4.29.15

Do you ever have something that you sit on, marinate, swish around in your head? Do you do something with it? Let it out, see where it goes? I worry that our constant need for stimulus keeps our brains busy on the hamster wheel, and things "long thought" take a very back seat.



Doha Thing Long Thought and Kind

Alice Fulton



A gift is a risk. Let roses be the prodrome.
It’s like it dropped a gold and a silver

ring with its name on it
in my brain. That was the gift

before the storm. It sent you a stumbling
block. Just scribble yes or no

on the form. Now every time the doorbell
rings I think someone’s sent me one.

A gift is a guess. Did it come close?
It’s what you need most

that turns you nerve side out. Right
now I think I’m growing something

long thought and kind of
clumsy. Just wrap it in drafts with awk

in the margins. Stuff it
in a wooden pillow with a drawer.

A gift is a task. It could be oxblood
or puce. You have to decide

whether to send those flowers that drop
whole from the stem or

the ones whose petals fall one
by one. You know how rain will

turn the roses nerve side out?
A gift is a test. They need to know that.

When she wrote their thorns
are the best part of them I can’t begin

to tell you how many kinds of
right she was. Now I think I’m growing

something long thought
to be the prerogative of certain

entitled individuals. Wings
or thorns. When all I wanted was

a more subtle pulse
at the throat bone. Well what size

do you wear? I am smelting you a surprise.
Not another luminous lyre

cum lint remover. Take it
from me. If you depend on gifts

for what you need you’ll end up with
a gold and a silver shoe both

for the same lame foot.

4.25.15

I found this poem in my inbox and I liked it a lot.



Ode to Love

Jennifer Militello




Place its toothpicked pit in water, watch the grist
of its insides grow. Witness its populous bloom,

honeycombed with rough. Its cobblestones grip
the heart in its mitt, a closed fist thickened

and gritty as silt. The swamp of the plumb beat
adamant as weeds. The dish of which is salted

by complexities or cries. It is a house in which
we cannot live, the quiver on the arrow

we cannot launch. It grows late over Nevada
as we watch. Strikes its gullies: we grow burnt

as a moth. Mimics a sleep of archives and
the small lies all forget. Mimics all laughter

broken by the time it leaves the mouth.
With its moving parts, its chimes, its gleam,

it muddies our archways, lying low, gives off
noise and steam; its mechanics clear the fence.

It must be wooed. Must be quieted. Hush. It must
be soothed. Has a snag. Has a bleed. A drape.

Flaps awkwardly, at its edges, a heron. At
its center, a wide bottom perfect with fish.

And this one, at least it's opening, made me think of a poem I  have heard but I can't remember or find via googling, it ends  "That damned avocado seed!". I thought they would dovetail nicely, despite being rather different. So tack that thought on the end of here, an formalist, rhyming commentary on part of this first poem. 

4.15.15

Today I have for you poetry and comedy. Do you read The Blogess? She's funny in the way that people making light of their own weaknesses are--hilarious and relatable. And saying things were are all thinking (a theme, perhaps, Watson?)

Here's the original post: "Also, that fucker ate all the hot pockets" (I'm copying and pasting because it amuses me to see it all here below)

"An imagined open letter from the justifiably disgruntled wife of poet William Carlos Williams, the man who wrote this famed poem:

This is Just to Say 

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Dear literary critics:

You guys are assholes.

Did you even read the poem you claim is so brilliant?  First off, my husband ate all my fruit, and then instead of apologizing in person he left a post-it note admitting that he did it, but that he had a good reason which was basically “I wanted to“.  And not only does he eat all my plums, also he ends the post-it telling me how goddam delicious they are.  I know how delicious plums are.  That’s why I was saving them for breakfast. 

You people read this poem and love it, but really it’s just a not-very-apologetic-apology from a man confessing to mild burglary.  And who do you think had to go out and buy more plums for breakfast because someone promised his parents I’d make plum pancakes for everyone?  Not Mr. I’m-far-too-poetic-to-go-to-Walmart, I’ll tell you that.  Frankly, I don’t even think plum pancakes are a real thing.  They tasted terrible and I’m guessing he just made them up because he’s “poetic and whimsical” and so I ended up having to apologize for the shitty pancakes that I didn’t even want to make.

And then the whole world is like, “DID YOU SEE THIS APOLOGY LETTER?  IT IS THE GREATEST MODERN POEM EVER!”  Just – what?  No.  IT DOESN’T EVEN RHYME.

Frankly, I expected that people reading the apology would be more sympathetic, like, “That guy stole your fruit andthen told you how awesome it was?  What a dick“.  But instead everyone is all “GENIUS!  ENCORE!” and now my husband is utterly out of control.  This morning he climbed up into the tree in the front yard wearing only a bathrobe (my bathrobe – because he’s not content to just steal my breakfast, apparently) and he refused to come down because he claims I “purposely” destroyed his latest poem.  It was not a poem.  It was our grocery list.

I told him that no one wants a poem about kitty litter and two-ply toilet paper but he said I don’t understand poetry and that he couldn’t hear me anyway because he was too busy writing a poem about how “trees are very scratchy” and at this point I don’t even know anymore.  Apparently everything is a poem now.

Here’s a poem I just made for you :  There once was a girl from Nantucket.  I wonder if she has some plums I can borrow.  The end.

Oh, Christ.  I just found a leaf on the table with a note scrawled on it reading: “This is just to say that I broke the cat when I fell out of the tree.  Forgive me.  I fell so fast and Mittens was so old.”  

Jesus, people.  Just stop encouraging him.  

