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Friday, May 25th, 2012
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7:51 pm
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Marcel Duchamp
Salmon
Jorie Graham
I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty.,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,
and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river,
and a blue river traveling
in opposite directions.
They would not stop, resolution of will
and helplessness, as the eye
is helpless
when the image forms itself, upside-down, backward,
driving up into
the mind, and the world
unfastens itself
from the deep ocean of the given. . . Justice, aspen
leaves, mother attempting
suicide, the white night-flying moth
the ants dismantled bit by bit and carried in
right through the crack
in my wall. . . . How helpless
the still pool is,
upstream,
awaiting the gold blade
of their hurry. Once, indoors, a child,
I watched, at noon, through slatted wooden blinds,
a man and woman, naked, eyes closed,
climb onto each other,
on the terrace floor,
and ride--two gold currents
wrapping round and round each other, fastening,
unfastening. I hardly knew
what I saw. Whatever shadow there was in that world
it was the one each cast
onto the other,
the thin black seam
they seemed to be trying to work away
between them. I held my breath.
as far as I could tell, the work they did
with sweat and light
was good. I'd say
they traveled far in opposite
directions. What is the light
at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls,
the corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies,
illuminates, antique, freed from the body of
that air that carries it. What is it
for the space of time
where it is useless, merely
beautiful? When they were done, they made a distance
one from the other
and slept, outstretched,
on the warm tile
of the terrace floor,
smiling, faces pressed against the stone.
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| Thursday, May 24th, 2012
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7:47 pm
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Charlotte Caron
Certain People
Richard Jones
My father lives by the ocean
and drinks his morning coffee
in the full sun on his deck,
talking to anyone
who walks by on the beach.
And in the afternoons he works
part-time at the golf course--
sailing the fairways like sea captain
in a white golf cart.
My father must talk
to a hundred people a day,
yet we haven't spoken in weeks.
As I get older, we hardly speak at all.
It's as if he were a stranger
and we had never met.
I wonder, if I
were a tourist on the beach
or a golfer lost in woods
and met him now for the very first time,
what we'd say to each other,
how his hand would feel in mine
as we introduced ourselves,
and if, as is the case
with certain people, I'd feel,
when I looked him in the eye,
I'd known him all my life.
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| Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
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7:39 pm - For Silvi
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Smithe
To a Girl Writing Her Father's Death
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Sometimes the lake water writes and writes and gets
no answer. You tell me, It was just October.
That is good. His voice was full of love and laughter. Not
so good. Full of copper, jacks-of-diamonds, cubes
of honey, I could believe. But I did not know
your father. The moment when the cable snapped from
the boat has, however, its drama. Yet it is not
enough. Try to understand the need out here for
gestures, wind, raw sound. Was it a spasm
of sex in the motor, light shingling
his black hair as the boat spun
on its wide iris down? Were you standing?
I know this must be painful, standing
at the edge of your white page with someone
gone under. You were sixteen and he called you
Princess, though it is a cliche to be
called Princess. And to be sixteen. Yet
I have looked at you and you are not now
much older. You could wear tiaras,
your blond waves pure as the back
of the knee. Though you wear your carrot rouge
in clumsy circles, which makes me
love you. I have not lost a father
except in my dreams. But each one has left
my mouth open. Speak. Make holy
detail. Let the water bend over you like cold
eyeballs. Let in the scream and the lining of the scream
and the prismic figure eights of oil
mad on the wake--and forgive me
for asking. You have to think of the world
which gave and took your father.
The world which asks for him now.
There's no sense writing poems unless
you see the mob: We who gather for the red
pulse of every ambulance, we who crowd
lifeguards kissing the still blue lips of
children on the beach, and murmur who
and how, hungry for every morsel
of this life that is not ours, not really. Not
for long. But for the asking.
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| Thursday, May 17th, 2012
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8:52 pm
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Peter Bialobrzeski
In Praise of Han Shan
Charles Wright
Cold Mountain and Cold Mountain became the same thing in the mind,
The first last seen
slipping into a crevice in the second.
