THE SPACIOUS FIRMAMENT

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)



the people walk, burning

back to whoever took one reddish
unfazed note
for all the foxglove angels

give us what we bargained for

chumps and ferrets

a piss hall during the week

kilts out toiling, no force

going out in the nursery till time
is a grown man

it's true, a great fullness
waited at the end of my cobbled context


Capitalist runoff

villages blossom on wasps


just come

be my dance professor

See it? A walking stick. I haven't in a year or two. One was
hanging along the river behind 100 Center, or closer to Main
Street I guess, on a slender branch near the cool water. I can't
write. I went for a stroll. He feels like a harbinger of some sort . . .

It's Saturday


and thanks to Suzanne for posting a poem of mine
here on this fine weekend . . .

*

I couldn't sleep much so got up with the waking dead
and drove to St. Joseph so I could get back to the beach,
Lake Michigan (I grew up a block from the big lake,
up north quite a ways), feel the sand, hear the water,
feel how it cools everything off. No wonder I'm spoiled
concerning heat, for life. I needed a windbreaker.
I liked that I needed a windbreaker . . .

*

Finished arranging a book of poems, making a manuscript,
for K. B. It's a second book. I was given 65 poems (long, mostly
narrative). The ms. is now composed of 47 poems.
There was some real wild action tossing pages back and forth,
into this pile, making 6 sections, realizing the flow works
better with 3 rather long sections. There's 83 pages of text
(not counting the pages, obviously, that constitute section
breaks). I think it's a very strong book, unique voice--sensual,
funny, a little edgy, emotional . . .

SILENCE


I'm having trouble saying what I mean. Sometimes I'd rather
let an image talk for me, but I'm not even sure what I mean by
that. Is there a problem with words? If I post a picture of a
wrought iron bench in an atmospheric fog will it burn the edges
of your mind a little bit? Maybe it's more difficult to invite
somebody IN . . . But to what? Where? Meaning and making.
I'd sure like it if the internet were more physical, that bench
something you had to approach using your legs, unclear at first--
what is it?--and then clearer, and clearer. But then what? I
want to make for you and with you, whoever you are.
Battleship Potemkin. I thought, how nice to have such a powerful
thing to say; how nice to feel so sure of yourself and what you
want to mean that you are passionate about propaganda,
which is what BP was. Yesterday I watched Woody Allen's
Mighty Aphrodite and it is hard to express how terrible it is,
how whatever romance I once had with Allen, ongoing since
Annie Hall (and, really, Stardust Memories, which I loved),
is finished. The nostalgia factor runneth under. Yes, Mira Sorvino
was colorful. But her performance only underscored how
empty the film was as a whole. Frankly, I could do without
Allen kissing anyone on screen ever again. The only other
bright spot was Jack Warden's screen presence as a present day
"Tiresias." I miss him, one of the great character actors . . .

I watched Battleship Potemkin, the details of which are posted here.

*

I almost want to say nothing. The film speaks for itself. At first it

feels wooden and mannered, even though you're aware it's over 80

years old. But as you settle down Potemkin feels almost like

a collage of still photographs one might view in a darkened museum

late some evening. It's haunting the way dreams are haunting.

Often the narrative thread of some piece of violence ends abruptly,

including the famous baby rolling down the stairway scene, and

the last image is lodged emphatically in our minds because of the truncated

thread of the thing/idea--the editing makes this movie (and the historical

moment it's associated with). I always associated the above still from

the movie with Munch's The Scream, and how surprising to experience

it in the film, how subtle and perverse it indeed is.

Morvern Callar

(place picture here . . . Oh, forget it)

Below is a synopsis of a dissonant, cacophonous film directed by

Lynne Ramsay. Or rather this is the description of the novel

the movie is based on. Samantha Morton does a good job in the

role of this seemingly autistic character, who seems neither

haunted nor particularly troubled by anything other than how

bored she is. It is sexy in an awful, remember-your-youthful-

kegger-days, sort of way. I winced frequently and mentally thanked

God I no longer have to pretend there's something mind-expanding

about getting blasted and standing with fifty other people in

crowded rooms while lights flash and music cracks through every

arthritic (now!) joint in my body. It's The Passenger in slacker

clothing. See it for the chaotic spring break in Spain scenes. The

next evening I watched The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. One

of the worst films I've seen in ages. Every cliche in the book. I'm done

with biographies. I remember Pollock being pretty ridiculous. (Push

that table over, dude!) But in the Sellers movie there is no enchantment

having to do with the art of acting or film. It's really bad. Really,

nobody is that unappealing. I loved the hunk playing Stanley Kubrick.

Uh huh. Casting!! (John Lithgow, where'd you get the awful

wig, buddy?)

I'm finding scenes from Children of Men coming back to me. And it's

as if the sound is turned off and these backlit frames dance across the

doomed bright world that is the back of my cranium. There's this one

odd scene involving a white tailed deer and a wreck of a building.

Perfect touch. And the nightmare taking place outside, through the

bus window while one of the films central protagonists is . . . oh, but

that would give it away . . .

Synopsis: It is off-season in a remote Highland sea port: 21-year-old

Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket,

wakes one morning to find her strange boyfriend has committed

suicide and is dead on their kitchen floor. Morvern's laconic reaction is

both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling...

