Rapid Rapid,

Change of pace

2006-11-28T22:47:00.000-05:00

My poetic sensibilities -- however meager -- have been exhausted. Propensity for rambling however, is still intact.

2006-11-23T01:41:00.000-05:00

There are not enough stars in Boston. Stars, like the kind in the sky, which depending on how far you are, could be the icy tips of invisible stalactites or possibly, mutilated balls of burning gas floating aimlessly through a black void. Fortunately, we are very, very far, and the air outside is -- as it happens without fail in this neck of the woods in Maine -- very, very cold. So cold, in fact, that it feels like a different shade of cold every time I step outside, as if the particular combination of the stars and the wisps of clouds and the dry, clear night elicit a sort of poetic amnesia. A short term memory loss brought on by feelings of metaphysical insignificance, in turn brought on by the looming face of infinity every time I look up. Then there's the desire to record every drop of sensation somehow--in words, in calculable thoughts (etch it in the temporal lobe, practice dreaming), in action. But what performance of a verb could possibly capture frost? Or the cruel bent of a tree branch? In fact, I can tell you it's hardly cruel at all in the daylight, and that bodily ache of mine for a word or a sentence, a tome, a treatise on my right to be here, all but disappears after I've digested breakfast. This is the time of day when more than just thought comes into the light. Revelations. A remedy for hate in other people's countries, or for love in mine. No, nothing nearly so important. Whims. Insights. Poetry a delusion, a false celebration that we've mastered and intensified our experience and somehow established a nameless corner of humanity against the blank wall just beyond our crystalizing breath. But what it celebrates, indeed, deifies, is worth the falsehood. The critic T.E. Hulme hated romanticism, thought it mystical nonsense. But when I'm standing here, home but not home, the trees empty, having given their way to the freedom of spacious leaflessness, I wonder if he was just missing the point of his own insight:

By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic...You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

Here's to spilt religion: futile metaphors and wordless mumblings: prayer, expression, and the failure of both: to leaves, trees, the grass and the birds: quiet despair, rambling exultation, and the faint vibrations of stars in the firmament, in the dark, on cold, cold nights.

A Fictional Conversation Between a Coral Reef and a Pentium M Processor

2006-11-22T12:43:00.000-05:00

The coral reef has died due to global warming.

Sea Horse: Look! I am pregnant!

Pentium M: I deliver outstanding mobile performance and low-power enhancements that enable a variety of laptop designs so you can find the one that fits your mobile lifestyle.

Sea Horse: And a man!

Pentium M: Check out my power optimized 533/400 MHz processor system bus, and Micro-ops Fusion & Dedicated Stack Manager.

Sea Horse: I bear an uncanny resemblance to John Kerry!

Opinions

2006-11-16T00:11:00.000-05:00

When I look like I'm staring into space when you're talking to me or if I have my eyes closed in the middle of the night, it's not because you're boring or because I'm tired -- although I'm sure you are and I am. In fact, I'm preparing for my vocation as an art/literary/film critic, in case the Modernist movement or Classical Hollywood Cinema ever runs an ad campaign of 30-second TV spots. However, the profundity of my criticism loses its force after one or two sentences, so it must be delivered as sound-bites.

Cubism: put as wallpaper in the room where you will be caffeinating in preparation for the morning commute. Let your eyes lose focus and bathe in your ability to see objects from twenty-seven different angles -- your post-modern existence necessitates it. You never knew the perfect woman until you went to a brothel in Avignon and met mademoiselle poly-backo-frontal-profile-deconstructionist-africanmaskface nude.

The Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein: although he probably has never seen this movie, I know his reaction already. Upon seeing the 90th intertitle containing the words "brothers" and "revolution" used twice in the same sentence, he would shake his head, mutter a word beginning with the letter "p" and ending with the sound "ropaganda," then say something about a "sledgehammer to the spectator's head," before promptly walking away to play ultimate frisbee in the dark.

Wagner: Nazi sympathist.
Ezra Pound: eloquent Nazi sympathist.

