About Dang Time for a Spider's Appearance

A Spider Came To Me In The Night


     She tickled my neck, she tickled my sleep, in my loose cotton blanket I felt in my sleep that stroke on my neck, the soft feathered poke, the slim wavered frond, the hand of the spider—in my sleep, in dream, I knew her, and smiled. But waking I vaulted straight up on the bed, waking I switched on every light in the room. I shook my shirt, my hands whisked like brooms, I pummeled the blanket, slapped and pulled the sad sheets of the bed. Awake I searched for the intruding spider. And in the bed? Nothing. In the mess of my hair, the spare fur of my skin, nothing. I left the lights to blaze. In the morning, in the mirror, there was a bite on my neck. A red patch, a raspberry, a fresh birth mark.

I’ve been calling it a love bite.

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.

Moth Wing Postcard

Claim this cloak
of moth wings and damp
fallen leaves.

I’m the man
become suddenly old, the man
who shivers

and stands at the curb.
I have cast aside
all cloaks. Finger by finger

I have taken off
my gloves.
Tell me what

to ask
of the harsh realm
of winter.

I give my checkered wool cap to the wind.



(I wrote the first version of this a few years back.)

The Stanley J. Nippersten Award*

For the best words in the latest issue of Southern Poetry Review:

nothing   horizon   eyelids   expectancy   gravel

factor   knives   scuppernongs   unseen   steep   gorilla   skittles

moustache   cannonballing   bankrupted   repetition  

counterpane   granted   childhood blossoms   hoist   oxblood  

skyward   garden  pinwheels   dust   spoilsport   pitchy   dough  

portion   ladder   cottage   dunes   loneliness   scritches   exhalation  

black-eyed   gasoline   rescue   hidden   canary   flaring   untucked  

alfalfa   gnashed   thorn   stumped   mesmerist   bequeathed  

windward   marmalade   tasks   hazard   futile   review


*This Award is a one-time award with no monetary value whatsoever. It is awarded by Lives Of the Spiders.

One Day in October

A series of photos from the Chicago lakefront.

The last of the berries on the tree.

It could almost be the ocean.

The city always is so beautiful from a distance, and shadowed in blue.

Diane Wakoski has a poem, "When the Moon Explodes in Autumn as a Milkweed Pod."

Japanese Poetry on the Evening Train

The poems in the Japanese poetry anthology (see previous post) made me remember the late poems from Denise Levertov in Evening Train. The shorter poems here often have the succinct nature imagery and the "aha!" moments  (no, not the swedish band A-Ha) that the Japanese poetry favors.  Here, for example is "Idyll."

The neighbor's Black Labrador, his owners
out at work, unconscious anyone
is watching him, rises again and again
on hind legs to bend with his paws
the figtree's curving branches
and reach the sweet figs with his black lips.

What I Don't Know about Japanese Poetry Could Fill a Book

For instance, there's this work of classic Japanese literature that everyone who knows about these things knows, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a compilation a Japanese poems from the seventh through twelth centuries. I was given a contemporary translation (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, translated by Peter McMillian) from the very nice gent at the Columbia University Press booth at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers conference last weekend.  (one thing that is so pleasant about the book business is all the free books.) Since then I have opened the book time and again, just letting the page pick itself at random:


How the night deepens.
As lovers part
a white ribbon of frost
is stretched along
the Bridge of Magpie Wings
                                                  --Otomo No Yakamochi

and


I can only pluck at random
for I cannot tell apart
in all this whiteness--
white chrysantemums
from the first frost
                                                        --Minamoto No Muneyuki


Both the forward and afterward are valuable in giving the ignorant reader like myself some context and history. This book makes me want to write nothing but short and sad nature poems, containing the moon, and frost, and fallen leaves. I want to walk along the Bridge of Magpie Wings.