Brutal, erotic, jarringly poetic and rich in a blood-dark humour, Morvern

Callar is a powerful debut novel from a new Scottish writer.

SYMPTOMS OF THE DRIFT

(a collaborative poem)


Must eat its weight in nectar everyday.
Passes through the mind like an idea of rain.
The idea of rain is not rain.
And this kills us, sparks in a stone closet.
Eats petals, in order to spite the pharmacist. Will not heed.

Because the tributaries are nettles. Because
there are tender vials that no one touched.
And planets: glass pours off the girls' faces.
The general neglect of faces. Architects
who ignore the bone structure. An arbitrary

lily in its place. That’s not to say
there aren't armatures collapsing. They're darkening.
The magnolia’s entrails repeat, as if
what's given body hungers for body. As if the idea of rain
on leaves is gloss and will not heed.

*

poem by ddl and louise mathias

THE WHOLE IS ADMIRABLY COMPOSED

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


a face looks up shore
blank and unconcerned

the lonely face sobs grieving

I bet you know
how he forgot

ill with water amid smooth boulders

now this envy

the challenge a dunce
shares around the real boy

you want the inconstant smile

a human tree again
that leads you to forget him

Mare Pacificum


Who will vouch for the jacarandas--
breath-sensitive, meteorites in transition, something seeing,
seething, beyond the derelict gait.

It's simple declarative, the body is a con-artist.

X's and O's. Transmutation
is an ethereal second waking, the stars pushing

out salt, here where she sits listing Oceans,
a crushed ring of bleeding flowers. Or is her tongue a gestation.

Ultraviolet, on the lam. Maybe she is what he told her,

nervous, The birds startled
in the wake of her licorice sweat.

After, he can't see her for the feathers,
sacrosanct, anything but sealed—

Oh but they're immune, he is; she's a cocktail of roots,
or the dusky smell that gathers on the ribcage of a shadow.

Shaft of summer down the skylight. (She counts
the muscles of his back.)

So maybe they can walk under this sky, plastered with feeling,
ankle-deep
in other people’s blossoms.

She's retroactively wet; he's diving up through her water.


***

This is a collaborative poem, written with Louise Mathias, in
which we took turns writing single lines. Not an Exquisite Corpse,
since nothing was ever unknown, hidden, during the process . . .

Also, several lines are indented (in the manner of Charles Wright,
say) but I've failed to figure out how to post in that manner
since I'd rather have my teeth drilled than wrestle with technical
problems . . .

LIVELONG DAYS


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


I sat at my desk, blasted

There was living in her young sister,
that precedence

and time
scrolled-up

everything living
in an answer

the whispering was cold

the occasion noticed a ghost
draft under the door

the painted stars were invisible
in the summer weeds

provisions constructed as a way of being

I won't tip
the book just as
the door is closing

I eat angels

something slight, different

inexact as longing
or myth

It seems to me Children of Men is the movie it should be. It's deeply
imagined, atmospheric, and puts us in a place so completely we accept
the director's vision. It's the most stylistic dystopia ever, and the beauty in
this movie is relentless. I was expecting something more disturbing, but
nothing comes close to what I felt watching The Pianist a few years back.
Still, this future feels closer at hand than is comfortable, and it's to Cuaron's
credit the film doesn't get expository; it relies on textures, the passing of
scenery, time, the mobs, the graffiti . . . that world, ours, too close at hand.
I kept thinking. Here we are in the woods, and birds are singing, as of
course they still would be. I've thought about this a lot . . .

COP AND SWEATER

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)



It's this thing
we beginners get in on

Once the face
no longer forgets

No homes on our backs

Sometimes in
long pauses

the elementary in mind
house so many of the others

the sick
stay away

a darkling few
wait with the buttons

a man could smash

into a
bird
person

an oasis of waiting to know

back here other moons
release happiness

the wine is a rain barrel!

Peace to the living we are to be more than

Glenngary Glen Ross and Full Metal Jacket

Psychology, culture, male aggression (in war, in business (same

thing?)), one film poetically visual, the other so crammed

with dead-on realism in the dialogue you're almosy dragged

out of the moment of suspended disbelief (huh?). One created totally

by the director, one energized and realized because of the skill

of the actors . . . two very good movies. If you enjoy rants and

tirades blistering the pavement with colorful language these

are your films; if not, these aren't . . .

Fit under here

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)



I remember a ship

Dammit, I meant all along
I should take that other child

presently care is a hat

a father looking out the window

time's just a driveway,
the parrot said, staring into
the thudding fog

and the future is a salesman
with his name tag flying in a void

Quite a few

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


a road spiked
with blue destinations

where a stranger deepens

silent now

so what to make of it
belonging under this plain wooden association

don't try to pass if off
as a canker

burn in the memory, a lever
for a new age of being

the day must start in poetry,
graves of sand,
the dead entirely attached, a small, other way of living



the wind?

the sound any creature has to spirit for a moment

and hope?

we perceive the animal

WHAT WAS ON THE DOCKET THIS WEEK?


