's carrying agin,
Birth is when babies eat 
their way out is their first taste
of meat

Ebony feathers float up
from the pavement
without body
they take to flight

When your brother come, give him a coke,
teach him to smoke, scar him, hit him
when he bleeds, tell him what a pussy's for
without a mother, you gonna be his Jesus

Cawing cough the crawling claw
Air longs for beating wings
Gnawing absence gnaws

Like you, he will hold back 
tears. Let his wasp stings
smart and burn before
you tend him with bactine, ice
and silence. He will think a black
eye is equal too one thousand
words

Them birds is waiting
for you to leave him be
cough and look away, 
look back
they will peck out his eyes
when that happens, give him yours

Sunday, May 18, 2008

who put the dead bird in my mailbox? - w4m (a little something from craigslist, author unknown)

a) how did you get into my mailbox in the first place, it is locked
b) did you kill the bird
c) it died horribly, that much was clear
d) you're psycho
e) do I know you
f) if I do know you I don't want to know you
g) if I don't know you, what did I do to inspire you to put a dead bird in my mailbox
h) I don't know how to disinfect a mailbox from a dead bird, I'm worried about diseases and have used five different kinds of cleaner but still feel like the bird's still in there still and like my bills and my catalogues and my coupons have dead bird on them
i) it was a hummingbird, I looked it up - they don't even live in New York - this is so f*ing psycho, I can't believe this
j) are you the mailman?
k) I'm always nice to the mailman
l) the super didn't care when I told him what happened
m) the neighbors didn't care either
n) do you have some kind of problem with birds
o) don't put anything else in my mailbox
p) unless it's an apology
q) no, I take that back, I don't even want an apology
r) what am I supposed to do with this bird - it's in bubblewrap in a bag in a shoebox in the freezer right now - am I supposed to bury it - where? how? in a construction site where they've jackhammered through the concrete - where is a person supposed to bury things in this city?
s) I could drop it in the Gowanus canal, but that seems undignified
t) I could drop it in the ocean, but the ocean is so big and it is such a small bird
u) I could drop it in the toilet but it would probably get stuck
v) I hear this whirring around my ears every time I go to the mailbox and I'm pretty sure it's ghost bird, and I'm all "it wasn't me that killed you, bird!" but still the whirring doesn't go away until I get to the stairwell
w) am I supposed to eat it - maybe you were trying to feed me - don't you know I'm a vegetarian
x) if this was Ricky, I'm gonna beat your ass, mama told you stop bothering the zoo
y) if this was Gina, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, how many times I gotta say I'm sorry
z) I could drop it off the roof, maybe it will reincarnate while falling and I can start reading my mail again

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The hammer and the new machine

(A Blues for Guillermo, nicknamed Memo, who worked making danishes for seven years until last week)



He was about to ask me to the movies; I would have said no;
I declined when he asked me to play basketball—where are you now,
Guillermo, you said when you went to Mexico you’d take me with you

This is the hammer that killed John Henry, but it won’t kill me

I only saw him for about one second in his street clothes
leather coat, shoulder bag, it wasn’t that he was handsome
or not handome in bakery clothes face framed by white

Pictures fall like a forty pound hammer on my heart, ten hours a day

The day we met, Memo asked me to spell out my name
on a paper fry-cook hat on the floury table. The day after
the day we met, Memo wore my name upside down—it isn’t just that

This is the hammer that killed John Henry, but it won’t kill me

Memo asked me where I lived, was it near the pool
he rode the #11 past every day. I said why not just get off,
Memo, why did you not get off?

Pictures fall like a forty pound hammer on my heart ten hours a day, twelve hours a day

They were looking for someone else; Memo answered the door,
they ran a check on his ID. I can not picture where he is,
I do not know what these words mean.

This is the hammer that killed John Henry, but it won’t kill me

Paula’s shopping for a new machine
which can be programmed to roll out the dough in sheets
but will it sing?

