If Lost, Return

A new season, maybe a new dailiness for poems...

2011-09-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

It's cool and rainy today. Students are streaming onto campus, moving in... Here's a poem from a notebook I've been carrying since mid-May. Draft #15 I think.

Double Negative

Until then everything we knew about it
had to do with rabbits;
bunnies to be precise---
Our father's hands plunged
into a blue pail filled with water
as he crouched in the space
beneath the porch.
We hid to watch.
Curious.
She was busy with a baby
while he dispatched the newborns
orphaned by our cat.

So much of this is human-
made, the cat domesticated
but not, the man a few years out
of the caves of Tarawa, silent,
now our father taking those little lives
because death comes one way
or another; sooner or slower;
harder.

Her suicide became the cat;
the shock of her dead body water
in a pail. So he turned his back to us and began
his own drowning while we watched,
knowing it would not not happen.

okay, so I'm a failure at regular blogging, but....AND outlawing language

2011-06-04T18:02:00.000-07:00

I'm back here to brag a little tiny bit. And to post the link for The Guidebook, which is where my poem "Homesick" has been published, and where they will also publish my first poem translation of an Italian poet. So stay tuned.

I'm also going to work on getting daily poems going for the summer. Stay tuned for that too, those faithful followers of mine who haven't heard from me in more than half a year deserve something for not abandoning me altogether.

And here's something to think about,

I'm editing a book on Basque Politics and have just finished the section on all of the ways that the Spanish and French states have tried to extinguish Basque language and culture for good. Although many were sweeping acts of legislative tyranny, one in particular has grabbed my attention. On September 25, 1936 the (Spanish) military commandant of Lizarra (a Basque city known to Basques as 'Estalla' (city of stars) put an ordinance in place that prohibited the use of the Basque word 'agur' which means 'good-bye'. I think, for that reason alone, if there was ever a word that deserved its own poem, it would have to be 'agur'. I'll begin to work on it!

First official translated poem coming soon!

2011-04-05T04:52:00.000-07:00

Hi All My Dear Followers,

I wanted to share that, finally, I have a poem I translated from Italian coming out in a journal. The journal is called The Guide Book. Look for it online and in print in April. The poem is titled "Canto 18". It will be published along with an original poem of mine "Sesso e l'Anima: Sex and the Soul".

I'll be posting more here in about 6 weeks, after the semester's dust settles.

Bless you all,
Miriam

Daily smaily, writing, but not here

2011-02-06T14:55:00.000-08:00

A none-poetry entry just to tell my 7-8 followers that I know I've been silent on these pages, but I AM getting a little bit out writing done and I HAVE intentions of getting back here soon.

Translating Italian several hours a week now, if not every day. I'm also putting some of my own poems into Italian to share with a friend.

Reading Cattafi in Italian and some in English.

Grading papers again, it pays the bills.

Stay tuned. And thanks for being out there.

M.

making borscht in September

2010-09-23T09:07:00.000-07:00

Shred the beets
simmer them in broth and onions
until tender

add white potatoes
green cabbage
a bouquet garni

of parsley and bay.
Bring to a boil
and simmer for an hour.

Walk the dog,
put away the towels.
Scrape the chopping boards clean.

Your mother's voice won't help this,
but sing; even though she's not listening
and doesn't know that you remember everything.

trying to get back

2010-09-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Belonging

I don't join well;
don't walk into the midst
with confidence. Once
I thought I'd make a habit
of prayer, but even God
seemed difficult to be with. Maybe
I'd be asked for what I didn't have.

When I do decide I'm in
I've usually missed the fine print,
been subject to the only caveat
about membership; tried
too hard; believed my own fear. Maybe
I belong somewhere else

and that's why my heart
is so easily strained.
It has no group memory;
no impulse to open or offer access. Maybe
that's why I end up staring
confusedly around the crowded room.

from scratch because I have an itch a 'splendid' revision

2010-08-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

From Scratch Because I Have An Itch

The day your sister disses you on Facebook
because you spelled your niece's name wrong
you want to split
the atom or a blister on your
heel, you're not supposed to, but

if you don't know something
you have a hard time getting it right,
you might even do it all wrong
though you mean well.
And you know

family is the torque
of the spinning pot
standing on its lone foot.
Who knows
how it does that?

Daily Poem - July 29, 2010

2010-07-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

Retrieve

My husband has shut me in my room.
This happens sometimes.

I am reading lines from Mary Daly's
Sin Big, 'Decode their mysteries...'.

He is making a narrow space
where our puppy can learn retrieving.

Only one person at a time can train a dog
but each can reinforce the good behavior.

It begins with a pair of socks
curled heel to toe into a sack

he tosses the length of two closed doors
toward a closed window.

The pup must wait for the command.
Fetch. The trainer must not delay the pup

too long or berate too harshly
or interest wanes, the retrieve will never happen.

When their session's done they go downstairs.
My door's still shut. So I open it.

Working on this one today- A poem from March to cool us off in blistering July heat!

2010-07-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

Residue

My neighbor is burning his brush
in spite of the wind, which means
all day the pale blue smoke of briar and leaf
will roll over the fields and Howland Pond,
nest in dropped bittersweet, the gooseberry
thickets and cat tails that narrow Shingle Brook
to a leaf-brown thread
that falls through the little woods,
finds the Eel River,
where there are no more eels
or elvers. When the smoke clears
the ash-black scab on the old hay will glitter,
bits of sky trapped in pools
of hose water will tremble.
For a little while
soft cinders will go on falling.

July 13, 2010 - no poem yet

2010-07-13T11:14:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading Eavan Boland's, essay The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma. Who ever you are, female or male, if you want to understand some things basic to the way women have written in the 20th century, go read this essay. But be sure to question her claims too. After all, she writes about having identified herself as a writer before she became a wife and mother, at which time, she was thrown from her own center as a writer, to the hinterlands, so to speak, of those other roles.
I can't identify with that experience, having come to my self-identity as a writer long into my careers as wife and mother, having had no such 'center' for the first half of my life. It was a hidden part of me, one I protected and did not invite scrutiny of, in case I was wrong, in case I was pathetically presumptuous of my own ambition.
In fact I don't know many women who started out as Boland did. That has much to do with the fact that I left college within a year of arriving and was a wife and mother by the time I was 19. I did not move in the collegial or academic spaces where a woman in the early 1970's might begin to believe such things about her self. The women writers I know, are, by and large, former closet writers whose love of the practice was for long years, subservient to other practices including spousehood, parenthood, the work of making a living, etc.
I also realize that much of that lack of self-confidence came directly from that fact that I did use the lens of the canon to evaluate the worthiness of my own themes and subject matter in my poems.
So I do agree with so much of what Boland has to say about 'ghosts' and her discussion of Adrienne Rich's idea that we are 'drenched in assumptions.' That is, that women, at least into the mid-late 20th century, took their cues of their poems' poetic worthiness from themes and approaches the male poets had established, ie: we assumed the value of a topic based on what had already been found valuable to the canon. AND I agree with Boland that we owe the ghosts of other women and our own pasts their due in poetry.

This part of her discussion reminded me of a line from a poem by Louise Bogan, which reads in part "women have no wilderness in them". Bogan was not fond of many women poets and their work it seems. Or maybe it was that she was, herself, too drenched in those assumptions to see any other way of writing.

Go read this essay. I'm sure it's online somewhere. I'm reading it in my copy of Poetry in Theory, an anthology of essays on poetic theory by a staggering range of writers, from poets, to philosophers, to literary critics.

I'll go write on paper now and maybe have something to post by the end of the day.

Daily poem June 25, 2010

2010-06-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

The Dance

It was winter in Vermont,
When Agha Shahid Ali,
poet and samba man extraordinaire
whirled me in tight circles in the Commons,
his grip so tight we became a single
centrifuge, our sweat and laughter mingling.
My breath forced out to my skirt hem, which flew
wider and wider, opening the space around us,
the rhythm of my heart wilder
than bounding doe's.
Snow howled on the porch, pressing for admission.
Revelers stamped in and out.
The ring of women around us,
human manadala, rosary,
crop circle, druid choir,
called out their ullulations
to the Kashmiri exile
poet and the middle-class visitor from Massachusetts---
both of whose eyes were shining,
open--- in that moment
we have no ancestors.
There is nothing else to believe.

Beginning of Summer, 3 days late, Here's hoping for daily poems again!

2010-06-24T09:52:00.000-07:00

Homesick

On the eleventh day
I weary of my beloved
Italian,
its noise in my head.
Like wind
it rattles the loose
shutters of English words
I use to cool my rooms.