Sleep, fog. The last good waking and vibrant days
I spent were out west, and ever since others I love
have been dangerously ill, and I have been battling
an odd, apparently undiagosable throat ailment that
had been humming along, accompanied by my
usual nervous brand of fatigue, and was diagnosed as
strep on Wednesday. The fact that congestion, now
that I'm taking antibiotics, has come on like something
tidal, means what exactly? Sleep is out of the
question. Staring at the ceiling while shifting uncomfortably
and wondering how I'll get more food (soup) seems to be
in order. All of this parallels my sister's drama,
much more worrisome than my pitiful, mometary
disablement. No long story, since maybe she doesn't want
the world to know every little detail, but an exploratory
surgery because of infection--abdominal pain and fever--
seemed to suggest all was on the mend, or that all had
miraculoulsy HEALED on its own in a matter of
18 hours or so. Next thing anyone knows, the blood
pressure starts dropping (this is mere hours after the
happy surgery), and the kidneys begin failing.
And the pain is stratospheric. Now no one has a clue.
I mean, serioiusly, as in, you'll think I'm being hyperbolic
but I'm not, Maybe we left a clamp inside the body.
That kind of cluelessness. "She's septic!" of course, but we
knew that going into surgery. The internists are gathering.
Meanwhile, J., cousin, has blown out a knee
at soccer and the rush to get attention from a good
orthopedic surgeon is on, and C and K's golden retreiver,
diagnosed with cancer, is going to heaven. Ah, life, the
bumpy, unnerving unpredictability of it. The steadfastness
of hope when you begin taking your two tablespoons of
flaxseed meal a day religiously, wanting just whatever
is there to want, not really a raging against the end so much
as a Yes, please, can I see more flowers and the ocean
a few more times, please. I rode a bicycle across the
northern tier of states twenty-some years ago, and maybe
it's time to canoe the Mississippi, out on the water with
only the world, or something. Something. That's longer
term. Hopefully M will be blinking and fine short term,
the mystery no longer a mystery . . .

Quinceanera

If it says "Sundance" on the Netflix sleeve

the independent of spirit should like the enclosed

film, I suppose. I'm having trouble with Indie

movies. Or, that's not it exactly. I'm having trouble

with the idea that each one is a great movie.

While Hollywood spins more and more cartoon

crap--hyperbolic dramas, TV remakes, goofy

kids' stuff like Spiderman and Pirates etc.,

the Indie side of things is covering what we

might call the realistic side of things. Realism.

Just that is enough for acclaim. I watched

Quinceanera last night, a small movie for sure.

The dialogue was in Spanish and English, all

the characters were realistic (and boring), and pains

seemed to be taken to not allow anyone

to take over the movie by appearing interesting.

A portrait of the culture--Hispanics in America

(Echo Park)--appeared to be enough to justify

scene after scene. Here is how the people

celebrate. Here is how they decorate their homes.

Here is how they talk to each other. Here

is what they dream about (American dream) . . .

The movie had a good heart, and by the end

I was won over. Everything works out

for the pregnant teenager, the gay young man,

but they suffered for their happiness. But the

film was forgettable, whimsical with light poetry,

very ordinary in the way it challenged conventional

ideas of morality (right down to the ridiculous cliche

of a preacher father). The unlikely bond that forms

between our two misfit heroes is a joyful thing to

watch develop--suffering working into the heart

a kind of purity we want to simply call love,

as opposed to the more obligatory kind of love

required simply by virtue of the nature of a relationship,

culturally mandated love . . . Perhaps it's unfair

to judge this little movie right after watching

Breaking the Waves. It's not that Quinceanera is

that bad either; it's simply that Breaking the Waves

is that good, truly great cinema. Yeah, it's disturbing,

and Q is not. The problem is all the Indie movies I've

been watching are starting to blur together. For

every Half Nelson there are four Garden States.

Oh Good Grief



Yeah, well, I'm not sure this says much
for the idea of poetry. How it's about language,
how it's about filling a vacuum miraculously
with abstractions that make the blood boil,
a heightening of reality . . . minor miracles on paper.
We always get the cornball idea of POET flung in
our faces, dorks in movies who believe they will
become famous poets, the poetry "reading" trotted
out in the media (sitcoms especially) as a cultural joke.
When one is in the grip of wrestling with some actual
construction, getting it down, feeling the burning spires
burst up through the page because some
juxtaposition--idea and image, sound rubbing
against sound--that shouldn't even make sense
creates a new intensity of consciousness . . .
At that moment who cares. Still, rinky dink
is rinky dink. I'm sure this poet/treasurer
is a nice lady and all, but still . . . What about the
poet as outlaw, or just the guy or gal who won't
accept the usual crap? Or the poet as sensualist,
a lover of all matter--flesh, flora, fauna . . .
Where does this kind of thing even come from
anyway? Walt and Emily were both marvelously
crazy, drunk with the intensity of it all,
certainly not the little doilies popular culture
wants to equate poets with these days . . .
The whole thing is simply too Kooser-ish for words.

Thanks to Anne (Land Mammal) for the link . . .

*

By the way, pick up a copy of Jason Bredle's new
book, Standing in Line for the Beast. It's funny and
fresh and the persona Bredle's cultivating is more
interesting than anything Collins or Kirby can muster
(not to equate David Kirby with Collins, I just like Bredle
better than both of them. At the same time I like Kirby
five times more than Collins. I just do okay!!).

CHARISMA





Judi Dench and Emily Watson
were both so convincing, so indelibly
the center of these films:

Notes to a Scandal
and Breaking the Waves

*

Note: Dentch? Oy. Who can I hire
as my official speller . . . ?