Casablanca, Michael Curtiz: sentimental, in a way that makes you feel guilty for secretly wanting some of the characters killed for the sole purpose of making the film self-consciously avant-garde, and thus confer intellectual superiority on you, the spectator. But alas, the bubbly I'm-clearly-taking-film-class-as-a-core girl in the row behind you is weeping in joy at the manifest affirmation of romance and human goodness. Yes, that goodness.

Higanbana, Yasujiro Ozu: chinese melodrama, without the melodrama. And Japanese. What a good movie.

L'enfant Noir, Camara Laye: just read the last chapter. You're not culturally insensitive -- you simply don't have time to learn about animist rituals but are willing to be enriched by the universalizing power of puppy love and a doting mother's reverse Oedipus complex. Did I mention the intricate yet accessible prose? Imagine squinting really hard and admiring a delicate flower. Never mind the vocabulary you're too lazy to look up; this book simply can't be ignored by any self-aggrandizing language snob. There's no sex, sorry. For that you will have to go to an art museum. Just don't let the expressionists rain on your party.

Lakeside

2006-10-26T01:55:00.000-04:00

The summer sun found reds, browns in each strand;
A painted canvas; flaxen umber strings.
Orchestral fabrics, cellos sussurant;
Branches chuchotent, foliage sings.

The wind found waves, curls, loops in every lock;
Beneath the waves, ocean currents rush
Entire seasons by; a rust-brown brook
That flickers seaward, rhythmic to the touch.

The mid-day warmth found spaces within
And ran its fingers through, unable to choose,
Pausing on cheeks: gleaming, red, bold.

A glance found a smile, and a kiss, a face; in
The colors of the earth, enfolded
Delightfully among tangles, a muse.

Back on Campus

2006-09-26T01:25:00.000-04:00

But still thinking about the summer.

Writing to come later.

2006-07-15T22:42:00.000-04:00

The last line of this sent so many chills down my spine that it even made my away message for a couple weeks, not that it would have been noticed there.

Time of the Fieldmice
Brian Swann
Poetry

An old crashed cicada dragster, hole in the roof
where they'd cut in and hauled the driver out
who, luminous, broke from their hands and,
veins swelling, whistled about the dark
perfumed season till, exhausted, he returned
to the place where fire sublimed, then folded
his wings inside his dull mummy while all round
was turning bare as a bombed-out airstrip
with odd clots of color in which the animals
recede to a core, tighter and tighter, waiting
for the wave to bounce back, scoured and solvent
from earth's outer edges. Now is the time
of the fieldmice who have eaten most of the seeds
and nibbled soap to arrowheads. Their cache
has not diminished at the bottoms of drawers,
down the backs of horsehair chairs,
at the bottom of the bed you lie in, listening
to the noise stars make on very cold nights.

Vignettes

2006-07-14T00:35:00.000-04:00

Dance
Two deep sighing outpourings clasp
the yearning strings in strong discord
and then, melting off with a heavy heart,
give way to pastoral melody,
bouncing and ebbing
over the flow of celli
and the clarinet's plaintive call --
then suspended in the oboe's reach:
up a region of ill-defined tonality
sliding into a chorale
subtly hanging in this
studied sketch of tragic fatality.

Storm
The grass was for a moment
the texture of fertilized earth,
the white specks of frozen sky
embedded among the blades rippling
in unison in the wind and water,
absorbing the ache of the ground
and tugging at the corners
of this curtain of rain, waiting
patiently for the stomping
feet of clouds to run their course.

Some more Mary Oliver

2006-07-10T00:31:00.000-04:00

I haven't had time to write much in the past couple of days, so here's a cop-out post for the day, not only unoriginal, but not even a new poet. However, the theme here hit so true with me -- and with everybody, I'm sure that's the point -- that I had to get it down on my blog. Many thanks to the person who created the online anthology where I'm getting all my life-inspiration this week.

The Journey
Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
'Mend my life!'
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations --
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -- determined to save
the only life you could save.

