I'm game

80 poems
80 days.
Bring it on, bitches

(january 1stish)

(have i ever told anyone that about half of my poems start as haikus and are quickly revised?)

with a clank and a
hiss the house comes alive and
breathes in. outside, snow.

Dream Song 29, John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
So heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
The little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
Like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
Would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
With open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
Thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
End anyone and hacks her body up
And hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

How to disappear (a primer)

Untitled

be still now,
this bare hour of tar centipedes
in waiting boots
take the morning breath
that hangs like chalk dust in december air.
the shudder of night along a cheekbone,
makes familiar turn and cough.
absence is as tasteless as space
wrought as hunger in china stomachs.
who would be whole if filled with glass?
don't worry, you've already lost
ten and twenty and a hundred times.

"Not Everyone Can See the Truth, But He Can Be It" Charles Wright

Sunday. It's always Sunday.
Rifts and seams of dark birds
Right-flank and wheel across a darker December sky
Southwest and so wide.

Winter solstice again,
burnt end of a narrow road.
The lawn chairs gutter and glare in their white solitude.

How short the days are.

How imperceptibly we become ourself--
like solstice-diminishing light
Devolving to one appointed spot,
We substitute and redress
In predetermined degrees we've neither a heart nor hand in.

How slowly the streetlights come on.
How shrill the birds are.

Take off your traveling clothes and
lay down your luggage,
Pilgrim, shed your nakedness.
Only the fire is absorbed by the Holy of Holies.
Let it shine.

Because

Because I am unhappy with (my) writing
Because I am overwhelmed by ______
Because I know many of my readers are lovahs (ipso facto or by choice)
I will now present a few block quotations from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments or, as it could be known, True Facts About Life

Agony/Anxiety

2. The psychotic lives in the terror of breakdown (against which the various psychoses are merely defenses). But "the clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown which has already been experienced (primitive agony) ... and there are moments when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, fear of which is wrecking his life, has already occurred." Similarly, it seems, for the lover's anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first "ravished." Someone would have to be able to tell me: "Don't be anxious anymore--you've already lost him/her."

To Be Ascetic

Whether he feels guilty with regard to the loved being, or whether he seeks to impress that being by representing his unhappiness, the amorous subject outlines an ascetic behavior of self-punishment.


1. Since I am guilty of this, of that (I have --I assign myself--a thousand reasons for being so), I shall punish myself, I shall chasten by body: cut my hair very short, conceal my eyes behind dark glasses (a way of taking the veil), devote myself to the study of some serious and abstract branch of learning. I shall get up early and work while it is still dark outside, like a monk. I shall be very patient, a little sad, in a word, worthy, as suits a man of resentment. I shall (hysterically) signify my mourning (the mourning which I assign myself) in my dress, my haircut, the regularity of my habits. This will be a gentle retreat; just that slight degree of retreat necessary to proper functioning of a discrete pathos

Absence

4. I waken out of this forgetfulness very quickly. In great haste, I reconstitute a memory, a confusion. A (classic) word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence: to sigh: "to sigh for the bodily presence": the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace, in that it melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels.

(But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?)

Talking

1. Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words...

The Unknowable

1. I am caught in this contradiction: on ethe one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumpantly assert my knowledge to the other (I know you--I'm the only one who really knows you!); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

(Of everyone I had know, X was certainly the most impenetrable. This was because you never know anything about his desire: isn't knowing someone precisely that--knowing his desire? I knew everything, immediately, about Y's desires, hence Y himself was obvious to me, and I was inclined to love him no longer in a state of terro but indulgently, the way a mother loves her child.)

Reversal: "I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

...

3. Or again, instead of trying to define the other ("What is he?"), I turn to myself: "What do I want, wanting to know you?" What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not as a person? And if I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours? This would happen: my other would be defined solely by the suffering or the pleasure he affords me.

HEY MISS RICH. I LIKE YOU SO MUCH.

3.
We can look at each other through both our lifetimes
like those two figures in the sticklike boat
flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;
even our intimacies are rigged with terror.
Quantify suffering? my guilt at least is open,
I stand convinced by all my convictions--
you, too. We shrink from touching
our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves
and each other, we're scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love,
hose it on a city, on a world,
it wields and guides its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, rats, viruses--
like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.

Adrienne Rich, from Hunger

Y'all should listen to this new radiohead album.

Seriously.