TREE OF SMOKE



Many people dig Denis Johnson's work; but some people
hate it. I'm not sure what that's about. Johnson's ego
looms large, I suppose, and I once heard someone surprise
me by saying, "Another book by Denis Johnson about
Denis Johnson." I don't agree. I guess you'd have to say,
then, "Another book by J. D. Salinger about J. D. Salinger,"
although you might have to wait a long time to say it.
I suck up Johnson's prose, mainline it, and I'm shaken
alive by it. True, there are tics in his style, little moves
I see over and over again (and they used to be all over the place
in American poetry in the 80s and early nineties, in fact
there are nice echoes in Franz Wright's work presently).
But I like Johnson's sheen, the ultra-hip voice, the tension
between his persona and story. There's a paradox in all
of it that really works, say, in a story such as "Beverly
Home." Sometimes, as in Already Dead, it doesn't work
that well. But when Johnson goes somewhere a little different,
away from the "land of the maniac drifter"we get something
sublime. Who has read his novella "Train
Dreams" for instance? I'm just happy because a new (long)
novel is on its way. It's called Tree of Smoke. Here's
a bit of info. I loved, by the way, The Stars at Noon,
the book nobody ever talks about . . .

Like, it was Phenomenological, or Something . . .

My shadow was so long in the remote parking at O'Hare

after one a.m. The wind slipped alongside pieces of metal

everywhere. I had all my things in my bags, tumbled

together, my precious objects--books, flip flops, a Marc Bolan

box set. Not a soul crossed my path, or a million seemed

to fly by overhead, squalling. When I'm alone like that,

warm in the middle of a field of cold metal, all I want to

do is step through into some dimension--divest me of all,

that which is smothering me, at any given moment,

the pieces of the culture I try to cling to, including the

things I own, the things that own me--and let me start listening

or making notes. I knew birds were sleeping like hidden

eggs around me, cars crashing in their dreams probably.

On the way home a drunk driver weaved down the

highway. I'd pass him. Then a few minutes later he'd speed

by me, straddling the highway divider lines, smacking the gravel

shoulder and veering back onto the pavement . . .

It's not part of what I want to relate whether I did anything

about it. I did or I didn't, and the blurred trees watched

off in the seemingly godless dark. Past Gary, Indiana, a deer

stretched across the road, leaping, like some creature out of

Winsor McCay's imagination. I was thoroughly haunted.

In bed finally near 5 am, the birds, and my ticking mind.

I had one of those things where you start to fall asleep but

you're too tired and so it seems like you are literally falling.

I spasmed a half foot off my bed. I'd listened to the T. Rex box set

on the way, bought in Belmont Shore. Tall beings with twenty

foot long legs ranged around my grist mill. They kept slipping

in and out of knowable dimensions themselves. I'd see them,

heads of feathers in the high sky dawning light, and then there

would be a splitting sound, like wood in pain, and they'd

disappear. I think they were cousins of the night herons

I'd seen in scattered trees along the Pacific Ocean. After failing

to sleep properly--in deep cold water instead of the shallow

stuff, the buzz of the world always on hand--I got up to

the catbird singing. Not quite a mockingbird, but making

a beautiful music nonetheless.

King of Marvin Gardens

"The gun was always with the water pistols," the character named David Stabler, played by Jack Nicholson, says near the end of the film . . .

*

The KOMG kept reminding me of Tom McGuane's novels, especially Panama . . .

CRAZY



I don't know. I find charm unexpectedly,
when I'm most fixedly hidden deep inside
myself, sleeping say, as was the case last
night when a mockingbird--THE mockingbird--
yammering sex maniac I suppose--woke me
at 1:30 in the morning. He was wildly doing
his arrangements, sets of three, every bird
on the planet's cover song, singing and singing
out in the pitch black of night, no cars about,
just the echoes and cries of this insane, beautiful
bird, who hasn't the sense to shut up when
it's most appropriate. Ahh, I was up for an hour,
smiling angrily I believe . . .

STUNG BY SOMETHING

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


my vice is comfort

a naïve story

and the current tragedy of priorities

the end of your pleasure
with girls—

they have so many bones—

couldn’t happen

her front door knew my name

tree-house laughter
and mist

ten visits to reason
and an eternity of silence

her floors are not enough

embroidered departure we have heard about strangers

the pleasure

WET CASEMENTS


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


The conception: see as he streams
the look of diet impressions

self overlaid by

Ghost cosmetics

The shoes point (drifting)
Like a surface pierced

opinions as snapshots

you crow and some persons
named in his wallet crumble

I want very much that anger

a bridge like a dance for the bridge I face
not in water but in the stone bridge I keep for myself

not others

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)



the child ignores the horse
afraid to refute it

in the unconscious a weasel
grants you
stark theories

a person eats the bodies

and the hour wanders

dead ridinghood caught in a book

I saw His theory though,
my song

and now We are changed

FAR AWAY



Okay, I've been away, not reading much really, mysteriously
away. Think of that thin, tall state out west. The beach
under a marine layer, feral cats in the underbrush,
black crowned night herons clucking in rookeries in
eucalyptus trees in the city, along the water. California
towhees, black necked stilts, lizards you see coming out of
nowhere, stationary, but suddenly doing what look like
little sets of push ups. A mockingbird I saw a hundred
times included in its symphony of sounds not only
jay cries, but the sound of a small dog barking, and
a car beeping its horn--all these delivered in sets of
threes. OTHER BIRDS: curlews and greater yellow
legs, terns (Forster's, least), western grebes, great
and snowy egrets. A green heron observed the world
from a dock. Strange jellyfish, named after the moon,
kept floating to the top of the ocean in a small cul de sac.
These beings, and nothing but ocean from a kayak,
sunburn, and too much food because L. suggested
Super Mex for a late lunch. How do you go back?
Or how stay in both places, the words blending into the
wood under the dreams of herons . . .

