Sarte Erasure

The earlier majority, as if to ask the day
not wishing anguish is past,
surpassing to the extent
across the fact.

The mode apprehends this
instant, again.
Permanent nothingness.
Yesterday, a synthetic situation.

Play seemed a former memory.
Order more, remake it freely.
My fact is another,
disappointing like boneless flesh,

alone as the day, having the circle of
resolution, the fact of myself,
not past good resolutions.
Which vain condition is ignorance?

A view would come, effective, in action
we shall not question. Only show this
established structure, this existence
of description, either indeed, unrealized.

Ashbery Erasure

My hurting, many say,
off to it, which to it may
so about it. Or, cover a shame
by this night, to and of flames...

To so recoup the start, this, the
how, the transaction: fear the best new things,
new season. Others, the ours in weeping,
the them in pajamas--the underneath,
a belief, never much hoping "out" was "yes."
One cannot account for it.

It's April, so it's National Poetry Month.  Awesome.  Artpost in South Bend is having another poetry marathon this weekend, Friday April 13 starting at 5pm and ending Saturday, April 14 at 5pm.  

Readers can sign up for a 15 minute time slot.  Come and listen, have some refreshments provided by Fiddler's Hearth, and get your voice out there.

Get the schedule of times here, at Artpost's website.

She Passed Fulton Street

Don't gravitate away, he says.
Smooth it over with your
sweet talk, your savvy
harmonica skills.

Actually, what works best
is a word, a thought--
any indication that
what we have here is more
than a thistle

Then a saxophone wails
like a cavity entering a tooth:
slowly at first, then echoing,
empty as a cave.

Hiking

Perhaps it is today that totals all meaning of life, a
roundabout progression of time. Perhaps,
like celery, time is good for you.

Stars creep up in their stately way.  Forgetting
to breathe in the night air, one had best forge
expectations in the daytime.
And another lover waits for you at the Sycamore.

Did we figure we'd be this far ahead?
Let's not lose the trail.
Ours is a recessive trait.

Portrait

It lives in the lungs,
is buried and harsh--
bound to travel and
want. It cannot hear you.
It hardly wants to. And
outside the ground lay silent,
feeding the troposphere
with rising smoke.

How To

If the world appears large it is merely

by contrast.

We sat for hours in the anesthetic

silence, keeping our

words to ourselves,

sharing space, forging a relationship

with the idea of one another.

And really the effort was short-lived,

the results divergent yet calming.

Then someone opened a window

and, slowly, the morning fell in.

Please Realize

We grow up learning boundaries, and there
are deadlines, too.
Cushioned as a great aunt's fine china
might be on the last day of the move.
Someday we'll learn to hold broken glass
without getting cut. We melt
crayons on the hot pavement,
desiring a blending of the hues.
Finalized by this action, and wild, we know:
a true believer.
And coming home is a bird, wings extended
in triumph of the day.

And now for something a little different.

Two short pieces from another class, inspired by and created around found lines:

1. (connecting three lines of found text)
Playing the sister of a brother imaged lost at sea;
she knew he must be out there somewhere, this
figment.  She looked for him on every island they
passed.  She heard him in the crushing ocean waves
and the cry of the salty seagulls.  And at night she
would go out on deck, the moon big and bright,
reflecting off the calmed ocean,
water like glass unbroken, silent stream.
He would probably be gazing at the same moon,
wishing it were a compass to lead him home. He
would be shivering just then in the darkened waves,
bobbing like a cork in a wineglass.  His hopes reached
her in her dreams, this imagined brother.  He was alone.
she was alone.  He did not want to be alone.


2. (connecting two lines of found text and three pictures)
It started in Ezra's lungs, just like that.  A spiny,
troubling sort of feeling that stayed with him for days at a time.
Sometimes he felt as though his breath would never escape and
he held it unwillingly hostage.  This feeling began to creep into
his limbs and he started wondering what was happening to him.
A sluggishness, a lack of clarity in thought and speech.  He had
loved to run and now he was troubled even to climb stairs.
He felt--old.
A thought began to brew in his head.
He knew medicine and science, he knew
the information and building blocks were out there
to solve his mysterious feelings so he began looking.
He brewed and searched and boiled beakers of colored
liquid, and often he would burn himself or cut his finger
on glass broken in his unsteady grasp, and the blood would
spread out on the counter, scarlet as the fever that settled in his heart.