This is the hammer that killed John Henry, and it won’t kill me.
For this I am ashamed.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

the 52-hertz whale

We listen in on the line, like CIA ops
on a covert mission abroad
Unintelligible language crackles in our ears
garbled voices like someone speaking under water

We’ve been cruising the oceans for years,
making use of borrowed equiptment:
our Navy-issue hydrophones record
domestic struggles between ocras, the humpbacks’
intra-pod disputes about migratory paths,
the elongated tones of two blue whales singing
to one another, their calls and responses echoing
amid the hum of the broad, dark sea beneath our bow

Lately a soloist has peaked our interest
a high, insistent call like no other before
a different sequence and range, unique—
we’ve analyzed the patterns, tried matching
the peaks and troughs of the sounds
to other known callers, we’ve tracked the movements
of this one-whale show, meandering across the Pacific
playing each night a different venue (but never a packed house)

Our reports conclude: older, male, traveling alone
sporting baleen and barnacles like yesterday’s stubble
his 52-hertz bleat is unlike any other we’ve encountered
wandering for miles, searching whole oceans for a matching voice
we read in his treble tones a plaintive call for companionship

Isn’t that what we each hope for?
And don’t we drift likewise,
searching open faces for a glimmer
of soul-deep recognition?
Don’t we each crave a unique listener
or two for our particular song?



(disclaimer: this is the first poem I've polished or shared in several years, so I'm a bit rusty at this. That being said, any and all critiques are welcome.)

Also, to listen to this whale's song, go here: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/whales/sounds/sounds_52blue.html

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Trobarique

I worked the past three years as a pastry cook
Learning the meaning of the word confection
The back room of the bakery is the back room of myself
Deceptively sized, site of sleight of the hand and reflection.

Is this a magic box? What the recipe calls for
Is spelled out in words and stored beneath the table
Dipping a scoop into each unlabled bin
I weigh out the flours: all-purpose, cake, and pastry.

A cake: and no sensation that I have made it.
A simple product made of hands and rules.
That is my work; this product is my conjure
And question: will the days of words produce?

I worked the past three years in the back of the house,
Ghost-white apron, dove-white apron, worn by visions:
Where there are more buildings than space between the buildings
To see any distance you have to look within them.

Pigeons in this bakery: I hear them
Making their nest-noises high above.
They do not sing, a pigeon does not sing:
It makes a home, then finds it: song enough.

Coming here, making the cakes day after day—
I call it work, but it is a kind of lingering.
I came because it was warm and stayed for bread
Say invisible doves, appearing in the rafters.

I worked the past three years as a pastry baker.
First in Maine, where I woke up blindly in the night:
Time had come to start the doughs. I carried my bike
To the road with no idea where it might be leading.

Memory travels backwards--no, if it did that
The image would plumb from the sky, growing more
Discernable, to land in a white towel in Santos’ hands
So he could gently shepherd us indoors.

Instead I remember correctly—the misplaced starling,
The starling’s capture, the starling’s release outside.
The strange feeling of standing in the sunlight
In the middle of the day. Then, empty sky.

I worked the past three years as a pastry baker
In Maine, in Portland, Oregon, in New Jersey.
When I have worked out all the metaphors
Will I be more or less tied to these places?

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Poem share!

Balance

by Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport's labryinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day's sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.


Today's poem is from Eternal Enemies, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted with permission (well the Academy did anyway). All rights reserved.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

poem to share

Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh
XXI Dynasty

by Thomas James

My body holds its shape. The genius is intact.
Will I return to Thebes? In that lost country
The eucalyptus trees have turned to stone.
Once, branches nudged me, dropping swollen blossoms,
And passionflowers lit my father's garden.
Is it still there, that place of mottled shadow,
The scarlet flowers breathing in the darkness?

I remember how I died. It was so simple!
One morning the garden faded. My face blacked out.
On my left side they made the first incision.
They washed my heart and liver in palm wine—
My lungs were two dark fruit they stuffed with spices.
They smeared my innards with a sticky unguent
And sealed them in a crock of alabaster.