My mind refuses to translate;
can't hear the conjugated verbs---
so often in the third person,
so often irregular.
I find myself listening only for
the familiar---
the direct address.
The you: present
form, ending almost every time
in i.

May 24, 2010 - revised July 13, 2010

2010-05-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

Faith

Churches, I suddenly think--- no,
hear the word
and see the cathedral at Trani

above the harbor in misting rain---
dun and taupe against the blue gray sky,
clouds stained lilac,

fissures of pink
where the setting sun tries to pierce them.
In Ostuni, the narrow fresco of Santa Elisabeth,

the small church, painted white
as all buildings must be in the centro storica.

When the allies bombed
the harbor there the people rushed
to pile sandbags against the saints

to shield them from percussions that shook down old walls
all over town.
They saved Santa Elisabeth, Santa Maria, Giuseppe,

at least in part---
When we stand before her we cannot fathom the fear
or faith of that time;

or our fathers high above
where the saints are invisible---
where longitude and latitude

joined
like hands in prayer.

Summer is almost here. I'm writing again.

2010-05-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

Song

Upstairs my husband
plays a riff in a minor key
which I once explained to my students is
the key of sorrows, but also
revery. Outside the sky is
mute in wooly nimbus beds
and an osprey rises in widening gyros
above the little pond where every Spring
the State dumps farmed trout
that are gone by summer.

All day we have stayed at home.
No business to take us further than the barn
or garden. The clouds have hidden all the contrails
of the planes bound for Europe---
Crows have fed on the robins' worms.

It isn't that we don't care to travel.
Sometime we simply cannot think
of where to go, or why to leave the room.
Still, all day I've been remembering
the Adriatic; mowed meadows
running down to that blue---
the tattered scatter
rug we found beside the road, its fringe
half torn, pattern obscured
by a thousand fallen olive blossoms.

Not a prayer rug; a prayer.
I carried it all the way back
here. Upstairs, song ended,
I hear the click of case clasps---
footfall down the stairs.

Finally, a daily poem! April 22, 2010

2010-04-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

Behind The City Gate

At White Horse Point,
from the water by kayak
I see two kids kissing
behind the City Gate,
a rock as high as a fortress wall
his jams sluicing the glassy flow,
her suit straps dropped and slack against her arms.

They are out of time;
out of the view from her parents'
window on the road above---
One body nut brown, one pink with sun,
both halved by water.

They don't care about the oceanic wilderness
beyond us; that blue, glittering vastness
so much smaller
than the span of his hands
on her hips. Her brown bangs
flutter when she leans
against the slick rock looking up, looking
only at the fringe of his pale lashes,
her brown fingers meet
across his narrow back.

Silver-sides flash; a burst
of white sparks in water. My boat rides
the single ripple that slides
between them then away
when she pulls him closer,
into rock-green shade.

2 rough daily poems for January 19th, 2010

2010-01-19T14:36:00.000-08:00

For Charlie In Winter

To wake beneath the wing of night
and know your heart
is to know that the dark has no intentions
and only you can distract yourself
from your fear of hearing
the mother-bird's awful shriek
as she lowers her deep crop, reaching---
Is to know you are never abandoned child.
You are never abandoned.

(Khidr [hidder] is the guide of souls in Sufi Mystic belief)

When Khidr Greets You

Because I can see you without seeing you
but I cannot recall your smell,

because I can bear the bell note of your laughter without hearing
but cannot call back your touch,

You have become a vision
in a song,

who once breathed persimmon sweetness upon my cheek,
and parted my hair with kisses.

It is not enough, this longing in my other senses.
And it is all.

A 2nd daily poem for January 8, 2010.

2010-01-09T07:12:00.001-08:00

Ran out of time last night. (Don't let Heidegger hear me way that!) Here's what I wrote yesterday.

Entering

not sunlight, just
(a word we hardly ever use in poems)
snow gleam lifted by lamps in windows
from the yard up to a lesser dark
above the fields where perhaps
(that word we often use in poems but not in life)
a half dozen geese flap into the open water
in Howland Pond I am in the kitchen rinsing
a glass my reflection on the glass
a part of that other scene of resettling
wings over my forehead below the red valance
then off my right breast collage
of field kitchen and the ersatz palms
that pretend to sway on the chintz
every day we say maybe
if
but
no every day
without meaning to we
yes

First daily poem of January 8, 2010

2010-01-08T13:20:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Rumi. Trying to learn how to walk in circles with happiness.

Thief

I say this isn’t me
but the rose gold wristlet
on the floor of the thrift
store says otherwise,
a little gold snake beneath
a dark and downy cloud— medium
women’s winter jackets.

Acedia: the frenzy of need
that believes in itself. Without
thinking I kneel, palm the bracelet.
All day, like a karmic bell it rings
in my pocket beside my hip.

The next day I go back
to who I was. It’s embarrassing,
the clerk’s straight stare. Is she trying
to comprehend my happiness?

I go home. No ringing.
I write this poem about a thief.

My first daily poem of 2010. Hoping to begin anew.

2010-01-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

The Fold

Waking up at dawn that woman
pulls on her jeans one leg at a time
and stands up.

She’s dreamed of cowhands,
the ones who sometimes turn out to be poets:
just as sweet and mean as anyone who sleeps
with one ear to the ground
and the other open to the stars.

She buttons her fly
one button at a time. Cinches
her belt. She knows she’s left
too much undone,
tack unmended, muck in the barn.
They’ll say she’s a lousy horsewoman.
But she’s not in it for perfection or even duty.
She has a horse that trusts her, that’s enough.
Someone else will have to clean up.

A friend asked her once why
she likes to ride alone in lonely spaces.
As if friendship should be enough.
As if the animal in her could not exist
out there
on its own.

She spins her spurs’ wheels
as she oils them, listening to
wing-it-wing-it-wingit—
their little jingle hits the rafters,
vibrates in the loose hay—

Wing-it-wing-it-wing-it—
If you let it
be it’s that simple.

From riding out she’s learned
there’s always a place that’s hidden in the landscape,
like the flesh on the under-curve of the breast
or the fissure between scapula and rib
when the lover’s back’s flexed in climax—
Some place where in Spring the quail covey
or the wild ponies crop at the sparse early grass.

When her father died she found it
behind his ear where his silken scalp followed
the velvet question mark of his old man’s hair.
She remembers how, as he lay in the coffin
she rode down that hidden valley once with her left thumb.
An anger and a tenderness of palomino proportions rearing inside her

and all that afternoon
the sheen of his hair oil on her skin like a talisman;
her father-wounded sisters
unaware of where she’d been.

This morning, satisfied
in her grief she faces the flatland.

Knowing it’s there somewhere,
she rides
toward the fold

revised poems begin today. Here's the first one. Let me hear from you.

2009-11-30T08:04:00.000-08:00

Keeping Love's Habit

We carry it around inside us
like an infant or a frail elder
whose feet cannot hold it upright.
We listen to its speech and speak back.

We say, there, there; even kiss its bald head,
as all the while we await the day when the child will walk;
the old woman’s face will melt into peace.

Imagine
how we will begin anew. We will
lift the emptiness
as if we know what we are doing.

Daily poem - october 21, 2009 A Revision...

2009-10-21T05:45:00.000-07:00

The Artist’s Means

She was my mother.
That meant she thought she understood.

It was a long time ago and she is dead.
And her life’s become

As luminous as hydrangeas in October.
Blue or blushing— chromed with early frost,

And ready for the weight of snow,
closer to the earth.

A lash slipped beneath my eyelid.
Ruff of torn grass

the wild turkeys scratch
for grubs—

Perhaps a princess seam
where the shoulder meets the sleeve.

a shout out to Chris the Knitter!

2009-10-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

Hi Chris!

I'm back, sort of... Daily Poem, October 14, 2009

2009-10-14T05:36:00.000-07:00

I've missed posting poems daily, am trying to get back into that groove. To get me going, here's one I drafted in Rome in June 2008. It's a hybrid, part poem, part flash fiction, part something else.

Dime Novel: The Pantheon

I know their hurt.
Each one its own kind.
Being the accused.
The accuser.
Wronged.
Wrong.

She's almost crying.
Self defense exhausts her.
She's alone. He's tired
of all that.

I never said YOU,
she insists, I SAID 'WE.'
But he knows
what he heard.