By the way, I'm posting a separate blog that will contain
details about my freelance poetry editing, ads about which
will begin appearing in P & Ws, and elsewhere. Speaking
of which--congratulations Matthew Guenette, whose book,
Sudden Anthem, just won the American Poetry Journal Book
Prize. Dream Horse Press will publish his manuscript.

DINOSAUR COUNTRY

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


Satin words, the strangest sins decline

Everyone happens tomorrow!

Now I'm an island self selected

I thought no one knew
about the pact between me and women:

"My dwelling place is your oven"

And then there was your wrist on my whispered Roman:

they'd done that
dinosaur
a moment of pleasure

you flash your shit
in the country
hold on

there are shadows
but you pay

you get even

BAD COMPANY


Nothing has been good since Google took over
this blog. I can't even type get "Remnant"
over Louise's poem. Type it however many ways
I might, there it is on the edit page,
there it ain't on the actual blog. I have to log
in twice as often as I used to, which isn't
that big of a deal, but I didn't want to switch
to begin with. It was obvious I was being strong-
armed into switching. I should have resisted.
Greed, or "taking care of our share holders,"
the acceptable way of admitting money means
everything now, is destroying the people
on earth. The vast majority are still starving
and the rest are arrogantly pushing everyone
else around and see nothing wrong with it.

The title for the poem finally worked. The key
was I had to use BOLD type. Great system Google!!

ELEVEN POUND CAT


Unlike my dog
I have the sense
to wipe my feet

on the rug.
So I guess I’m like my cat,
who buries her waste in her cat box.

Most of the time.

Clay Matthews


has a new chapbook, Western Reruns, released very recently
by End & Shelf books. It is available for FREE download.

Here's a link to the press: http://endandshelfbooks.blogspot.com/

poem by Franz Wright


Certain Tall Buildings


I know a little
about it: I know
if you contemplate suicide
long enough, it
begins to contemplate you--
oh, it has plans for you.
It calls to your attention

the windows of certain tall
buildings, wooded snowfields
in your memory where you might cunningly vanish
to remote, undiscoverably
sleep. Remember your mother
hanging the cat
in front of you when you were four?

Why not that? That
should fix her. Or deep drugs
glibly prescribed by psychiatrists weary
as you of your failure to change
into someone else--
you'll show them
change.

These thoughts, occurring once too often,
are no longer your own. No,
they think you.
The things is not to entertain them
in the first place, dear
life, friend.
Don't leave me here without you.


from Earlier Poems, Knopf, 2007

poem by Martha Rhodes


Pattern of Cracks

The plasterer, most assuredly,
hasn't been here (he'd leave his pail
or trowel behind), besides
I haven't left the room all day--
too strange outside:

a 1946 piper-yellow Piper Cub
about to land in my yard
ascends suddenly;
and the orchards cling to their dying leaves
sensing something below's more treacherous
than wind or cold . . .

Difficult to account for the ceiling,
this morning's zig-zagged pattern of cracks
now seamless, no thanks to me,
a step ladder's third rung higher
than I've ever chanced. Impossible
impossible, such fine, expertly
crafted work, faultless as it dries
above me, shrinks and cures.

*

NOTE: I Googled "'Martha Rhodes' Pattern of Cracks"
and came upon this found poem:

Poem

Old men haunt the crack
between my pillows. Days

I spend on the internet ... banjo imprinted
on a gene now notated,

unalterably,

in the pattern of my body.

*

I put it into lines and called it "Poem"

poem by K. A. McGowan


Sometimes We Get So Close


The night you buried
your poems
and married money,
a star deserted the sky
and landed in my
rum & coke.

True the moon
still smiles on
planned communities,
but can you buy the quiet
to build constellations.
Anyway, you choose your poison,

and the subdivision needs
a garden of the month.

Photograph: Being Sad

(an early self-portrait with freckles)

by Joe Bolton

I suppose I should begin by saying
I once made love to this woman,
Though the black and white image,
Faded a bit on the thick, warped paper,
Doesn't remember her body as my body

Remembers it. And, too, because
The camera was tilted slightly,
The angles of the room behind her—
That same bedroom, walled with books—
Fall strangely away, disturbing me.

She dons a white slip, paints her face
Even paler than usual, balances
The Nikon on the chair, and, crouching,
Brings the calculatedly disheveled
Empty bed almost into focus.

Then sets the timer and plunges
Into a grief that doesn't look feigned
Because it's not.—Just lying there,
Drawn so tightly into her own arms
As after making love which is not love.