To the bridge of love,
old stone between tall cliffs
-- eternal meeting place, red evening--,
I come with my heart.
--My beloved is only water,
that always passes away, and does not deceive,
that always passes away, and does not change,
that always passes away, and does not end.
-- Juan Ramon Jimenez (trans. James Wright)

Raven, George Seferis

Years like wings. What does the motionless raven remember?
What do the dead close to the roots of trees remember?
Your hands had the color of an apple ready to fall,
and that voice which always returns, that low voice.

Those who travel watch the sail and the stars
they hear the wind they hear the other sea beyond the wind
near them like a closed shell, they don't hear
anything else, don't look among the cypress shadows
for a lost face, a coin, don't ask
seeing a raven on a dry branch what it remembers.
It remains motionless just over my hours
like the soul of an eyeless statue;
there's a whole crowd gathered in that bird
thousands of people forgotten, wrinkles obliterated
broken embraces and uncompleted laughter,
arrested works, silent stations
a deep sleep of golden spangles.
It remains motionless. It gazes at my hours. What does it remember?
There are many wounds inside those invisible people within it
suspended passions waiting for the Second Coming
humble desires cleaving to the ground
children slaughtered and women exhausted at daybreak.
Does it weigh the dry branch down? Does it weigh down
the roots of the yellow tree, the shoulder
of other men, strange figures
sunk in the ground, not daring to touch even a drop of water?
Does it weigh down anywhere?
Your hands had a weight like hands in water
in the sea caves, a light careless weight
pushing the sea away to the horizon to the islands
with that movement we make sometimes when we dismiss an ugly thought.
The plain is heavy after the rain; what does the black
static flame against the gray sky remember
wedged between man and the memory of man
between the wound and the hand that inflicted the wound a black lance,
the plain darkened drinking the rain, the wind dropped
my own breath's not enough, who will move it?
Within memory, a gulf--a startled breast
between the shadows struggling to become man and woman again
stagnant life between sleep and death.

Your hands always moved towards the sea's slumber
caressing the dream that gently ascended the golden spiderweb
bearing in to the sun the host of constellations
the closed eyelids the closed wings...

Carrion Comfort, Gerard Manley Hopkins

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

in summer after a flood we went hiking

if ever we passed that tree again,
with branches like hanging spines,
i would not lose the stink of the fish
the maggots ate, nor the sight of their
supine white bellies, how the dried scales
caught rainbows in each tiny cell.
how some of their eyes were open,
some were closed, but some were open
and they watched in glassed stillness
our boots, our hands clasping our face,
the flies surrounding lean silver crescents.

Dreams of an English Major

Last night I had a dream that we were supposed to read the first two acts of Macbeth for my next class. But I didn't have the book and didn't do it. I was called on and my professor asked me what was on the wall in the second act. I said, "I spent so much time reading the first act, I just didn't get to the second act." My professor nodded, knowing I hadn't done any of the reading, but I felt some what justified.

In my dream, the first act of Macbeth was only a page long and when I found out, I was so embarrassed that I ran out of the classroom crying. What worse was that at that moment I knew the answer about what was on the wall--a clock was on the wall.

I ran out of the classroom and this girl I taught Latin with was there and she tried to give me a smoothie and I said, "No fuck you" and she said, "You are the meanest person in the world." Then she began to scream and holler until Professor Dugan came out of the classroom and told us to quiet down.

What I find so amazing about this dream is that I remembered from my mediocre 10th grade English class that in Act 2 Scene 1 of Macbeth that a clock is mentioned! How's that for memory!

Potential idea for a short story.

Having not a single plot-driven bone in my body, I will come up with ideas here.

General setting: The car ride to drop kittens into the river.

Possible character/scenarios:
1. Two characters: A younger child whose mother fell down the stairs and died and is now being raised by an older detached sibling and living in the same house as where the parent died. Older sibling is married, but the marriage is strained by finances and the fact that the couple cannot conceive.
---- Ultimately, older sibling wants to kill the kittens (silent understood subtext: how come that cat can have babies and I cain't?) and younger sibling is too naive to understand that his/her caretaker wants to kill the animals and goes along for the ride.

2. Two characters: Younger child and mother. Mother is single and destitute.
---- Mother wants to kill the kittens (silent understood subtext: I can't feed another mouth! I'm poor! Who would bring another life into this godforsaken world!) and has no choice but to bring the child with her.