Two (Almost) New Finds

2006-07-08T23:34:00.000-04:00

A friend introduced to me a new poet, Mary Oliver, who writes some very simple, sublime descriptions. Note the imagery in that last line (ummpf!):

The Hawk
Mary Oliver

This morning
the hawk
rose up
out of the meadow’s browse

and swung over the lake—
it settled
on the small black dome
of a dead pine,

alert as an admiral,
its profile
distinguished with sideburns
the color of smoke,

and I said: remember
this is not something
of the red fire, this is
heaven’s fistful

of death and destruction,
and the hawk hooked
one exquisite foot
onto a last twig

to look deeper
into the yellow reeds
along the edges of the water
and I said: remember

the tree, the cave
the white lily of resurrection
and that’s when it simply lifted
its golden feet and floated

into the wind, belly-first,
and then it cruised along the lake—
all the time its eyes fastened
harder than love on some

unimportant rustling in the
yellow reeds—and then it
seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it
turned into a white blade, which fell.

Also rediscovered a poem I'd seen once before but couldn't remember the title; this poem by Yehuda Amichai was published in the New Yorker a year or two back. His verse is celebrated for its reflective and unflinching treatments of his chosen subject matter, which is often serious or violent, and you can see the way that ordinary English words acquire a new power in his grasp, in a way that only translated poetry seems to achieve:

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily
Yehuda Amichai
Tr. from the Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily
on the walls of the dams,
now, when the white storks, returning,
are transformed in the middle of the firmament
into fleets of jet planes,
we will feel again how strong are the ribs
and how vigorous is the warm air in the lungs
and how much daring is needed to love on the exposed plain,
when the great dangers are arched above,
and how much love is required
to fill all the empty vessels
and the watches that stopped telling time,
and how much breath,
a whirlwind of breath,
to sing the small song of spring.

What I had for lunch yesterday and today

2006-07-08T14:33:00.000-04:00

When it looks like this outside:

you know it's time to break out the vegetables and make lunch. So yesterday I cleared out the fridge and threw this together:

And today, feeling like something light and crisp, went to the store for some chicken, and found a stash of some lettuce grown in a friend's garden, with colorful results:

And yes, I love cooking.

When Mother Dreams

2006-07-02T22:30:00.000-04:00

You know it is one of many nights
First the dumb yell
A mumbled rasp of a yell filtered
Through the wall before being caught
In her windpipe. You open your eyes
And stare. Blue gray plaster
Silence of air drawn
Through a dried windpipe. Whip-cracking
of a voice, the mounting shuffle of bedsheets
Your sheets shake solidly under you, the house
Off its foundations for a brief performance
Of her nightly stampede.

Or minutes before that recognizable thud
It was maybe her humming
Her music she keeps for protection
Mournful then violent
A rise in pitch and that paranoid sound
A broken peal before
She's wrapped in sheets and on the floor
Bruise on her head, eyes drawn shut
In confusion as the lights go on.

Or you don't get up, too tired or cruel
To care, so you sleep
Your ribs
Left hanging in a hollow of disquietude
Ears pricked open
For the sound of intruders.

What did she fear? As a girl
It was the spirits she tortured herself
With, or the closeness,
The visits to the villages
Where shadows lined the streets
Of stories too often told
They aren't real, but of course --
Better if they were.

Some nights you're the anguish
You're the beacon of her searching cry
Its failure, the shriek
A requiem for the missing
Sang nightly when her eyes close
And again the loss is renewed.

You wonder where your own dreams have gone,
Whether what ceased at the chirp of wakeful birds
Burst into vapor
Is no more or really lies
Beneath the filmy surface of black crude
Like lumps or bubbles
Burst and there's the crash
Of glass and the bleating destruction of steel,
The crunch of bone that leaves you orphaned
And free at last.

If fear incarnate is what she flees
In that mad scramble
Three feet onto hard wood
Then what you seek to hide
Is rather what's unfelt, the lack thereof.

Is this remorse then, or shame?
Moaning endlessly, inaudibly
Laid in hypothesis under daylight
And given proof
When no one sees but you.

