Saturday, October 27

bargle

poems titled rain

filth falls.

the streets are sodden
with squeaks of
shoes and clumps
of paper
fraying
in defeat.

at the door, the girl
in disgust, hair
clung with clear pearls, with
strident mouth

shakes the memory
OUT

Wednesday, October 24

This has been brooding for a week...finally expelled it from my system. Haven't found a title. Gargle.


Impatience laps like a dog.

The poem waits line by
line, crosses the street

and gulps watery coffee.
In the mirror the song

puts finger to strings,
admires its low bodiless
register.

listen to this -
word on skin

Languages you speak spill
onto pavement and
ruin my shoes,
my direction
of sense.

Tuesday, October 23

Just wanted to share a Keats poem I really like.

"After dark vapours have oppressed our plains"

After dark vapours have oppressed our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieving from its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May,
The eyelids with the passing coolness play,
Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.
And calmest thoughts come round us - as of leaves
Budding - fruit ripening in stillness - autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves -
Sweet Sappho's cheek - a sleeping infant's breath -
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs --
A woodland rivulet - a Poet's death.

Monday, October 22

What is her name?
When I last saw her
it vanished beneath the ground
where we stood.

Filing past crates
of fruit and potato,
the Thursday crowd follows
sidewalk lines,
moves content towards
no center.

A boy follows her.
Her face is pale and smiling,
floats before the apple
barrels.

Linda -- mid-sentence, mid-laugh.
Even the last name
comes, and draws for me
the portrait of
a word.

Sunday, October 21

i really should be working

but, because i really should be working, i was looking at craigslist for some reason. the site has this feature called "missed connections", which is oddly captivating. people mostly empty their hearts out to strangers (or air) about someone who caught their eye that day. some of the posts are actually quite touching (y'know: along the lines of "i wanted to say hello, but i was so shy and you were so pretty"; that sort of thing)... anyway, i cobbled this together from the titles of the posts.

urban love story

i.

me in a taxi; you with friend.
you freezer-burned my heart.
you slapped me at the Met.

ii.

it doesn't matter what you remember

hey
our eyes met for a brief instant
(my treasure Vincent)
our eyes met and we smiled,
photographer girl who likes wind

Friday, October 19

hymn undone- revision

a figure from clay he made.
he fashioned a figure from clay.

hard to see
until i take
the lathe--

on the wheel, earth under
hand tears into skin like
steel wool un strung

(its hungry grit
'brades the skin. it does not
settle silt)

from this
lump
unconvinced of lines
or grace--

from this
clay

he made
the shape
he made the make,
he smoothed the shape
and figured clay

with hands like mine

for seven
days

Wednesday, October 17

October, Brooklyn

Walking past the brownstones,
no leaves yet on the ground.
Night as if it would be
forever night, inching
into the fabric of my coat,
prying the last hour
of conversation which is
still warm beneath.

The station is closed:
I follow the curve of street
where two bikers return
from a dark, silent ride.
Luminous green ahead,
the government buildings loom
with lit facades,
empty lawns.

Underground, construction workers
hunch exhausted on benches,
plastered in tunnel dirt.
I stand with others who also wait
for the slow rumble of steel -

Tonight, I can wait
through unhurried night.
Somewhere the train glides, as
in sleep, through its
long corridors.

Saturday, October 13

from the nyt article: autumn in eight european cities

in rome,
cold over takes the old
city and the old
men set up
their stands--

cones of chestnuts that
have burst
their skins--

Thursday, October 11

hymn undone

a figure from clay he made.
he fashioned a figure from clay.

(hard to see
until i
take
myself the wheel--
how earth under
hand tears into skin like steel
wool un strung

how hungry grit
'brades skin and dreams of
smoothness-not)

from this

lump
unconvinced of.....lines
or grace--

from this

clay

he made
the shape
he made the make,

he smoothed the shape
and figured clay

with hands like mine

for seven
days

Tuesday, October 9

The missing limbs in sleep -
a search for gauze to stifle
the wound.

