In the descending order of your feelings
Please identify your concerns
Postscript: Remember Susanville, where Restore the Night Sky has become the town cry.
*
Dear Unbidden, Unbred,
This is a flock of sorrows, of unoriginal sins, a litany of obscenities. This is a festering of hateful questions. Your only mirror is one of stainless steel. The image it affords will not tell whether you are young still or even real. In a claustral space. Hours of lead, air of lead. The sound, metallic and amped. You will know the force of this confinement as none other. You have been sentenced for worthlessness. In other eyes, apotympanismos is barely good enough. The strapdown team is on its way. The stricken, whose doves you harmed, will get a mean measure of peace. The schadenfreudes, the sons of schadenfreudes, will witness your end ‘with howls of execration.’ Followed by the burning of your worthless body on a pile of old tires. None will claim your remains nor your worthless effects: soapdish, vaseline, comb, paperback. All you possess is your soul whose mold you already deformed. You brought this on yourself. You and no one else. You with the dirty blonde hair, backcountry scars and the lazy dog-eye. You shot the law and the law won. You become a reject of hell.
*
Dear Child of God,
If you will allow me time. To make a dove. I will spend it well.
A half success is more than can be hoped for. And turning on
The hope machine is dangerous to contemplate. First. I have to
Find a solid bottom. Where the scum gets hard and the
Scutwork starts. One requires ideal tools: a huge suitcase
Of love a set of de-iced wings the ghost of a flea
Music intermittent or ongoing. Here one exits the forest
Of men and women. Here one re-dreams the big blown dream
Of socialism. Deep in the suckhole. Where Lou Vindie kept
Her hammer. Under her pillow. Like a wedge of wedding cake.
Working from my best memory. Of a bird I first saw nesting
In the razor wire.
Fin Amor
Peter Gizzi
Usage is more powerful than reason.
—Castiglione
Château If
If love if then if now if fleur de if the conditional if of arrows the condition of if
if to say light to inhabit light if to speak if to live, so
if to say it is you if love is if your form is if your waist that pictures the fluted stem if lavender
if in this field
if I were to say hummingbird it might behave as an adjective here
if not if the heart’s a flutter if nerves map a city if a city on fire
if I say myself am I saying myself (if in this instant) as if the object of your gaze if in a sentence about love you might write if one day if you would, so
if to say myself if in this instance if to speak as another—
if only to render if in time and accept if to live now as if disembodied from the actual handwritten letters m-y-s-e-l-f
if a creature if what you say if only to embroider—a city that overtakes the city I write
if in Provence.
Something in Blue
Blue everywhere in the sounds we make dissolves, a breeze failing to reach you.
A failed history unaware that the ground is also a factor.
Arbitrary the form of things at times. Do you ever think why ocean in the eyes? The blue of Ophelia’s portrait.
It’s easy to read but it’s also easy to read (thinking that) and the detail is caught in an iris fleck. Blue.
Felt sheets of sound die in distance—a music failing to teach you another language—the pupa crackles as it enters a world. All those champions,
dressed up in a hero’s skirt, a long cape with stars on their boots meant nothing then, not the least kerpow.
Pure noise—silent particle-wave—a hole in space enters the room, an iris opening to record the darkness.
This is a blue unlike any other.
The waves tumble sheets, a blue wash touches everything.
Inside us an ocean, a seashell of sound in the ear, kisses are like that—blue, outside, on a stare.
Just a Little Green Untitled
An oblique memory informed my animal;
traversing life with nothing to hold fast,
I move through groundcover
knowing it is important to sing.
This was my story. To understand
the serrated leaves hold a partial answer.
To understand there is a green unpronounceable.
Small things in shadow move
with a purpose. Do you ever say
runner, or buttons? These starts
out of the shallows in dusk.
I appeared at the edge of a great circle—
lines if seen with the proper instrument.
If seen at all, do we begin again in chairs,
rooms where people are? The field extends
a window, trees come to meet it.
That moment in the solo.
Instances when one came to sing,
the motor of the voice box, to see it,
to see the mouth open to take air.
The notes weeping, even willow,
insistent willow.
Noise surfaces at a circumference—
that sudden rush of air, a small tick
smaller tsk tsk, a timely emphasis
on prayer, voice, a body.
To say light on the bridge meant nothing then
not the least shining.