3. One character: Poor woman who can't have no babies. Probably most like older sibling in scenario 1, but without the tension of having someone to look after.
---- Wants to kill the kittens (silent understood subtext: I can't have no babies, so why can the cat?) and has a silent car ride with kittens in a sack next to her.


I mostly like the younger main character (possibly narrator) for the image of seeing the brick in the sack and having a moment of realization. I think the first idea might be too complex for short fiction (when I think up stories I tend to think of too much back story). I think the mother/child relationship is much simpler though, so better for a short story. However, I also enjoy a good story where a person is interacting with not much other than his or herself. BUT, I do like the familial tension in the first scenario.

And this is why my short stories never make it out of my brain.

Read this. It's a really interesting opinion piece about Charles Simic being named the new poet laureate.

For Corrie

When he put the revolver to the heads of the neighbor's dogs
he didn't know you were only a mile away,
curled in pink and white pajamas,
down the roads of Botetourt that roll like tongues
in soft, wet, unsuspecting mouths.
He didn't think anyone would hear the shots
the high yelps as they tried to get away.
He didn't know the ghost dogs visited your windows
that night and many nights thereafter,
eyes whiter than the moon in full,
snouts wrinkle back, expose foaming teeth,
bristled hair standing as tall as August grass,
still barking, even though he went to silence them,
still barking, even though they were only your mind.

my summer of cherries

i.
everything is
equal sign
something else.

terse statements
sound like a closet
falling out of itself
everything from
baseball bats
to winter coats
sit at your feet.

ii.
a frog along a tall reeded creek curve:
his throat strings vibrate
low inside a hollow neck
the sound of an untuned guitar
a long breathy noise,
moving away from my feet.

if he swallows enough fireflies
he would glow:
be impossible to hide.

iii.
this season
twelve dollars for a pound of cherries
sounds like a bargain
and shoes grow stale
as feet harden for fall
on soft asphalt.
cherry pits pile up in the pail
still red with the tendrils of flesh
that teeth couldn't gnaw away.
far from summer's shadows and
the long necked swans of narrative poetry
the gardener still tends his glass house
plants: yellow when
everything was green.

You move formless in and out of the stripes of light through closed blinds. You are not what you seem, staggering to our cold treblinka bed. Your arms bloat and disappear. Where did you go, my croaky sleep voice calls out. From here you have no eyes. From here I see you in another life-- a dripping grin over a prostrate prisoner, looking to the camera a gentle nod, holding in your palm the teeth you so precisely extracted. The black hooded figure in the doorway who comes for you with electrical wires, a screw driver, a pair of pliers Who comes who comes who comes for the venom smile you didn't even know you had in a life you did know, passing through the space between the dark and the light. Losing yourself, you are enormous, You are nothing. You breathe up my spine. I don't move. I wouldn't dare.

Excerpt from The Cow Caught in Ice, by Ted Genoways

iii. Tideline Debris

She watches for him by the window's leaded glass.
It ripples like tideline debris ringing edges
of summer ponds. As a girl, she crawled through tallgrass,

squeezing pollywogs till they shed their tails. Her ledges
hold vinegar and dillspice while she cooks, but nights
she lowers each jar till a circle forms around

the old Franklin stove. L.C. feeds a split rail-tie,
scavenged from the switchyard, into its grated mouth.
She rises first, her children still tucked in the loft,

and steps softly, now lifting each cold jar to rest
around the skillet. This is the time she covets:
when the stove is cool enough to touch, each hand pressed

hard against its belly to feel inside what's left
and almost breathing. The last four children drowned
in their beds before the pastor could hold their heads

under. Jaundice, doctor said, their stomachs so round
they were ready to pop. She can't live for the dead;
seven live mouths hang open. She slips back to bed--

two minutes till the coffee boils--but keeps one eye
on that orange egg purling across the frozen pane,
like watching her dad light stars in the nighttime sky

making constellations of sheep pens, against rain
and wolves and the darkness that never died in years
after he did. Go on sun, get up, sweeten snow

into warm rivers. It's all of those things she fears:
glass is fire and sand, water expands in the cold.
Seconds now, hold your breath--the kettle's lips explode.

Because talking about writing camp seems more apropos here

The last two nights of camp, we have a mandatory student reading, which is actually lots of fun and not as boring as I remember it. Maybe it's less boring because of CLICHE BINGO (otherwise called, Cube Poetry), in which we make boards with squares like "Blood" or "beating heart" or "I caught my breath" and have to listen very intently to make sure we get a bingo.

