growing tender from everything and nothing

Just the weather that's here now. The sky is a sheet of solid white and Sharptop is obscured completely. It's snowing lightly. A little while ago it was a cold mix of sleet and snow and the flakes were bigger and more distinct. The hemlock branches are tossing and the birdfeeder is rocking; a little brown bird that I don't recognize sits up in the crook of a big bare oak just beyond the deck. It seems like it might be a nuthatch or a flycatcher. a shadow of a brighter bigger bird, like a finch. I should look it up. The wind has a winter voice that's cold and clear and fresh and wild. It wakes up my bare arms and neck and face when I walk out into it. The snow doesn't seem to be sticking but it's still falling in the gray and brown weave of trees down into and beyond the ravine.This sky feels like it's mine but I know it spreads its pale blanket above other heads and feet and places, blessing them too with the pearl of its color. And the bird is a golden-crowned kinglet.

Pine trees and strange rocks remain unknown to those who look for mind with mind.
--Shih-Wu

Fox Fire at the Changing Tree

The burning that must
have been coming from me-

these are lines I'm stealing
from someone else's poem, just after

I've resolved not to lie, not to steal
to live in my evergreen

integrity as long as I can manage it
I'm much like these foxes

gathered on a night whose stars
might be flakes of snow

They have their burning torches
to lift and bear

down the road, fully camouflaged
once they've put on the stolen forms

of pious pilgrims
The bare, spreading tree above them

is fit for owls to inhabit
when a savory hunger makes them take

deadly aim
on any small rustle in the dry leaves

That's their true nature
however haunting their melancholy cries

But the foxes-for the love of me
(and it's exactly that)

I can't see why
I shouldn't want to touch them, stroke them

I might just rub the ruddy silk
of their coats against my cheek

And often have, you tell me bluntly
That friction, however

slight, sufficient to make me
spit fire, gnash my teeth

and lunge for the soft parts of your body
lifting my chin moments after

to say hotly, I didn't mean to
I didn't sense it coming

As if I were the innocent one
blindsided, bloodied

--Margaret Gibson

(Ando Hiroshige, Fox Fire at the Changing Tree on New Year's Eve at Oji, woodblock print from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo)  

Yellow
blooms here
through
my
small evening

--lks 3/3/09

Throw me a bone. Hand me a prompt,
a set of words, a place to start,
a seedbed or maybe just a seed.
Tag me It and push me out
from this place of wide and empty margins.
I don't need much. Just a few syllables,
a sentence fragment even,
like this one.
Remind me that the weather has a skin,
a voice,
and some days wings and talons
for holding on to things it needs.
Hand me a pencil you found in the hallway.
I won't mind the toothmarks
or the empty pocket of air
where its eraser used to be.
I don't plan on making those kinds of judgments
anyway. Put on some music,
something that sounds like something that it isn't:
a string that hums like a friendly old machine
or a reed that burbles like boiling water. I won't need
anything else. No slices of yellow apple to lick clean of peanut butter,
no salty bluecorn chips to crunch on late at night.
No black tea to befriend until it's strong and cold,
like the big sky we saw that night at the orchard,
with a taste like sugar licked from iron.
Just this:
a shove,
a nudge,
a chord,
a frame,
a word.
A smallness,
waiting to grow layers,
to disturb, sing,
fracture, collide,
transform and humble.
You won't get back what you give me
but something else instead:
a joke where solemnity once lived,
a pile of fragrant sawdust
where there used to be a two-by-four,
an empty begging bowl
that sings beneath your fingers on its rim,
ashiver with the blessing
of what it doesn't hold.

lks 3/6/09

Truth is always Paradoxical.

--H.D. Thoreau

 

I don't know what the weather is going to do. Big winds share the twilight with small snow. Over in the next county, there's a funnel cloud, but it's moving slow, and it's not very big,  only a furrow of fast air, just enough spin to show up on someone's radar. A blip of scarlet purling across an expanse of dark green. It seems somehow pitiful, like a feral animal searching for food in an unfamiliar place. I can feel it trying to show us the bluster of spring's intermittent thunderheads in defiance of the bitterness of winter. If it doesn't get much bigger, I wouldn't mind having it around, a tumble of fast air playing by itself down in the woods. I could feed it errant tree limbs that other winds would blow down and surplus pine cones that I don't feel like using for firewood or decoration for my lonely hearth. When spring gives way to summer this cloud will move along, or maybe it will just stop spinning, winding down in a gentle way that won't take down any trees or splinter any houses into piles of hurt and toothy wooden beams.  In its place would be a tousled spiral of forest floor, earth made messy with weather but not so much that I couldn't plant something there if I wanted to. Maybe trillium, or moonvine, or something wild and thorny that I haven't found the name for yet.  I'll know that seed when I see it: no need to search. These things have a way of finding me.

a thin trail of clouds
goes on
for a whole county
rushing the ghosts
to their carnival

--Zack Rogow

I found this on a website called American Tanka. I've been reading quite a bit of tanka lately. These poems are similar to haiku but structured somewhat differently. They apparently have 31 syllables instead of 17, for instance. Jane Hirshfield has collected and translated a wonderful collection of these by two Japanese women from the Heian era, Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. The poems in this collection are primarily love poems.

http://www.americantanka.com/

These are from Maurice Manning's book of poetry, Bucolics. I heard him read at Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia, not far from here, several years ago.. He's a fine poet and one of my favorites.


