Evasion (A Portion Of The Transcripts)

What is it.  What is it with you and spiders? 

Why this
  obsession?

What is it about the ocean, the fish

like needles in the blanket of the ocean?

Why this evasion?

What is it about the mountain, the villages

  of snowdrops

in bloom

  on the mountain?

Beauty.  Rendering.  Love

in all
     its odd-bodied forms.
 
Go on...

I love the spiders because

who else will, and who

has ever loved me

  like I want to be loved.

 

Dear Wrought Iron Fence,

In troubled times I imagine turning you into

a weapon. Tonight in full

moonlight I decide what you might say

if you could speak,

a voice that sounds like Mary Tyler Moore when

she holds a spear.

In December ice is your secret

friend, I can tell

by the ferocious way each glass

knife finds

a way to embrace you.

 

(One of the 69 Letters poems)

The Woman Who Some­times Sits Invis­i­bly at the Foot of Your Bed

I've been so crazed and busy with work, and worried about parental health and such that I forgot to crow about this--but I have prose poems in the newest issue of New World Writing.  I submitted five prose bits, and editor Frederick Barthelme accepted all five, and lo, there was much rejoicing, much popping of corks and hooray the lad's still got it kind of exclamations among the voices in my head.  Expect more regular updates for a while, as it appears I'll be back to a normal 40 hour week throughout this holiday season, leaving me no excuses for not at least saying hello to the keyboard now and then, just to be friendly.

When the dish ran away with the spoon, while the knife and fork went about their daily routine and tried not to speak of such matters.

Dear Overcoat,

In you I become an old man,

a raven, someone’s

uncertain doom; in you I could carry

the Prince of November’s

one dozen pockets, home

to a pebble, a pen

and a knife,

you stretch me

taller,

you catch the wind,

you are a plowed field

for the first snow to fall,

you the fashion

I’d been

wanting

to hide myself within,

oh overcoat,

realm

of moths and mantle

of fog, the means

to mask my unsculpted

body—I found you in

a secondhand store,

I lost you

in a pile of coats

at a stranger’s

party, or did you melt

into some midnight

closet, where unexplained

breezes

or unseen hands

swing you

on a stern

and clanging

metal hanger?

Dear Family Chronicle of a Flock of Pigeons,

There are so few pigeon

heroes, or dastards,

and also, I think,

so few affairs, since

each and every character

mates

for life—the history

of pigeons

is a chronicle

without wars—sure, a falcon

grabs a sacrifice now

and again,

but on the whole this

is the tale of how you rose,

a chorus on

a January morning,

wings nearly

white against a bank

of darker cloud, and I

read that chapter,

thankful to see

the fog of my breath

while I waited

on the train, nearly

able in that moment

to love my lifetime the way

a flock of pigeons loves

to be silver in a flash

of sky, dark

then silver.

You May Run Into Gertrude Stein on the Bustled Streets of New York City

I was in NYC for BookExpo, the big annual bookselling conference.  Walking to a dinner that was going to be paid for by the publishers, and understand that if you are a bookseller at BEA pretty much all your food and drink will be paid by publishers, I ran across this lovely sculpture of Miss Gertrude Stein, looking both solid and also cloud-like, in a Buddha kind of way. It was such a pleasure to see her. Among all the flash, and promotions, and publicity machines grinding their tired gears, it's good to be reminded that part of of the industry is rooted in a love of words, and how they an be coaxed to play and be new.  The dinner, by the way, was lovely, and I like writer Lauren Myracle even more than I did before.

A SOUND

Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this.



DINING

Dining is west.


CELERY

Celery tastes taste where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.



(Three of my favorite sections of Tender Buttons, first published in 1914.)

Why I Subscribe to Poetry Daily

I get one email a week from the Poetry Daily website.  It give me news, some links to various contests and conferences, and a list of which poems will be appearing on what days.  The weekly e-newsletter ends with whatever poem had been featured on the site the year before.  I have to confess that I often don't read any of it.  I tend to look at my email at work, and if there are a lot of work-related notes lurking in the inbox, I feel the need to tidy up by deleting anything not vital.  Still I sometimes glance through it, quickly, to see if there's anything necessary or amazing. A while back I found this poem at the end of their missive. It stopped. me. in. my. tracks. At least enough to email it to myself with a note to share it. But then of course that note got buried under the deluge of daily emails. I just now resurrected it.

Problems with the Dictionary

Shouldn't the distance between impossible
and improbable be widened? Might miracle

deserve its own appendix: the ease with which night
becomes winter? There must be a word for it,

a term unique and apropos to star-pocked sky
and village roads blanketed by snow,

a good-natured—but stone drunk—schoolteacher
leaving a warm bar. It is improbable she will drive.