My brain was next. A pointed instrument
Hooked it through my nostrils, strand by strand.
A voice swayed over me. I paid no notice.
For weeks my body swam in sweet perfume.
I came out Scoured. I was skin and bone.
Thy lifted me into the sun again
And packed my empty skull with cinnamon.

They slit my toes; a razor gashed my fingertips.
Stitched shut at last, my limbs were chaste and valuable,
Stuffed with a paste of cloves and wild honey.
My eyes were empty, so they filled them up,
Inserting little nuggets of obsidian.
A basalt scarab wedged between my breasts
Replaced the tinny music of my heart.

Hands touched my sutures. I was so important!
They oiled my pores, rubbing a fragrance in.
An amber gum oozed down to soothe my temples.
I wanted to sit up. My skin was luminous,
Frail as the shadow of an emerald.
Before I learned to love myself too much,
My body wound itself in spools of linen.

Shut in my painted box, I am a precious object.
I wear a wooden mask. These are my eyelids,
Two flakes of bronze, and here is my new mouth,
Chiseled with care, guarding its ruby facets.
I will last forever. I am not impatient —
My skin will wait to greet its old complexions.
I'll lie here till the world swims back again.

When I come home the garden will be budding,
White petals breaking open, clusters of night flowers,
The far-off music of a tambourine.
A boy will pace among the passionflowers,
His eyes no longer two bruised surfaces.
I'll know the mouth of my young groom, I'll touch
His hands. Why do people lie to one another?

From Letters to a Stranger by Thomas James. Copyright © 2008 by Thomas James. Published by Graywolf Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Elizabeth, this reminded me of you. Any new developments on the Amazon front?

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Let's not be this:

Miss Snooks, Poetess
by Stevie Smith

Miss Snooks was really awfully nice
And never wrote a poem
That was not really awfully nice
And fitted to a woman,

She therefore made no enemies
And gave no sad surprises
But went on being awfully nice
And took a lot of prizes.

-----
Sorry I haven't been reading posts or even writing lately. I have, however, just quit my annoying day job in preparation for starting grad school (in Book Publishing). I'm feeling more creative already.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

And then the well-meaning parts of the day show their face

The metro empties us up and out
into the square where one can be assured
a stray ball or bicycle wheel will find its way.

It is then I think of you stringing together
your own same-self acts, turning over the moments
and marking your satisfaction or the hole you find there.
There was a broken line of sunlight this afternoon.

On the train it was a sequence of beaded points,
A fleshy man all in black, thick plastic glasses
puffed around his sober face, but there pinched in a fist
a bright reel of glowing daffodils.

He must have been smiling somewhere.
Another stranger held a large wooden frame carved
with animals, leafs, blossoms in relief,
but empty only leaning on the blank wall
surrounded by us who make the myriad.

Each one of these selves moving has a day
and a universe, keeps an eye on the grey sky like I do perhaps,
waits resignedly for the rain that will pierce this peach
of a hard spring not yet ripened.

I imagine you quietly with your book as is fitting,
or slicing thin blades of garlic which also suits you.
It is enormous; you do not see these seconds of day
that are here, mine.

This is the space in which I have chosen
to construct. It is pliable. I wait for the moments
to make something as they pile up.

Monday, March 31, 2008

sharpshooter's strikeout/win him back telephone ballad



the quickest of the quickdraw brains
she draw so fast she shoot a vein.
they say the nerves zap in her head
she say her words shoot sharper (she said,
       my words lodge worse than lead)

she sayed oh yes I hate to talk
agreeing with her man. he balked. she saw
the wound: his words sulked off
with his tale between his legs she thought
     (she thought a silent thought)

revising feelings, feeling lucky
she calls back from northern kentucky
the gesture, the dialogue, the cast out line
may reel him in she hopes in time
       (she hopes in 4:4 time)

from memphis, over the telephone's plumb
she needed words, no deadair hum
no good a kiss, no good a face,
she payed out a yarn and walked into the maze
      (and prayed the yarn would lead her out again)

the metaphorical maze gets cozy:
with he and she and the monster dozing.
yarn winds a skein, brain wends in the skull
and the story don't end but doublecrosses itself
      (crosses back and embraces itself)