V
You're the hay maker Boss
you light the candle in the sun
dip the water in the rain
O for the whole big picture
you're the painter Boss I know
it's you the biggest Boss of all
you must have a sack full of wind
somewhere a barrel full of salt
a recipe for stone things like that
you keep them close to your chest
you keep your secrets Boss
you flash a yellow eye then crow
away you're like a rooster Boss
sometimes you're like a fox

XVI
The light inside the shadow how
it hovers there it's like an owl song
a quiver hoot it shakes a little Boss
I think your face is in that flicker
is your neck a candlewick your face
a flame on top you're always almost
going out so dim sometimes bright Boss
not for the life of me can I put
my finger on it the way it comes
it also goes which is quickly Boss
if you would just sit still I'd carve
your face into a stick then I
could see you Boss a hundred times
a day we could listen for the owl
if he let out a hoot I'd turn
your wooden ear into the wind

XVIII
There was a fox Boss in my dream
last night a fox the color of
the field before it wakes to green
I didn't know there was a fox
about until it moved until
it moved like it was sliding Boss
it slid across a furrow then
I barely saw it sliding to
the woods sliding to the river Boss
I never know what's going to cross
my path O never what will make
me ask another question that's
a question in itself I'd like
to know why everything is stuck
in the middle Boss of something else
why the fox was stuck inside my dream
though it was making for the river
do you make nothing Boss but questions
did you set that fox inside my head
did you lay that field behind my eyes

--Maurice Manning, from Bucolics

He's my current musical preoccupation.

Lately I've been playing around with this haiku magnetic poetry kit I got recently. I've been putting the words together kind of instinctively, not terribly quickly but not without a lot of deep thought. it's calming in the way putting together a jigsaw puzzle can be and it seems to help me feel clearer, more focused, gentler.
This is one I came up with recently. I think it was the other night when the moon was full. That night was so sweet and warm here, and I went outside and sat on the weathered lonely gray wooden deck and put my bare feet up on the glass tabletop and listened to wind and trees shifting around together. nothing else on the move.

Purple moon
looks full
above a trickle
of winter road
no journey

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too,
said Rilke one day to no one in particular
as good poets everywhere address the six directions.
If you can't bow, you're dead meat. You'll break
like uncooked spaghetti. Listen to the gods.
They're shouting in your ear every second.

--Jim Harrison

I acknowledge and work with the numbers that show me how to eat and travel and make my necessary way in the world at large, but the numbers that I live with show me things much larger than they are. I mark a kind of worldly time with them too but not as much as I used to. The intimacy they carry isn't about that marking off of shadow and sun. I can think of these numbers as sentient at times, almost, in the way that I can anthropomorphize ideograms and the moods I impose upon them or signatures and the things they show me about what they want. And the numbers I know always carry tags of luck and caution, unseen subvocalized scripts that show me runic messages from cultures that knew better than to quantify by habit and make that habit a mandate. My numbers have colors that remind me of when they came to mean what they do. The number four is the shade of Arizona desert, a sort of cimarron with a heart of nutty brown. Twelve is scarlet with black and white edges, like the Gothic lettering I know so well, reflecting flourescence behind framed glass in church basements. Three is the color of pewter, a trinitarian metal that is humbler than silver. Nine is viridian, a spread of mossy summer that harbors a song I overheard on a hiking trail near Brasstown. And eight is a color I don't know yet, a color that wants to be born into hue and tint but plays games with what it might represent. It's square but loopy and forms a field of linked lines like bars that might fall from an old corral with the push of a big wind. and it has a heart where circles come together and then away again, doubling up upon the sunny flush of four. Telling just enough of its story to make me hungry but not a syllable more. I have other numbers too, but these are the ones that stay with me. They don't hold size and richness the way that grainy paper does, and their value doesn't sag and sway when the math of oil and futures goes awry. Their stories morph and play like dreams with curves to sleep in, and the things they have to show me can't be traded, built, lost, or hoarded. You have to look behind the weight they carry to see this other luck, a way of measuring that stands outside of time and money to let you in on the mythos of what came before and is on the way, as well as what's right in front of you.

I found this prose poem in my book The Party Train: a Collection of North American Prose Poetry.

