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.
3/17/11
3/3/11
John Wayne
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?
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?
2/2/11
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!
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]
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]
12/16/10
If Then What
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.
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.
10/16/10
Ingress #1
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.
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.
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