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1/26/11

Earthy Anecdote: An Explication

A good group of good friends in Brooklyn started a blog last summer featuring music reviews, poetry explications, and wonderfully bizarre reflections on science, language, and "Stopping Pleistocene Repopulation!"

As part of an ongoing poetry explication contest, they recently featured my brief, freestyle interpretation of the poem "Earthy Anecdote" by Wallace Stevens. It's whimsical and melodramatic—hope you like it!

1/24/11

Untitled Circulation

A voice in the loaf murmurs of sedimentation,
sandwiches, screech owls. These echoes,
disseminations of sound—owl pellets, oak bite,
mingled blood—the squirrel bone at the center
of the Milky Way spins slowly, ordering the orbits of nutrients.

In my neighborhood, trash is the singularity,
our codex, a double tree-helix marking
out history as yeast, crust, crumbs of the remainder
of spirit, sealed airtight in Tupperware.

Occasionally the helpless rising comes to bubble in our skins,
timorous, hearty, a vitamin lacking an alphabet,
the conversions within or beyond digestion
petrified, then eroded or erupting the processes
of which we know, of cherries, of talcum, of lifespan.

[another old one]