Once, fire was used to put out water. When a house was drowning, buckets of fire were heaped on water till the house was dry. Two-thirds of the earth, scholars say, was once covered with fire; when the sun went down in the sea, it came up even hotter; when sailors saw all that fire, they thought dragons lived on the other sides of the seas, and never went there. The people on the other side thought the same, and stayed home boiling potatoes in kettles of fire by turning on the water on the stove. With only water to heat their kettles of fire, a lot of houses drowned, a lot of fire that couldn't be spared was used in bailing out homes. The seas shrank enough so people could cross them, and when they didn't find dragons, the seas went away altogether. Now we have to gather up every lightning bolt that breaks for enough fire to water our gardens.

--Duane Ackerman

Song

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in the imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--

Looks out of the heart
burning with purity--
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in arms
of love.

Not rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love--
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
cannot be bitter,
cannot deny.
Cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye--

Yes. Yes
that's what
I wanted
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

--Allen Ginsberg

Sky ghosts
speak to
your deep red
mornings

remember
the velvet work
of present voice



lks 3/19.09

(This is another from the haiku magnetic poetry kit I got recently.)

This is something I just kind of put together quickly, just now. Very impromptu. A line from Dave Bonta's wonderful microblog Morning Porch got me thinking along these lines, and here's what came along. Here's the link to Morning Porch, as well:

http://www.morningporch.com/

Is your moment small enough? Can it shrink down to a place where pine needles carry the sacristy of their thinness along the brown earth like evergreen arrows? Can it cradle the running legs of skinks from cats, their blueness striped on shiny black? Can it forge a hidey hole for crickets, plump and lucky? (and for whom is that luck intended? the one whose linoleum cools those tiny cricket feet, who totes it out to safety?or does it live, like silent falling trees in lonely forests, along its own small plane of fate and fortune?) Or is it like a tiny burbling engine, setting loose a change in heat and daylight?
Can this small moment make you happy? And is it small enough to change your heart, to take up home in places where you bleed and breathe and fade? to show you how to lie against the scrappy breathing dirt where these shifts happen, and take inside its little seeds and wings? If you shrink your sight down small enough you'll see the changing scales of green anoles as brown earth turns them sandy. If you let it steal your size, your moment's heart can carry you in this same place forever, an empty warmskinned spirit in the rune of present vision. Absolved of any yearning, any reach.

To continue the ghost theme. I wish I could find a decent live version of this, but the ones I've found have people talking all the way through the song. it's a great song, though, from the Patti Smith Group's Easter album.

Green sun
Full of breath
Above a small
Trickle of field

Hear skin's
Almost
Bloom

lks 3/23/09

The twitch begins behind my left eye,
The dusty one, lazy in long hours,
The one once patched and hidden,
then tweaked and tendered
Into working.
Prepared to wait it out,
I gather myself
Into silence and shadow,
Filling up with each throb's angry firing
And wanting a deeper,
Less savage dark.
Finally,
I let myself feel color
And surrender to those bending furls
of cobalt blue and purple,
abiding with the discord
of this world's restless clutter,
my weakness stilling
the hurried rush of blur and trailer
into a settled, milder space
of gritty safety.
Sleep dispels the last of all that prism,
Subduing it below a falling wooden dock
where no boats get to tether.
It settles on its knees
In fishy mud,
Browning away
From that shuddering muscle
Of weakened sight.
Released,
I dream of thick glass,
Pirates,
And the hand puppet I left under the bed
When I was five,
The gray tabby kitten
with the rip in her left ear,
The one who heard
(and saw)
my stories.

lks June 2007, March 1009

A recent discovery.

Italy, October

To be here is to be where fruit you have never seen before grows on equally strange trees. The fruit is not, as you first thought, oranges, though it is orange in color. Nor is it a tangerine or some strangely colored apple. Then you see it in the market, each soft fruit cradled in its own nest of woven plastic. Cachi, the sign reads, 200 lire. You hold out a palm of silver, and let the cashier pick warm coins from your waiting hand. Then she wraps your cachi in white paper like a present, which you carry to your hotel, hoping cachi can be safely eaten raw.

In your room, you slice it open, lift the cachi to your lips and find it sweeter than any fruit you've ever tasted, half watermelon, half pressed roses. Only when you've finished, do you think to look up cachi in your pocket Italian dictionary which says it means persimmon. And you remember as a child picking a persimmon at a friend's house, then leaving it all afternoon in your mother's stand-up freezer. Still, when you bit the unripe fruit, your mouth drew up in a pucker from which you-silent person that you are-never did recover. Until today in Sacile when you took a bite of strange fruit.

Now, who knows?                                            You may speak in tongues.