Sunday, March 23, 2008

AMAZONOMACHY

it's high time for me to admit that i am working on an epic poem about amazons, and that i would like your help. i started with an amazon creation myth, and after that each poem is in the voice of a different amazon (eventually they will all have names according to which amazons were present in the battle against the athenians to reclaim their kidnapped queen but for now i'm just trying to get a feel for the different voices that come up). i might hear from some amazons more than once. anyway anyway anyway, here are the six segments i have so far. please imagine more space in between them (each on a separate page).


The first of us was created, then erased
by the god of men. Our god is the seed
that grows within us, light and winged!
This is what happened before god blanked
her out in the memory of man, blanketing
the garden in a sleep that thread time back
into the earth—the woman ate not one fruit,
but every fruit, and then the leaves and bark,
and twigs, trying to consume the tree thinking
she would become a god and understand
the beautiful language, hold it in her mouth.
She swallowed the seeds and they grew
inside her in her exile, became us Amazons.



At first it was like snowmelt gathering
to flood, to fight—the rush of river pulsing
blood, the horses underneath us kicking dust
over everything there is to see without
looking up. This Herakles, we knew,
was not a man exactly, but who decides who
gets remembered as a god—when so many
of us are mixed of mortal and immortal elements?



Monster, he called me and went for my throat.

In the reflection of his eyes, I was a storm at sea,
but he settled it with a concentrated movement of his brow,
and so the sword
entered my skin as the skin of the sea calmed by dusk.



Why should we believe their language of paired opposites?
In our tongue we do not define things by what they are not.



Some of the others have seen it before and others like it,
but to me it looks like the city of the gods.
The rocks and temples seem to trap the sun
and hold it there above us, just as clouds
sometimes appear to be lit from within. I am the youngest;
this is my first battle against men; in the evening light
the city on the hill glows red.



Not even our horses can sleep.
Strange winds came spiraling up the rock face
from below, pressing us to tomorrow, just as all
the way to Athens the winds beat strong
against our backs.

I understand what the horses understand,
lighting and relighting the small fires of lanterns.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Six Glimpses of the Animal Self

I really need your help with this unfinished piece. Is there interest? Is there cohesion? Where is there too much confusion? Would the poem benefit from more form? Thank you in advance.

I.

In myself, when Paul called, a loss for adequate reply yawned
below the flimsy words that Paul called upon to express the bad fact,
the immediate objects as Pierce would have it, the representations, the signs
of the dynamical object: a pancreas that is, now, completely a tumor.

How this reference to the guts of his father makes me know—
know in a movement like striking—how ridiculous a telephone is,
and how useless a sentence of words -(“Oh, I’m sorry”),
to be walking up the stair in socks—

who ever could have thought a second floor, a rug, a shoe,
necessities?

II.

In my own father, the hair grows wispy and parts,
with a fineness like the thinness in a cloud, reveals
a mystery is on the other side. I don’t know much at all about
these animal bodies that keep us as their pets,
these animal bodies we tend until they die.

What is it that makes the pate shine?

III.

In ourselves, the signs of our animal selves are printed, but people-fur
being unlike that of a tiger, unconfined to zoo and picture book,
seems less than beautiful. In fact I was amazed, I scrutinized
I was moved, my stomach lurched in delight when I saw my sister’s eye
brows finally unplucked. The fan of individual dark hairs
so different from what I’d seen in magazines.

It was a sheaf of wheat, it was a beauty
that only could have grown.

IV.

In the bedroom, we no longer can perceive
human bodies through the stencils of clothes,
sectioned off by color and printed matter, ruled
muscle-charts mislead us; they look nothing like meats.