Here's today's Daily Poem - September 7, 2009

2009-09-07T14:05:00.000-07:00

Thinking We Know What We Want, We Reach For It

I’m thinking again, of the grackles we watched last night.
Not thinking— I’m seeing them again and hearing
as they rise en masse from the crown of an old oak,
where, until that moment we had not realized they were roosting.
Hear their twittering, their anxious chatter as they take flight
and turn in unison from the east and loop west, that spilled cackle as they rise
and fall by some shared intuition on the air above the stubble hay.
See one small flock break from the rest and fold back on itself,
east, but further south, like a wave retreating at a slant over its own foam.
I’m hearing the sound of perhaps 500 wings flutter as they plunge
forward, a sound like the swish of silks over taffetas as Odette hurries
down the swept gravel path toward some assignation. She is wearing grackle-
black. See how it shimmers with flecks of autumn leaf. She is rushing because
Swann has been sulking lately and she must, she simply must get away.
And because dusk is falling. Because the air is cooling and the red sun rests
in a net of chestnut limbs. Because she is always hurtling, like a bird,
navigating some unseen path, rushing toward what might fill the void.
See the birds return in twos or threes from the neighbor’s lindens.
How they disappear into their silence.

A stanza from Wallace Stevens I want to share

2009-09-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

I'll post my poem later today, but I couldn't resist this stanza from Wallace Stevens. It's from his poem, "Variations on a Summer Day" and it captures, I think, the essence of this gorgeous September day in Plymouth, MA., and what it will be like this evening under the Corn Moon.

XI

Now, the timothy at Pemaquid
That rolled in heat is silver-tipped
And cold. The moon follows the sun like a French
Translation of a Russian poet.

---

Daily poem, September 6, 2009

2009-09-06T14:34:00.000-07:00

This is short and rough. I decided it needs to float in the ether for a while so I can see if it has legs.

What He Said

The son is in the father.
They both lie down in their beds at night
and wake in the morning from dreams of weeping.
They cannot remember the meaning of their tears.
I remember dreams in which I scream, but
rarely remember fear.

It is more likely I have made the sound of falling in a river
or heard a woman posing as a shutter, closing off the moon.
More likely I felt her hand upon my cheek
and lost my reason and tried to heave the stone of want
out of the way to show the light within me.
More likely I have forgotten what screaming means.

A revision of a daily poem - sept. 4, 2009

2009-09-04T05:28:00.000-07:00

I'm having trouble getting started on new things, but happy to be revising. Here's one from August 25, much more refined I think.

On Being The Muse

That day I am attending to the olive groves
just before sunrise— to their image from the terrace at Monte Zuzzu.
The oldest trees toss their heavy crowns on the light wind,
and all through the groves is kiss-kiss-kiss as olive leaves
play each other. The pale, almost platinum sky is about to assume its rosy veil.
All of it part of the record of my existence.
I am alone on the patio in my white nightgown
staring over the groves to the Adriatic
which the sun has not yet shaped into a cymbal
that will ring with the shrieks of gulls following the freighters—
I am inventing that sound;
being so far inland, being so far up the terraces,
being half asleep and in thrall to the olives’ music,
being the only thing
awake, a gleam on water,
the note of a song not yet heard.

September 1 2009 is not a poem

2009-09-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

I'll spare you the details of my day. Suffice to say, there will be no daily poem, but I have a little aphorism for you, inspired by the Belgium train station singers.

It's hard to say how to solve a problem like Maria.
Maybe you don't have to---
maybe that's all you really need to know.

cheers.

Daily poem, August 31, 2009 - a revision

2009-08-31T15:13:00.000-07:00

My friend Anne suggested some things about my last poem that made a lot of sense. So, I've been messing around with "For the Commercial Trade", and thought I'd post the newest version, which may not be the last, but which, I think, is tighter and more focused than the original. You should know, it's not the exact coherence that Anne suggested might be possible. Instead, it's what happened next.

Let me know.

Pictures For The Trade

One has an oddly shaped cabbage,
like a pinecone from a spruce, long and green,
or a slender version of the Cone of Welcome
painted on pottery for the commercial trade in Italy.

One has a headache
like a spruce, dark and green,
or a harder version of the fist that found her lip
and split it the August she was twenty-three.

One has buttons on a shirt, white and neat,
like a line of little stones a child might string along a storm-washed beach,
or the pretty needle teeth a tabby kitten shows you
when she yawns widely before curling up to sleep.

In the picture of my mother at seventeen, her eyes are smiling. She is slender. Green,
like she was just as safe and happy as she seemed,
or like the time between when she’d forgotten
the last loved one who’d left her and didn't know yet the one about to leave.

Daily poem, August 29, 2009

2009-08-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

Here's today's poem. I'll try to get more cheerful, I promise.

For the Commercial Trade

I have an oddly shaped cabbage in my fridge,
like a pine cone from a spruce, long and green,
or a slender version of the Pineapple of Welcome
painted on pottery for commercial trade in Portugal and Italy.

I have a headache
like a pine cone from a spruce tree, long and green,
or a slender version of the fist that found my lip
and split it, the August I was twenty-three.

I have buttons on my shirt, white and neat,
like a line of little stones a child might string along a storm-washed beach,
or the pretty needle teeth a tabby kitten shows you
when she yawns widely before curling up to sleep.

I have a picture of my mother, seventeen, her eyes smiling, slender, green,
like she was just as happy as she seemed,
or like the time between when she’d forgotten
the last loved one who left her and didn't know the one about to leave.

Daily poem, August 28 - 2009

2009-08-28T19:21:00.000-07:00

I didn't know I was writing this for this reason, but it all seems to have happened anyway.

Write a poem about a dog
(for Edward M. Kennedy)

That’s all the instruction I was given, walking down the stairs
as the rain from Hurricane Danny wandered up the coast.
But I knew it couldn’t include the anticipatory words
that drag the reader on a leash to the dog grave
or the treacley memories of tennis balls never retrieved.
It had to be a poem about a breed hardly anybody knows,
maybe a Vizla or a Rhodesian Ridgeback,
sleeping in the deep shade on a lawn in Marshfield
on a street of antique Capes where there’s a yard sale to pay the taxes,
and everything arrayed out on the grass takes on the momentary promise
of a previous century. The patina and the verdigris and the tarnish, all authentic.
The lawn suggests a mantelpiece inside
where white and orange Staffordshire ceramic dogs flank pewter candlesticks,
and wing chairs’ plumped cushions receive the cats,
curled into their own oblivion, and there are paintings of the sea.
In other words, the Ridgeback doesn’t belong, but
he doesn’t know that his ancestral world has no Butternuts
and does not serve the kind of Mexican beer that holds a hint of chocolate
which his master pops as the afternoon heat deepens and sales dwindle.

I keep stopping the poem to look at faces on the television
as mourners speak of speak faith, and speak
of grief and comfort. A woman says about her son, lost at sea, ”He said,
“They’ll find him.”” And the commentator says, “They did.”
She ends her story with a sob, saying,
“I know we’ll meet in Paradise.”
And I think of people’s faith in Heaven—
their belief that someplace else waits for us.
How that changes the way we see the dog in the shade,
how we might overlook the moment, might not see the paradise
of the Ridgeback, so far from his homeland,
how he manages to be at home in the world of chocolate beers and Staffordshire,
How we forget the giving up of all that is not needed.

Daily Poem, August 26, 2009

2009-08-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

This is a poem I've been writing for more than 10 years. Somehow, today seemed like a good time to try it again. I'm messing around with commas and mdashes in this one too, so if you have comment on the punctuation please let me know.

The Space In Between

I tell myself the crows
broke the bird bath
or the gale or snow—
a terracotta stream of debris
glazed with cream and verdigris
flows now
between wands of black astilbe
withered Virginia bluebells
a cracked calligraphy
of vinca. It was not neglect.
Sometimes we forget
(we sip coffee eat elephant wings)
that we ever drove each other crazy with our grief—
and whose turn it is to give. Unlike our mothers
who were born wanting and died of it
the birds seem not to miss the font,
if I scatter seed they come.
If the bowl is gone
there are other sources of water,
they don’t care much,
they’ll still lard the trees all winter.
When the ground goes soft
I’ll haul out the broken pedestal.

Daily poems for August 25, 2009

2009-08-25T05:17:00.001-07:00

I promise I'm working on getting back to DAILY poems. Send me lots of energy and light, etc.

I want to start with an aphorism that arrived in the middle of last night.

Boredom may be an invitation to joy
if only we learn to attend it.

And here's a daily poem I never posted from last week.

The Most Solid Things

We paddle out to see great blue herons
wading but there are none today.
Swells build as we near the open water
so we dig in, turn back into the cove

The beaches deep in shadows
the sandbars pale in clear, green water, the more distant
water a baize blue—
The anchored boats turn eastward.

One night in Monte Zuzzu, as the rare rain pattered
I lay on the floor of the little living room
watching the ceiling light— its wrought iron shade,
the grillwork shadow that held the walls in its delicate net of darkness.