She does. North of town, wind uncovers ice-sheets.
A drift swarms ditch to ditch and the street

becomes impassible (see also impossible). She cannot
u-turn and begins walking home. She forgets

her headlights and roadside crops go miraculous:
snowed-in corn pastures awash in shadows

from her halogen bulbs. Another driver
would not see her. None come. The night is nothing more

than boot-prints in fresh powder, a wobbly path
tracking to back-patio where she frees the latch

and lets herself in. Her high-beams will burn
to sunrise. Her frozen steps will melt beyond definition.

The poet is Luke Johnson. This appeared in Southwest Review, and then at Poetry Daily. You can find out a lot more info on Luke's website, and by reading that I found out he has a blog, and a first book, which I am going to order for myself right now.

The Concise Guidebook Contains Everything

The Concise Guidebook Contains Everything

I feel, dear November, a thinness beginning.

Your sky today insists on the color of rooming house sheets.

Enough of polls—no one polls the sparrows on who should rule the world.

The white roses still in bloom on Summerdale Avenue, do they clarify the nature of November morning light?

The concise guidebook contains everything you need to identify seventeen varieties of cloud.

I was dwelling past midnight in the house of your silence.

Why wear the color of blood at all, unless you want to attract the attentions of every hungry wolf?

Sometimes the empty bus arrives just in time.

All my ducks are in a row, they just need to be nudged until they waddle.

We live every moment in the grand perhaps.

The wolves might howl but they cannot get in.

I’d like to state for the record that all the birds of the world at last belong to me.

Enough of elections—the trees did not vote on the closing of the day.

What About the Moon?

I looked up and saw the full moon tonight and remembered this poem from the archives:

Postcard Written at Montrose Harbor

If God exists then God loves the crows; they gather like soldiers

around the flooded portions of the municipal golf course; and if

there’s a God, then God loves the black water

and the worms therein; and God might love the sweet

high notes on the violin, and the man, his violin case

a mouth and hungry on the sidewalk—although

I only allow for a God who loves what I love,

God loves the night because I love night, and the crows,

and the glint of dark water, my God loves broken voices,

an old woman sings a childhood hymn while she fishes for carp

in Montrose Harbor—rats in the garbage, I can imagine

a God who loves rats, for their tunneling, their stewardship:

sticks, refuse, crusts, a fierce attachment to the scraps

of the world—One might love an ash tree’s yellow leaves,

how they pave the sidewalk just after a storm, one might love

birds, or blood, screams, or explosions. God

loves the darkness, because

what about the moon?

Notes from The Book of Light

Exciting news!  The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton is coming out this fall. Ever since I discovered her work in the early 1990s, Clifton has been a major deity in my poetry pantheon. Denise Levertov said of Clifton's work:

"Poems after poem exhilarates and inspires awe at the manifestation of such artistic and spiritual power."

Even more than Levertov, Clifton could be so compact and succinct.  I don't know of another American poet who uses five and dime words--the vocabulary of the everyday--to build such palaces of language.

thel

          was my first landscape

          red brown as the clay

          of her georgia.

          sweet attic of a woman,

          repository of old songs.

          there was such music in her;

          she would sit, shy as a wren

          humming alone and lonely

          amid broken promises,

          amid the sweet broken bodies

          of birds.


You can see Lucille Clifton read her work here.

 





 

Man oh Man that Marie Howe. I tell you

I don't know why it never occurred to me before to watch a video of her reading. She has long been 

one of my poetry goddesses.

Let’s Hope Every Bluegill in Lake St. Clair is Sated

Mayfly Postcard

The mayflies of your youth have not flown away, they cling dumbly

to screen doors, or dangle like suicides from stray lengths of spiderweb,

a thousand thousand bodies, turning into mummies

on the sidewalk in the sun, their wings

crackle

under the tread

of your sneakers,

the mayflies of your youth were also known as fishflies,

let’s hope every bluegill in Lake St. Clair is sated, let’s assume

the fishflies have their use, of course they have

their purpose:

to mate and so continue

the dynasty

of mayflies and also

to bring back to you the mayflies of your youth,

how they basked on the garage door, or gathered

like sports fans

around the porch light, you threw them into spider nets

under the porch, because you loved to see

a spider

struggle and delight

in such a bounty.  The fishflies,

of course, live an entire life

in one day.

They are completely

without stomachs

or the curse

of hungry

mouths

The Later Cornell

Look up at the sun risen golden over
greystone two-flats; rest your eyes

on two windows at the corner of Clark
and Berwyn, each with one word

in white letters in the middle of the glass:
"Ballroom" and "Tango." When the world

is dimmed by nostalgia and longing,
there you will find me, said Joseph Cornell.

When you feel the smooth clasp
of an impossible obsession--ballerina,

opera star, lanky boy in tattered blue jeans
who rides your morning train, there,

says Mr. Cornell, I will be, with a scrap
of velvet, a newspaper clipping

from before the war, a cardboard cutout
of green parakeet.

