7.30.16

Weekend words for you. I wrote this at a winery, and after taking a photo of my original, left it there. Not really poetry terrorism, since I wasn't forcing anyone to consume it, but still a brave act for me. Who knows, they probably recycled it.




7.23.16

Divested of dreaming

I wake in an air of omens.

Tired of carrying, I pour wine out

with my poems.

We forget to lock eyes and admit

we share the same burdens.

My comings and goings don’t match

the depth of my urging;

Coated with words that are liquid

in what they furnish.

Waking each day I hope for a hope

that can grow,

Stained cups on the counter are

all my work shows.

7.29.16

I feel like a real blogger--I got Russian spam! At first I wasn't writing (here or there, or anywhere, Sam-I-Am) because of all the violence and terrible news, which just keeps spooling on and on. So the grief made a few things, and then I just got numb to it and stopped at all. Then I got hurt (sports injury) and started feeling particularly useless and unhelpful, which never gets anywhere.

I liked these poems by Catie Rosemurgy, at first because I related to the sometimes-consuming quality of my dreams. They eat up a huge amount of head-space throughout the day, depending on what happens. When I was still semi-serious about self-publishing, I had a whole segment in my manuscript about things written from dreams. They are so real that often I forget which mundane action I did in real life and which I didn't. Another thing I came to like about them is the death of self. The more I spend thinking about the self and purpose, the less I am sure any of them are really alive, so I like to see how her speakers kill themselves or die off, time after time.




America Talks to me Like a Mother

Don’t worry. One kills in dreams
but wakes having not killed.

Having not killed is part of waking. Some mornings, though,
you lay there pinned under layers of light, fear,

and woolen blankets.
You know what’s right and what’s wrong,
what you don’t know is what happened
and if you were actually there.

That’s why dreams of digging a deep hole with a stolen shovel
are so confusing. That’s why you expect to jerk awake
when you stand in a pile of dry brush
holding a lit match in your hand.

The best thing to do, always,
is get up and walk down the stairs.
Don’t leave.
Not yet.

Wait awhile in the kitchen, it doesn’t matter whose kitchen,
and let the house absorb the blame.
That’s what a house is for.

You aren’t screaming,
you’re insisting
because you’re always wrong,
even while you sit on the ground before daybreak waiting
for enough light to gather sticks.
You don’t know yet what a stick is.
You can’t be expected to remember anything
once you’ve seen the sun rise.

All day long, you walk back and forth through the field,
standing guard over what didn’t happen
to keep it from mixing with what did.
You didn’t shoot the gun, you just listened well
when people talked about how to do it.
You didn’t walk unscathed through the fire,
you walked unscathed over it.
You happened to find a narrow bridge.

You wouldn’t purposely hurt anyone,
but keep describing all the ways that you would.
List all the things that never happened,
and see if you can suck clean the edges of what did.

Winter in Gold River

Pretty girl. The weather has knocked her down again

and given her to the lake to wear as a skin.


Why am I always being the weather?
There were days in the winter
when her smile was so lovely I felt
the breathing of my own goodness,

though it remained fetal and separate.
I was a scavenger who survives


with a sling and stones, but whose god
nonetheless invents the first small bright bird.
And it was like flight to bring food to her lips


with a skeletal hand. But now she will always
be naked and sad. She will be what happens


to lake water that is loved and is also
shallow enough. The thickening, the slowing,
the black blood of it, the chest opened
to reveal the inevitable heart attack.


God, the silence of the chamber
we watch from. What happens to water
that isn’t loved? It undergoes processes.


It freezes beside traffic.
But the reaching out to all sides at once,
the wet closing of what was open?
That is a beautiful woman.


So of course I stand and stare, never able
to pinpoint the exact moment I killed her.

On the same themes, but too long to reproduce, is her poem Miss Peach: The College Years which you should please also read. 

7.9.16

Weekend words for you.

7-7-16

When the living speak

they usually begin at the beginning;

of a start in fire and water,

one that would char the bones

and set them in the mud,

and that is where the living begin

when the speak about the way things are.

From the water things grow,

and in the fire they are ruined

until we are enough

that we stop feeling the flames

as pain,

and the growth as our charge.

Our will is large and diffuse,

and longer tied to the price of grain.

So now when the fire is upon us

the living reach back into a mind

that is not a mind, and bare their teeth.

The dead can do no such thing.