Some things I did this session:
-- Forced 13-14 year olds to read Lyn Hejinian (one girl was really into it and actually wrote this really cool "My Life" esque prose piece)
-- Went to Waffle House and wrote haikus
-- Convinced a girl she could write poems even though she always thought she could only write stories
-- Got kids to 'fill in the blanks' in Sappho fragments
-- Didn't eat any meat
-- Went for many drives in a 12 passenger van

I am really happy with how this session went. In about one week, there was marked improvement in over half of my class. They made fun of me. I offered to read a poem in class. I started by saying, "Okay this isn't the best" and they all yelled "NO DISCLAIMERS." Then I read and they offered me really insightful criticism and I thought, "hey. You guys are really good at this." They also said, "Kate when you don't like your poems you read them all low and sad like. You should read them like you mean it."

They are sage sage sage children.

(unfinished (perhaps permanently unfinished) Re Vision of that moving poem)

you take them back:

i.
the color of your lips,
your chest,
the topography
of our common sweat
the smell coiled around my neck
you hold your arms there.
Curved as a jaw bone--
pull me close to your body.
Boxes of photographs prop
the door, keep an eye open
unable to sleep in this space.
you beneath the window
the new bed we pushed that night.

on moving (a love poem!)

that night, we pushed the new bed
beneath the window.
you unable to sleep kept an eye
at the door, propped open
with boxes of photographs,
pull me close to your body,
curved as a jaw bone.

when you hold your arms there
coiled around my neck
they smell of our common sweat,
remind me of the topography
of your chest, the color of your lips.
when you take them back, I just roll away.

The Seals are Dying

From the sea
to keep the land
they line them
heavy as sandbags
black as oil spills
carcasses
on the shore.

The agency sait
it would kill

Infect, forget
they claw
scratch
at another throat.

Waves green
just beneath their eyes.
Their barks:
monstrous sounds.

Important question: who is the Jenny McKean Moore writer in residence next year. I know Loren told me the guy's name but I don't remember it.

In other news: poetry poetry poetry no air conditioning charlottesville tofu poetry poetry poetry.

Quotations that I thought would inspire me, but instead they didn't

Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.
-- Sylvia Plath.

Count it ten thousand trees ago,
five houses and ten thousand trees,
since the swallows exploded from Bowman Tower
over the place where the hermit sang,
while I held a fantail of squirming roots
that kissed the palm of my dirty hand,
as if in reply to a bird.
-- Stanley Kunitz

But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again
-- George Seferis

Look for me another day
I feel that I could change.
I feel that I could change.
-- The Innocence Mission

Today my boss said to me, "Kate, you're one of those people who is so smart that you can't make friends."

To think I've been blaming this on my crippling anxiety!

Poetic content: John Giorno - Drinking the blood of every woman's period

I know everyone has heard all these dial a poet poems, but fuck that, this is pretty cool.

Written for a cat named Lovey (revised rough draft)

sphinx,
seated upon a love worn chest,
i have never thought you the killing type.

but here:

eyes black like nazi coal
watch my heart move
through my breast.

Recently Acquired Books

Grendel, John Gardner

Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Charm: Elegies of Propertius, Sextus Propertius (translated by Howard Katz)

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory

The Pressed Plant, Dinoto & Winter (Bought for Anselm Kiefer's art)

Great American Prose Poems, Scribner ed. David Lehman

A General Course in Linguistics, Saussure (I don't understand one thing this man says. I read and reread and read again, but it is a wasted effort, my friends)

Selected poems, Mark Strand

And obviously, the most important:

Catwings, Ursula K. Le Guin (A new copy of one of my favorite early readers)

The Malignant Cells

stacking atop one another
the flat jelly faces look up.
build a wall out of each
nameless façade saying
do not come any closer.

you don’t get to come
any closer.

Commencement Address, Stephanie Brown

I read this in the Great American Prose Poem collection and thought I'd share it. Also the collection is pretty good and I'd recommend looking into it.