And what name for the side of your neck
where I put my face and let my world go dark?

V.

In going out-of-doors, even when the sky is white with impending storm,
even when the grass is dun where it lays
in large swathes, it soothes the eye, it slows the mind,
to view for moments in a row at the speed of a person walking
these expanses of sameness.

What I see of the world is the shape of my eyeholes,
what I see of myself is the breeze, my whiskers trembling.

VI.

In my own theorizing I conclude
it is the respites from confusion,
it is these vastnesses—of color or darkness, of time
spent gazing at a face or a feeling—these true us to our bodies.

As even a small theory is needlessly wide,
I’m sure Paul will want to crumple this one
and throw it in the gutter and keep his face in city clutter.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

"Be Your Own Best Ride" (Excerpt)

“It’s a simple thing to make a bicycle into a person, but much more difficult to make the average person a bicycle. She must move with a steely efficiency, letting her rigidity be her strength, converting pressures that weigh upon her (that feeling of a heavy tread descending in a swift, tantrumous kick) to a gliding forward motion. She should not be excessively chattery.”

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

three views of a bicycle

The bicycle had lain on the side of Clifton Street for eight days. It was a little boy's bicycle, designed to look like a police car, with smart black and white varnish and a police badge painted on the seat. It had a flat tire, and the passers-by wondered if some careless boy had abandoned the bicycle, and whether he was being reprimanded by his mother.

Mr. Bentley parted the curtains of his sitting room and saw the bicycle still slumped on the curb. He remembered when he was a young boy how much he had cherished his red five speed bicycle. One day he came home to find that his mother had donated it to be melted for the war cause.

The bicycle sighed. Eight days ago he had chased a burglar bicycle down this narrow street, a routine job for a veteran cop. But a nail had been waiting to snare him, and now he lay injured and destitute. He was growing rusty in his inaction. All day he lay on his side, peering into the sewer through the grate, where the wan sunlight illuminated the yellow eyes of the rats below. On the sixth day an attractive lady bicycle passed him on the street, giving him a helpless shrug as she was maneuvered away by her driver. The bicycle missed his old life of heroism, and the sensation of cleaving the city air with his pedals.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Submit!

Yes, I've been feeling down that I haven't had anything new to post too. Writing has been sporadic due to reality.

But here's something: I'm part of a group of anglophiles here in Paris who are starting an English language lit mag. The name is in the deliberation process. But submissions are currently being accepted for poetry, prose and black and white art. You can submit up to three poems of no more than two pages each, or any kind of prose, 3,500 words or less. Send submissions via email to: submissions.paris@gmail.com

The magazine is in its infantile stage but we're hoping to put out an issue by this summer.
I'm not one of the editors, so I'll have no control whether it gets in or not but you're all super, so you should submit!

Monday, February 25, 2008



I've been feeling a little remiss that I haven't posted lately but the truth is I haven't been writing at all. If anyone has any ideas for prodding myself to do so, please share them. In return, here's something that may interest some of you.

Friday, February 15, 2008

how about a quick comparison?

The opposite of thunder

Trees are struck dumb by the light;
houses shine out their equal astonishment.
Covering the east
like a black cloth backdrop,
the clouds make this light
impossible, transfixing,
transfixed.
Shadows line up along the fence awaiting strange commands.

Evenings like this, it is hard to remember anything voiced.
Our voices are not part of us, and if we tried to speak we would say everything at once.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

i found this scrap from a few years ago and wondered if it is a poem. thoughts?

The opposite of thunder

The trees were struck dumb by the light,
and the houses shone back equal astonishment,
with the clouds covering the east like a black cloth
backdrop, making this light impossible, transfixing,
transfixed. The shadows line up along the fence
awaiting strange commands.

Evenings like this, it is hard to remember anything
voiced. Our voices are not part of us, and if we tried
to speak we would say everything at once.

Monday, February 4, 2008

The world from inside


Anya, if your theory about a poem being a blessing is true, I would like to bless you.