I remember that I wanted it— the rain and light and shadow,
the smell of dry soil barely dampened, the tiles beneath my spine
and hips and head the most solid things. I knew
my heart had been broken. I knew it would mend.

Daily Poems - Wednesday - July 19 2009

2009-08-20T18:21:00.001-07:00

One of these maybe from July 18. I lost track for a while. The heat has been enormous here in New England, coupled with humidity that stultifies us all.

Perpetual Adoration

She divides the daylight hours
by six— two for each of us,
and sends the first one off
to pray before the Holy Eucharist
in its gaudy golden locket.

Rosaries, novenas, little litanies of saints,
Pray for us oh Lord—
Votive candles in red cups,
dust motes dancing in the middle distance.

We practice sitting still with no one
but the flat sad eyes of Jesus staring
from His crucifix. At home the hill
of sheets and diapers is transfigured
into swaths of cloth that float on pins.

Stupid with the August heat we
wait our turn to enter the cool dark.
Outside the church whoever’s leaving
is met by summer light as harsh as judgment.

Tick of the mantle clock.
Squeak of the hinge on the cabinet beneath the sink.
At home the day ended, too much left undone;
him reaching; her making silence. To sleep
she kisses her beads,

Oh Lord hear our prayer.

And here's another from the same day.

On Being The Muse

That day I am writing about the look of the olive groves
just before sunrise. In a picture I took from the terrace at Monte Zuzzu
the oldest trees toss their heavy crowns on the light wind,
and all through the groves, kiss-kiss-kiss, olive leaves
play each other. The pale, almost platinum sky is about to assume its rosy veil.
All of it part of the record of my existence.
I am alone on the patio in my white nightgown
staring over the groves at the Adriatic
which the sun has not yet shaped into a cymbal
that will ring with the shrieks of gulls following the freighters—
I only imagine the sound, being so far inland, being so far up the terraces,
being half asleep and in thrall to the olives’ music,
being the only thing awake, a gleam on water,
the note of a song not yet heard.

At Last! Daily Poems again.

2009-08-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

My revisions continue, but I've gotten back to writing new poems daily. Here are 3 from August 18th. I'll try to get the newest ones posted by tomorrow. I hope you will let me know your reactions to these, they came out of me with great energy.

Mid-August

All over the house dead flies.
Some swatted into silence. Some
that must have simply lain down
exhausted by the heat.

Most on their sides; on one wing;
like the dead of Troy,
their shields beneath them,
who were carried to the pyres.

Keeping The Habit

We carry it around inside us
like an infant or a frail elder
whose feet cannot hold it upright.
We listen to its speech and speak back.
We say, there, there; even kiss its bald head,
all the while imagining the day when the child will walk,
when the old woman’s face will melt into peace. Imagine
how we will begin anew. We
lift the emptiness
as if we know what we are doing.

In The Valley Of The Poem Of The Dead Woman

We speak of women converted into poems by their men.
And what that makes us feel about him
strapping on the memory of his dead wife like saddlebags
of tea from China; heaving her image with a graceful trope
across the gleaming rump of his poem after scattering the ashes
from the night’s fire.

We want him to not carry her all day beneath the hot sun
as he heads west across the Russian steppes. We don’t want
her to end up in some tsarist teacup in Saint Petersburg, sipped,
the long weeks of nights beside the campfire infused in her
as a perfume of smoke and starry sky and wolves pacing beyond the firelight.

We don’t want him to tramp into the nearest bar after currying his horses
to look for an ass to caress, a woman worth fighting with in bed.
We want the dead wife to refuse his poetic advances, to resist
the pathetic tremble in his wrist when he picks up her comb
and finds a single, ink black hair. We want him to stop
stop, stop this convenient traipsing through the rooms of our awareness

in his muddy, widower’s boots, clutching some memory or other
of his wife, in coitus or in the bath. We want him to look up,
look out into the world, to see her the way we see—
not some object of desire, but blessed and cursed and always alive.

We want to know her but we don’t want him saying who she was.
Then the poem reaches from behind and rests its fingers lightly
on the napes of our necks. We flinch and then stand still.
We drop our heads. We graze on the wild green grass.

the dirth of daily poems lately - August 13, 2009

2009-08-13T17:39:00.000-07:00

I'm revising right now. Hope to be posting again by next week. Stay tuned.

Daily Poems for July 23, 2009

2009-07-23T18:41:00.001-07:00

Okay, I'm recycling (in part) one title. There are two poems today.

Pillow Talk

Now we lie down with the clouds like turbans
above our heads and discuss rain, thunder, the electric
shock of lightning, which is not like
the moment when a birth begins,
which is called lightening—
the child moving into the birth canal,
the storm of labor about to commence.

We discuss the uses of roses, bloom,
thorn, stem, which is not like the thick root
of the penis seeking its earth,
sometimes in the woman—
the rose sometimes double anthered.

We discuss the music on the radio,
chanting Mongolians, wailing Cherokee,
the Beatles singing, Judy In The Sky With Diamonds,
which are not like the diamonds in the open mines
of Venetia, where a woman wearing rubber boots and a head scarf
sits down on the slag while she eats her lunch.

Consider the Lilies of the Seine

The young people’s choir from Paris pours through the door of the coffee shop
looking more like a flood of lilies than mere human beings, long stemmed with shining faces.

They hum along with the strange world chant on the satellite radio station,
reaching for harmonies out of instinct. They wrap their leaves around their tourist maps.

One lily with pale blonde hair across her shoulders accepts a deep French kiss
from a brown-haired lily whose arms wrap around her from behind,

whose hands flutter across her ribs while she leans back to take his kiss,
her hair forming a pale gold sea foam V down her back.

Her pale pink lipstick finds the tiny crevices of his lips. The other lilies
order coffee and ignore the lovers, because afterall, they are all lilies from Paris.

But the rest of us sigh silently. We sigh and wish.
We sigh and wish.

Daily poem - July 22, 2009

2009-07-22T18:12:00.000-07:00

A prose poem today. I've been thinking about what Jason Shinder told me, that the poem will show up; that I don't have to fight for it. So I'm trusting that this is the poem.

Dear Son,
I hope and pray that you are well so far from us. Your father sends his best regards and we both thank you for the banknote sent in last month’s letter. It will keep us above water for another month or two. You will remember the sheep that learned to climb the stairs. We were offered money for her by a man who runs a small, traveling sideshow. He was impressed that the animal was so tame and the she knew how to lift the lid from the cooking pot. He is convinced he can teach her other little tricks and, besides her yearly shearing, he can collect a pence a piece for her performances. I know you were fond of the animal, but times being what they are, and the rest of the flock being more than enough to handle, your father said the man could have her for a crown. They argued, the man saying, she’d take a year to begin to truly earn her keep. But you know your da, he would not be moved and the price was settled.

Now the kitchen is quiet in the evening. The lid of the pot stays put. The room upstairs is empty but for the old coat she used to dream on. I did not know I would miss her. It is hard to lose you both in so short a time. I enclose a curl of her coat. Wasn’t she bonnie?

May God keep you close, your loving Ma

Daily poem # 2 - July 21, 2009

2009-07-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

And here's the second one.

Shell Life

Listen,
when a snail dies, its home
fills with sea-sound. Hold it
to your ear all day,
you won’t hear a single word of grief.
Who knows why we haven’t thought of this?

Daily poem #1- July 21 2009

2009-07-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

Two poems today. Here's the first one.

Sex And The Soul

She says, The body is a dark house
and the soul its lamp.
He says, I have matches.

She says, Beauty is an unvisited darkness
lit from within.
He says, It isn’t very modest is it?

She says, A light shines within,
but it’s hard to see.
He says, Try opening the shutters and the door.

She says, Jesus is my light
and my guide.
He says, Tell me where you’re going.

She says, I think of Jesus
like a lover.
He says, I’m not sure where that leaves me.

She says again, Beauty is a light
that reaches us from inside our darkness.
He says, Maybe you can look inside of me.

She says, If you love Him,
Jesus will live inside you.
He says again, Maybe you could take a look inside me.

All night they wrestle with the light.

Daily Poem - July 20, 2009

2009-07-20T15:08:00.001-07:00

I swear I'm not going back to look at previous days' work. Sometimes though, it seems I am.

Thinking about what to do next

He doesn’t feel sad about her.
He knows time is our own invention.
Besides, that’s not what he’s worried about.

A woman in a blue skirt and aqua tank-top
drinks iced coffee at a sidewalk bar.
The idea of what makes war or joy is beyond her understanding.