Insomnia

2006-06-29T01:28:00.000-04:00

closure as
a measure of knotted chests:

yours not his
nor mine
a measure of sleeplessness:

explosion of a moment in
your memory exploding
in mine
an exclusive claim irretrievable

in arms gone: what
of mine?
sparks of a riotous expression

lost: cruel
caprice now
the sight now of your lovely

what now?
closure as
a measure of knotted chests:

of sparks
dimmed then
lost

27 February
22 June 2005

There is a C-section in about 5 hours that I am to observe. I just went to the post office in the midsummer Maine drizzle to drop off letters for a business. My business, which is really someone else's business, but I wanted to make money and I thought the 6 am pick up would allow my word to spread quickly where I need it to go the most, but the 6 am pick up box is actually inside the building where it is locked at night, and though the fluorescent lights are on for the P.O. boxes the space is void of any activity. I left the letters in the outside drop box, where they will not see the light of day until tomorrow at 2:30 pm and I have wasted my time this morning, getting out in the moist air and trying to avoid all manner of normal observance of traffic regulation with the idea that after 11 pm it is perfectly alright to justify the means with the ends, to cut from point A to point B and not have to look back to see what you did or what ground had been beneath the wheels. And here I argued within myself with myself for minutes and Bartok continued in the dashboard. Elegiac, for a lost first wife or mistress, and you wondered how much more he kept inside him that he couldn't have written.

Indubitably my lot in life

2006-06-26T23:29:00.000-04:00

Autopsy
Virginia M. Heatter
American Literary Review
Spring 2006

This is the sky where it meets
the water's surface.

This is the wet ridge of it,
the line between life and drowning.

This is the glow of embers rising
against the rigors of evergreen.

This is a ring of large stones,
and in the nostrils, cedar burning.

This is the sound, still throbbing
in the ear canal, of translucence

passing through narrow tubes.
This is the salt of confluence,

and the sweet of imperfection.
This is melody, harmony, silence.

And this —

is the dead space, the rift
behind the gums, that hollow.

Sounds like a poet got trapped in a pathologist's body. The poet has gone into the morgue and made off with a corpse, lifted it part by part, organ by organ, into syllables belonging to the realm of poetic fantasy. You can hear the faint hints of phonetic borrowing from a medical textbook, inserted between the lines of verse. It says "embers" and you think "embolus, emboli", "rigors of evergreen," "large stones," "throbbing."

A little tenuous, perhaps? Or tedonitis? The cleft of severed scar. Umbilical, abdominal.

asininepoetry.com

2006-06-20T22:30:00.000-04:00

is where this was headed:

Last Wednesday I was trying to find three-sevenths of
my soul, which was missing and had eluded me for
the span of my life thus far, but luckily enough
I saw you in all your beauty come through the door
and that's when I knew beyond a doubt that in your love
I found it, my beloved.

Would you believe that there are no words to confess
the depth of my feelings for you, or perhaps you have
already remarked that I am met with emotional distress
and only a pathetic squeak leaves my mouth to save
me from utter silence when I am trying to impress
you, my beloved?

And what of the arrythmia (this I cannot ignore)
that afflicts my heart whenever into your presence
I am thrust, this irregular pounding that is sure
to send me to the emergency room, though in essence
I have never felt better than now, never more
alive, my beloved?

The generic compliments that here I bestow
upon you—hopefully you won't mistake them for mere
empty flattery, for in their generic-ness, though
it may seem trite, they are intended to bear
the universality of what I in my bosom now
hold, my beloved.

For you are like the angel that comes to visit me
when I am infirm, almost dead, beneath a tree, and
your spirit is like a halo—serendipity
itself—compelling me to reach out with my hand
so that you can save me with a caress of mercy
and love, my beloved.

So if you have any of that mercy left, my
beloved, maybe you will overlook the fact
that I screwed up, and forgive me that lie
I told about that one unfaithful act—
and I swear it was only one—so that I
would not have spent this time and racked
my brain for rhyming words for (*sigh*)
nothing.

