No title yet...

White lights,

A morning train from Valdemoro --

Why have they turned them on?
Nothing like darkness
to soothe the fog,

the vision that climbs the hills
of each stranger's face
and attempts escape through a window.

The car is now
a compartment of eyes:

Pinto, San Cristobal,
Atocha.

Clear, wet ribbons
cut down by the sky.
A vein-work of yellow fields on the glass,
growing.

The harder it rains,
the more you learn about distance.

On either side two men
are speaking Russian.


----------------------------------

Here is Lorca's "After a Walk," from which I've taken a line.

After a Walk

Cut down by the sky.
Between shapes moving toward the serpent
and crystal-craving shapes
I'll let my hair grow.

With the amputated tree that doesn't sing
and the child with the blank face of an egg.

With the little animals whose skulls are cracked
and the water, dressed in rags but with dry feet.

With all the bone-tired, deaf-and-dumb things
and a butterfly drowned in the inkwell.

Bumping into my own face, different each day.
Cut down by the sky!

Sequence

I.

The almond tree, the flower from underneath the almond tree
by that fence, the stone fence
It blew and upturned like sea plants
like hands and bowls asking
The almond tree in spring.

II.

I bathed in almond oil and milk, skin
inned the little red tub
when I was a child we ran out of soap
My mother she washed my hair out like so
many little galaxies of black, dusted black
She polished me so I gleam-smiled and
broke my teeth on the red walker
Played with sticks of red and black, their meetingsounds
hollow.

III.

Now if I saw an almond tree in the ground I would not
stop to say it is an almond tree I would
never think to know the flower which grows on it, where
inside the carbon has married an N, that
the carbon inherits the end and I

begin to ignore, eat
the aspic taste I learned in childhood was wrong,
That bitter almonds are spat before the carbons inside poison
the first erring step - inside the grown arsenic
taste lines mouth and twists it like grass leaves breaking

IV.

The almond tree. Its flower has five white leaves.


_____________________________________

I rather want to call this "The problem of describing trees" but maybe "Envy over other people's poems" is more apt, ha.

annunciation, winter

If I believed in it, my constellation has eroded.

The earth sign, the negative
treble that is true only inside the mirror of tongue,
eye.

It is not true, let it not be true.


____________________________________________


not that i've had the time or mind to read anyone lately, but i still find myself sounding out peg boyers often.

unfinished.

continuing on my temple kick:
__________________________________________
Inari

That night, the secret-faced shrine - - fox
god glowing dim, shadow of the cat slinking
from altar to step - - melting
into stone when beckoned.

You don't scare me. I play the game, run
bravado past mouth quietly.
Timid like shoe-sounds.

(By the brief snake, the empty rib bones of red gates.)

The lanterns are not lit but clever
with their paper luck, cut
pictures of horses, pumpkin silhouettes.

the sameness of living runs keys across the doors of cars.

the same type of people on and off the train, the same white people abandoning train at the 96 station, absurd clockwork.

kiyomizu dera

at the temple, two innumerable stones face
each other across a path and, eyes
shut, you walk from one to nearly the other,
through the throng of children, on
uneven pavement where bricks are
tiled haphazard like daily trials,
stretching out to where the eye can see nothing
you walk, but the eye cannot help it--it winces
open, breaks the charm.

in the walk from one stone to the other, your wait sinks
resigned into the spring you did not drink:
the time no-longer-yours is let
go guilty from the marble of love, luck

past superstition, clattering
back down the pebble steps to disperse in
rain mountains, shelves of air--
you follow

The blog's back! I like your strawberry liquor account, and the new alias? I really haven't written anything at all besides yelp reviews; things are going by too fast to document any sort of settling emotion about them. Hennyway, maybe (hopefully) I will have something to post soon! <3

commerce

the vast in the sky, the inside
eggshell curve of my night when
even our lights don't punch through the
cover or make it diffuse, i want to sell them to you.

no, no more jade in my mottled ring.

thought strikes the same place once
only, then gone.

BARF.

And just for fun time's sake.......This has no title yet either.


The color of your walls
has no real name.
When I sit on your couch
before the low oblong table
the dark paint, stagnant,
apathetic as mud,
watches from each wide surface.

I play the game of turning
your apartment upside down:
walking up the verticalness
of color, crawling across
the picture frames. I force my hands
into shelf bottoms, scratch
book spines against palms.

Towards the window, parting the
blind slits sideways, the buildings
spear sideways. The cars drive up,
down, and suddenly we are much
lower than ten floors, much higher
than could be allowed --

Feet first, towards the mirror
that hangs over your dinner table.
Your living room multiplied;
Sickness, an obscure shade.

Can't think of a title, but this is part of an upstairs meditation. It's very undone.


Black, jagged tar pieces
came dropping from the roof
and piled onto the driveway.

A furious pounding above: all day
the heat pressing down on furniture,
breathing through the window screens.

Footsteps of the muscled men,
the giant men, shaking the ceiling,
dragging their boots over our routine:
The blood of an Englishman.

Our cats could smell it from under the beds,
the dust of all our days clogging up
the drains and filling up the rooms,
which have never transformed once --

Not into closets heaped with small radios,
like in some dreams, or into
soundless swimming pools, from which
water disappears, suddenly.

They are as always:
stationary, too old to grow.

No dark attic either for the men to stomp through --
the sun exposing them, browning
their knotted skin with
a harsh, yellow eye.

Immigration, age 6

When I was real
the moon grew fat.
The broad leaves of the tree hid mothers, light.