She shakes her head as if dislodging water from her ear.
All they know is that two worlds collided,
the given life and the life imagined;

that fear, anatomically speaking, only asks us to choose—
does not have an opinion—
that a lifetime can’t be measured until after the fact.

a bunch of poems for today, July 18, 2009

2009-07-18T14:47:00.000-07:00

We are in the habit of believing certain things

Each morning the woman watches herself sideways in the mirror. She is trying to decide if she is deep or fat. If she catches the right angle she can see the shallow (or thin) girl she once was. In her eyes, she still sees the surprise of that time she realized that stabbing pain was her own flesh tearing. And the blood after, on the sheet. She can see the medicine balls of each son as she carried— the blue topographical map of stretch marks running from breasts to hips— the years of anger and regret for all that would not change and all that had to. She places her palms on the apron of flesh left by her hysterectomy and lifts it, pressing everything back into place. She tells herself she’s going to be herself again. Someday. Really.

Not Giving It A Name

Pressed to name it
he might say Myra,
for the bitterness he felt.
But he wasn’t asked,
and he couldn’t give a name
without a shudder for the shape
of his own affection—
its weak-kneed urges,
her pink and black lipped mouth clamped shut.
It was better this way, her being
just the animal he would eventually be made to give up.

The Going Out

The boy has packed his case;
two pairs of trousers, two white shirts, three pairs
of under-shorts. He’ll carry his winter coat
even though it’s June in Galway.
He’ll wear his shoes though they don’t really fit.
He’ll carry his comb in his back pocket
and his papers in the pocket on his breast.
No one will see him off,
mother can’t stop herself from weeping
and da has to get the livestock fed.
The priest has blessed him.
The neighbors have raised a glass.
The sky sways on the surface of the harbor
the way his heart tilts and shimmers
between fear and longing;
the little lamb of madness,
the grand big earth—

Daily Poem July 16, 2009

2009-07-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

This comes from deep in my past and from a land I don't remember occupying except on Sundays in March.

Pajama Roses

If you ask me
I’d say it wasn’t meanness,
it was strangeness, yes, that made him say it;
and a lot of denial.
But the little kids in the street
don’t know that.
They don’t know
how it feels to lie down in the dark—
To lie,
down in the dark
in your own dark,
in your own lie.
They’re young yet.
They haven’t had time
to figure it out,
and to forget what they’ve figured.
For instance, when Owen told them,
I haven’t found a single rose
the color of pajamas, I mean,
I knew he was lying but
wasn’t sure what he was trying to hide,
the roses or the pajamas—
the bruise of wishes on his eyes.

Daily poem, July 15, 2009

2009-07-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

I know I missed yesterday's poem. I'm trying to decide if I will continue to post a poem a day. Then today, I felt like I just had to have one here, so this is it.

Harbor in the Afternoon, July 15, 2009

For hours we watched the blue spotted mantle shimmer.
Like translucent saucers made of current and wind
they spun the color wheel from French lilac, to pink mallow,
under blue, rinsed sky.
Emerald sea moss blackened the underside of each ambiguous dish,
as a million brilliant circles slid in unison like the train of dark gold satin off the lover’s shoulders in The Kiss. All afternoon she lay before us dreaming,
the mackerel weighted minnow baskets of her breasts just below the surface.

Daily Poem July 13, 2009

2009-07-13T15:47:00.000-07:00

Five pages on John the Baptist, Herod and Herodias, and sleeping alone and this is what I end up with, a fragment from an old journal entry that wouldn't let me be.

Woolgathering

I keep the sound of a motorcycle on a dirt road;
jazz piano in a room just going dark in April;
that final loving letting go,
and I card the wool.

Daily poems - (2) July 12, 2009

2009-07-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote two. They seem connected but individual. Maybe later they'll end up part of one poem.

How You Know

I tell her it’s like delivering the afterbirth,
or when you pitch a perfect curve ball
or drop a stuffed a zucchini blossom into the pan without it tearing.
It’s what you do to finish what you started,
the second just before you get your life back.

What It Is

Maybe it’s that he left home expecting to be free
and look what comes running after him.

Maybe it’s what never changes;
you have a good day, and then you don’t.

Maybe it’s that we’re all trying to choose between the lesser of two evils
and we rarely know, up close, what evil is.

Maybe it’s that a man gave his children rat poison because he couldn’t afford to feed
them,
and sat in the next room weeping while they died of thirst.

Maybe it’s that two people in their sixties got married by a river
and their six grown children kissed them, rejoicing.

Maybe it’s all of it
and we can’t see it.

Daily Poem, July 11, 2009

2009-07-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, I missed July 10 -- more on that lapse later.

The End of Madness

You know the story of the boy and his little sheep
asleep in their coat of stars,
their little legs folded under all that glowing,
their backs to the warmth of the chimney wall,
the air outside filled with hoarfrost
and the occasional drifting cinder.
Downstairs mother and father
are going over the numbers one more time.
Something has to give—
What can they get at market for the sheep ?

Daily poem July 9, 2009

2009-07-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

What You Learn Without Even Knowing It

The crabapple tree below the library,
windows and branches both filled with starry night—
fallen fruit that deer will nuzzle for in winter
all around my feet; me leaning against the bark,
then stepping into the path, wanting things I could not have.
When my first marriage was ending
in a little house in a wintry woods,
I’d think about Ohio like it was a star;
a place I’d never been,
a place I was pretty sure had once existed.

Daily Poem July 8 2009

2009-07-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

I'll be running a poetry hour for 2nd and 3rd graders tomorrow. So I'm trying out the exercise they'll do. It's a slight modification of an exercise created by Cora Vail Brooks in her book of writing exercises, The Sky Blew Blue.

Write your name on a paper bag. Think of something you would NEVER want to be or do. Write a poem about a person with your name who actually does the thing you would never do. Begin the poem by writing 'In this bag is a girl(boy) named ....'

The rhythm is established for the child by the first line, which includes the name.
I tried to anticipate one of the names I've run into recently for this age group.

When they are done with the poem, the poets get to decorate the bag to illustrate what the person inside does.

Haley The Herpetologist

In this bag is a girl named Haley,
who catches snakes almost daily.
She puts them in a long glass box
with sticks and leaves and fuzzy moss.
She also locks a screen on top
so the snakes don’t crawl in her mother’s mop
or down the legs of her kitchen chairs
to meet the orange cat down there.
She likes to count the green snakes’ freckles.
She likes to watch their toothy grins,
their slithering slides between the sticks,
the way they lick their skinny lips
with tongues that look like licorice whips.
And when the sun is turning red,
she takes the snake box to the woods
and lets her catch of snakes go free,
because tomorrow, Haley knows,
where some other snakes will be.

Daily Poem July 7, 2009

2009-07-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm trying out a tanka. A friend told me of seeing this image in Vietnam. I wanted to find a Vietnamese short form, but ran out of time. Maybe later.

Water buffalo beside
child with slender stick.
Tap-tap. Walk this way.
Tragedy
only if there is no trust.

Daily Poem July 6, 2009

2009-07-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

Meditation On Wonder

At a party in Westport we notice a tree like ours
in another yard. Just like our tree, we say, amazed.
We admire the graceful, triple trunk that opens up
to a full, symmetric crown that sways deliciously—
we notice that from a certain spot it mostly hides the ugly house across river.
Just like our tree.

Every morning for a week after the party we remember
when we first look at the world. We see our tree and six crows
that have perched beneath it on the fence rail every morning all this summer—
six fledges we can’t tell apart; who dip stale bread into the birdbath
or use it to wet paper bags they’ll tear apart for what’s inside them.
And one of us will say, The crows are back.

Daily Poem, July 5, 2009

2009-07-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about Rome today. If you go there, don't buy bottled water, you can drink the water from the aquaduct wherever you see it flowing. It's cool and clean and tastes great. If you go up to the Palantine Hill, there's a great spigot on the walk down to the Forum.