*

I don't remember where I first heard of Bolton. I know I ordered
Days of Summer Gone from John Rollins Books, in 1992, and that
was that. Bolton was already dead so there wasn't much promise
of more work coming out. And yet 7 years later we got The Last
Nostalgia, edited by Donald Justice. For a long time I relished the
poems in Summer Gone but had nobody to share my feelings
with. "Joe who?" It's gotten a little better, a few people have
read this smoldering book. Are there flaws here? Sure. But Bolton
risks a lot going for big moments, a high lyricism, a sort of noirish
tough young sexy smoke in the atmosphere body of work. Anyway,
perhaps I'll post a few of his poems here. University of Arkansas
Press published The Last Nostalgia in 1999.

Quote 8



Of "The Night the Lightning Bugs Lit Last in the Field
Then Went on Their Way," (Liam) Rector writes:
"Meaning in motion passes through the triadic stanza
much as water passes through the green garden hose
on its way to the plant--rushing, touching such solids
as there are, inherently integral, nothing to do but
proceed. 'I can't go on; I'll go on,' said Mr. B. The beauty
of that stanzaic form got me to this poem and provided
the net for its fucking meaning."

from Best American Poetry, 1992.

Note: The poem Rector is referring to is about having
sex in a field at dusk, among other things natural and
transcendent.

THE COLDEST WINTER ON EARTH



My mother used to carry a brilliant symbol.
It tore into her ribs. She became the
Person standing beside the antlers,

The one in a boreal forest, angels touching
Her lips with the peppermint of grace.
A cracked block, or softer. But final.

Migraine that burns too much oil. My mother
Picks up a pen and the tulips in Michigan wilt
And the freezer full of dark chocolate sparks,

Refuses to be born again. Owls look
Through the backs of the heads of the family found
Frozen at the drive-in. Winter, flower.

Big ring of keys scattered inside the father's pocket.
Then my mother stopped talking, a feather killed
By its own violent nature. Fading,

Like light trapped inside milk.
The syncopation of ice and pine needles,
Like real Canadian wind, is so pure small crowds

Of leaves flatten and look. Sometimes sex
Or a blizzard helps with the pain. Glasses of wine
In the kitchen. A little cemetery behind the dollhouse.

*

The above poem appeared in POOL; "Hellgrammites," below, in
Hayden's Ferry Review. All are part of the new book (to be).

The poem "Turning Seventeen," which I posted on this blog
on August 3rd, 2006, will appear in Minnesota Review, thanks
to Poetry Ed. Jim Daniels . . .

*
*

And now for something south, and west (way west):

UNTITLED


Ill-suited and

notexception (you must have a

claim check . . .)

***

Essa iss the multitudinous goes from horse dark
to a piroutte in oil PAINTING

Grand rolls Her Eyes for love of American
sEED . . .

Flaunts by on silent casters.

Ahh, November, you sly bitch, I've been to the market
You who thinks it's just Get there and run
And shall wade into another twilight without . . .

***

Lack just never set right on her person

I remember her zzzippo

But there's no longer any bidding

They just make it elsewhere

(wonder
what on earth
it is)

The dream of a wick in a ballroom full of Manifest Dee

HELLGRAMMITE

(Anna filled a milk jug with beer
and we hid in the trees
finding deer runs to where the white sand glowed beneath the power lines.)


There is a fish with her own eggs
In her mouth. I often imagine
Stroking its throat. It is a woman.
Calcium of spurs in her thighs
When she sighs. Where the head shop used

To be—over a few of these hills,
Grease all over the plastic and
Gears, worn sprockets, the smell of
Gasoline clinging to the curtains,
A box of corn flakes resting beside

A tire pump on a utility spool—
Dragonflies swarm a pond choked with
Weeds. The oars make a plummeting sound
Because the pond has no floor but
Isn’t all that deep. I bought her some

Flip flops. I thought her kisses tasted
Like cherry-flavored rolling papers.
The store was now an apartment,
And the screen door banged shut for lack
Of hydraulics. It was pretty

Much what I used to call perfect.
The way Anna kept holding my feet
In her hands. Massive drums of menthol
Blazed in my dreams. Tooth, with a nerve
Dangling. These bolted hard into

Place on a kind of conveyor belt
For sticks of gum. I left that job. I took
A Civil service exam. The
Pencil bled all over the paper. I bought
Milk and popcorn and couldn’t wait to

Get home. I sat watching the buzzards.
Fur coats all around, balding, hobbled,
Mouths slick with tripe. I wanted her salt.
She said the pond was the opposite
Of heaven. It was a hundred degrees

Outside. The window ticked, a second hand.
I had hellgrammites, new fish hooks . . .
Then I watched the glass crack, like a thought,
like voltage. Residual torque.
Her voice like a chemical, a sur-

Reptitious kiss. She had cuts on both
Arms. Deer breathed in the orchard at dusk.
Anna’s fingers spread like a wheel sailing
Into an open garage. She’d sit
On the vinyl and the sweat in her

Skin made the room smell like burnt wood.
Afterwards, prostrate on the plastic,
She crossed her ankles. We were both sleepy.
The landscape was a lament with four
Borders. The glass hissed like an aspen. I

Cracked the gun barrel over my knee.
I could see at the other end what
Might be heaven. The light splashed in my
Face and I started. I thought of the
Hellgrammites as something keeping time.

They turned in the cup like a womb
Growing legs. A stopwatch for desire.
I liked how her underwear was always
Filthy. She lifted the shotgun.
There was a sound in the magazine

Like a death sentence lodging in
And then dissolving inside a blind
Prisoner’s throat. Anna placed the gun
In the middle of the sofa.
It floated there like the boat we

Used now on hot afternoons. Who
Should be working, I remember
She said once. I thought, Somebody
Else, I’m fishing. She tied her rod
To the bow with a shoelace and dove in.