I have no more to say about throwing up or causing myself to get diarrhea there's nothing heroic about it though the movies on TV want us to endure quietly and cry appropriately. It's a wonderful role for any young actress to place herself in some dead household where the dialogue is sexual between all of them including dead grandparents who are still alive in theory and very much inside everyone's bodies, clucking away like old geezers with huge inflated egos bruised by the failure of their children to spend each moment worshiping their self-created sun. So the girl you see who opens her legs to the idea of fucking everyone who says hello but also wants to feel like a nun with vaginal orgasm rather than the ones his kisses and teeth cause which seem to come to e.g., Saint Therese the Little Flower just from prayer in her cloister for hours which made the girl, the subject of this poem, cry for its truth and its nakedness. Because how could it be good to have that curly-haired boy put his face between your legs nearly every afternoon who will not even say he loves you and this is what your parents don't like about it: he will not spend his money on you or take you places in his car. But of course we have to learn to live inside fences and to sweep and clean lower our heads until in the end it is this which gives me flutters I do not need his teeth and lips at my sacred entrance I find release in order and demure discipline the needle and thread tongue-tied when you accept that you do not have this choice if you become a slut, after you see the error of your ways, you renounce them, you become someone who will live easily within his four walls where he keeps you like the flame of live inside his body there's no need to find the way out this is the way it will be and always was: all the mirrors around you say sacrifice order and love.

Pt 2: Atrocities (a not so lucid reaction to school shootings)

And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
Walt Whitman

I have talked about the old cat and the open throated swallow before, about how all paths lead one way and how it is hard to look away from the intestine spilled across the yard and how hard it is to still welcome the cat home, as he washes the scene away with his pink tongue. He does not think like I do about the bird, whose I know from its persistent calls throughout the day. I think too much of it and feel nothing; I push it from the yard to under the bushes and hope to never see it again. Later the old cat will rub against my leg and I will pet him and he will purr, knead my feet if I let him, and, in time, neither of us will remember.

It might be April still, but it is as cold as February and the wind is unrelenting. I wanted to sit by the creek today, but the wind did sing as I went to the car and I thought better of it. Instead of changing my setting, I set to change myself. I imagine that I am just a set of floating eyes. Without the aid of my glasses, I watch a blur, as though the world is masked by a shroud. How easy a shift can be. It reminds me of locusts; grasshoppers in their swarming phase. When the population becomes to great, the food supply becomes too little, ordinary garden bugs become the thing of plagues. They change from droll greens to pink and yellows. They create a noise that makes this wind outside of my window sound like the mew of a kitten. People say their incisors can draw human blood.

This is the world that we inherit: locusts swarm, cats tear the song from birds. They know nothing else. We do our best to walk on.

Listen: let's make love like praying mantises. I'll bite off your head and suck out your innards and you, decapitated, will fill me with the seeds. In time I'll hollow out a twig and lay down thousands of eggs like the froth on milk. You'll be dead. I will be soon thereafter. In time our larva babies will wriggle out; they will know nothing of us, but the swift acrobatic motion they will use on their prey, whose gaze will be lost in their smooth green faces.

Pt 1.

It is Spring here: I wrestle myself from my cocoon in the mornings to walk barefoot across hard wood floors into the sunlight that litters the room, to the loyal snout of a dog that hunts my long shadow with the single-minded intensity of her nature. I ask nothing more of her and she only wants my hands and food in return.

It is easy to dichotomize and so often we do. We live simply, the dog and I. There are city mice and there are country mice and I suppose that I am the latter. The city mice look down on our types for being naive, for lacking a certain grit that can only be acquired with daily exposure to smog, fresh urine coated buildings, and endless motion. And yet, it is the environment that allows for innocence that becomes so appealing. "What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object." It's not impossible for the other half to achieve. It is the goal. I seek it no matter where I stand: a street corner in Beijing, a mountain in North Caroline, the intersection of K and 21st, the sun room of my house... It is easy here, where I come face to face with a world that created itself; a world thats sphere barely touches my own.

"I loafe and invite myself" just as many have. I seat myself at the edge of a large drop and throw rocks to the bottom where a shallow creek runs. I have never known as I do here. I have never loved as I do now. There is no one in sight, but there is everything around. The rocks hit leaves that have never been touched by the prongs of a rake; they do not make a cracking noise, but rather a soft thump of having hit a pillow. If I tune my eyes correctly, I can see a grasshopper make the same leap from the leaf cushion to the creekside as the rock. He is a gazelle. I am a titan.

"In a field, I am the absence of field... Wherever I am, I am what is missing." I could be more than this. I could, if only I could let the private holiness of this place, where I am an intruder, enter my heart and grow through my body like endless reaching vines. But this would require a leap greater than the grasshoppers, the rock, or even the spring of a cave cricket in the dark of a basement. It would require more love than I have to offer. Love here is the act of whole selflessness, the complete abandonment of the character we cultivate, to create a life, a moment, a feeling, of pure devotion for no other purpose than because it can be. It is the dog chasing a shadow, it is the caterpillar walking across the grass bridges.

