DAY BY DAY

The new online issue of Caffeine Destiny is here, with poems by
Brenda Hillman, James Galvin, Katie Ford, and yours truly.

Broken English is a so-so movie, lit from within by Parker
Posey . . .

I went out and caught Atonement--I didn't find it as incoherent
as many critics did. I thought the love story and the war stuff
folded together movingly, and the film is understated, despite the
over-the-top beach scene that seems to be too much for many
critics (I loved it). If anything, it needed to run longer (the entire
film). 4 1/2 stars. But then I returned home to discover
I won the Zone 3 poetry contest for the best poem, the
Rainmaker Awards in Poetry for 2008 (scroll down a bit), for
"Walking Catfish," a poem written in early August, a poem
from Automatic Thank-You Kisses (the book Four Way is
publishing). I can sure use the prize money ($500!) Fuel
oil prices are insane . . . The judge was poet Rane Arroyo.

MICHIGAN

(after the un-primary)

I don't know, where is the overwhelmed
freight of the general, a luminous lack of narrative,
very un-summerlike, oh, less Minneapolis, its
bright stasis of implacable strips along waterways . . .
The industrial, the abstraction of classes,
the absurd fact of having to drive a mini-bike
over the beach and it's lax bags of living grave markers.

I don't care if the family is a hot, sentimental,
breathing slab of cute pancakes. It's the
look like a dog--the lack of affect--you want when
the very last pollster craps in your yard.
A blizzard of neons and a political tongue in your soup bowl,
a forthcoming treatise from i-universe,
limping with footnotes. I'm not voting.

***
for J. P.

THE NOISE


I know because there was a face, a kind of
bell looking out of a cup of coffee. I couldn't
have simplified some other air, the laughter in the grass,
a carbon-monoxide questionnaire. There are too many birds,
and the mailboxes they shit upon feel mostly
illegitimate. There's a head with a beak
that's a man in the cancer of tabernacles. That's right.
And then they lance the amoeba. We might cry
because we want some angel to delight in the noise we make.
But your aura turns lovely, Antarctica green.
The stalled forehead of Adam Smith turns dry as vespers,
ice sheets falling in Panavision. Her pits smell
like steel inside a canteen. It's cell enthusiasm. Ride piggyback.

BLUE HORSES

ooooooooooo(after a painting by Franz Marc)

I flattened the letters in a row so I could see past
where the roses nodded over the signatures.
Whatever they did in the bedroom--a gray wall,
other salutations, lanterns and a thumb print--
I still remember the germination, who pushed me awake . . .
Now I'm afraid of the distance, actually, a word
drawn out along a string of gut, a long shiver
of green between a retro-fitted landscape
and the shells of what's gone flat line. Paper blows
across the street during such febrile hallucinations,
a carnation for your silence, but the love through
high windows is more than a little dirty and damp.
Kisses are where the wilderness flares out of the
cantilevered downspouts. It's not leafless; she's
wholly Tamarack, an armature swarmed by a lack of
adornment and the glittering hiss of her body,
and will.

***
for L.M.

IN AND OUT

poem by Arthur Vogelsang


There was an important interior wall down,
Much to dust and lost.
Clear the day poured normally through the windows.
The sky was not filled with the bland accident.
A neurotic woman spread her fingers on her legs.
Her normal way but ever remarkable,
And hinted I wrote letters like an old man,
Allegories that could give her headaches,
Non-representational scenes that could give us all headaches,
If studied as they demanded.
Now as horses have heart, and come again,
And are forgiven,
We leapt forward word by word,
I'd say very much together,
But the light slid through the trees like quick little apes,
A blue sky all day in winter.

***
from Twentieth Century Women

ON THE LIQUIDATION OF ZOOLOGY

poem by Alan Dugan

We put the mountains in the valleys,
the oceans in the deserts,
and paved the world flat.
The botanical trash was burned,
and life put in its place: zoos.
In this way we cleaned up
in honor of the flat out
continuity of the green glass sea
and walked on it like Christ
in horror of the bad old days
when any kind of life ran wild
and men did as they pleased.

***
from Poems Seven

Adolph Gottlieb, Blues, 1962

Auto-Lullaby

poem by Franz Wright

Think of a sheep
knitting a sweater;
think of your life
getting better and better.

Think of your cat
asleep in a tree;
think of that spot
where you once skinned your knee.

Think of a bird
that stands in your palm.
Try to remember
the Twenty-first Psalm.

Think of a big pink horse
galloping south;
think of a fly, and
close your mouth.

If you feel thirsty, then
drink from your cup.
The birds will keep singing
until they wake up.

***
from Walking to Martha's Vineyard

Head of J. M. II, painting by Frank Auerbach

St. Martin of Tours

THE TEACHING

poem by Christine Garren


We had a long rectangular yard behind the house.
At dusk the birds came, eating the berries.
while the olive-colored leaves blackened. You said the yard
had the lure of anything that's been let go,
with its vines tangled in the evergreens
and the milkweed pods' explosions. I was drawn to it
the way one is drawn
to the abandoned, the small wildernesses of it,
the blown-everywhere leaves, as it was true
here
its ruin was its beauty.

***
from The Piercing

UPDATE


New work in Barrow Street, la fovea, Denver Quarterly.

Work forthcoming in Field, Natural Bridge, Zone 3,
Green Mountains Review, Laurel Review,
Caffeine Destiny.

some color

Church as sailing ship (Ark) . . .

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)