This one appeared online in Pedestal. Read it here: http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=2256
Her Slow and Downward Line
August and morning. Growl and mumble of a tractor
where they´re building those new offices, over
where the old ones burned. Here, breezes in the leaves
and the crickets making up this summer´s entry
on the theme of love and death.
Now the pink is gone, the sky comes into its blue,
first blue. The light seems to come from below the clouds,
which are wispy and scarce. It makes their presence
more like that of bodies, things alive and attentive.
The moon´s still out despite the daylight, halted on her
slow and downward line, yesterday´s moon, no wish
to disappear just yet.
The bus pulls up, a man gets off, it puffs a cloud of
black and lumbers off again, he passes with an
inward face, preoccupied. The milky light of a hot
morning, shadows hide beneath the leaves.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
In Memory of Caliban
This was a wild and excellent magazine that kindly gave me space and let me run with the gigantic dogs. It passed away after fifteen issues. I just stumbled on the archives and info on back issues here->http://mongryl.com/calibanhomepage.html
Nothing available online or I would post.
Nothing available online or I would post.
Gargoyle #54 is out
The newest issue of Gargoyle is out with a couple of my pieces; if they end up online in the archives, I'll post them here.
Their mission:
Dedicated to printing work by unknown poets and fiction writers, as well as seeking out the overlooked or neglected.
I had pieces in it years and years ago, some of my very first publications (those are always the most important for the writer, even if they don't look as good now as they did then but what does?)
It seems to have gone into hibernation for a while and then it started up again just recently and now it sounds like the future of the magazine is in doubt.
Visit and investigate here->http://www.gargoylemagazine.com/gargoyle.php
Their mission:
Dedicated to printing work by unknown poets and fiction writers, as well as seeking out the overlooked or neglected.
I had pieces in it years and years ago, some of my very first publications (those are always the most important for the writer, even if they don't look as good now as they did then but what does?)
It seems to have gone into hibernation for a while and then it started up again just recently and now it sounds like the future of the magazine is in doubt.
Visit and investigate here->http://www.gargoylemagazine.com/gargoyle.php
Sure Thing Blues
This appeared in Branches Quarterly
Sure Thing Blues
Doves come rushing overhead and gone: a mile away,
a load of cloud is coming, moving fast
and a piece of lightning jumps down out of it in green
and diamond with a purple edge, and a heavy breeze
comes rushing up, the young trees bend and flail
beneath the kind of wind that could make you transparent
if you could stay out there inside it long enough (blue
and heavy now myself: this load of trouble feels
too big for me: maybe I took someone else’s
by mistake again?) Darker now so that white toothpaste dog
that’s climbing wooden stairs to get a better look at the lightning
seems very white this minute but he isn’t really,
it’s just a case of those old semi-cerulean Sunday-twilight
Monday-coming blues: all the leaves are stirring now,
the singers are all territorial and clear, the dogs
forget what they were barking for and suddenly shut up,
a robin on a fat branch sits and stares at me as if to ask me
something but so? Black time is a sure thing now, so
come on rain. If you’re coming, come now.
Sure Thing Blues
Doves come rushing overhead and gone: a mile away,
a load of cloud is coming, moving fast
and a piece of lightning jumps down out of it in green
and diamond with a purple edge, and a heavy breeze
comes rushing up, the young trees bend and flail
beneath the kind of wind that could make you transparent
if you could stay out there inside it long enough (blue
and heavy now myself: this load of trouble feels
too big for me: maybe I took someone else’s
by mistake again?) Darker now so that white toothpaste dog
that’s climbing wooden stairs to get a better look at the lightning
seems very white this minute but he isn’t really,
it’s just a case of those old semi-cerulean Sunday-twilight
Monday-coming blues: all the leaves are stirring now,
the singers are all territorial and clear, the dogs
forget what they were barking for and suddenly shut up,
a robin on a fat branch sits and stares at me as if to ask me
something but so? Black time is a sure thing now, so
come on rain. If you’re coming, come now.
Poetics, what's a poetics?