The water was smooth and green, but what I
Remember is her body opening.
I remember the way the gas tank
Locked into place on the black frame
Of the motorcycle and how

Perfect that felt. It was like falling
Forever. It wasn’t the opposite
Of anything. Under the boat the
Water yawned like eternity. Her
Curls dragged circles on my bare skin.

Sometimes she moaned in my ear riding
On top, “I love this Harley.” Put the
Gun in the grass, I said about
A year later. She kept leaving butts
On the windowsills. The bike, the boat,

The starlings like doppelgangers
Screaming obscenities out of the
Eaves-troughs all August. She kicked her legs.
I could see the world in her eye. I
Could see the hurricane of all

Those body parts and a stream of oil
Trailing behind her. Minnows pushing
Through her teeth. Tines on a fork, the blond
Glass falling like rain. A vulture
Spreads its enormous wings. She sank.

Tomas

by Jonathan Pugh

You are right to be mad. I called you an awful name.
I’m very sorry.

It’s noise pollution. I’m talking about light to heavy
industry directly below my apartment—shoe
manufacture twenty-four hours a day. Presses. Stitching
machines? I don’t know.

It’s like I got overcooked in the brain, like food.

You know what a bivouac is? Miss, please just tell the
doctors, if I become completely incoherent, that it feels
as though something is suspended inside my head— like
one of those little mountaineering tents—and I’m being
forced against my will to go to sleep in this narrow space
and wake up and go to sleep again and communicate
through this material, this nylon material. Even when I
walk down the street—I try so hard—I feel like I’m
trapped in my little tent.

TONE POEMS


Interesting, the way tone works in writing,
how self righteousness as subject has to end up
sounding self righteous. For instance, I imagine a general
consensus the below poem wags its finger at
the unlocatable "You" the speaker is addressing.
That wasn't my intention (and yet, really, at some
level, it was exactly my intention), and if so maybe
it's just the idea that we can't read poems without using
our limited experience to provide the meaning . . .
I do think the "you" is forced into a sort of
emotional display mandated by our narrowly
moral public's idea about how pureness
has to do with certain ideas of blind devotion.
Never mind everyone's got a story to tell.

*

"So, just for some clarification. 'Artistic Experience'
is your poem and after you posted it you posted something
about it? And it is a tone poem? And you do or do not like
your own poem? I liked it, it was melancholy, and sort of
condescending to this "unlocatable you". I think sometimes
having an "unlocatable you" is what makes a poem cryptic,
which this one is." Samantha

*

Naw, tone poem is the title of the post. The statement,
kind of a self indictment, is the poet, me, thinking too hard
about the poem. The poem is of course, both things,
and it can mean whatever it wants, but like most
writers who write out of the surprise in the geniune
moment (I hope I'm one), often I'm flummoxed by the
implications of a poem and what I intended it to mean (or not
mean) and what it appears to mean (to me) (or not mean) . . .
My psychology rises to the bait in this poem, and then I find
myself surprised over the assumptions I leap to (or react to).
Actually, Sam, I like your statement and how you see things. . .
thanks for the clarity . . . DDL

ARTISTIC EXPERIENCE


(“Your trust in me is a . . . miscalculation,” Mark Halliday, Vegetable Wisdom)


It wasn't like you to moan, pining after death.
But then from what I could tell
she'd been living like a red scar in rooms full of alcohol
and too-dry heat. Now when the dog

bays at the moon it really is more than the tide that curls
like a relative watching beyond the tall shrubs
and lobster barns
waiting for your next poem about illness & spilling hair

and the little packages of breath that
come gift-wrapped in the foothills of love . . .
Go back to the beginning, do not pass go, collect what any
reasonable ass might call a pretty good ransom anyway . . .

I remember seeing you in the cemetery,
holding a waxy looking lily while a giant tear wobbled, shook,
and fell recklessly out of your eye
crashing into the crabgrass near her stone

which was within sight of the highway
with its speckled brown and green median strip
and diesel trucks and occasional lone hitchhiker.
Sometimes five minutes would pass

and the road remain empty. I thought it apt
that on the anniversary of her death you brought your
lover, & a hawk soared in the empty sky, shrieking.
It wasn't like something bad had happened.

a poem by Naoko Fujimoto

A Kapok-tree


A Kapok-tree falls in love with the moon.
It is speechless in the morning by the bedside but it sings,
craving for me to open the curtains
after sundown. When the Kapok-tree
looks out the window, a scythe cuts
the night sky and the moon appears. Until dawn,
the Kapok-tree reaches out those leaves
higher and higher as if kindergartners
raise their hands. They want to get attention.
But the moon burns for a moment in this February— Jupiter orbits
closer to the moon over the centuries. The moon wants to leave
with Jupiter to the endless universe. When I pick up
my phone and dial, the display glows a pale
light. As I wait for your voice, Jupiter flashes,
the moon reaches its arms down, the Kapok-tree
sighs, and the display loses
light. When the moon drops
its tears on the cobweb by the window, a sprout leaf
grows on the Kapok-tree. I have another
sleepless night.