And the boy with cordoroys on the Brooklyn-bound A train running local for the C,

a trip that takes so long (mom, we’ve been on this train for hours, right?) he leans

against the man next to him with the earphones to escape his sister’s oompa joompa;

then snaps shoulders forward with his own. Oompa joompa! (guys, lets try to be calm.)

Fur hoods on fidgety brother and sister (but mom!) (but what?) (nothing. But mom?)

Such a multitude of stops, a wealth of worlds beyond this car, and each,

the older sister tells her brother, is a place, like Queens.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

"The oral storyteller not only takes dvantage of our tendency to share feelings socially by doing the voices and facial expressions of characters, but also tacitly trains young children and members of the wider social group to recognize and give priority to culturally valued emotional states. This education does not create our feelings, but renders emotional states legible through their labels and activates our expectations about what emotions mean. Narratives in prose and film infamously manipulate our feelings and call upon our built-in capacity to feel with others."
-Suzanne Keen, Narrative Empathy

Friday, February 1, 2008

What's so beautiful about the cold? [title pending]

We knew the rain would come,
and made provisions for this grey—
the bright curtains hanging there,
slouching proof of our optimism.
Rows of glass are clouded in droplets,
we made plans, we must ration our joy.

I walked a long time in the stiff cold with the steel
sleeping monster inside me. There are many things
in the streets now, signs of watery disintegration,
dogshit perhaps, the man who pisses when I go out for bread,
the banners announcing the deportation of immigrants.
We can’t help but feel homeless.

We live at the top of a series of hills,
up always up the narrow lanes.
Arriving home to the highest point in the city,
we pass the hedges where people are sleeping,
shrouded in thin tents and night frost.

These evenings of moon-solace have stretched out
so that I’ve learned it’s good to take time
to savor something sharp; some pickled mango,
a bite of a lemon. Too bad those winter berries
are always poisonous, we so often desire the red in them.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Model City

What is the purpose of globes? A large thing falsely small.
The globe with colorful countries pasted on it;
the globe containing, adrift in plastic snow,
a city where the atmosphere is liquid, denser than air.
Yes, this is how we, outside of cities, feel;
our noses smudge against the lens of glass,
our hovering breaths behold the skyline whole
and fiercely we believe that it is real,
unlike the sere, street-level town in which
to represent a large expanse of grass
someone has taken pains to depict each blade, and filled a useless field.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Other People

In the afternoons we slink out over the city,
pure clear squares of grey leading around corners
to wrought-iron and wood, constructs that claim
other people live here too.

Other people in the park, by the boulangerie,
down the hill, other people tut-tut-tutting along
the square with the glass pyramid that nobody understands
but everybody sort-of likes.

We pass other people’s gardens with ivy overflowing,
other people’s lights illuminating their swan-laced curtains,
other people’s beat up desk discarded on the sidewalk that hey,
we could use.

We come home when it’s too dark and too cold.
Across the way, the neighbors sit down for dinner, just as we do.
Do they look happier than us? We wave at them,
we watch them moving about like mimes;
to us they’re more than strangers.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

two-worldedness

This is an essay that is mentioned in the back of Vendela Vida's novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I just finished and recommend highly. Vida credits this essay with provoking the novel by making her wonder, "What kind of person feels that her past has nothing to do with her present?"

These questions about where the self resides temporally may be interesting to anyone who chooses the lyric mode of expression over the narrative (as well as to any philosphers skulking in our midst.)


‘Against Narrative’


Times Literary Supplement October 15 2004


Galen Strawson




“Self is a perpetually rewritten story”, according to the psychologist Jerry Bruner: we are all constantly engaged in “self-making narrative” and “in the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives”. Oliver Sacks concurs: each of us “constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ [and] “this narrative is us, our identities”. A vast chorus of assent rises from the humanities—from literary studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political theory, religious studies, echoed back by psychotherapy, medicine, law, marketing, design…: human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.


