Category: poetics

Brunch Poem Day 1 (mine).

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This is so not our job we hauled in
the Christmas tree dressed
in mom’s boots mom’s jackets

in the New York freeze, Sarah
with the meat cleaver at the trunk
knocking off stumps the both of us

sweating after the sawing second
step and even later still gloved because
This is so not our job! I’m facefirst

in the tree’s underside my hat stolen
by branches Sarah’s sweeping like a housewife
in a hat until at last the thing stands cornered

in its hoop skirt beside the fireplace
and the rug is spiked with scent
and the cat declawed

New York Endeavor (mine).

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In honor of a friend of mine, who knows me better than I might care to admit, I’m going to challenge myself to write a poem every day while I’m home in New York. These poems will all be posted on this site. They will likely be short, or possibly they will be rambling, but surely they will be mine. The challenge is to see what I can make when I’m under the constraint to make something every day. No: the challenge is to put on display what I’ve made on the day that it was made. The terror of the challenge is posting a poem that you’ll all know was Made That Day, which means I won’t really get to eye it and dine with it and give it love nudges for weeks until it’s in shape. Hence, this experiment is a search for new shapes, as well as an ode to advice not taken until now. Along the lines of O’Hara, I’ll call this endeavor Brunch Poems, and either you’ll read it, or you won’t.

(photograph: “Woman Looking at Victory Garden Harvest Sitting on Lawn, Waiting to be Stored Away for Winter” by Walter Sanders)

 

Poem that’s true tomorrow (O’Hara)!

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Song

I’m going to New York!
(what a lark! what a song!)
where the tough Rocky’s eaves
hit the sea. Where th’Acro-
polis is functional, the trains
that run and shout! the books
that have trousers and sleeves!

I’m going to New York!
(quel voyage! jamais plus!)
far from Ypsilanti and Flint!
where Goodman rules the Empire
and the sunlight’s eschato-
logy upon the wizard’s bridges
and the galleries of print!

I’m going to New York!
(to my friends! mes semblables!)
I suppose I’ll walk back West.
But for now I’m gone forever!
the city’s hung with flashlights!
the Ferry’s unbuttoning its vest!

[1951]

Poem I read out loud to a group of people last night at an ad hoc poetry gathering

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I like the word ziggurat a lot more than I like ziggurats

We will not associate with the noun
we will love the word for its z-ness
and its sound
its utter rarity
and for the fact that I once said rarity to you on your birthday & you remembered it
and titled a photograph “rarity”
and the photograph had many trees in it, only trees on a hill, long and leaning
and the rarity was that many of them, and was you
it was january twenty-third; you were twenty-four years old
we walked for hours there was not a single ziggurat in our mouths or in the trees
the trees has been planted quite planned quite public for all to see

this is not a story about ziggurats or bridges or the publicity of gardens
this is not a story about age or of how our mothers boast of our first and current talents
there is nothing of the triangle here
nothing of the sphere
this is a story about geometry, and not at all about geometry
this is a story I wrote for you so that you would remember it

(this is a story that only the two of us know)

Saul Williams.

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A friend gave me “said the shotgun to the head” when I was twenty. Said

friend is now married but still eats sandwiches at hours

inhospitable to sandwiches. Last night I dreamt

of Cornel West, woke up thirsty for the noise

of some man with stature and a boom. Hum diddly

couldn’t find the room inside this room to yell

but websites never cease to flaunt their wares

so here is sleek Saul Williams, staring fair.

 

And here is sleek Saul Williams:

“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again – the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world’s greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding.”

What the Body Wants (poem) (Amy Gerstler).

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What the Body Wants

Not temperance or etiquette, but heavy petting.
Not modesty, but the sweaty chase me games
of childhood. Not renunciation, but chocolate
custard, served in mother’s chipped pink ceramic
custard cups. Not bones, but the marinated all day
meat. Not pious missionary safaris, embarked on
limping and soul-injured in monsoon season.
No cautionary fore-glimpse of its burial place,
the trees waiting, patient and starved for nitrogen
in their secluded grove. The body, undaunted
scholar of its own encyclopedia of greeds,
craves a front row seat for the new satyr play,
lusts after the happy sacraments of black
cashmere sweaters midwinter, big dinners
with plenty of bread to sop up the gravy,
and long nights of athletic sex that leave it giddy
and winded, hallucinating dime-sized fireworks,
gasping that it can’t continue, it’ll expire
on the spot. Then a blessed second wind blows
in out of nowhere, followed by more naked
horseplay, racing thoughts, confessions whispered
into the darkened grate of another body’s hazy face.
Soon absolution ensues, and a little late stargazing,
as the body teeters on the cusp of sleep. Next morning,
the whining, ungrateful mind arises unconsoled,
and the body must begin its cajoling all over again.