*

This is a poem Naoko sent, a student of mine, and
it's a "draft" as they say, but I found it so striking right away
I just followed my impulse and posted it.

CRICKETS




I love movies like The Passenger. I love movies in which the land-
scape is a stage upon which intimations about what our lives mean
simply seem to hang in the un-didactic air of so much silence and
historical space (the film takes place in several places across the
ocean--Africa, Spain, Yugoslovia, etc). Space space space in this
film--white and rifted with pale sand, stucco buildings with
lots of open air inside, grasses, rocks, sunshine. Lots of ambient
sound--crickets, birds, crowds whooshing around, cars endlessly
cranking starters to get the engines going. For five minutes the
regular TV came back on--the eight billion words a minute
crush of talk, the blaring neon colors, the blatantly capitalistic
slant of everything. I excused myself and took a car ride, stopped
then at my office (no one anywhere), and felt the wonderful white
space just BEING there on the pages I've been working on. I love
when a silence from one piece of Art connects me to another, poetry
particularly (in this case). I was frankly not breathing for the last
ten minutes of this movie, I found its pacing and incidental,
voyeuristic manner that compelling. It's always great to see
Nicholson, so young here. Casting Schneider was an odd choice
though. I can't suggest what how I might have done it differently.
I keep thinking of Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces, and yet she
wouldn't have worked well here. It doesn't matter. When I left the
house and heard the night sounds my heart raced a
little. Oh, the world. We're all just black bugs on a white wall!

Ambien



What did I just--
did I just ask you? What
did I say? I said that yesterday?
I thought I dreamt--
it also seems like milk,
something about milk.
I must have broken it.
That's Nutella on the light switch?
I should never answer e-mails after midnight.
Those are definately raisons on the floor.
Never, never again.
I'll just take my pill and go right to sleep.
I'll wait until I'm already asleep to swallow it.
Wait, did I just take a pill?
You were here.
Did I just go into the other room?
Did you see me do that?


poem by Elaine Equi, from Ripple Effect

No Sleep


That's what happens. (I'm talking about the post
I just deleted.) Although reading Ashbery put
me in mind of tone in language, even when it's nonsense,
which is what A flirts with. But really, all yesterday
I was flighty, and the heat has really really got me
messed up. For one thing it won't rain. When the weather
is like this I don't want to hole up, I want it to blizzard
or storm--anything but humidity and oppressive heat.
You can't escape it. You sit inside and look outside,
watch the world bake, not a leaf moving. Oh mountains,
oh streams, oh rain. Not this cement and glass and
exhaust with a little bit of lawn here and there.

DRAFTS



I'm not sure about posting drafts, about composing
right there, for everyone to see. But at some level
once everyone has seen you at your worst a strengthening
takes place. I would deny this, for instance, right now, when
dinner at the grist mill confirmed the poem was overreaching,
trying too hard to connect dots (and wanting to add more
and more dots to make a problem). So I can come in
and do the minor surgery. I mean, magnetic north?
Please, spare me! Later something social perhaps, maybe
with an ovenbird or a ball of yarn . . .

*

Thanks for the bird reports!! I love those kinds of comments,
the indigo buntings and coots and crows acting strange.

FOR THE COUNTRY

(Happy Days Café, Wakarusa, Indiana)


We’re buzzing and adrenal
with contempt,

then laughing—

a cork pops out of the life raft.

The cook wears a pea coat.

Northern diet, everything a smothering,
while the flickering reel
of a window

helps give life texture: a bird
rides a small
wagon under a traffic light . . .

at home she has finally gotten up

she can taste the air coming in through the screens

*

It’s in the drink,
just north of Wakarusa,

sassafras in the joints,

the blur of test tubes where a tear might throb . . .

The usual contingencies and then this
tertiary

black light

the choreography of smoke and paraffin tendons,

her name in a cup,
the ash while he waits

and the vestigial foraging
in his lust—

the fork on his plate

the pine needles.

*

Elaborately complicated
by candlelight,

her fingertips stuck to my arm like sawdust.

Yes, though, I say, to the fresh
gleam on the wood and the yellow rope,

her drenched anxiety,

the orange she’s allowed to eat,

the time it takes
for the claw-footed tub to fill up.

*

“Hot Blooded” surges
on the radio

an unfortunate marriage of circumstance
and nostalgia

a nice haircut

a kiss on the cheek

crows on the phone lines like her little black shirts

*

The waitress’s blood ran down the bright front window

He’d given her a “photograph” of the ocean

She took it, held it close

A mayonnaise jar full of weeds and distant water

Quote 7



from Louise Gluck's 1993 Introduction to Best American Poetry
(collected now in her Proofs and Theories):


"Nevertheless, the absence of social function or social
usefulness sometimes combines in the poet with a desire to
serve, to do good: this absence and this pressure direct the
poet toward the didactic. The teacherly, the wise, the morally
sound, the noble: such utterance further soothes the poet's
fragile ego by seemingly aligning his or her voice with the
great voices, whose perceptions have been internalized
as truth. But to make vital art, the poet must forswear
this alliance, however desperately it is sought, since what it
produces is reiteration. Which is to say, not perception
but the sensation of perception's endurance. And what is
inevitably missing from such echoes is the sense of speech
issuing in the moment from a specific, identifiable voice;
what is missing is the sense of immediacy, volatility, what
gives such voices their paradoxical durability."