Water

We drink from a stone box in an ancient wall.
We drink from a copper spigot with a lion’s mouth.
We drink from the Alps transported.
We drink from arches crossing valleys and rivers.
We drink from the hands of slaves nailed to crosses along the roads to Gaul.
We drink from pine woods, terraced fields, rock gorges, wind farms in the east.
We drink from city states, their mines outside of town, their cathedrals.
We drink from each Caesar, especially Augustus.
We drink from Lydia’s cruets and urns, her breasts afloat in rose-petalled water.
We drink from hands stretched out in supplication, in condemnation, in applause.
We drink from the graves of each poet and painter buried in the English Cemetery.
We drink from Senegalese illegals selling Chinese Pashminas on via del Croce.
We drink from the spray paint artist squatting on her heels on via Barbieri, switching out
her templates as she builds each Trevi or St. Peter’s on paper.
We drink from the flecks of green on green in the pistachio gelato, the swirl red in the
framboise.
We drink from the gypsies begging, their babies’ heads lolling on their arms.
We drink from the glad light of palazzos and piazzas as dusk settles on the city, from the
rain freckled streets, the red metro buses hurtling under
ground.
We drink from the tiny sparrow picking crumbs between the stones in front of the Arch of Triumph and the bride and groom having their portrait taken.
We drink from the spigot in the shadow of the Palantine. We wet our hands. We wet our arms. We splash our faces with the flow of Rome.
And we drink.

Daily Poem July 4, 2009

2009-07-04T15:34:00.000-07:00

Today I'm resting, so I'm posting a poem I worked on in early June before I began my daily postings. Hope you like it. Have a good rest of your Independence Day.

Breaking News

An hour earlier in the day
the lovers slept; her mouth
sealed, nostrils flaring slightly,
his leg slung across the back of her legs,
stubble of his barely risen beard showing red.

An hour earlier in the day
the swans in Howland Pond
had not yet raised their heads
wearing wreaths of duckweed around their necks,
their coronets all accounted.

An hour earlier in the day
the church group chaperones were kissing
loved ones goodbye and shepherding the choir
through the gate, the ramp to the plane
shuddering beneath their weight.

An hour earlier in the day
I had been planning to call my father
to tell him, as I had the night before, I love you.
And my sister had not called me.
I had not served roasted chicken, salad, bread.

An hour earlier in the day
a coyote had not yet fed her young,
bringing up the half-digested flesh
of my cat when her pups yipped in hunger.

And hour earlier in the day
tourists at Ayers Rock
had posed for one another,
the round shadows of their hat brims
hiding their faces in midwinter’s midday sun.

And no one knew the time.

Daily Poem, July 3, 2009 (posted 7/4/09)

2009-07-04T05:59:00.000-07:00

Rant Hits Daily Poem Circuit

Keep going, I tell my students, keep going, push past the place that feels like a tidy ending, keep putting words on paper ‘til you’ve wandered off the path, down a side street, witnessed a bar fight that spilled outside, and seen a pair of men kissing goodbye while they each hold a briefcase a-kilter, and the pedestrian signal has started counting down from 10. Write until a troll crawls out from under the bridge you’re walking over, and offers you one wish which you have to use by midnight, and suddenly you realize how one wish is never enough, because as soon as you make it you realize you needed to think bigger than you did. Write until you get past that predicament and realize one wish is better than no wish and it’s okay if you didn’t think outside the box. Write until the wish comes true and you’ve ended world hunger or stopped the human proclivity for making war, or reversed global warming, or you’ve received your flame orange Porsche which attracts state troopers everywhere. Write until you have a cramp in your hand or your pen’s out of ink, until your mother and father come back from the dead to remind you to do something useful with your life and you get to show them how you stopped the people in China from starving because you met a troll on a bridge and they say, Look, we’re from the other side and we can tell you, there’s no such thing as trolls, and you remind them it was them and all those bedtime readings that gave you the idea in the first place, and anyway, you ask them, does it matter how I did it as long as there is now World Peace? And maybe you mother says, but Jesus told His apostles, The poor you will always have with you, and now you’ve gone and messed it all up, and maybe your father asks, But what about the Marines? You mean there won’t be any more Marines? I was a Marine, he reminds you. And you say, Nope, we won’t need them. Then stop writing, before he can say another thing.

Daily Poem, Thursday, July 2, 2009

2009-07-02T14:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm probably just rain-logged. But here it is. I woke up with the title this morning and tried to let it percolate for a few hours and then began writing. Who knows what this endless rain is doing to my brain....

Grasping Three-dimensionality

1.

It requires sunlight, so you imagine you see, by way of shadows in between things, the full picture. Imagine the cultivated cypresses along the avenues in Aix, and Cezanne, gripping his brushes and box, stomping down the street. See him wrench in and out of the pillared shade. He is thinking of the shadow of Mont Sainte Victoire. Or do you know the shapes of the cedars on the point at Manomet, how, in sunlight they cast their shade like a crew of toreadors might toss their capes with fanfare before el Toro, all in a row across the summer grass? Each one lays flat and full; the bullish sea foams around the rocks below them; the fragrant honey locusts on the bluff spill their flowers into little drifts.

2.
I know so little about three-dimensionality, except that it should be easy, but it’s hard to see in cubed things— Like Picasso’s women, disassembled and rearranged to illustrate the perceived complexities of everyone, leaving spaces where you might think they aren’t needed.
I tried to learn the art of throwing pots, but couldn’t master the wheel, that act of coaxing the clay around the air without letting it collapse on itself— couldn’t create that inside space that makes a thing a vessel.

3.
A man walks into a room and sees his lover about to take off her shoe. She’s leaning on the door frame for balance, and one hand is wriggling her heel as she pulls it, and the other hand is pressed against the doorframe, and her face is screwed up with concentration and her belly is round and a little droopy because she’s a little fat, and 10 years ago had the operation, and because she’s folded at the waist. And one leg’s bent across the other’s shin when she looks up and sees him, and she suddenly feels the way her hip is turned in and her belly’s sagging, and the way her ankle cracks when she pulls at the shoe. And he’s a little older than she is with less limber limbs and he probably should lose some weight. They’ve been finding each other for years now, for years and years— He moves around her to get to the kitchen, as he passes he asks if there’s any chocolate. She nods yes, pointing her shoe toward the worn green tin. And as she does the late day sun breaks through and lays down their merged shadows between them, like the many-thumbed space that’s left in the middle of puzzle where a piece is missing.

Daily poem, July 1, 2009

2009-07-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

Hold onto your hats kids, the girl's going bonkers with all this rain!

Consider the lilies of the field…

Pretend coyotes can talk.
Pretend they happen to meet Jesus.
Pretend they ask about the loaves and fishes.
Like, how’d you do that?
Pretend that Jesus thinks coyotes are redeemable,
you know, ready for salvation, so he says,
I just believed it.
Pretend the coyotes can’t get their heads around that thought;
they’re just trying to figure out how to feed the kids.

2 poems on Tuesday, June 30, 2009

2009-06-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I don't know what's happening here, but I'm trying to go with it. I have two poems, one to make up for playing hooky yesterday, and one for today. Now listen, I realize I've probably been a little precious now and then and I'm trying to turn that around some, but keep some of it, because, frankly, a little precious is okay if it's done with good taste. I'm reading Swann In Love right now, so I'm having trouble staying in the moment because I keep imagining all the energy it took Proust to create those Swann and Odette moments, where they constantly anticipate the other's moves and are also apparently unable to see their own irrationality. Proust presents their minds' workings in all of their dizzying processing which can be appealing, but also saps my energy. So I read a little Cattafi this morning, just to ground me.

Here's my token poem for yesterday.

Midday, June 29, 2009

Fog burns back
as far as the road below the field.
Five black crows.
Hay pale yellow.
No shadows in the green windbreaks.
Each color in the landscape
separate.
Each day I go back inside,
search for something that simple.

And here is today's poem (6/30/2009) Goodbye June

It Must Be Tuesday

This page intentionally left blank
will be used later to examine my disgruntlement
at being asked to explain the meaning of my use of Cheetos in a poem,
which everyone assumed was a poem about that crispy orange snack
that leaves greasy orange dust on your fingers,
so you end up eating orange while you wear orange because the dust stuff stains,
when really it was an analogy for explaining the human act
of merging two distinctly opposite ideas or situations in one thought
in order to understand something else,
for instance just this morning Yahoo listed places where there was breaking news, including Washington, Iraq, Iran, (think crispy)
and above that the list of the most popular current searches for Tuesday
which include Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett,
and the get-it-now-only-on-TV guy, Mike (think grease).

I’d stay to counter arguments that popular culture matters
but then you’d have to shoot me. Besides I’m intentionally leaving
this page blank.

Sunday Daily Poem (6/28/09)

2009-06-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

I don't know where this came from except from some tear in the fabric of the day.

The Last Night in Gomorrah, An Oral History

It was late when two men knocked at the door.
The master and the mistress sat up from their mats and listened.
Then, the master bade me get up and let them in.
He could see right away it was a mistake
to be so hospitable, but once they were in…

Wine and cakes, I brought them,
olives and bread. It was clear they were planning something.
One tore his crusts into tiny pieces.
The other’s eyes snuck glances at the corners of the room where all of you were sleeping.