In six years, one memory of rain, sieved from
hailstones the size of fists. Ice burst to the ground,
then melted.

That country
changes every seven years, a water clock
dredging up buildings, billboards, and, once,
the body in sheets by the side of the road we don't come near—

the away mind

the ciphers of the
monk, from when he counted notes at vespers
and numbered the fingers
remain arcane as grapes, wood.

no roads arrow, no roman rooms
are lit--yet
the little cell knows itself.
remembers a thousand times over, the divide.

on string, beads chase fingers

the inner ear curls inward strict like prayer

(another crappy exercise)

I wait before the hill.
The others have become dark
figures at the top.
Camera swinging about my neck,
I climb, and the heels of my feet
dig into sand. With my toes
I draw the character for tree:
The landscape relents, and wind
covers it with a gust --
Sweat, gone cold with nightfall. A man
in the distance is saddling his horse,
A quiet couple is shouldering their bags.
At the summit, they are looking up at a chrome moon.

Tearing the fronds from a leaf's underside,
he sits slouched where sun hardens three wide cracks -
on the island the ground yields to no depth.
He takes a plastic spoon and digs the first
hole, and polishes his fingernails white.
Sinking into humus, his feet go last.

House

(coauthored exercise)

Once did the tiller a house
Cut out of weeds;
A thinning, yellow shade,
That covered moss and seed.
It slept and slept; a thought
Grew on the sill;
Like darkened fields a tired room holds
Its curtains still.



Wind

- Lizette Woodworth Reese

Now has the wind a sound
Made out of rain;
A misty, broken secretness,
That drenches road and pane.
It drips and drips; a hush
Falls on the town;
Like golden clods an old tree shakes
Its apples down.

Flight

In the square of dark window an island
moors places where the hills' slouch ends--
hidden
in an echo of wells, dull spoons.

Glass polished in altitude bears
itself up with fronds of water
curling from cold
and below,
lit pins. The human pins grow
bright

the saskians explore MoMA

interesting new exhibits, as usual. too bad i've got writer's block.


I. hanne darboven

to get out, one follows the
lightness
of air.

the notes have raised their hands.
in the close, white room
plagues of notes

and the woman
sings thrice

off-key.

watching
in place of silence i am eye
and cannot help but crinkle.


II.

all day i have been chasing the clean
line___ the window inked
in black

shadow folds the corners into
a room, directing
sweep of
the white walls, the
whitewash.

at the Met, puero

the body of the youth i could write
pages. bent perfect like a cyclops sunset
or the stones set in spades of threes on
the wall's floor. he
is broken invariably, faceless
the cracked marble exposing.

how holes are hid behind a skin of stones--

[one can almost imagine, as the bent hip insinuates itself inside the eye, his legs attached back at the knee, those arms lost, the head shriven off clean. but i do not wish to see what will disappoint the mind]

bear with me

Still Life with Raj


in the room hides
an unwell mind

laundered clothes fester in piles

the chair is plied
with question
the table
has been drunk

in white cups of tea the bitters seep--
brown fingers cradle
palms together

he bows
where the English have planted their
names like trees

the English have piled into my name,
(the walls stroked in ink)
my tongue,
mine--


if you want some exposition: Raj refers to the British Raj.

? (helpican'twriteanymore)

the carthaginian
queen
defined a shape, but the atom's
edges are uncertain.

the electron comes and goes from node to node.

light lifts and strikes like minute hammers
flung.

the girl washing leaves,
the button scored like a mushroom cap:
the dog pricks its quizzical ears--

between you and
me--distance the length of the train

This was written in late December. Haven't found a title yet. What's new.


I come to the table with questions.
These will be the last, I say,
but on this surface
no voice takes on the task.

Potpourri in gold gift-wrap,
and blocks of imported cheese
uneaten on the black wood.
Next to him her face is animated
and milk-white. He nods in
pantomimed sympathy, his hand
smoothing her nervous leg.

Across the table I am the guest,
watching, my insides bowled over
and body flattened by the reoccurring
mistake. A fever, an infirmity
made pure by sleeping fiction.
I am only sleeping. I know this.

We’ve met here before, with
and without sound, or taste.

I see through his affinity to
varied black.
Each time is real as day, repeating
the same deferred fact,
gesturing the silent answers.

trying to write haiku but...

the poem fills with word:
imitation not finding the
difference of branch and tree.

one blossom-
a particular grief.

I'm back from bumming around. I found this poem, translated from Polish. I love the 6th stanza.


I Would Like to Describe
by Zbigniew Herbert

I would like to describe the simplest emotion
joy or sadness
but not as others do
reaching for shafts of rain or sun

I would like to describe a light
which is being born in me
but I know it does not resemble
any star
for it is not so bright
not so pure
and is uncertain

I would like to describe courage
without dragging behind me a dusty lion
and also anxiety
without shaking a glass full of water

to put it another way
I would give all metaphors
in return for one word
drawn out of my breast like a rib
for one word
contained within the boundaries
of my skin

but apparently this is not possible

and just to say - I love
I run around like mad
picking up handfuls of birds
and my tenderness
which after all is not made of water
asks the water for a face
and anger
different from fire
borrows from it
a loquacious tongue

so is blurred
so is blurred
in me
what white-haired gentlemen
separated once and for all
and said
this is the subject
and this is the object

we fall asleep
with once hand under our head
and with the other in a mound of planets

our feet abandon us
and taste the earth
with their tiny roots
which next morning
we tear out painfully