So I loafe. I invite myself to someone else's party. I open my mouth an wait for the oak pollen to dye my tongue all shade of green. I imagine if it could grow inside of me, make me take root at this very spot, on this very day. How then, I would no longer be the absence of the field, but the field itself.

We live unsettled lives
And stay in a place
Only long enough to find
We don't belong.
--Mark Strand

Springtime in Lynchburg

What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth.
-- Annie Dillard

It is Spring:
the old tom cat
leaves blood prints on the porch.
I hate them and the open throated swallow
at the end of their serpentine path.
I hate them as I hate the hyacinth scent
that hangs stale in the air these mornings,
and how I have never learned to look away.
All journeys end this way. What’s the surprise?
And yet, how handsome the old tom looks
reclining beneath the azalea bush,
licking his jaws with his pink tongue,
purring like a lion.

tho ught:

A blue whale's heart is the size of a small automobile.

nightmare-ish?

The teeth twist clockwise before coming out
and out they come. You shouldn't be afraid.
They are pieces of quartz from the great digs
we gave up when we found the femur in the yard.
It was a funny thing, that bone. You laughed,
looked like Prometheus with it by your side.
We are not much better now, dragging our
knuckles along the ground behind us.
Smile. Let's see your gums all pink and wet
dripping from cheek to cheek.
There is a still a Saturday left in these legs
so lets run it into the ground, see what we can find
see what else we can lose.

Shorter poems in one entry.

Recently I've written some unsubstantial and silly lines that I don't consider finished by any means. It's really just things that come to my head, but aren't quite the jumping off point that I'd like. In any case, I think they're funny in my sad melancholy sense of humor.

a PhD in English
it's out of fear
of floral patterned book clubs
of lavender morgue perfume
of dog eared romance novels.


The Day I bought those shoes
everything moved: Keds and i
we kicked out the sidewalk from under us
we warn't a feared of no mans.
Keds and i, we stomped down
stomping grounds.
we'd keep going
but i punched a hole in Left Ked.
I let him sit on the rack
like the Inquistion.

i've been in the mood recently where i write the poem first and then worry about the title later, which is the opposite of what i usually do.

I could give you
a stone--
so smooth and black
you wouldn't believe--
to run my ankles
raw and red
(and how you'd love
to peel the skin
from my nimble bones)
I'll pull it from the creek.
In the silt
I'd bury myself
and you too--
if i cut out
your sour tongue,
taught you how smooth
a stone can be.

because i'm copykate:

Albums:
Wilco - A ghost is born
Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
Modest Mouse - We were all dead before the ship sank

Songs:
Band of Horses - The End's Not Near
Sufjan Stevens - Pittsfield
Smoosh - Take it away
Modest Mouse - Fire It Up
TV on the Radio - Playhouses
Roxy Music - Oh yeah!
Beyonce - Irreplaceable (possibly the greatest song ever written)
Feist - Past in Present

Books:
How green was my valley - Richard llewyn ( is this shit on Oprah's list yet? If not, soon)
The journals of Sylvia Plath (abridged, fuck me)
Penguin's book of contemporary american poetry

And as always,
Wait Wait Don't tell me: The NPR news quiz.

lent: the season for giving up.

A stone can be just
how smooth and black--
you would not believe.
I could give you one
to run my ankles
raw and red.
It is cold enough
and shallow, yet.

Growing
until I stopped
where I grew,
behind this house:
the creek
I wanted to own.
In its silt
I'd have buried myself
and you too--
after i'd cut out
your sour tongue,
taught you how smooth
a stone can be.

Did it hurt?

Nothing feels in our world:
Not the sparrow we gassed in the kitchen
that April when it frosted late. It wouldn't live.
I knew that, you convinced me anyway and
who wouldn't trust your strong voice, your large
hands, as you say, "It won't feel anything."
And what of that bird that we buried in Spring?
Who gets to claim its death--
the one who turned the oven on
or the one who left the room? .
Our lives are exercises in silence:
only perpetual pulsing knees make noise
up and down like a piston engine under the chairs.
What now? Who gets the surgeon sucked entrails
the ghost of could be, black as bile
silent as tongueless dogs.
Are they fed to those starving for anything?
Are they taxidermied, held in a museum
fiji mermaids:a nickel, an eyeful?
Are they captive in jars, swimming in
beautiful shades of amber, fostered
until, fully grown, they pull themselves out,
walk down the streets where we live
meet the eyes of who gave all they could:
Do I know you from somewhere?
When I put my hand on the stove
The skin bubbled in target formation.
It didn't hurt. No. Not that much.