A Post About a Ghost

I just read this post by Sarah Sloat.  Her new chapbook is out from Dancing Girl Press.  I just ordered my copy, you should get one for yourself, as I don't share well. Her post referenced the blog Via Negativa, where I became enamored of the ghost poems published there.  Here's a ghost poem of mine.  I just read it the other night at a reading in a de-sanctified church, with a pale Jesus stretching his arms out behind me on the wall.

Visitation

In the concert hall in Evanston I met my dead sister,

I could sense

her bulk when I closed my eyes; she was silent

and invisible,

two years gone, shot in the head with a stolen

gun, killed

by her own determined hand, and in the dark theater

I reached over

and briefly touched that hand, now made of air, held

her cold hand, while on stage

Greg Laswell sang his songs, which repeat

and repeat

that all of us are broken.

Do our sad dead return? Sister oh my sister I want

to believe

but I do not believe—I listened

to the music,

I’d downed three glasses of mediocre

red wine

and fancied I sensed you, a presence. But

I write this

in daylight, away from music, away from booze and all its

suggestions; I’m riding

the train, dust swirls across an asphalt lot, dust,

some dry leaves, Kathleen

are you with me today? There’s a seat free

next to me

on my commute, oh dear dead and intangible sister,

in this moment

could I reach out and hold your lost hand? Might I myself

live beyond

the imperfections and needs of the body? But here’s

what I know:

I spoke

to kindly men in blue suits, I initialed the forms,

every portion

of the ruin of you given over

to the crematorium’s

devouring

glare.

Some say this world will end in fire.

Here Is Clean

We've had straightforward poetry, some visual art in the mix, and now Richard Fox presents his adopted poem in a sound format.  It's got a beat, you can dance to it.   And if you like it, you can download the thing for free, because Richard is a giver, and because Lives of the Spiders shies away from commerce.

The Death of Snow

I have a poem just published at elimae, a very cool literary journal. This is from a long series of 13 sentence poems, with the individual sentences collaged and collected and then altered from art journals and my own notebooks. Then the sentences are put into a room together to see if they have a conversation. It's a fiendish experiment.

Lots of other good stuff in this issue.  On a first reading I am particularly struck and pleased by this poem by Feng Chen, and this one by Jon Cone.

In other news, I am already looking forward to the death of snow.

An interview with me that one could read should one chose to do so

You can read an interview with me about a recent publication in the fine online (and print) journal Pank here. There's also a link to the poem itself. Many thanks to editor Tim Jones-Yelvington for asking for work and then accepting this piece.  It was wrenching and necessary to write.

And a Third Re-Working

I never ride the train back from Michigan without thinking of you and how you died—the lonely parking lot, your mouth, the gun, it’s something about repeating the journey, about the long trip back, after I had to identify your body in the morgue, a journey with hours for sorrow and regret: the golden light of dried grasses in the empty lots of Detroit, a kind of resurrection, the return of a city to wildlands, to meadow. At the top of a bare tree, a Cooper's hawk stares at military attention--a meal might yet be revealed. A bit later a dozen, two dozen deer bound across a field of last year's mown corn, flashing the arrows of their white tails, maidens fearful of the monstrosity on the tracks, but swans seen from the window of this train, the swans don't care, In inlets, in silvery pools at dusk, they are illegitimate sons of the nearly-full moon, come down to this world to sip from our waters, not the waters of forgetfulness, no these cold waters are opposite of that, and I remember a movie I saw in high school, maybe it was a movie I saw with you—the girl in the movie weeps as she says, I want to dance Juliet, I wanted to dance the role of the swan.

Dear Russia,

Frank O'Hara always did love
you best, and one of my
great loves
has been Frank O'Hara,
but why should we
share you? I like snow,
and I like the early darkness,
and I think I could come

to appreciate a skylight
half-open on the top floor
of a six story walk-up, dark
bread, hard cheese, and a bowl
of borscht for supper, and I'd
look up
and hope for a glimpse of a star, but
Russia frankly
your distances frighten me and Russia
I am not fond
of vodka, or tears, oh Russia
Frank O'Hara
is one of the icons, his eyes
smudged with candle smoke,
his laughter a gang of cossacks
on vacation, three sheets
a madras bedspread and an army
blanket to the wind, they attempt to cross
the half-frozen river.

Dear Night,

Thank you for the crows, the day
has borrowed them
for a very long time, and I

want you to know (as the crows certainly
know) that their calls to each other
from the ledges

of buildings and the wet branches
of sidestreet maples, the way they
rejoice at the opened envelope

of a deer by the side of the road,
their flight, whether silent
or harpied, all flurry and rasp,

all of these things should be
happening
at night, dear night, your

time, your place, and so dear night
I have arrived to broker
a deal: we will give you back

the crows.  We will include the sawbox
containing their voices, and slide everything
into the drawer of underbrush rustle,

a coyote's bark, an argument
in the beastly dark.  All we need
in exchange are your bonfires,

those midnight bursts of morning, and later
we can discuss the true
home range of the moon--despite

your best efforts it has been seen
in the firmament one late
July morning.