13 January 2005, Bangor

Workaholic

2006-06-18T23:01:00.000-04:00

It starts as a brief pressure,
a twinge somewhere behind
your forehead, a puckering
of your skull; then the dull
ache creeps in, a faint discomfort
above your eyelids making
you squint a little harder,
massaging your eyebrows
as you work, hoping that the
pain doesn't build, but it does;
your eyeballs start to feel
the pressure, then the bridge
of your nose, then the inside
of your head, like some obese
monster is flexing his muscles
against your cranium, until
it spreads to your neck; soon
your back muscles tense up
and your eyes start to lose
focus, and finally your will
loosens—it's time to get
off the computer.

31 January 2005, Bangor

About face

2006-06-18T01:37:00.000-04:00

Time to face the facts: if I continue to wait for semi-passable poetry to come pouring out of that numb little head of mine in order to make posts, this blog is dead.

To reconsider: the blog is a dynamic, fluid pursuit of an ideal form of enlightened discourse, the exploration of the writer's principles with respect to the chosen subject matter. The subject here is poetry, the dialogue sought is with the self. The errant jabs at insight represented here are preceded ten times over by repeated acts at uncovering the layers of hazy thought, at navigating the crooked, misguided paths of my mind's meaning.

To translate: what is on my mind is not nor has ever really been poetry and poetry alone. The literary and the artistic are not my true concern, and I'm more comfortable pondering the sociopolitical, the philosophical, the scientific, the sentimental -- maybe what ought to be recorded are the initial insights and dead ends, the potentialities and missing links. I read my own thoughts more than anyone else does, so let these posts be letters to my future self, containing the seeds of what I hope to glean in the form of abstractions from my worldly experiences.

Is my conception of poetry as an end in itself, as poetry for poetry's sake? Maybe that's what I seek, but it's not what I make.

2006-05-07T04:35:00.000-04:00

I explained the intricacies of pulling grass with fingers
You sat and looked on
The sun-freckled foliage far across the field behind us
I murmured play of words beside your ear
You turned and from your hair the rust-gold traces flickered
And jumped out from hiding
My joke fell flat
Your smitten reply was all we needed

Our toes we wove into the grass
Our feet entangled in the blades of grass
Our backs like solar panels to the sun
Like warm roof tiles or basking cats

By the river
Where the sky shines and throbs off the space of glass
Accumulating empty distance
I run while listening to recognize a voice
Awash in static, an ocean of noise wider than the sea
Your words have crossed

Our feet we dug into the grass
Our toes we threaded through the blades of grass

I sit and grasp the earth by handfuls
The faint cluster of snaps
The loamy grit and the stickiness of freshly-wounded stems
Severed by fingernails
I sit while listening for the long-tailed bird
Past the hush of passing cars on the other side of a wall
For the voice I'm listening to but cannot hear
From a face beside me I cannot see

Our feet entangled in the blades of grass
Our backs like solar panels to the sun
Our dark hair soaking hot beneath the sun

The breeze rolls over us
Besides us it breathes, uncertainly past and beyond us
Today is just a day
Today was never responsible for itself
Nor the moment, which encapsulates nothing but the moment
Unreachable by memory, habit, or even love
But who can live and not confuse constraints of space and time?
Who can yearn and ache
Knowing full well that what we seek, we seek to lose?

2006-03-27T02:40:00.000-05:00

the drenched dark concrete
the world of buildings crumbling

rain-soaked trunks of trees
fell by the sway of spectres

and the swollen flesh of wood
drank in wetness

absorbed the insistence
of the wind's touch

and after having waited in
hesitating calm the sky

unfolded and exacted on
its spectators: you and I

the dull fear of blindness
that I to you and you to me--

unseen but by the light of streetlamps
reflected off the wind-torn pitch

we sigh not of chagrin but of exhaustion
of release

look -- there's nothing blue between here
and the lights across the bay

only the oily black into which we dive.

Valentine's Day

2006-02-14T04:33:00.000-05:00

You might think that I forgot
What holiday it is,
For why else would I have bought
Easter candy like this?

Well let me tell ya, Heather hon,
Why I don't celebrate
In the manner that's usually done
And then you might commiserate.

Since every day of every week
It's you I'm thinking of,
If I can kiss you on the cheek,
For me that's holiday enough.

But being honest I must say
What actually transpired--
I did not recall what day
Until I was too tired.