--Jesse Lee Kercheval, from Cinema Muto

The seeds of all the seasons come together in a soup of something I could once taste but hold in my mouth now like water.  Everything is here: sweetness cupped in kernels that distill its flavors down like some old mill might do. White corn gone to tassel late in summer, hot from fire and swimming in some kind of honeyed brine that tastes like weathered wood and nothing I can name, a leftover solstice mix fierce and slow with underpinnings of rot and adventure, a taste of singe and lakewater, of a wet moon and its spell.  It carries too the haunted pucker of October, the sour whimsy of collapsing things in ruined little gardens. A mystery, sliced in half when I wasn't looking and offered with one hand out and one hand hidden. Pepper plays with it well and coaxes it into almost giving itself up. When I try to say its name, it almost leaves.  It tickles like I think the folds of snowflakes' edges would, a tumble of melting angles in my throat.  Most times too it trails a residue of spice---shyer than nutmeg and wilder than something like paprika. It has its own wild way of warming into me, a lonesome heat gentled by the ways I get to know it and by the slick and chilly film of spring, of cool things breathing water as they birth. It wants to be raw but simmers. I don't season it but wait for it to tell me what it needs. Sometimes it's cream to cradle it and make it younger, to soften up its brazen twiggy heart. It might be a sprig of rosemary, nipped from the bush by the train tracks, or the green of wild young onion, raised up from feral earth and brought inside. Other days I've sensed a flush of rosehip, much too sweet for its own good, a blast of death inside it like the blasphemous hymn I found myself humming at dusk in April as a child. There's nothing written down for me to go by. I play and add and mix and stir but nothing lets me name it, and then there I am again with that drink of simple water, limned by none of the grit and gruel I'm used to getting. I cradle it against my tongue and then it's mine: an emptying fix for all my angry fullness, a hex of chaliced shadow warm as earth, my only season now its gulp of dwindling sun and ragged twilight wind.

l.s. 2008--2009

Before Saying Any of the Great Words

We already know: first we must agree
on which they are; but let us acknowledge that they exist:

they resound in all their weight and gravity
down Nevsky Prospekt, in the muttering of Raskolnikov,

and Cortázar mocks them at every opportunity,
lightens them up, musses their hair, reconciles them

with the rest of the vocabulary so that they may rub benignly
against one another and liberty won't do too much harm

with its tonnage of Greek marble
and its whiff of existentialism and its undeniable tragic greatness

to janitor, tenedor, bibelot-although the greatness of this last one
is suspect, for which we have Mallarmé to blame,

there are also the short and decisive words: yes, no, now, never,
turbid love, clean death, rattled poetry,

other words that are like art for art's sake: sandalwood,
for instance, and words like deoxyribonucleic, telescopic

and possessing an undeniably scientific elegance, a diffuse,
intense, and labyrinthine character, all at once, linked

to that other word, life, and of course there are the combinations,

your mouth, this letter, dozens of verbal objects
that are only important for inexplicable reasons,

spoken at night or during the day, said

or held in silence, in the velvety net
of memory, in the transparent and energetic fortress

of forgetting, that body or fabric from which
are also made the great words, time, so many things.

--David Huerta

Antes de decir cualquiera de las grandes palabras

Ya se sabe: primero tenemos que ponernos de acuerdo
en cuáles son, pero convengamos en que existen:

se escuchan con todo su peso y gravedad
por la Perspectiva Nievski, en el murmullo de Raskolnikov,

y Cortázar se burla de ellas a cada rato
y las aligera, las despeina, las reconcilia

con el resto del vocabulario, para que puedan rozarse
sin daño con las demás y libertad no lastime demasiado

con su tonelaje de mármol griego
y su tufillo existencialista y su indudable grandeza trágica

a tenedor, a janitor, a bibelot-aunque esta última
es sospechosa de grandeza por culpa de Mallarmé,

también están las cortas y decisivas, sí, no, ahora, nunca,
la turbia amor, la limpia muerte, la zarandeada poesía,

otras que son como el arte por el arte, sándalo,
por ejemplo, y algunas como desoxirribonucleico, telescópica

y de indudable elegancia científica, de una manera vaga
e intensa y laberíntica, al mismo tiempo, conectada

con esa otra, vida, y estan las combinaciones, claro,

tu boca, esta carta, docenas de objetos verbales
que solo tienen importancia por razones inexplicables,

pronunciadas en la noche o el día, dichas

o guardadas en el silencio, en la red aterciopelada
de la memoria, en la fortaleza transparente y enérgica

del olvido, ese cuerpo o tejido del que también
están hechas las grandes palabras, el tiempo, tantas cosas.

-David Huerta

taken from Poetry Daily and from Huerta's book Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Collected Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press

Leave no morning
skin here
Walk
full of rust
and road
to an early field
wild
and almost green

lks 3/29/09

(This is another from the haiku magnets series, where I pull a bunch of them out of a cup and put something together from that handful.)

Preoccupation with what is possible in the nonexistent future.