I want April to sleep in, dreaming
with the regularity of numbers,
silent equations turning, bits
of fractions, without need to reckon.
Mostly we count in the direction
of the ray. A shame not to notice
the length of a dream. Do you ever
say helix or fairy dust, just a little green?
Color of my true love’s hair.
Plain Song
Some say a baby cries for the life to come
some say leaves are green ’cause it looks good against
the blue
some say the grasses blow because it is earth’s instrument
some say we were born to cry
*
Some say that the sun comes close every year because it wants to be near us
some say the waters rise to meet it
others say the moon is our mother, ma mére
*
Some say birds overhead are a calligraphy: every child learning the words “home”
some say that the land and the language are the father
some say the land is not ours
some say in time we’ll rise to meet it
*
Some say there are the rushes the geese the tributaries and the reeds
*
Some say the song of the dove is an emblem of thought
some say lightning and some the electric light some say they are brothers
*
Some say the current in the wall is the ground
some say the nervous system does not stop with the body
some say the body does not stop
*
Some say beauty is only how you look at it and some beauty is what we have some say there is no beauty some truth
*
Some say the ground is stable
others the earth is round
for some it is a stone
I say the earth is porous and we fall constantly
*
Some say light rings some say that light is a wave some say it has a weight or there is a heft to it
*
Some say all of these things and some say not
some say the way of the beekeeper is not their way
some say the way of the beekeeper is the only way
some say simple things all there are are simple things
*
Some say “the good way,” some stuff
some say yes we need a form
some say form is a simple thing some say yes the sky is
a form of what is simple
*
Some say molecular some open others porous some blue
some say love some light some say the dark some heaven
Local Forecast
The whole thing is a lie, often
helpless. Hapless? No common error.
Paradox asks so much from us
we often experience it as grace.
Just in time, shaking at the lip
of a doorway, heavy sleet falling down.
I remember, in the coo of shade
my body, something from 20.
In early times the storyteller spoke
of a wheel falling across the heavens.
We depend on early sun, clement
weather, afterward come storms.
In a notebook the relative timidity
of observation can be brutal.
“Out of the rain I found you walking
out of a storm you rescued me.”
Festina Lente
Carol Moldaw
Rake marks on gravel.
Flecks of straw in adobe.
Four and a half feet down,
a blue-glass flask flaking mica,
charred wood, a layer of ash,
a humerus, if not animal,
then human. What looks
like the slatted side of a crate,
the backhoe driver says
is an old well shaft.
Mounds of displaced dirt,
dug up for new leach lines,
rise higher than the walls.
All we know of the pueblo
is that they burned trash here,
in our courtyard; spoke Tewa;
and dispersed—were driven out—
to Santa Clara, to Hopi.
Did the same ditch irrigate
their beans as our flowering plums?
And where we sleep, is that
where their turkeys flocked?
The man who built this house,
scavenging bridge ties for beams,
died in the courtyard,
his sickbed facing sunrise.
His wife’s “stitcheries”
still cover some of our windows.
When we reburied the humerus
under a cottonwood, with incense
and a patchwork prayer,
we were only putting it back,
festina lente, into the mix
of sieved dirt, sand and straw.
Five Poems
Charles North
CONSTELLATION
In the canyon of knowing
the one with the flashlight and inflatable raft
(probably some trail mix) turns out to be
the palpable excess.
It used to be that houses,
unadorned, would swim upstream
to sit and stand in the teeth of spring.
Your breath being the visible effect
of the constellation that includes you,
the aria swoops down and follows
like a paddock fence, reaching its zenith in Manhattan,
a mica stone set in a mica sea.
FILM JAUNE
That’s the urge you’re talking about and not the cover
the cover is lined in burlap it has no epistemic distance
not even if you count the supports which in film jaune
collapse character to abandon the apple trees now you see them
with a lot to say without saying it now they are 100% talk
plus rayon without saying anything they have it just not at the moment
which doesn’t deprive them of their legitimate means of support
SETTLE
The ice storm in the
patrol car—but it isn’t
feeling what you can do in
groves, rather the explanatory
finish, as Byron said
of Coleridge in the dedication
to Don Juan, “I wish he would
explain his explanation”
marbling Broadway with copper ducts,
October inspiring September
which reaches down and breathes,
settling everything on you.