Only the poems remained,
scrawled on the rocks and trees,
Nothing’s undoing among the self-stung unfolding of things.
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| Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
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8:22 pm
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Eric White
Lace
Dean Young
While crickets tighten their solitary bolts
and morning's still dark-tousled,
the steady fan, steady turbine of summer mist,
each engine, planet, floating spark,
each person roams a room in my heart,
mother snaps beans into a bowl, father
blows smoke out through the screen door
and my wife lifts her arm to look at her arm,
the amethyst-and-platinum bracelet, in slats
of amber light, caught like a bee in sap.
After the afternoon hammock, beer bottles
loosening their labels with sweat, after
fireflies ignite like far city lights
that tease, devouring and devoured like stars
that fall, hampered with lust and weight,
I wait for her to come to bed, the water
in the pipes a kind of signal like locking
doors, turning the sheets and sleeping
like a shell smoothed in the waves' lathe
and the kiss cool with fatigue and mint.
Before the delicate downward yearning of snow,
the winter wools and wafts of cedar, naphtha
and dry winter heat, the opaque wrapping
done and undone, burning in the grate,
before the gray vaulted shape of each burned thing,
the bitter medicinal dust, old lace and its cobweb
dream breaking in my hand, each thread frays, knots
give and knot again like roots into stem,
the stem unraveling into flower, into flame,
into seed and wind, into dirt, into into into.
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| Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
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7:40 pm
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Tom and James Hancock
Fever 103
Sylvia Plath
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ---
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise ---
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.
Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ---
To Paradise.
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| Monday, May 14th, 2012
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3:02 pm
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Louis Lander Deacon
Getting There
Christopher Buckley
Time to give up
grieving my mother’s loss,
faulting my father and
his Neolithic moral certitude
about every detail
on the evening news,
his general absence
hanging like the gray
sheets on the line.
Never mind how
mismatched in the heart,
I should be grateful
they were there at all,
for that moment
that childhood stretched
like fog, the beach empty
and unmarked.
It comes to little now
who I forgive, mourn,
or thank. The dust shifts
and we are barely
suspended in the light.
I know this little thing:
there’s a boy somewhere
in a station where
the trains still run,
wearing scuffed brown shoes,
gray overcoat, and cap;
someone has neatly parted
and combed his hair.
He is waiting
to be taken by the hand
and told where we are going,
to hear we are headed home—
though I can see nothing
beyond the smoke
and midnight haze
at the far end
of the platform,
where I am not
even sure of the stars.
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| Thursday, May 10th, 2012
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8:28 pm
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Shusei Nagaoka
After Long Busyness
Robert Bly
I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.
Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars, no a trace of light!
Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?
Every day I do not spend in solitude was wasted.
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| Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
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8:26 pm
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Vera Pavlova
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| Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
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8:11 pm
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Noe Sendas
The Poem I Didn’t Write
Raymond Carver
Here is the poem I was going to write
earlier, but didn’t
because I heard you stirring.
I was thinking again
about that first morning in Zurich.
How we woke up before sunrise.
Disoriented for a minute. But going
out onto the balcony that looked down
over the river, and the old part of the city.
And simply standing there, speechless.
Nude. Watching the sky lighten.
So thrilled and happy. As if
we’d been put there
just at that moment.
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| Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
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2:28 pm
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Vaka Valo, from the series "Dream Diary"
Ray
Hayden Carruth
How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? - that's what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's
book and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
read in a long time," saying, "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.
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| Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
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2:10 pm
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Elizabeth Weinberg, from the series Of "Recklessness and Water"
Eistein's Alphabet
Mark Neely
Afternoon breeds
curtains; deviant evening
forages grain here
in January's
kaleidoscopic last
move. Night opens,
pulling quarry.
Rise stars!
Teach us
void's worn
xerography.
Your zealot.
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| Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
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1:56 pm
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Joe Webb
Hug O'War
Shel Silverstein
I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.
