Category: poetics

Monday night flight (video, photograph, poem).

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Sometimes my life is hip(ster)/I love you Heather/I’ll (we’ll) miss you Heather

And off we go to the east…

 

August 1, 2011

 

We eat cheese we drink

rosé, eat salad (eat olives),

finish off some soup, sort

through plums & nectarines,

flip the laundry, pack jars

for presents and the house

is hot as fired bread. There’s

a pile of my paper booklets

standing in an fruitcrate

on the shelf and everyone

will get one. And anyone

who wants will know I’m

home. And friends we farm

or farmed with might miss

our little yard. I’ve packed

my new red shoes and we’ll

eat peaches on the plane.

The neighbor with the high

white socks will grumble

at our incorrectly-plated car,

the banana plant will grow

another, stronger leaf and

the chickens left last night.

The house is vacuumed,

mopped, and marveled at;

we’ll be flying through the night.

the after-sideyard:

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mostly just this

mixed in with this

(thanks kaz)

and frankie’s feeling it too

and misha sold four prints

and there are flowers all over the house, even by the sink and right here on the desk

and there are four dollars in “20,000 words” which means at least 2 people have my chapbooks

and maybe, maybe, some sort of art scene to remember is getting going in san diego, but even if not, even if we’re all just smartpeople in a yard for a party, it feels good to remember how many  good people there are in this city, and that with some wood and tacks and trashbins-turned-to-tables and the help of farmily, art can happen right next to where we live, and even though no one on the east has seen this thing we did and made, we will bring it wherever we bring our selves, sideyard or sideporch or sideacre of a plot of land…

Sideyardsideyardsideyardsideyard

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the frazzled state of hair in this photograph is no where near to the frazzled state of my hair right now. by tomorrow, i will be groomed. by tomorrow, 29 photographs around the yard. by tomorrow, poems and poets and flowers by ellie and good people in the sideyard hearing art, seeing art. you should come. 7pm.

 

 

Just a poem for today (mine).

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I believe in signs: yesterday got some

right great news, no explanation needed,

just love inside a courthouse. I could’ve

crossed my legs and cried. Today

got punched straight in the face in the nicest

way she could have done it, two days ago,

two letters in the mail, black ink that

wouldn’t  smudge. Times They Are

A Changin’, as Dylan’s wont to wail.

Time’s got a slew of whys headed straight

for its wagging, wettened tail. Yesterday

a colored message on the sidewalk, red

and pink plus orange with the arrows

pointing toward the house. Today one

block of cheese melting in a canvas

bag. To signal with one’s  arms is a signal

of our times: we’re tired. We’re all choked

up. I wrote two dozen signs in waxy

pen today, words like, Stuff these Peps

with Cheese. Market signage is important,

as is signage sketched on cardboard,

like the piece above the closet that

tells me  where to go. Judging from

the unkissed sky, time is rushing in

on us again,  neckties and bowls

and rickshaw  almost-yeses, morphing

into no’s. Ears nose and throat all crammed

with altered cries: if you duck out or

cancel on the weather, it doesn’t mean

the rain will cease. If you invite me

with your nostrils to the pleasure

of your presence I doubt I’ll turn you

down. Pried from the edges of these

brightblue eyes is a type of scuffed

acceptance: what you do won’t make you

who I think you’ll always be, but it makes

you who you are. The liars and the thieves

were right: it’s easier to jet than

stay and watch the garden go to seed, all

that food  that someone loaned good soil to,

all that high green-watered need.

Tuesday Update.

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Misha shaved all his hair off and we got a new chicken. Her name is Vicky. Vicky Christina Chicky-Wicky. V’Nilla and Vicky: the sideporch chicky-sissies. Is that a good name for a movie or for nothing at all?

In other news, I held two baby goats this week and they melted into my arms like butter. I also finished “Bossypants,” (by Tina Fet duh), sewed Misha’s robe, and watched the spectators of the pride parade like a granny, in a plastic chair on the corner of the sidewalk, with my other granny friends. (“Look at that lady! SO much purple! AND HER BUTT IS OUT! YEAH!!!”) Afterwards we made hot sauce. On Sunday, at the farmer’s market, I wore a mustache for three hours. I highly recommend this experience. So many jokes.

 

And last night I found this poem again. Swoon.

To the Harbormaster by Frank O’Hara

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Some goodness, shared.

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Things that made me glad today or recently, during these days in which I need some gladness:

1. NOONIE link. Nuni. Nuny—SNL, you win on this one.

 

2. David and Sandy Katz, summertime

 

3. Long poem that’s worth it and made me cry, in a good way.

 

4. Today I planted thousands of sunflowers. Literally thousands, and about half a dozen types. In a few months, there will be a 1.8 acres more of beauty in the world, and I will have been part of it.

Poem about onions (William Matthews).

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Onions

How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest

and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.

“Poems” (list poem) (mine).

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In a poem I wrote, I reworded the clichés about promises in a promising way.

In a poem I wrote, I was just as forgettable as the next forgettable face.

I wrote a poem with an encyclopedia of tenderness trailing from its lines. Then I wrote six more.

In one of my poems, two people bicker inside a Taco Bell. I know the people, though I’ve never been.

In a poem I wrote, I use a metaphor too aptly. I should have just said: I’m angry.

Poems of mine include birdlife, recently.

One of my poems is about knobby, unique noses, and the boy who loves them. Actually it’s about this one boy’s love of noses, and my less unique love of ankles.

All of my poems are true, whether or not what’s in them “actually happened.”

I wrote a dozen poems on a single topic and now my topic has returned to flesh.

Once, in a poem, I said, Fuck you, Caligula.

Poems don’t get written; they are wrought. Or fought against. Or they are simply made of rhymes.

In a poem I wrote, I asked you to leave your coins at the door.

In a poem I wrote, I asked, May I please be excused? and politely.

In a poem of today, my size was defended by someone else besides myself.

Poems don’t often find themselves among company that isn’t poems.

While I write a poem there is no thirst.

While I write a poem I have no hands.

While I write a poem…I quit. There is not always a poem.

Perhaps a poem could don a wedding gown.

Perhaps a poem, perhaps a no-em, if it’s not any good.

This poem is rated PG. Pretty Good.

If I didn’t write poems, I’d just call them something else.

In all of my poems, I never say “firmament.”

I sent you that poem I wrote for you, with your name in the very first line. Didn’t you love it? Why didn’t you love it?

If poems aren’t people, please explain to me how it is that I love them like this.

You can judge a person by their poems, even if they’ve never written.

A poem of mine was taught to a classroom of eighth graders, and I believe they survived.

A poem of mine was slipped under a doorway as proof of: You wronged her.

All the poems I’ve written are forms of proof.

The proof resides just outside the poem. The poem, poof.