LESS POEM, MORE FALL



I'm not finding anything in this stuff--short and cryptic
or more narrative and contrived. Time to kick the tires
and slam the doors.

Time to stop posting drafts.

The car coasts on the fumes and rolls along silently.

Anyway, time to watch the leaves change instead.

(They are, they are changing already)

I saw a cat eat a cricket today.

I saw a hot air balloon get stuck in a tree near Niles.

The cat ate the cricket and then licked its paws.

For Jim Zola: You really owe it to yourself to try to find a copy of Ruby for Grief.

The last pre-season football game is right now (for 2007).

"The game nobody wants to play."

The cat was black.

THE BOOK (A Book!)



I took pipe wrenches and a shoe horn. I used these things.
The result anyway is that Four Way Books is publishing my
fifth book, tentatively titled The White Horses. It includes
everything--or parts of everything--for instance, not the
whole kitchen sink, only the faucet, and that flat part
where you let the soap rest. Also Calendar poems, and my
"sonnets," and the syllabics poems. The contract will come directly
and I can ease out of that existential feeling life--including
art--is guided by nothing but bad decisions and rising gas
prices. But seriously, this is great. Four Way remains one
of the most highly visible and best distributed poetry presses
out there. Book parties in New York and readings there
are the rule. Don't ever ignore the various open readings
periods offered by presses out there either. They work.
Or can. Now I can push the Ashbery book. I can take a nap.
And then the moving of furniture and books. So long
grist mill.

I DIGRESS



Yes, my regressing blog. A good one. And yet
I find the last month (or less) since the stoppage
of poems, worthless as record, sort of
insane as indication of mood, done with half my will.
Don't you ever just want a couple weeks
back? So, really, what should Bonnie Jo
call her book of stories? Witch's Tit? I need
the creative juice back. Football is almost
upon us and I still want to wear flip flops.
When when when is it going to snow? In Maine,
in Michigan (especially in Marquette) the leaves are
changing. Anyway, I pruned back to
where the last poem ran and shined on the
piece of earth there where I last remember
it emerging and growing urgent and still. I read
Philip Roth's Everyman (old news) but
am reading the terrifying Plot Against America.
God, I miss Roth. Thank you to several people for
sending me links to Ashbery's strange new
MTV poetry project on college campuses . . .

CALENDAR SERIES I: GREEN TEA


there’s a judgment
she carries in her heart
like a damaged neck

the annulment

the dream and the soft leaves
and the stacking of hay

they pull the screen down before your eyes

birds fly in clouds
over nothing but ice

a teabag

or the smell of a leather saddle

when she was angry
he’d place an ice cube
against her jugular

she felt what was yielding inside her

trees blowing around
on the smallest island

She’d brought along
a green satchel
containing a Bible and an orange . . .

it’s good to die in the Midwest

such a French quality to the light

Monet in eternity

frosting all the hay rolls at dusk

the mild stink of her own body
after hours alone outside this strangest of cities

DIVING WITH THE WHALES

poem by Stella Radulescu


the pilot whale like the pilot light keeps our sea from
retracting

wide open the shell of time

I keep talking talking cut my way through the waves

the whale joins meooooooooowhite for teeth

crimson for remembrance


stars browsing through the lost pages

A Cicada

poem by Naoko Fujimoto


A cicada slept
six years under the side walk when my lips
lightly touch your—velvety but indecisive
soul. Since then, I hide
under the blanket with a taciturn
cellular phone and I vanish
into a shadow between the street
lamps. Yet, the cicada
hides its wings—
silver bubbles of rain—a lime
drop with ethereal
frost. It wants to fly into an insufficient,
glassy world that my lips
always taste. But I want to stay in the womb of the earth,
six more years of hiding wings.

CALENDAR SERIES I: WALKING CATFISH



something like
being smacked around

blue jolt as a splash

and the under-breath
muttering of large hearts

this is where
I want to stay

not the tongue rolls out another polished tooth

a sanctuary, no defense mechanisms
no irony

dull sense of “catharsis” firing through the sky of the human body

a pervasive inertia

let's try it all again--he is waiting to be born

the splinter

in each of the larger bones (twenty campfires at once)

they come out of the mud
and literally burp their way onto
land

you see it sometimes
when a dog puts his head on your thigh
and looks in your eyes

I want your bologna sandwich

I mean Evolution

the whispering about the other species that made it

(The sharp eye the wide eye in my head faithful)

the sun on the grass, so fine

the traveling from point A to point B

(a single-minded man in a fast ship)

The World

but then always the murk and the watery dark

the timeless longing

the wanting to go back

*

note: line 26, line 29, from Arthur Vogelsang,
Twentieth Century Women, p. 58.

CALENDAR SERIES I: THE COLUMBIA RIVER



the smell of the body

here at the river it disgusts us

or we can't talk past it

sweat and blood like so many simple fish . . .

the elephants go crazy in zoos
and believe me

we feel like them

the world is what you can see while breathing

I appreciate your not showering

words for how that feels

and then the letters start falling
out of the alphabet

CALENDAR SERIES I: MUSKEGON

"The whole of 'altruism' reveals itself as the prudence of private
man" Nietzsche


there's an ambulatory IQ

meditation in the garden

people holding drinks
down into swells on Lake Michigan

we slow to recreational heartbeat

and when the flames
ran downhill

the boats had water shining on their hulls

it was so much like shouting

all that noise
in the leaves
like souls leaving . . .

remember when
dad parked sideways in the garage

O there were blizzards of amber-colored
comfort that Christmas

and DTs all Easter

the fat guy there said drinking is like breeding dogs

Ku Klux Klan slogans
in the middle of group therapy

you know they get a knot in their boner, he said

all I know is it was always sunny
and you were supposed to lock the doors

if you even crossed that part of Seaway Drive

a dove with its eye locked on my eye

it could walk but couldn't fly

I'm always the one at night
who turns out the last light

stars spinning in the sky . . .

sadness and summer

trouble