I’ll call this the Psychological Narrativity thesis. It is a straightforwardly empirical thesis about the way ordinary human beings experience their lives—this is how we are, it says, this is our nature—and it’s often coupled with a normative thesis, which I’ll call the Ethical Narrativity thesis, according to which a richly Narrative outlook on one’s life is essential to living well, to true or full personhood.


Two theses, four possible positions. One may, first, think the empirical psychological thesis true and the ethical one false: one may think that we are indeed deeply Narrative in our thinking and that it’s not a good thing. Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s novel La nausée, holds this view. It is also attributed to the Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius.


Second, one may think the empirical thesis false and the ethical one true. One may grant that we’re not all naturally Narrative in our thinking while holding that we should be, and need to be, in order to live a good life. There are versions of this view in Plutarch and a host of present-day writings.


Third, one may think both theses true: all normal human beings are naturally Narrative and Narrativity is crucial to a good life. This is the dominant view in the academy, followed by the second view. It leaves plenty of room for the idea that many of us would profit from being more Narrative than we are, and the idea that we can get our “self-narratives” wrong in one way or another.


Finally, one may think both theses are false. This is my view. I think the current dominance of the third view is regrettable. It’s not true that there is only one way in which human beings experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative. I think the second and third views hinder human self-understanding, close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and can be highly destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts.


To take this further, one needs to distinguish between one’s sense of oneself as a human being considered as a whole and one’s sense of oneself as an inner mental entity or “self” of some sort—I’ll call this one’s “self-experience”. When Henry James says of one of his early books, in a letter written in 1915, “I think of...the masterpiece in question...as the work of quite another person than myself...a rich...relation, say, who...suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship”, he has no doubt that he is the same human being as the author of that book, but he doesn’t feel he is the same self or person as the author of that book. One of the most important ways in which people tend to think of themselves (wholly independently of religious belief) is as things whose persistence conditions are not obviously or automatically the same as the persistence conditions of a human being considered as a whole. Petrarch, Proust, Derek Parfit and thousands of others have given this idea vivid expression. I’m going to take its viability for granted and set up another distinction—between “Episodic” and “Diachronic” self-experience—in terms of it.



The basic form of Diachronic self-experience [D] is that one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future—something that has relatively long-term diachronic continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life. I take it that many people are naturally Diachronic, and that many who are Diachronic are also Narrative.



If one is Episodic [E], by contrast, one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. Episodics are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms (the Episodic/Diachronic distinction is not the same as the Narrative/non-Narrative distinction, but there are marked correlations between them).


This is just the first 1/6th of the article. Find the rest here. It gets thicker and better.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Points of Light

The ever-present calculation, am I going to die today?
to which is added, for the first time in years, the smell of skunk.
I thought they were extinct already in these parts, or nearly.
The inundating wave of gratefulness.

For us, the skyline cast like jewels along the river.
The audience stands in the aisles of the local bus
as it wends its way though West New York, the last bus of the night,
what luck, for us and only for us.

I do not know how I come to my emotions.
Between moments of nuzzling his bundled hija’s face
a man is unreeling ropes of words I climb to laughter although
I am sure I do not speak the language of this complicated joke.

Friday, January 18, 2008

could use some help

is not the title of the poem but i've been slicing and dicing and smushing together bits on this one. Any advice is welcome, especially for the troubling last stanza.

Relocating to Colder Climates

The urgency of August has disappeared.
Gone are the towns of dust and spit and dung––
I’ve been sent looking under some other rock.

Here is where the city lines draw a mazed procession,
the mind rambles among cobbled edifices;
containers we’ve made to store books and chairs,
scribbled papers, and the little crooked cupboard of the heart.

The contrabass beyond this door and then another
plays a pebbled path bubbled, swerving.
The pin-pointed part of the self remains elusive.
It’s best to cling to things that can be molded by hand,
tugging on strings to fill this space with life-rumblings.