If I had one this might be it:
From a radio interview with Gertrude Stein in the Fall 1990 issue of The Paris Review. The interview, conducted by NBC reporter William Lundell, was broadcast on November 12, 1934.
Lundell: But how is the reader supposed to know what you are thinking about?
Stein: The reader does know because he enjoys it. If you enjoy you understand and if you understand you enjoy. What you mean by understanding is being able to turn it into other words but that is not necessary.
From a radio interview with Gertrude Stein in the Fall 1990 issue of The Paris Review. The interview, conducted by NBC reporter William Lundell, was broadcast on November 12, 1934.
Lundell: But how is the reader supposed to know what you are thinking about?
Stein: The reader does know because he enjoys it. If you enjoy you understand and if you understand you enjoy. What you mean by understanding is being able to turn it into other words but that is not necessary.
2 Things from Diagram: Where I Grew Up and Radio
From Diagram, an electronic journal online with beautiful layouts and visuals. "We describe ourselves as: odd but good." As usual, I'm trying to walk through a comment on the source without falling into the greasy mudpuddles and backscratches and log rolls. Not sure how well I'm doing.
Find them here-> http://webdelsol.com/DIAGRAM/subs.html
I have a kind of epigraph at the bottom of the page...Kay Ryan says in one of her readings that poems exist as a way to preserve epigraphs and here's another bit of evidence for that.
WHERE I GREW UP
Before the rain the doors are swollen shut,
arrowheads are sharp beneath the driveways.
Early in the day, a tanker pouring milk
into the river, a fiery cloud came like a lion,
a man fell quickly into darkness
watched by an angel with a blue spear. New shadows
in the rose, lascivious and green. According
to the old folks, one red morning left
before the rain in a sleepy city in a
hundred miles of grass. A heavy sky that
holds away the ragged cold,
the sweetness of lights and signs and faded buildings,
narrow streets that curve away to nowhere,
skinny old ghosts in homemade uniforms
stand waiting for news of surrender,
the bees are asleep in their tubes,
the firemen sing in the crumbling warehouse
that smells of rice and burley, of Monday blues
and blessing, of the river
gets a little older, of the distant curve
of the world is slowly lit from far away,
of an empty box in the road where a man full of nails
is sleeping, of hard hearts and pretty days to come.
____
RADIO
Birds investigate inverted flowers, a vacuum
sings at the far end of the hallway
Darwin talks about the violence of the rain
the gizzards of birds, dust from Africa
The guard is asleep in a chair beside
his small murmuring radio
He says the moon rose early, scratched by a knife
He sees a foxglove in a sleeping place
The cat's long legs are slightly curved, she
stretches back on her bones and shuts
her eyes, deep in her pleasure
He mentions the luminous powers
a single leaf, a person fresh from the sea
____
On WHERE I GREW UP and RADIO:
From a radio interview with Gertrude Stein in the Fall 1990 issue of The Paris Review. The interview, conducted by NBC reporter William Lundell, was broadcast on November 12, 1934.
Lundell: But how is the reader supposed to know what you are thinking about?
Stein: The reader does know because he enjoys it. If you enjoy you understand and if you understand you enjoy. What you mean by understanding is being able to turn it into other words but that is not necessary.
Find them here-> http://webdelsol.com/DIAGRAM/subs.html
I have a kind of epigraph at the bottom of the page...Kay Ryan says in one of her readings that poems exist as a way to preserve epigraphs and here's another bit of evidence for that.
WHERE I GREW UP
Before the rain the doors are swollen shut,
arrowheads are sharp beneath the driveways.
Early in the day, a tanker pouring milk
into the river, a fiery cloud came like a lion,
a man fell quickly into darkness
watched by an angel with a blue spear. New shadows
in the rose, lascivious and green. According
to the old folks, one red morning left
before the rain in a sleepy city in a
hundred miles of grass. A heavy sky that
holds away the ragged cold,
the sweetness of lights and signs and faded buildings,
narrow streets that curve away to nowhere,
skinny old ghosts in homemade uniforms
stand waiting for news of surrender,
the bees are asleep in their tubes,
the firemen sing in the crumbling warehouse
that smells of rice and burley, of Monday blues
and blessing, of the river
gets a little older, of the distant curve
of the world is slowly lit from far away,
of an empty box in the road where a man full of nails
is sleeping, of hard hearts and pretty days to come.