Hugs, Mrs. William Carlos Willams

Did that make you laugh? Do you ever feel that way about a work sometimes? I like that poetry can be playful, unserious, and laugh at itself. It might be a fun practice to turn everyday things into poems. I hear there is a national haiku day (it's Friday!), might be a good exercise. 

4.14.15

Here is something which I think is beautiful. Mortality has been following me around and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I watched Louis C.K's show "Louie" the other night, and while funny, it's also along the lines of "things we're all thinking but are unsure of how to say".




from The Uses of the Body


Deborah Landau




Before you have kids,
you get a dog.

Then when you get a baby,
you wait for the dog to die.

When the dog dies,
it’s a relief.

When your babies aren’t babies,
you want a dog again.

The uses of the body,
you see where they end.

But we are only in the middle,
only mid-way.

The organs growing older in their plush pockets
ticking toward the wearing out.

We are here and soon won’t be
(despite the cozy bed stuffed dog pillows books clock).

The boy with his socks on and pajamas.
A series of accidental collisions.

Pressure in the chest. Everyone breathing
for now, in and out, all night.

These sad things, they have to be.
I go into the kitchen thinking to sweeten myself.

Boiled eggs won’t do a thing.
Oysters. Lysol. Peanut butter. Gin.

Big babyface, getting fed.
I am twenty. I am thirty. I am forty years old.

A friend said Listen,
you have to try to calm down.

4.13.15

It's not the weekend, but here are some words.

3-30-15

Since I hollowed I have attempted to fill

the remaining space with silence.

That didn’t work, nor the approximation of music.

It caught on all the barbs left exposed.

I thought it would be very zen to be filled with water

but I got tired of the echoes.

I stacked materials neatly; fabric, paper, wood,

with no space between so the fire was frustrated.

I am still waiting to be satisfied with my decision,

and to find a new center to be my holy burden.

4.7.15

Mark Doty is an American poet who's work identified strongly with gay identity and the HIV epidemic in the 80's. I chose this poem because I enjoyed the winding story, images that make you peek a little inside, a little past what you think is there--and the "then". You'll see it when you get there. I think this poem is also for anyone who has dealt with loss, and the arresting way it jumps out at you from plain things.

This Your Home Now



Mark Doty



For years I went to the Peruvian barbers on 18th Street
—comforting, welcome: the full coatrack,
three chairs held by three barbers,

oldest by the window, the middle one
a slight fellow who spoke an oddly feminine Spanish,
the youngest last, red-haired, self-consciously masculine,

and in each of the mirrors their children’s photos,
smutty cartoons, postcards from Machu Picchu.
I was happy in any chair, though I liked best

the touch of the eldest, who’d rest his hand
against my neck in a thoughtless, confident way.
Ten years maybe. One day the powdery blue

steel shutters pulled down over the window and door,
not to be raised again. They’d lost their lease.
I didn’t know how at a loss I’d feel;

this haze around what I’d like to think
the sculptural presence of my skull
requires neither art nor science,

but two haircuts on Seventh, one in Dublin,
nothing right.
Then (I hear my friend Marie
laughing over my shoulder, saying In your poems

there’s always a then, and I think, Is it a poem
without a then?) dull early winter, back on 18th,
upspiraling red in a cylinder of glass, just below the line

of sidewalk, a new sign, WILLIE’S BARBERSHOP.
Dark hallway, glass door, and there’s (presumably) Willie.
When I tell him I used to go down the street

he says in an inscrutable accent, This your home now,
puts me in a chair, asks me what I want and soon he’s clipping
and singing with the radio’s Latin dance tune.

That’s when I notice Willie’s walls,
though he’s been here all of a week, spangled with images
hung in barber shops since the beginning of time:

lounge singers, near-celebrities, random boxers
—Italian boys, Puerto Rican, caught in the hour
of their beauty, though they’d scowl at the word.

Cheering victors over a trophy won for what?
Frames already dusty, at slight angles,
here, it is clear, forever. Are barbershops

like aspens, each sprung from a common root
ten thousand years old, sons of one father,
holding up fighters and starlets to shield the tenderness

at their hearts? Our guardian Willie defies time,
his chair our ferryboat, and we go down into the trance
of touch and the skull-buzz drone

singing cranial nerves in the direction of peace,
and so I understand that in the back
of this nothing building on 18th Street
—I’ve found that door

ajar before, in daylight, when it shouldn’t be,
some forgotten bulb left burning in a fathomless shaft
of my uncharted nights—
the men I have outlived

await their turns, the fevered and wasted, whose mothers
and lovers scattered their ashes and gave away their clothes.
Twenty years and their names tumble into a numb well

—though in truth I have not forgotten one of you,
may I never forget one of you—these layers of men,
arrayed in their no-longer-breathing ranks.

Willie, I have not lived well in my grief for them;
I have lugged this weight from place to place
as though it were mine to account for,

and today I sit in your good chair, in the sixth decade
of my life, and if your back door is a threshold
of the kingdom of the lost, yours is a steady hand

on my shoulder. Go down into the still waters
of this chair and come up refreshed, ready to face the avenue.
Maybe I do believe we will not be left comfortless.

After everything comes tumbling down or you tear it down
and stumble in the shadow-valley trenches of the moon,
there’s a still a decent chance at—a barber shop,

salsa on the radio, the instruments of renewal wielded,
effortlessly, and, who’d have thought, for you.
Willie if he is Willie fusses much longer over my head

than my head merits, which allows me to be grateful
without qualification. Could I be a little satisfied?
There’s a man who loves me. Our dogs. Fifteen,

twenty more good years, if I’m a bit careful.
There’s what I haven’t written. It’s sunny out,
though cold. After I tip Willie

I’m going down to Jane Street, to a coffee shop I like,
and then I’m going to write this poem. Then