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!