On the ground floor, the first floor?
Moving down flights of old stairs
at hallway ends -

Open windows like giant frames
of white light, mouths of towers
and I think (in my sleep):
I will write a poem beginnning:

I envy those plants
hanging there, which inhabit
the stair. Which do not
have to remember this place
as a gray mirage.

You, there the whole time,
who I followed between floors.
While you watched, it all ended
the same way I was sleeping. Hand
pressed on cheek, legs bare

and scissored, and what I was saying,
asleep within that dream:
déjame, déjame:
leave me be,
leave me.

the quantum mechanical particle

the cat
is only partly
dead, Schroedinger
said as
is
every one around
this
place a
solution to
possibility,

probably

Friday, October 5

i don't know why i wrote this

sometimes, i feel so very frustrated and get the urge to howl like a child, yet leave people unsurprised. days that i hate everything, like walking down a street and being seen or looked at...resenting the fact that the laws of physics dictate even how an eye can define the boundary of me.

anyway, this is strange. too many "un-" words? distracting rhymes or repetitions? please advise (especially the ante penultimate set of lines)
-------------

rest easy in the face of a
dog i have inherited, the
lips and curves unfine,
ill defined.

stalking up hills and
narrowing the corners of my
eyes at strangers--

the photon that has done me wrong,
the indecorous eye that will
continue to look
must turn elsewhere

at them i am shaking my
arms, rattling ineffectual
air

past the sullen quiet, the glare
of solid quiet
is a state of un-care
where i am
unconcerned.

shaking arms, knives

Thursday, October 4

a new way of looking

one of the things i really appreciate about taking a poetry workshop or seminar is that i'm forced to read things i ordinarily wouldn't think of picking up. when i make the margins of my mind less narrow, the effort shows up in my poetry later...

on that note, i'm reading "cascadia" by brenda hillman, one of the women poets who's coming to barnard this month. i wonder if saskia gave me her books intentionally, as hillman writes exclusively about science or that way of viewing the world. at times, the words and poems are so dense they daunt the eye: pages and pages of close-set lines. it's like holding a wedge of clay in your hands, thick and difficult to mold into something understood...but, the lines are frank and deliberate. if i listen closely, i can almost hear her reading them to me, or inscribing them in my brain.

i write short poetry and adore short poetry. to me, it shows the author understands that words are weighted and each one should be something worth. but, it's interesting to read something you don't necessarily like and force yourself to see its fine aspects. (sort of painful, though...)

in any case, i'll end by sharing a (short) piece i particularly liked:

songless era

A fine ash obscured the sun.

Leaves grew large as rooms.

Stamped recreants strolled near the pond of wands.

There was a great and terrible brightness
that was pretty much like a fire
but it had lots of eyes in it.

Four syntaxes correspond to four styles of going on.

Can you hear? (How 'bout now.) Non-chanson:

lie down in the tent of a servant-queen
lie down in the dust; go on.

One kind of sentence remembers the accident;

one kind of sentence is a scar.


-------------------
what think you?

Tuesday, October 2

Caravaggio

been trying to work a bit on this one...having trouble with the wording in the last stanza and the subject+verb variations, the narrative vs. imagistic effect...

Caravaggio

Black grows from the light,
from the scene, fills
the churches - bodies
so heavy they
fall to altars, cannot keep
themselves to shadow or
street corner.

On canvas the saints
are sooted, recognizable.

Sword in hand,
stumbling the nights in Rome
he is thrown into cells
and out, stalking the living.
He paints yellow wax
monsters of the murder,
offers his own head as Goliath's.
The teeth gnash, the eyes
almost see. David clutches
the slick hair, afflicted -
neither are triumphant.

And the final scene:
dragging his way down
a shoreline, the receding sails
drive him into fever.
Following a curve of
water, cutting his
feet on rocks.
He falls to the sand -
The ship goes under horizon
with his paintings.
A death, no pardon.

How a dream writes you again

How a dream writes you again

Trapped in a house by a day-storm,
which rushed the doors and windows
like a pattering army.
An empty room, a clawed
bathtub in the corner.
A door at the other end
which you came through,
throwing its curtains across the glass
as I bent over in the tub,
removing shoes
and long woolen socks.