Passover prose poem (mine).

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You know I used to play tennis with Robin Williams’ mother. She had her own way she liked to play: we would just hit the ball back and forth, no games, no sets, and sometimes it would finish and someone would get a point or they wouldn’t. She was really a very quirky woman, a real character, I think that’s where he got his sense of humor from. She used to put Band-Aids on the sides of her eyes like this to give herself “facelifts.” And she had this great story about her friend. This friend never did laundry because she was always playing tennis! And this went on for many weeks and her husband was, you can understand, getting a little annoyed with her, he said, I don’t even have any clean socks! But she loved playing tennis so much that she never had time to wash their clothes! So one day what she did was she took all of their socks, and she put them all in the dryer! She didn’t even wash them first! And then they all went back in the drawer! God knows if her husband even noticed!

O how unlovely!

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Pacing around my house, laughing

and crying at the same time, this is

the closest I’ve ever achieved at doing

both together, it’s a Frankie sort of verb,

laughingcrying, and an ice cube is dripping

off my face and onto my sweatshirt and

leaving little puddles as I walk around and

O Caity Baptiste I need you now! This

is going to be a cyborg of a cold sore it’s

gonna be full-on one-sided Botox of the

lip it’s gonna stun all your med schoolies

into silenced awe it’s gonna make y’all

reassess your medical vocations, it’s won

the Golden Globe for Most Likely To Make

You Not Wanna Disrobe Me, it’s the best

and worst thing my body’s done all week,

it’s making me laugh then cry then repeat,

a crunching of the face where I get those

creases round the nose (the face Jen loves

to try to do) and then laughing looking

out the window as the dapper drug dealer

in his white fedora walks by with the dog

-owning homeless addicts and the ice is for

the lip because Lorelei Frantz (of the Blue

Camel Café, of ginger peach tea and my

employment) told me that’s how you burn

a coldsore away, you ice it out, you decide It

Is Not There, you chill it freeze it drip it all

around the house is what I’m doing, a messy

sort of process but somehow worth a poem,

Please come to the sideyard reading on Friday

at 7pm! and see for yourself the evidence! of

me attempting everything at once, of trying

to get everything right the first time around,

the proof is on my lip, it’s a mountainrange

of dripping sickness but wait it’s not so bad

in profile in fact it kind of makes me feel

voluptuous and I hey, NEVER feel voluptuous

On erotic power (Lorde).

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Audre Lorde, from her essay ” The Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power”:

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

It feels very good to read something that reverberates so strongly in my bones.

Happy poem in your pocket day (April 14)!

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Today I celebrated a holiday that no one ever seems to believe is actually real. The night before this day each year, I stay up as late as I need to writing poems on stationery emblazoned with my name in purple script (thank you, Jeannie Scheinin). Check out these pocket-sized poem PDFs, if you want one of your own.

If I saw you today, I gave you a poem. Here’s the poem I gave to Misha today.

Letter Poem #3

The night is quiet
as a kettle drum
the bullfrog basses
tuning up. After
swimming, after sup-
per, a Tarzan movie,
dishes, a smoke. One
planet and I
wish. No need
of words. Just
you, or rather,
us. The stars tonight
in pale dark space
are clover flowers
in a lawn the expanding
universe in which
we love it is
our home. So many
galaxies and you my
bright particular,
my star, my sun, my
other self, my bet-
ter half, my one

-James Schuyler

Quotation & photograph (Patti Smith).

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Patti Smith, in Interview Magazine, on art and Robert Mapplethorpe:

But the artist has to struggle beneath that canopy, just as we struggled beneath a different canopy—though ours wasn’t as overwhelming. I think that true artists just have to keep doing their work, keep struggling, and keep hold of their vision. Because being a true artist is its own reward. If that’s what you are, then you are always that. You could be locked away in a prison with no way at all to communicate what’s in there, but you’re still an artist. The imagination and the ability to transform is what makes one an artist. So young artists who feel overwhelmed by everything have to almost downscale. They have to go all the way to this kernel and believe in themselves, and that’s what Robert gave me. He believed in that kernel I had, you know, with absolute unconditional belief. And if you believe it, you’ll have that your whole life, through the worst times.

And here’s my favorite picture of Patti Smith:

Read “Just Kids,” people. It is very, very good.

Of course I love this poem (Yusef Komunyakaa).

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Woman, I Got the Blues

I’m sporting a floppy existential sky-blue hat
when we meet in the Museum of Modern Art.

Later, we hold each other
with a gentleness that would crack open
ripe fruit. Then we slow-drag
to Little Willie John, we bebop
to Bird LPs, bloodfunk, lungs paraphrased
till we break each other’s fall.
For us there’s no reason the scorpion
has to become our faith healer.

Sweet Mercy, I worship
the curvature of your ass.
I build an altar in my head.
I kiss your breasts & forget my name.

Woman, I got the blues.
Our shadow on floral wallpaper
struggle with cold-blooded mythologies.
But there’s a stillness in us
like the tip of a magenta mountain.
Half-naked on the living-room floor;
the moon falling through the window
on you like a rapist.

Your breath’s a dewy flower stalk
leaning into sweaty air.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today was a poem.

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Today I saw a chicken on its first day of life. It was yellow and it hid beneath its mother mostly, and I loved it.

Today I saw my favorite bumper sticker. In bold letters, on a back of a truck, the only sticker:

I Love My Wife.

Today I saw Jason and Jenna and Frankie and Ryan and Dorothea and Claire and David and Jessica and Chris and Stephanie and Marshal and JP and Spencer and Jimothy and Stephen and Shanny and Sara and Anita and Scott.

Today a field of wildflowers overlooked by Tijuana saw this:

Today was good.