____
RADIO
Birds investigate inverted flowers, a vacuum
sings at the far end of the hallway
Darwin talks about the violence of the rain
the gizzards of birds, dust from Africa
The guard is asleep in a chair beside
his small murmuring radio
He says the moon rose early, scratched by a knife
He sees a foxglove in a sleeping place
The cat's long legs are slightly curved, she
stretches back on her bones and shuts
her eyes, deep in her pleasure
He mentions the luminous powers
a single leaf, a person fresh from the sea
____
On WHERE I GREW UP and RADIO:
From a radio interview with Gertrude Stein in the Fall 1990 issue of The Paris Review. The interview, conducted by NBC reporter William Lundell, was broadcast on November 12, 1934.
Lundell: But how is the reader supposed to know what you are thinking about?
Stein: The reader does know because he enjoys it. If you enjoy you understand and if you understand you enjoy. What you mean by understanding is being able to turn it into other words but that is not necessary.
With and Without
A piece that appeared in Massachusetts Review
WITH AND WITHOUT
I'm walking in the everyday (like everyday) and looking
around as I go the way I used to when I was a kid, gathering
things (with my eyes now only) to put in my now
metaphorical pockets and take them out later during
Tedium to examine and starlings (about a handful)
are scattered on a big smooth lawn as if tossed there now
by X (like a hand) that does that kind of thing for reasons
of its own and they, not minding it at all (the lack
of a theory or an explanation) begin as always
to go about their business at once: balancing, watching
with amused & fierce attention whatever there is
to be seen, seeing who can make the best high looney
whistle or fat and juicy chuckle or squeaking sound
and creaking sound Hke Count Dracula's door
coming open, meanwhile stabbing down into the tough
hard mesh of roots and grass, the stems crammed in
together by the dirt that's been so dry, stabbing down
so as to pluck a juicy squirming thing and let it drop
inside their black and boiling inner works...and then
all together and suddenly they rise into the air (as if
to some loud but inaudible clap or bang) and curve away
and vanish all together, taking everything with them.
I find myself staring at their absence the same way
I stare at the very last scene of a dream sometimes,
the only one I stiU have with me on waking, with
a sleepy inability to get it straight what all this is exactly
but feeling no distress at that, some kind of rightness
in fact. Then, after a breath, the ordinary grass
is back again, single-minded now (a thought without
starlings), less green, more dry, more uniform,
more silent, and then almost everything else is back also.
WITH AND WITHOUT
I'm walking in the everyday (like everyday) and looking
around as I go the way I used to when I was a kid, gathering
things (with my eyes now only) to put in my now
metaphorical pockets and take them out later during
Tedium to examine and starlings (about a handful)
are scattered on a big smooth lawn as if tossed there now
by X (like a hand) that does that kind of thing for reasons
of its own and they, not minding it at all (the lack
of a theory or an explanation) begin as always
to go about their business at once: balancing, watching
with amused & fierce attention whatever there is
to be seen, seeing who can make the best high looney
whistle or fat and juicy chuckle or squeaking sound
and creaking sound Hke Count Dracula's door
coming open, meanwhile stabbing down into the tough
hard mesh of roots and grass, the stems crammed in
together by the dirt that's been so dry, stabbing down
so as to pluck a juicy squirming thing and let it drop
inside their black and boiling inner works...and then
all together and suddenly they rise into the air (as if
to some loud but inaudible clap or bang) and curve away
and vanish all together, taking everything with them.
I find myself staring at their absence the same way
I stare at the very last scene of a dream sometimes,
the only one I stiU have with me on waking, with
a sleepy inability to get it straight what all this is exactly
but feeling no distress at that, some kind of rightness
in fact. Then, after a breath, the ordinary grass
is back again, single-minded now (a thought without
starlings), less green, more dry, more uniform,
more silent, and then almost everything else is back also.
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