Your father kept you all hidden at first, but coward that he was
he eventually roused your sister and my daughter from their rugs.

I’m telling you this so you’ll understand what happened.
So you’ll stop asking, Why did my mother look back?
So you stop sniveling about being abandoned by her for some pleasure she remembered
in the city that the Lord destroyed.

It wasn’t regret that turned her into salt.
Your father should have had enough for two of that.
It was because she heard their screams above the others,
“Father, help us!” For one unthought moment she imagined she would see him
turning back.

If you have to ask, ask a bigger question,
Why did Lot earn his salvation from the fires of Gomorrah
on his women’s backs?

Friday's daily poem written 8 hours late (6/26/09)

2009-06-27T05:28:00.000-07:00

Building My Box

Mary, for no good reason I forgot
I can exhale—
I have to stop trying
folding tiny tabs in corners,
trimming the double-sided tape—

Notice, the joints fold together smoothly
even though I measured some parts once
because I was thinking about apperception
yesterday when I cut the template,
because I knew the sound a sparrow’s wings make
buttering the hedge.

Thursday's daily poem (6/25/09)

2009-06-25T15:02:00.000-07:00

This is a sound poem. I am trying to recreate the experience of listening to my friend, Nicla, watering her garden in Puglia, Italy. Her home is on a terraced piece of land, so she climbs up and down stone steps, dragging her hose to little plots of fruit trees and flowers.

Nicla Waters The Garden at Monte Zuzzu at Sunset

scuffle-scuff-scuff-scuff
kiss-kiss-kiss
pitter-pitter-pitter-pittle-pitt—
scuffle-scuffle-scuff-scuff
kiss-kiss-kiss
ssssssssssssssss— ssssssssssssss—
scritch-scritch
scritch-scritch
rattle-rattle-rattle,
lizzle-lizzle-lizzle
lizzle-lizzle-lizzle
scuff
fill, bink-
bink-bink-
bink-bink-
ad-bink.
Squeak, squeak, squeak,
scuffle-scuffle,
scritch-scritch,
drip,
drip, drip, drip-drip
drip
drip—
This goes on for over an hour.

Wednesday's daily poem (6/24/09)

2009-06-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

If you like, go look for Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "In the Waiting Room". This poem is loosely based on the premise of that poem. It's not a completely fresh, daily poem. I've had some of it around for a few months. But it seemed like today was it's day.

In The Kitchen
after Elizabeth Bishop

How had I come to be here like them and overhear a cry of pain…?

It was early March and I was in the kitchen,
and my father who I already knew was easily confused
watched TV in the den,
and my mother, who had just turned 50 and disliked confusion
stood beside me, washing dishes.

And I was trying on what I would say—
the way I would present my news
as if it were a picture in National Geographic,
some notion we accept because we see it
like white bones pierced through ears and noses
or beetles brimming from the mouths of smiling children.
Without meaning to our lives would shift, make a place
for this strangeness.

I dried the dishes
my mother washed, her elbows above the suds
dimpled and glistened each time she placed a plate in the strainer.
The window above the sink a painting of her face on black velvet,
the buzz of the kitchen light.

When I said
Late, the glass in her hand smashed
as if a poltergeist had flung it
at the faucet, shattered back into the silky water
where bits of corned beef hash lifted
up off the wreck of forks and plates,
orts of white potato set adrift,
glass shards sinking like a thousand tiny hulls
of the Titanic.

Late,
I said again,
as if reading the caption
of a picture of myself by summer,
a ring of blood forming on my mother’s wrist.

Tuesday's daily poem (6/23/09)

2009-06-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

They're getting short, but don't worry, they have better bones I think.

Recovery

Black crow stumbles on green grass,
rolls upright.
Brother, you must learn to walk.

take a look at my revised poem from Thursday, June 18

2009-06-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, so, daily poems happen to need to rest, so I'm publishing some rough stuff here. I went back to 'Diagnosis' and, as a friend suggested, I 'hardened' it by paring it down, way down. I like it more now. It's closer to expressing what I'm trying to express. Funny how fewer words do better work in most cases. It's just a matter of being able to find which words can do the heavy lifting best.

ciao

Monday's bedraggled daily poem (6/22/09)

2009-06-23T07:31:00.000-07:00

The only daily poem I could write

The rain, the rain,
as silly and persistent as Judy, Judy, Judy
when you are only ten and don’t have a clue.

Sunday's daily poem (6/21/09)

2009-06-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

Instructions for a calm society

Destroy this before they read it.
Destroy it as soon as it makes sense to do so.
Destroy the fact that it existed, the ideas that make it sing,
the evidence, like the mangled flesh of chipmunks out on Holmes Street.
Destroy the history that goes with it.
Destroy all its artifacts, the little tales found in winter around woodstoves,
the praises for it sung in churches where the women fan themselves with vigor
while the men sit still as death trying not to sweat and the children lift
their buttocks one by one to feel the slow strip of damp cotton off of wood.
Destroy the middle of the night in shelters, so no one can wake to wonder if it’s true.
Destroy the sun’s long shadows either side of noonday.
Destroy the inside of the mouth where darkness makes a safe
for words we’d rather not hear spoken— the larynx with its little minnow trap of bones.
Destroy all pens and inks
so the paper remains blank and pure.

Saturday's daily poem (6/20/09)

2009-06-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

Where are you going and who with?

This is the poem I can’t right.
It keeps trying to walk on its hands,
stand on its head, etc. It
does somersaults when I ask it
to follow a line I’ve drawn in the sand.
I’m hot, I say, can’t you just do it?

This is the poem I wish would do that
thing good poems do so well, you know,
the seizing-the-unconscious-moment thing
that leaves you with dazzled, shallow breathing.

I keep thinking this is the poem that will save me
from the day’s unyielding reality,
but I realize that’s a different poem

and that this is the poem that plagues me,
because it knows it doesn’t have to do what I say,
because it could just laze around and eat all the tomatoes
in my garden if I don’t watch out—
because this one doesn’t get the difference
between national boundaries and geographic impediments,
and it doesn’t think a passport should really come between
an idea that feels like traveling and where its going.
Because it knows I’ll give in
eventually and let it
say anything it wants, just to get it back on the train with me.

Friday's daily poem (6/19/09)

2009-06-20T16:21:00.000-07:00

Grief Management

The metabolism of the planet itself takes place in the blood.
Osip Mandelstam, A Conversation With Dante

All morning, up on Jacob’s ladder, he mows the wet grass,
because he has no more time left,
because the realtor said, by Tuesday.
Mostly he’s doing it because his girlfriend wants this drama over.
I can’t decide if he loves her or loves her horses,
although to me neither love makes sense.
It all seems as random as the fact that we used to have nine planets,
and nine orders of angels, and nine sisters in my family.

His parents are both dying in different rooms, so he has to sell the house
in which he never did find shelter
because the same relentless dark they felt, he felt,
because a kid doesn’t get to choose his dark at three.
But as Beatrice told Dante in The Paradiso,
each heavenly body has its own degree
of luminosity directed by the angels. And the grass on Jacob’s Ladder faces
the mower’s blade as if the sun were out.

Thursday's daily poem (6/18/09)

2009-06-19T08:38:00.000-07:00

Diagnosis

Clinical is a hard word,
dull green walls, dropped ceiling,
recessed lights.

You have to be distracted
by the sound of cars out on the street,
because you need something

to remind you it's only one word—
that you don't have to hear it forever.
You think, Maybe tomorrow I’ll get dressed.

Daily poems, summer 2009

2009-06-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

A friend has invited me to write a poem a day for the summer. To keep myself honest I've decided to post them here. Feel free to respond.

Here is Wednesday, June 17, 2009's poem

My Brother's Religion

He believes in madness,
thinks of it as if it were a sheep
that followed him around the farm in Galway
which he encouraged with bits of greens and carrot,
until one day it walked into the house
and he fed it boiled turnips from the pot,
and then taught it to climb the stairs
to sleep on a woolen coat beneath the little, star-filled window.

At night, when he wakes in his room on Centre Street
where the man who shares his bathroom moans, “I’m lost!”
and my brother must call the nurse to find him,
he imagines such a sure,
such a resistless friend—
likes to think
he has domesticated his own darkness,
can feel its full weight shift close beneath the blanket,
hear it sigh beside him in the bed.

Poets Who Blog: The President Loves Poetry?

2008-12-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

Poets Who Blog: The President Loves Poetry?

Lost in Virginia Woolf and Returned from Pnuemonialand

2008-12-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

I've been quiet almost since I started this blog. Work of another nature intervenes so often, I teach composition to lots and lots of college freshman (read here, adjunct lecturer). Reading their papers interferes for a while each Fall as I go off balance and must regain my center.

