Sometimes you try to go to a yoga class and it doesn’t work, and sometimes the poem you’re working on is about dead people, and sometimes the day is foggy, all on the same day, and also sometimes you are me, but not most of the time. Sing it to me, Snooks.
The sideyard was better than ever before
The sideyard, according to a new neighbor-friend named Neil “felt like the 60s again.”
The sideyard had around 70 people attend which is record-breaking for the sideyard
The sideyard had a tiki torch
The sideyard had such good loud music that the police came
The sideyard thanks “Tendrils,” the new house band, who will perform acoustically from here on out so that we don’t get evicted
According to a girl I met, the sideyard was “the most fun event I’ve ever been to.” EVER!
Neighbor and friend Jed said about the sideyard, “Don’t ever let me miss this again.”
The sideyard offered free wine and decaffeinated coffee
The morning after the sideyard I had both a real hangover as well as a happiness hangover
Thank you to everyone who came to the sideyard
Thank you to everyone who let themselves enjoy something so analog
Thank you to everyone for coming out to hear poetry; we poets need you, we poets are you, we are all poets
(photos by misha marston johnson)
Hello goodbye San Diego. I’m off to say hello to the moon with my honey, in honor of our years. Because who said you need to get married in order to go on a honeymoon?
With You
The pockmark on your face
is like a sun. The sweat can pool
a little there—a space to fill,
a crater. On sunny days my eyes
align along the landscape
of your forehead. Hair shorn
and clipped away, the scar
left from a chicken pock
tells me where the little
and the largest of my lovings go.
(thank you, katie conway, for photographing)
I like brown beverages and
stripping coriander with a friend
on the hot September stoop.
I like four books in a pile
with biggest on the bottom
and making spicy beans
and maybe even Loretta Lynn.
I like it when someone comes back
from a trip and they look a little
better than when they left.
I like the way one hand on my chest
and one on my back bookends
my heart and keeps it in.
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
painting by Elspeth Sherman. poem by Frank O’Hara.
early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future
***
unfathomably translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied
We came by plane and boat, we beached
(he left), I danced in rain, I trained in along the Hudson, I saw Erwitt at the ICP and photocopied Sanchez at Poet’s House, I advised and pyschologized an entire closet, I lounged briefly in the 70s,
I quiched and coffeed, I dined and dozed, I family-ed and friended, I parked at Prospect, gave a gift, hugged tall men, ran in rain again, ate squids and octopus, shared kiwi chapstick and met two new boyfriends, hugged a crying friend and hot sauced a burrito, licked honey off my pinky and wouldn’t leave a restaurant, listened to my grandma’s birthday song and was dropped off in rain and sun, I bageled and I slept until I wanted to, I missed west people and wore a wide-brimmed hat…and tomorrow I’ll head to San Diego.
missing you is like
spring standing still on a hill
amid winter snow.
*
we stumbled into
each other’s lives like two young
children playing house.
*
when i return home
to sleep the shadow of you
covers me with day.
*
you have stamped your hour
on me, tattooed yourself on
me like sheets of silk.
*
For a while now the poets have known
the farmers and now the farmers know
the poets and they say hello and hug them
and Elle says again, You were so wonderful
on Friday night and Frankie is smiling
because it is never too late or early for
a compliment meant genuinely and I give
Frankie free zinnias by Ellie not because
she is a poet but because she is a very good
human who has such strange handwriting
that it makes people want to tattoo it on their
bodies, and she tattooed it on hers but not
in a braggy way, in a columnar/cut-off way,
and I like to watch people ask her about it
and I think to myself that I’d never tattoo
myself because I hate repeating myself
but, to repeat myself, now the farmers know
the poets and they like them for their words
and savvy presentation (I think of Scott
in the front row of the sideyard smiling like
someone gave him the exact correct birthday
present) and the poets love the farmers
for their very good foods like Nardello
peppers which are sweet and the most
divine, they’re Ellie’s favorite and she’s
a painter and a farmer, too. And life, I think,
is not as simply roasted as a pepper is, but
it is sweet to watch a farmer hug a poet
hug a professor hug a trapezist hug
a graphic designer slash table maker
hug a videographer hug me, I’m hugging
all of them one after another or two
at once at the farmstand on a Sunday,
and I think we’re all farmers inside somehow,
all artily growing or having newly grown.
At Tim’s New & Used Books in Provincetown today, I found this (“Freely Espousing” by James Schuyler, hardcover, first edition, a very rare and very exciting book to find and get to hold). I grabbed at it and threw myself on the wood floor of this tiny bookstore, set back from busy Commercial street (you have to walk down a sort of rickety boardwalk covered in vines to get there). It costs $150 and I want it very, very badly. “Does this really say one hundred and fifty dollars?” I asked the dude at the tiny desk with the cash register. The dude came over, looked at the number over my shoulder, and said, “Yes.” It’s not often that books worth so much are found on a physical shelf–mostly they’re squirreled away on some boring internet bookshelf where no one can touch them or faint over them or swoon over their very small and well-chosen fonts and the thickness of their paper and the now historical significance of their existences.
To console myself I bought “Other Flowers,” the uncollected works of Schuyler, edited by none other than JAMES MEETZE of the Summer Sideyard. I also bought the tiniest deck chair ever, because, you know, small things. They really get me.
panache, perhaps 