When it got very bad/they leapt into each other's eyes/and shut them firmly

From Adam Zagajewski’s Introduction to The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert:

"Every great poet lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world of history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a dense layer of dreams, imagination, fantasms. . .

These two territories conduct complex negotiations, the result of which are poems. Poets strive for the first world, the real one, conscientiously trying to reach it, to reach the place where the minds of many people meet, but their efforts are hindered by the second world, just as the dreams and hallucinations of certain sick people prevent them from understanding and experiencing events in their waking hours. Except that in great poets these hindrances are rather a symptom of mental health, since the world is by nature dual, and poets pay tribute with their own duality to the true structure of reality, which is composed of day and night, sober intelligence and fleeting fantasies, desire and gratification.

There is no poetry without this duality, though the second, substitute world is different for each outstanding creative artist."

When I read this yesterday it seemed to be speaking to Elizabeth's poem, which derives its power (for me) from its surrealism. The actions unfolding are dignified as signs (because the context is a poem, because of the underlying repetitive structure of the words and sounds) yet the meaning of these signs is baffling. The poem insinuates with its matter-of-fact tone that we should be able to figure out its meaning, but remains elusive, giving the eerie sensation that it is the reader that is strange and out of place; the world of the poem is solid; the two worlds that Zagajewski describes are inverted.

PS: Have any of you read Herbert's poems? This book is blowing me away . . .

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Name Day

We’ve broken all the windows in the attic
again with our singing games. The seventy-six
doves found the seeds we left for them,
and now they are all sleeping in the middle
of the day, their heads tucked under their wings.
We found the orchard full of plums and now
we’re all sleeping in the middle of the day,
with our heads tucked under our wings.

Yesterday a great wind or a ghost or god sent the wheelbarrows
all rolling downhill towards the dark water.

A man showed up, saying he could read
the furrows their stiff legs had dragged through the earth,
saying they spell his name, his story,
that it now belongs to us.

We baked the delicate bread in his honor,
the braided wedding bread with rosewater,
because he is the only one who can
tell us how divine came to be
a verb, and what language water
speaks beneath the earth.

Because, you see, we have no precedent
for celebrations of this kind.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

a Metaphor for our lifves [sic] as they stand

It felt like we had been driving forever through a forest of trees of which we couldn’t see the tops. It was becoming dark when, suddenly on our right, we saw lights. Yes, they were feeble, but I clutched your arm in excitement. They were the first glow we’d seen in miles and miles.

The road writhed a little and you read, spelled out on an arrow, surrounded by old fashioned chaser lights, “You Are Here.”

“That’s not what it says,” I objected. “The sign says Are You Here.”

The windshield was sparkling clear because of the rain. We pulled into the parking lot. The glass bulbs which made up the sign looked delicate.

There was an old Shell pump of indistinguishable color beside a narrow building made of wood. It had a sharply pitched roofline, shutters, dormers. The front steps were steep.

“I would like my stories to be made of real places, real events—these are the things from which I’d like to make narratives, find meaning,” I said.

“Lets go inside,” you said, getting out of the car.

Another, smaller, wooden sign said, The Inn Between.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Return To Form

Following the curvature of the earth, an orange circuitboard of light

as we circle the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Airport for reasons dark to me: once, twice, thrice.

Some of these networks congeal as streets, others coagulate into towns.

Bad neighborhoods, court districts, voting precincts are impossible to identify, looking down.

Twinklings hint of other systems, here arrayed in time: redlight, greenlight, traffic surges,

store hours, schedules, seasons, ways of moving, the clear as day but invisible causes of hidden wants, urges.

What I've come here for is the homes, those shells we each sculpt around our own life

to shut out the cold and to protect against the bone-grey trees, stunted balconies, satellites, sights

which root above, wrought iron and water tower, in sky-plots long ago

staked out for nobler purpose by our hearts.


Tuesday, January 8, 2008

bumper sticker

"Metaphors be with you."

I saw this on a bumper sticker in California this week, and it made me giggle. I want one.