In haste I scampered to the last
Store that was available,
Hoping to find something fast,
Not lame, yet still original.

So here you go, I tried my best
Though I wish I had more time;
If in your eyes I passed the test
Then will you be my valentine?

14 February 2005

Serve Cold.

2006-02-14T01:57:00.001-05:00

one part vinegar.
two part pepper.
(rub salt,
acidity to taste)
handfuls of bitter melon
diced. run fingers over
grater.
cautery by knife
on skin where needed.
incubate.
nothing changes when
you open your eyes. there's
no convulsive fit worth
having that's not weakness.
what's white-washed
through the stern invocative
of self-preservation,
you will it. broken flesh
bleached
into ash. then befriend
forgetfulness.
resist the reconstructions
of mind, thinking, undoing.
fucking (could be, as)
a good annihilation.
-- was it. discarding
(into) each
other was deleterious bliss.
-- a kiss? I remember
smooth, velvet graphite, hot,
moist, molten lead.
dark knobs. gangrenous,
scraped down
under a salt-rasp
prescribed for this.
mix well.

Invitation

2006-02-09T00:46:00.000-05:00

my eyes casted the question:
a forgotten two-step
the calm hesitation across a glassy
void: incantations

whispered empties
to a figure of thought

warm sands here
meet the space between our skin
toes cling to a more and
more restless gesture

were you and I on the floor
we'd move as the blur of dust
the hot smoke
of deities

Pauses

2006-01-20T02:52:00.000-05:00

At the end of a piece of music ending in a slow movement, when the final held note is unheld and gives way to silence but before the applause, breaths are drawn, awaiting closure, milliseconds before the first clap, before the entirety of what has just been heard hits all at once.

Before a waltz, standing straight and tense, before muscles soften, before body weight melts into the flow of the music, before the spine uncoils its rhythm, before all that there is balance, a view over the edge of a cliff.

A poem that sounds too familiar which is read and then forgotten, its meaning too fearful.

Before climax, before the moment when suddenly a renewed pressure of two bodies together, tensity hanging in the air above the bed and under the sheets, hovering, fusing upward in an embrace of more than arms, before the crush of softness flush against one another in ecstatic poise.

2005-12-14T04:47:00.000-05:00

Here the playfulness of icy dust shovel-snaps a torso straight
into a snow embankment. A gleeful grin and a neck brace. Here
judgment goes snow-blind as well as eyes, the severity of moods
swinging in manic cadence. The feeling of indeterminate absence.

So latch on to the unambiguous, the easy. Wake up angry
and bitter as the cold air, and warm with the thoughts of
clouds as snow to rain. Dance in the horrid wetness and curse:
"Fuck the traffic. The yard has turned to blackened slush."

They're the same, and again different. A graceful mess of knotted
curves, and again jagged black, an overhead cage perniciously
silent. Wind is beautiful, say, because in unmoving air how could
trees converse? What speaks more eloquently than leaf-whisper?

But there being no such thing as a soft rustle now, the sky
silent or deafening, in the numb howl of a snowstorm
not really a sound is perceived. Empty, the sum of a thousand
silences fallen from above, masquerading its entirety as alive;

What delights in the soulful lacks music. A brilliant orchestra,
the seats deserted, a neurotic conductor vanished and no word.
He was the romance. We've opened our ears to mere melodic
impossibility, our hearts to the chill of forsaken wood and metal;

This is the season we listen on a stage stripped of virtuosity--
for incandescent lines, for the most penetrating harmony.

Maine Winter

2005-12-05T22:01:00.000-05:00

I lifted my neck and strained to hear:
ensconced above the jagger-circle black
of the horizon, the shiver of stars.

Twinkling bone-chatter. Cosmic wrack
of angels broken: wings, breath, tears.
Sublimation into whispers above and afar,

faint, fading. Unmarred, blue-gray numb
of flesh again, whence uncurling fingers
a Platonic--was love dead?--concussive

and beautiful. Grace, its suffusive
sobs curved, a glassy cul-de-sac. Dumb
had been my breathing anywhere else.

picture from APOD