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| Monday, April 30th, 2012
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1:53 pm
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Scott Hove
The Stranger
Adrienne Rich
Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart
of the street to the river
walking the rivers of the avenues
feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt
watching the lights turn on in the towers
walking as I’ve walked before
like a man, like a woman, in the city
my visionary anger cleansing my sight
and the detailed perceptions of mercy
flowering from that anger
if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light
and hear them talking a dead language
if they ask me my identity
what can I say but
I am the androgyne
I am the living mind you fail to describe
in your dead language
the lost noun, the verb surviving
only in the infinitive
the letters of my name are written under the lids
of the newborn child
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| Thursday, April 26th, 2012
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7:02 pm
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Casey Weldon
A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
translated by Anthony Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
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| Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
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6:58 pm
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Greg "Craola" Simkins’
Parousia
George Oppen
Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen
And because it is irrevocable
It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal
And man may find his catastrophe,
His Millennium of obsession.
air moving,
a stone on a stone,
something balanced momentarily, in time might the lion
Lie down in the forest, less fierce
And solitary
Than the world, the walls
Of whose future may stand forever.
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| Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
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6:55 pm
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Robert Montgomery
The Skeleton's Defense of Carnality
Jack Foley
Truly I have lost weight, I have lost weight,
grown lean in love’s defense,
in love’s defense grown grave.
It was concupiscence that brought me to the state:
all bone and a bit of skin
to keep the bone within.
Flesh is no heavy burden for one possessed of little
and accustomed to its loss.
I lean to love, which leaves me lean, till lean turn into lack.
A wanton bone, I sing my song
and travel where the bone is blown
and extricate true love from lust
as any man of wisdom must.
Then wherefore should I rage
against this pilgrimage
from gravel unto gravel?
Circuitous I travel
from love to lack / and lack to lack,
from lean to lack
and back.
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| Monday, April 23rd, 2012
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6:53 pm
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JKB Fletcher
The New World
Amiri Baraka
The sun is folding, cars stall and rise
beyond the window. The workmen leave
the street to the bums and painters’ wives
pushing their babies home. Those who realize
how fitful and indecent consciousness is
stare solemnly out on the emptying street.
The mourners and soft singers. The liars,
and seekers after ridiculous righteousness. All
my doubles, and friends, whose mistakes cannot
be duplicated by machines, and this is all of our
arrogance. Being broke or broken, dribbling
at the eyes. Wasted lyricists, and men
who have seen their dreams come true, only seconds
after they knew those dreams to be horrible conceits
and plastic fantasies of gesture and extension,
shoulders, hair and tongues distributing misinformation
about the nature of understanding. No one is that simple
or priggish, to be alone out of spite and grown strong
in its practice, mystics in two-pants suits. Our style,
and discipline, controlling the method of knowledge.
Beatniks, like Bohemians, go calmly out of style. And boys
are dying in Mexico, who did not get the word.
The lateness of their fabrication: mark their holes
with filthy needles. The lust of the world. This will not
be news. The simple damning lust,
float flat magic in low changing
evenings. Shiver your hands
in dance. Empty all of me for
knowing, and will the danger
of identification,
Let me sit and go blind in my dreaming
and be that dream in purpose and device.
A fantasy of defeat, a strong strong man
older, but no wiser than the defect of love.
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| Sunday, April 22nd, 2012
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6:47 pm
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Travis Louie
First Light
David Wagoner
Movement in the hubris of woods, a
strutting partridge, his jerky
steps nodding forwards. And
I marvel at the brave
way he steps through stillness,
cautious
in the ways of wild ones. Perhaps
we too could attempt to push
aside our timidity, to test life’s flavour
its sweetness, and grow within
similar moments. There, a second
ruffed grouse, its mate. Together
they hurry into the journey of morning’s
awakening.
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| Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
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7:18 pm
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The Bay Bridge during last week's lightning storm.
Phil McGrew
Persimmons
Li-Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
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