Loose Leaf

Terminal Hymn

2011-03-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

The outline of a bright
fish sprawls on the land-
ing strip,

The cadmium lines
of it conduct vectors
and vehicles.

What ichthus
could gain this audacity,
this security

clearance?

One of myriad constellations
emblazoned on tarmacs
in the Midwest.

Who am I to catch
the declensions
of this, your airspace,

vacant, stentorian.

Partway

2011-03-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

Put on the slick moss
and cold water.
Lie down in the stream’s center
and be a rock
upon which the waters divide
and then rejoin.

Or be the bird that lands
upon that rock,
ascending at night
with wet feet
to who knows where,
what warm and dirty nest
in trees or caves,
softly breathing,
all alone like the wind.

John Wayne

2011-03-03T12:14:00.001-08:00

Like Julian of Norwich knew,
belief is something

you wear—there
but forgotten,

the khaki shoes
of my grandfather,

too tight but I keep them on,
the ancient plaid

and flannel, still pristine,
his bolo ties.

Not certainly for him
a career, simpler

more culinary, perhaps even the daily
bread and eggs

he never prayed over
or thanked

my grandmother for
or completely finished.

Homes and warehouses he built
couldn’t hold him.

His mother looking over
his bones

with the solemn gunfire behind
seemed like familiar war.

So what about clouds
now around the barn?

Wind, stench, dinner
scents all bend

in the bushes at nightfall,
and ancient aquifers

bubble into shale
beneath the lichen

and broken branches
of his apple trees.

My mother’s
father, is this you,

there, climbing in from
the reruns

to take back
your place, your workload,

your clean shirts?

After Bashō

2011-02-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

The frog and the pond
in the haiku are in
the haiku.

Earthy Anecdote: An Explication

2011-01-26T20:06:00.000-08:00

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!

Untitled Circulation

2011-01-24T18:55:00.000-08:00

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]

If Then What

2010-12-16T15:24:00.000-08:00

A recent poem, "If Then What," is part of the mass of poems (I like to think of them as stones in a sort of digital cairn) that make up Poets for Living Waters. Curated by Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples, the project is an online "poetic action" in response to the rupture of oil in the Gulf of Mexico this past spring—though it also speaks to the circulations of water closer to home (wherever you live) that pass through your watershed, your backyard, your cellular membranes.

You can find it in their collection under "W" in the Open Mic section—good luck finding it—or just read on below (but be sure to check out some of the fantastic poems they have posted).

*

If Then What

The sun’s reflection smears like an oil spill,
lost in sea or air, who knows.

The sun and then the moon are altars
of light and stone.

A voice in the alley said to speak
the names of the creeks:

sewage, soda, ocean spray.
Move into the flow, it said,

press salt upon your forehead,
upon your wounds in the surf.

What if we uncovered the waterways
beneath highways, watersheds in our nuclei,

if we used our new names to remember the old,
or became the taste of iron?

If the images have sunk beyond recovery,
what new waves will remember the history

of ferns and dinos?
We can sing and drive

home facts and morals,
from delta to Dakotas.

Mississippi and Great Lakes
will part our greasy hair.

Ingress #1

2010-10-16T17:01:00.000-07:00

Don’t recite the unwritten histories of sediments
or instruct me in decoding the script of the moraines

until we’re deadlocked in rush hour and you can sing
the anthems of third shift to the syncopation of a train track.

We can lie out in smog and fog, drift through fluids wherever,
if we’ve heard the same one song that rocks the San Andreas

and determines the curvature of magnetic fields at the outskirts
of the visible sky, sailed across event horizons into the vortices

of gopher holes and storm drains and all creatures’ resonating tracheae.

UPDATE: The Hard Way

2010-09-28T20:46:00.000-07:00

A poem I posted a few weeks ago is now available in Catapult, along with a companion (prose) piece, "Heavy Artillery." The rest of the issue is also read-worthy (as usual).

Let me know what you think.

Earth Song

2010-09-21T14:01:00.000-07:00

O circulating cell,
wrapped with dust,

all rests upon a root,
life rushing beneath.

I press two feet to you,
soles in osmosis,

and my mouth shapes a seed.

If I rest against the trunk,
a gradual spine,

the bend of shade reaches
down, your hands over my eyes.

Then I see our horizon, swaddled
in skin and bloodstreams,

turning into turning.

*

[This is an old one that has, for some reason, stuck with me for some years. How do you weigh your own attachment to a poem against the more objective sense of its "worth" or "quality"? Writing for myself for so many years gets complicated when I imagine a public audience, even if only an unread blog.]

What Can You Do With It?

2010-09-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

A poem can pop
like a turned-on vacuum.

It can wag a finger
like any old adult.

But most often it sits,
a slim shadow on its page.

Its fox-eyes follow fingers
to stalk, turn, scavenge, bite—

or just play along.

Nocturne in Computer Glow

2010-09-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

Monitor, speak
of the world

in its breadth
and largess.

Repeat the codes,
the jpegs of old,

those pathways departing
from tongue

into broadcast
beyond broadcast.

The pixel mind
turns corners

in the dark
soirée of the soul,

and I who abide
in flesh, to hear

the risen tones
of blowing wind,

would unturn the keys
in their locks.

The Hard Way

2010-08-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

I've never seen violence,
never had to raise my fists for anything but soccer,
though I can imagine—

more sweat than blood,
but the wound so opaque
with nothing to see in it.

What you don't know can devastate you,
translucent swords abroad
sharpened in your name.

I've never considered myself a violent person,
though I can imagine,
rising from my armchair in the cinema of war

to sample it, train in it,
conjure a dream to take this world
and become it, love it with pain.

Whose moment of comprehension precedes death,
besides the historians? Who knows the light
beyond blindness, except the blind?

Take, for example, any person you might know,
confidante or otherwise, and what can happen
provisionless on a long road.

What good then is a tincture of love
as gunfire flickers in the woods
like a campfire?

*

[My thanks to friends at the Litribune workshop for their thoughtful feedback]

Trash Haiku

2010-08-18T22:53:00.000-07:00

Bottle caps scattered
down the cracked, salted sidewalk.
Rains wash these sharp, dark seeds.