A Dictionary of Thanks (mine).

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for family all around
for health & the mending
for farmers & knowing exactly where my food grows
for my bicycle & the safety of my neighborhood, these roads, this country
for slippers
for all the poets that have come before (for Bishop, for O’Hara, for Plath, for William Matthews, for Amy Gerstler, for the revelation of Zagajewski, for novels too: East of Eden and Giovanni’s Room; for E.B. White, for Maira Kalman, for Salinger…)
for jobs I enjoy (one that pays in dollars & food, the other in beer & books)
for Misha in California
for new friends, for longstanding friends
for tea and Saturdays
for being a woman
for text messages & handwritten letters
for hummingbirds like little mice in the trees
for packages stuffed in the mailbox
for smart people all around
for professors with their apt suggestions
for the coming of summer
for the students in my class who take the literature seriously
for bartering
for good coffee
for anyone who has ever read a poem I wrote
for magazines and journals and presses and publishers
for Ladysmith Black Mambazo
for beans and flours and pastas jarred in the pantry
for the possibility that at any moment I may write a poem
for the new mattress & all the free furniture
for the car’s survival
for my parents supporting me in my poetic pursuits
for only one too-early morning per week
for this body that can dance and skip and also fit in small places
for things material and immaterial
for people (you know who you are), for food, for health, for joy, for sweets, for my family and my life I am thankful, I give thanks, I say Thank You, I thank & am thanked, I live in thankfulness, in the thanking I am full, I am filled, I am ever filling & filled with it, thankful and thankfilled, giving thanks and being worthy of a thank-you, too

Poem whose philosophy I agree with (William Meredith).

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The cheer

reader my friend, is in the words here, somewhere.
Frankly, I’d like to make you smile.
Words addresssing evil won’t turn evil back
but they can give heart.
The cheer is hidden in right words.

A great deal isn’t right, as they say,
as they are lately at some pains to tell us.
Words have to speak about that.
They would be the less words
for saying smile when they should say do.
If you ask them do what?
they turn serious quick enough, but never unlovely.
And they will tell you what to do,
if you listen, if you want that.

Certainly good cheer has never been what’s wrong,
though solemn people mistrust it.
Against evil, between evils, lovely words are right.
How absurd it would be to spin these noises out,
so serious that we call them poems,
if they couldn’t make a person smile.
Cheer or courage is what they were all born in.
It’s what they’re trying to tell us, miming like that.
It’s native to the words,
and what they want us to always know,
even when it seems quite impossible to do.

Poem to read slowly (Alberto Ríos).

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In My Hurry

The curious lavender attentions to itself of the jacaranda
Stopped me, as through the leaves and small avenues

In late summer I made my way in love toward you.
The tree’s flowering was an intimacy I had not earned,

A color of undergarment or something from the better
Pages in the book already underlined by classmates.

It was lavender or lilac, something from the hundred blues,
This color without rank and without help, standing there,

Giving me the gift over and over again but high up, outside
My reach, which made my desire to touch it all the more.

The color and the tree, the moment and the lateness of the season,
They joined in a gang of what I could see was a tangle of sinew,

So much muscle in search of the cover-skin of an arm,
The tree itself seeming all at once an arm unleashed,

Strength itself gone wild in its parts to the sky.
This was an arm that had stopped me—

How could I not have seen it? This tree was an arm
And more than an arm, its muscle strung in everything

So that the tree—everything about it—the tree
Made itself of arm and leg, leg and neck, at angles,

At stops and starts and in bends, everything broken,
Everything but the lavender, which was flower,

So much lavender coming from what was left, what must be
A mouth, a thousand mouths, at once speaking

The lavender or the lilac, the blue, understood language.
These were match-tipped words asking the impossible of me,

Whatever I imagined the impossible to be: a bowl of cherries
In winter, or that I might come again by this place and stop.

Absent of reason, I could agree to anything addressing a tree.
The cherries were not much, I know, but what they meant,

Born of this exotic, all lavender and muscle, held me.
It was an equal and other necessity, calling to me in my hurry.

It was a tree in wild color calling to a tree in wild color,
And the lavender, I think you know what the lavender is.