POEM
It’s not the white on the cows a star no actually somewhat unstarry
why not study its effect on what’s planted
in which the cloud doeth harbor
and the cup, blue petals containing what is at least
elsewhere saving the lights. Star-struck
flooded each contributes a plank
yet the forehead is an example of a wedge it drives a truck
through the gray and white stars barring
lachrymose New Englanders, synergism
of art brut and hairpin turns.
PALINODE
It is, I think, like giving away with one hand what
you scratch with the other, the disadvantage playing its
cards in the very real interest of social utility
not merely contiguous with its parts but continually summing
them up with clear consequences, flux and no matter
whose goal is fleeced as long as the divestiture is real
and the swell proceeds to cover all that hasn’t been swallowed
in illustrations. That’s assuming consequence means
world and the issues declaim from that and not shedding
of feeling via detachment, since the objects grow no matter
what else is attached and tend to be anti-anti-construction.
It reduces the smear, as if December weren’t contingent enough
and collective whereas contingency sorts its own selves out,
different in separating manifestoes from the conscious
performance of what pushes them if not always highlighted.
Supper
Robert Creeley
Shovel it in.
Then go away again.
Then come back and
shovel it in.
Days on the way,
lawn’s like a shorn head
and all the chairs are put away
again. Shovel it in.
Eat for strength, for health.
Eat for the hell of it, for
yourself, for country and your mother.
Eat what your little brother didn’t.
Be content with your lot
and all you got.
Be whatever they want.
Shovel it in.
I can no longer think of heaven
as any place I want to go,
not even dying. I want
to shovel it in.
I want to keep on eating,
drinking, thinking.
I am ahead. I am not dead.
Shovel it in.
Three Poems
Brenda Shaughnessy
BREASTED LANDSCAPE
If not so cloaked with the desire
to be the ravishing little transparency,
I’d have seen the autumn for what
it is: just scrambled math and nipples.
The occasional warm hand sandwich.
Red leaves are bendy scabs of wine,
married to the ground and still looking.
Parasites give their bodies to keep
others’ clean. I’d linger further
with you over yellow fat and never
be that berry-stained girl we take
turns being.
But now huge on the bed, the sheet
one quivery flake of steam,
your sleep beats me utterly underneath.
There is no light under the moss
under us. Your feet are the most
curiously private cathedral
whores science can prove, taking you
swiftly, primly
to the next curve of exile.
Can’t have you there.
Where trees knot up permanently
at each of their stomachaches
and if cried at, won’t listen,
not exploding with the human gas
of losing-again, that blown glass liquid.
A side-feeling rips me, everything
is you. Hello belly smell, where’s
the steriler air?
I’ve lost you in the choking dark,
but I brought you there.
OKINAWA, KISSED FROM WIVES
The flies drink the soup and so do you,
heat-hazy with protein luck. You slurp it
down like blood and the noise shows
your pleasure. Then you walk big feet
through your sweat to a blistering bath.
Yes, heat cools you. But you don’t congeal;
you can put nose to flower, and squeeze water
from genitalia mushrooms. Spellbound by
the steep hill of smoke spilling out of you.
Or the reverse, as you also dropped
your shoe in a hulking pot of noodles.
An island is a permanence inside
an evaporating. The trees have one branch
and four trunks, like elephants.
Each step expect to drop through to a city
of caved babies with rough feet, uncles drinking
saki from cups of air kissed from wives.
You saw a stick before it walked away.
You watched the rain dry just before it fell.
Burned the branch as feverish as shrine
incense and swallowed yourself amazed
at how silently your soft mouth slips
around delicate intestines in a birthday dish.
A TORN PATCH NEAR NIGHT
I will not forgive you, but I will grow in your house
sweet as corn
choked with minerals. As belladonna is fevershaped
by the oil of dusk.
Satisfied in a goosey sprinkling of light
like carnival coins,
I’m your boxed peacock and you, my slim plague,
hold the handle. I can still
tell you to steal the last gold
from the raven-pulled sky.
So I can be flattered
in the gloom of your orchestra,
playing with such glistening
on the torn patch
scorch-edging out toward night.
Shiny listening burnt in
your transparent
stretch of bodyclock.
ticking and switching. Your eye-pockets,
your breast
the shape of a stain after dark.
I haven’t quickened
have you? Yet nowhere fast is closer and sooner.
American Poetry Page 21