Sexual. It's not

So, rewriting the poems backwards seems like some sort of half-brained scheme you'd come with on an acid trip, but I'll have to agree with Loren: it does create this sense of excitement and ultimately is a great trick to reorder your thinking. Who thinks backwards? And in this case, it does create a new urgency and somehow still retains almost the exact same meaning.


wanderings:
these mind stoppings.
there's no sister, sister,
they say sobbing
hot, mouth, stalking

talk to,
easy to?
youre so
youre so.
seems that,
that it,
it's just.
they say:sexual.
It's not.

It's not sexual

It's not
sexual
they say.
It's just
that it
seems that
you're so
you're so
easy to
talk to?

black eyes
fish lips
sick of
dumb chicks.

Hot mouths
talking,
they say
sobbing
sister
sister
there's no
stopping
these mind
wanderings.

SPAM MAIL (The Son of Minos and Itone, Daughter of Lyctius)

ed. note: This was the text at the bottom of an email trying to sell me penis enlargement pills. I just added the line breaks. I am still worried as to how they learned I love Ancient Greeks and that I need a penis enlargement


He created his sister,
Nebele,
but he was jealous of her accomplishments
and said she was but a woman and therefore his property.

It is believed that she appears to a chosen follower
as a young maiden dressed in white,
telling him or her a prophecy that must be kept secret.

Nebele created all things except human beings.

(His weapon is a club he makes
by breaking off the limbs of trees,
which subsequently die.)

Bush leads in the polls.

The son of Minos and Itone, daughter of Lyctius.

It is believed
that she appears
to a chosen follower
as a young maiden
dressed in white,
telling him or her a prophecy
that must be kept
secret.

He and his brother kill their victims
pinning them down on their backs and
drilling into their bodies.

(He pretends to assist a mother with her baby and
then quickly runs off with the child
when the mother is not looking. )

John Kerry soundly beat the president in the debates sweepstakes,
watch Bush fall back on charm and personality.

A love song to the metro (10/8)

If I could take scalpel to the city streets,
peel away to its center, from the womb
I would pluck you car by car
know your lights as my own.

Annual masochistic tendencies come out at the start of the New Year. This for me means that I explore what written log I have left for the past year. So though I avoided it for the first week of the year, I couldn't help but look back at my journal--both the written and electronic.

There's a lot I could say about this year and how it killed my dream for The Writing Life as the elite members of the club call it. It did. Or at least right now I feel much more like going for my dream of being a cake decorator than being a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. But I guess when it boiled down to it, 2006 was just one of those years.

In any case, the best thing I wrote in 2006 (in my opinion) was actually written in 2005. I asked my poetry professor, Why is it that the things I write that I like the most are the things that other people enjoy the least? He said, "A poem is like a loose tooth. You just want to wiggle it." I'm still trying to piece together what that means.

Anyway, here's the excerpt from that. It (sadly) sums up the year.

So Loren and I got out early, walking the half hour back down to Foggy Bottom and the snow was coming down, but not touching the ground. I could see the cars in the window buildings and I stopped Loren for a moment, "Do you see that?" He said, "It looks like they're driving up the buildings." That's when I started to cry, but Loren was too drunk to notice. I said to him, "Do you ever think about where you are?"

Maybe I didn't say that. I don't remember.

And not two hours later I was in a bedroom with towels at the foot of the doors and smoking with a boy from my Latin class, his girlfriend and John. He said, "I think you underestimate yourself." I said, "I think I'm pretty dumb." "Too tough on yourself, " he said. Someone said "law school" and that's when everything went to bits. John got real sick and wouldn't leave the bathroom for a while. The two of us stumbled the entire way back to E Street taking a path that I cannot even remember. When we got to his room, John went into the bathroom and locked me out. When he came out and lay on the bed for a moment I had myself convinced that he was dead and I didn't know what to do. What do you do with someone who is dead. He scratched his nose, I took off my clothes. My throat was enflamed, cut through from the smoke. He pushed me away. He mumbled. I couldn't understand. He wasn't dead. Neither was I.