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.

Birthday poem for Kyle (I wrote it).

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Like a mini-mart off the highway,

Kyle Martindale gets older. Unlike

most poets, Kyle’s often on his way

 

from the gym, where he was rowing

on a machine outta water. Kyle got

hitched, hiked paths, chose classic

 

reggae, and flew on airplanes this year,

and that’s just this year. Not even gonna

count up all the feats he finished

 

during the other twenty-four. Hey

Kyle, we miss you here, the way

you’d decide on dancing most times

 

and eat the same beany slop three

meals a day, sometimes in a good bowl

from home, on the go, on campus. Hey

 

Kyle, there are people that you know

that don’t know how to handstand like

you do. But Kyle, we know you’d teach

 

us if we asked. You always do.

 

Lovepoem (mine).

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 Elegy for Hair

 

Between houses appears your unmistakable

hair, the hair of a wild man, wilderness

clothed in cottons. We warm

each other and warn the seasons

of their attributes. The winter steals

the softness from our elbows and you,

browned soldier, are older than

the weatherman predicts, more full

of starch, your heels unpeeling. Hot

beet skins stain a paper bag.

 


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.