7.8.16

This came in my email for the 4th of July. What seemed timely then seems even more so now.




America




by Claude Mckay (1921)

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, 

And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, 

Stealing my breath of life, I will confess 

I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. 

Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, 

Giving me strength erect against her hate, 

Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. 

Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, 

I stand within her walls with not a shred 

Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. 

Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, 

And see her might and granite wonders there, 

Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, 

Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

7.6.16

Mere anarchy from Yeats. My kingdom for some conviction.







The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

by Philip Levine:

Ashes

Far off, from the burned fields

of cotton, smoke rises and scatters

on the last winds of afternoon. 

The workers have come in hours ago,

and nothing stirs.The old bus creaked

by full of faces wide-eyed with hunger.

I sat wondering how long the earth 

would let the same children die day

after day, let the same women curse

their precious hours, the same men bow

to earn our scraps. I only asked. 

And now the answer batters the sky: 

with fire there is smoke, and after, ashes.  

You can howl your name into the wind

and it will blow you into dust, you

can pledge your single life, the earth

will eat it all, the way you eat

an apple, meat skin, core, seeds.

Soon the darkness will fall on all

the tired bodies of those who have 

torn our living from the silent earth,

and they can sleep and dream of sleep

without end, but before first light

bloodies the sky opening in the east

they will have risen one by one

and dressed in clothes still hot

and damp. Before I waken they are

already bruised by the first hours

of the new sun. The same men

who were never boys, the same women

their faces gone gray with anger,

and the children who will say nothing. 

Do you want the earth to be heaven? 

Then pray, go down on your knees

as though a king stood before you, 

and pray to become all you'll

never be, a drop of sea water, 

a small hurtling flame across the sky, 

a fine flake of dust that moves

at evening like smoke at great height

above the earth and sees it all. 

7.1.16

Weekend words for your long holiday weekend.

6-22-16

I write because I do not fight.

Surrounded by sound, we are spoken at

From every flat surface.

Their supplications shouted--

‘What you don’t know may harm you!’--

Their eyes drill, while the folds of their faces

Splash plosive platitudes,

Abhorring silence that comes within the vacuum.

Paper is crushed.

With combustions that make chads,

Braille erupts,

(If we can close our eyes enough to see it)

Words sprout amidst the paper’s teeth.

How muddy the pen, precarious the profession;

Weak but chivalric,

I go to work wearing armor padded with headlines,

My gambeson quilted with unread inches.

I could be the neck that steers the talking heads,

Sculpt them with my stylus,

Intoxicated with ink’s anonymous awesome power.

What else is there? Stories told by mouth or stories written down

In varying degrees of poison.

The truth makes you feel ill,

The sweet lies maybe make you feel better,

No option for “not to feel”: the yawning blank,

The unclassified, ready to consume.

6.29.16

I'm feeling rather depressed and cynical as of late, and was looking for some other expressions of disillusionment and disappointment. I looked for this, and as when you are seeking something you find it everywhere I was not disappointed in that respect. Enter Philip Larkin. Borrowing the words of poetryfoundation.org, "McClatchy notes Larkin wrote "in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires." 

MCMXIV

Phillip Larkin



Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

This one came to me via email, the part that hits me hardest is "Big ideas get me nowhere". I also like how the end dangles sans answers. 

Breaking Spring

Matt Heart

seems like a good way to say
I spent all last week feeling helpless
and talking about it in terms of not being

Why can’t compassion change our lives
even half so completely as a suicide bomber,
or half so immediately as a natural disaster

Big ideas get me nowhere, so
the fact that breaking spring feels better
than cracking up is at least a start

toward a walk through Washington Park,
its trees in pink blossom, its white-yellow-purple
Tomorrow I will talk about Frankenstein

in bed and then I will talk about it with people
who are sleeping I will say that it’s a book
about artistic responsibility I will

say it’s alive It’s alive And some number
of eyes will stare back at me without believing
any of it matters, or without believing

it matters for them And what can I say
to convince them I have only my love
to recommend it beyond what it already is

My suspect credibility upon the rockets
of birds, the soft parts of people, the oceans’
inevitable, cyclical weeping Who has time
for poetry has more time than they deserve

If anyone has suggestions for searching for poetry based on topic that doesn't involve the troves of amateur post-your-own sites out there, I'd love to know it. Often I have a hankering for something to echo a specific emotion but have no idea how to find it.