Then, in early November, the flu followed by pnuemonia. Why be slightly under the weather when you can go vertical for a few weeks straight?

Anyway, once out of the high-fever stage of the flu, but not back to the working-stiff stage of daily life, I found myself suspended in a state of not-reading/not-writing. If you have ever read Virgina Woolf's long essay, "On Being Ill," you will know what I'm talking about. If you haven't read it, high thee to Paris Press for a copy, it's a wonderful read.

Woolf talks about that sense of suspension that serious, temporary illness causes. We are not jocular, reasonable, or even particularly diplomatic, yet we are mostly permitted our behaviors because we are also not part of ordinary daily life. We are 'Ill'.

I have to say I was actually too sick to be undiplomatic, mostly sleeping and drinking fluids. But I did enter a sort of extended dream state. The walls spoke to me through images late at night, the rain made music. One night the wind tore around the corner of the house evoking expectations that Cathy would appear in my room and Heathcliff would howl out in the meadow beyond the split-rail fence ala Wuthering Heights.

Best of all, or perhaps the silver lining to the cloud of being ill, was that I found myself disconnected from the previous 8 weeks during which I had relinquished my own pages for student papers, my own poems for student compositions, my own revisions for student revisions.

I came to rest in an almost wordless place, listening to sound, wandering through images that rose from dreams, memories, idle staring.

Now I'm wrapping up another semester. Student papers are piled on my table again. And as I review them I recognize progress has been made.

I still get tired and cough in spasms, pnuemonia does not go gently into that good night! But I also find myself stringing letters into words again and words into sound images. I'm reading other people's poems again too. A friend sends them in 2s and 3s by email; books I meant to read all Fall have risen to the top of the piles in my study and bedroom. My appetite for words has returned.

But when I look back on those hours in suspension I realize that I was, even then, in the company of words, or at least the result of having read and having written. I experienced it all, the illness, the wind, the rain, the silence, the dreams, through the vehicle of language. I told myself what each experience was as it occurred.

Alicia Ostriker wrote an essay, the title of which I cannot remember at this moment, in which she wonders at the fact that we live 'thinking we know what it is because we know its name' (my rough paraphrase). Her point is that there is so much we don't truly understand even though we do have a name for it: war, peace, love, etc.

But this experience was the reverse. I heard 'wind'. I knew wind. I heard 'rain'. I knew rain. I heard 'wind' I knew Cathy and Heathcliff in that particular wind's voice, because in my adolescence Bronte's novel had made that voice so clear to me.

I know I'm rambling, so perhaps I'm nearing the end of this posting. I know some readers will hear me.

Blessed be.

Mimzerella

Lightness in a time of gravity

2008-09-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

I've been looking over my notes on Italo Calvino's, Six Memos for the New Millenium. He loved words so much. He writes about the many uses of writing (Literature) but always comes back to this. What's most important about the use of words is "... as perpetual pursuit of things, as perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety...." He explains literature as "...an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living." (26) He reminds me here, of Rilke's poem, the name of which I cannot call to mind, but the thrust of which is in lines I do remember. It's from The Book of Images and begins "You pale child...". In that poem he writes,

This is the crux of all that once existed:
that it does not remain with all its weight,
that to our being it returns instead,
woven into us, deep and magical.

These lines, written at the turn of the 20th century precurse Calvino's claim that the song/poem/play/story allows the memory and its related emotion to be revisited without its original, crushing weight. You might think of sorrow here, but it could also refer to the intensity of joy, which can no more (though we might wish it) remain in us as it did with its original weight/intensity than sorrow. We'd die of the weight of so much unrelieved emotion either way. This is why we have memory.

And this is why we have literature, to transmute gravity into lightness through language. To create what CAN be carried forward in the heart.

This is why I write.

Cattafi's 'La discesa al trono', 'The Descent to the Throne', a response

2008-09-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been reading Cattafi for a couple of months, at night in bed, early in the morning, in the car in the parking lot at work. It's Winter Fragments, selections from 1945 to 1979, translated by Rina Ferarrelli.

Last night, "The Descent to the Throne." Cattafi wrote

We're not stopping to think it over
seated at the top of the stairs
we're gathering strength
alms
before undertaking
the descent to the throne
and squandering everything
on the rough intoxicating
rock bottom of desperation.

Now, I want to tell you that the first thing that happened was, I didn't get past the second line for a while. My mind filled with a memory. Four or five years old, sitting at the top of the stairs at home, listening to the adult voices below, sure I am missing something, if only because my mother's laugh sounds so real, more real, when I cannot see her face--- this would be the laugh I heard later, in the dark when we stood on stage and she sat in the audience.

In the same moment (maybe a split second later) I bumped into the image in Frost's poem, "Home Burial." The grieving mother sits at the top of the stairs, alone, but, as dreams and visions allow, I am both beside her and beside the father who stands at the foot of the stairs, shovel in hand, his own heart broken. Her skirt spreads around her like a collapsed tent--- buries her from the waist down. He stands like a useless warder of a menagerie whose wild animals have all escaped, who must account for their loss. He must bury the dead child.

I think of my mother in the thick of a summer Saturday night in the the early '60s. The house is full of her sisters and their men, the handsome Jesuit seminarians sent to assist at the church for the summer when Boston Catholics come to the beach, swelling the congregation.

Everyone agrees my mother is beautiful and good. No one knows how, at dawn, she sits at the top of the stairs alone, and weeps.

I am in bed listening to the racket of katy-dids and crickets. The moon is caught in the net of the birch's branches. Cattafi's poem finally finished, my response caught like a wriggling fish only half hooked, I can turn off the light. But I can't quite sleep.

This is what poems are supposed to do, I think, thread our lives with others', both real and realized. This is their gift.

Jesus, Mary, and a conversation with God

2008-09-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

I spent the summer finishing the first draft of my own ms. of poems as well as Alda Merini's, poema della croce. The experience put me in hermit mode most through the end of August.

Merini floors me! Her book length poem presumes to speak in the voices of the main characters in the life and passion of Christ. Maybe it sounds too close to that old time religion, but believe me, it's not. She re-visions (my hybrid word for her process) the relationships and the rationals behind those relationships.

I don't want to give too much away because I'm hoping to get this text into print. Suffice to say, Mary and Jesus have a much more complex role than we are encouraged to think about when we study catechism in grade school. If you aren't a person of faith, the poem may draw you in because of Merini's ability to bring mother and son close to her readers as human beings with human hopes and frailties. God gets an earful from both of his creations.

The process of translation raises lots of interesting questions about Merini's intentions as I sift through language choices that are homophones that provide double entendre and/or challenges to translating her true meaning.

If anyone is translating her work, I'd enjoy hearing from you. If you'd like more information about her go to http://www.aldamerini.com/ .

There's a I welcome discussions about favorite poems, poets, etc. I'm reading Jack Gilbert's, Refusing Heaven right now, for the third time. His work keeps me from despair. Hope you'll check it out and let me know what you think.

After the Cave

2008-09-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Forgot to say, my own ms. of poems will be looking for a home soon. Here's a sample from AFTER THE CAVE,

Clearing

You decide things are a mess,
need clearing.
So you pull all of the pots and pans out
from the cabinet. And you look them over,
thinking,
which do I use the least?
So you can choose which ones
you’ll push way to the back,
in the dark, hard-to-reach place.
This assumes your shelves are fairly unmodern,
not the kind with baskets on casters
that roll out to make everything
available.
There’s something faintly sinful in the idea
of leaving nothing in the dark,
no quarter, no small corner to itself―
It sniffs of greed, you think,
to be so keen on access. So there they sit,
a cabinet’s worth of stainless steel, no-sticks, aluminum,
and maybe some oven-tempered glass
lids, a colander, a collapsible steamer
basket with one leaf missing,
like the first petal pulled off a daisy
(he loves me)―
And you’ve cleaned the shelves and laid in the new
liner, wishing the hardware store had offered
more colors than plain white and 1950’s black. And your knees
are sore because the cabinet’s beneath the counter,
and you had that moment when you knew what Sylvia
Plath had to do to kill herself by pushing her head
into her oven― the awkward kneeling, the climbing in,
squeezing yourself into that narrow, unlit space.
But then, you rocked back, your butt on your heels,
toes curled and flattened to bear your weight,
hands resting lightly on your thighs.
And your panoply of pots
sat like an audience at your back, waited for you to turn around
and see them. And you felt pretty good, felt lighter,
like Penelope after a night’s unweaving,
when she knew she’d bought another day
before she’d have to make her decision.