In the Remake,

legendary for its vanity and egotism

still fine and shallow, like tiny theories.  Centuries

inside stopped blinking--and the train pulled in.

He looked at her but she was familiar only in the 

fields of his desire.

His heart slowed.

He nodded at Pedro and walked to the truck.

A Day in the City

The Future and the Fading Present

somewhere after the flash of balloons and bubblegum:

 an ambulance siren, singing loudly to clear

the way.  It becomes

a howl, with longing and bright

teeth that shiver in the wind,

lonely as lake Michigan in the

dead of winter.  the raft had overturned

and the boys held their breath—

the seagulls have abandoned them,

the green shore a distant memory.

Progression is somehow a willow tree,

fingers trailing in the water, which flows and bubbles,

remembering that once it cared to live.

Vacation

The lights strung above the doorway
call you home:
this is not your motel room
in San Juan,
bed unmade and already
slept in.

This is a kind of contingency
where people read magazines
to divine the proper way
to live,

and outside
the garden is overpopulated
by termites.  they steal the trees,
renting out each branch like a

sub-let complex.  An in winter
they burrow deeper.  Try to ignore
them, but you can't.
We all want to be whole.

Mistaking Mortar for Daybreak

Farther out of town
the night sky seems higher
than heaven.  The lampposts
eclipse all celestial things...

We take for granted the stillness
between days, trying desperately
to make it mean.
In such low light, who could
help but to mistake a window
for a mirror?

I once thought i saw a sunrise in a stone
wall lit with floodlights
but the dark trees stood correcting me
in counterpoint.

You Need to Have a Plan

A roadmap of the lungs,

a slight exaltation resulting in

burning clothes, a broken ankle—

the kind of thing you get from

hitchhiking a desert come nightfall.

Delighting in the scrape of a wing

against the sand, smothering a

guttural growl.

The ancients take their dreams

and run with them, and

in the dusty morning find

There are no humans here.

The Last Trip We Took

Falling out of an airplane is sometimes nice,
like going overboard on a ship: cold air hitting
you, like water filling your lungs, like the
frost-bitten pillow cases shoved over our heads.

I’m telling you this because I care.
Red is not the color of malice, but of
diced tomatoes: watery flesh which leaks
onto our countertop;
it’s the color of wine that stains the carpet
and of blood that stains the mind.

The air has a brick’s weight
muscling itself into the corners of this room.
(somehow I expected to go much differently)
Weeping, I do not see.
Sight replaced by smell:
horse muck, rust, and
a boxcar full of kerosene

Elemental

Somewhat ridiculous,
here in the middle of winter, are
shorts.
These summer clothes are themselves
a nuisance: they badger
you about body shape
and what shoes to wear.

Hanging in the back of the closet
they seem to paint a beach
scene, all striped towels and
orange cover-ups.  The sun
evaporates the water and melts
the sand.  Do we have a name
for this synthesis of elements?

It's hard to remember
days lost to heatstroke and
condensation,
weathervanes swinging freely,
but somewhere people are
barefoot, the
sun dripping lazily in a
fading oleander sky.

Resonance (Ashbury poem)

We ride by night

and in the early afternoon

we

break the keys off in our locks…

Fool me once, shame on you

Fool me twice

and then how do we proceed?

O joy of my life

I knew you at once by your shadow.

Others may well try, be they God or man,

striking an anvil

as if everything around it will sing.

Black Ice

Faces reflect in the mirror

moving through the

light, the void—all illusion

an allusion to that thrill

Navy violets and yellow-oranges

bloom on the indulgent floor.

As we move,

rhythm & beats pervasive,

our bodies know this pulsing.

Night courses onward,

cities and stars both glowing

            (phosphorus and nitrogen exploding)

How To

how to write poetry

April

On a winter morning getting dressed
is the last thing you want to do.
Stand in front of the heater and it's like
being in an oven, but you step away
and shake with cold.  The car is running,

it's dark blue outside.  Won't someone steal
the car God please won't someone steal the
car? I haul my doll house (what a
burden). Their soft faces smile
at me.

Don't they know? Has no one
told them? Don't look at me I just
sleep here. On the chair, behind the couch, behind
the door in the back room of these walls
I sleep if I can and I do try.

I split in two, ribbons of my body
unroll from around my core--
a neat pile there on the cement
out front under the florescents, which cast
everything here with a yellow light.

Even the shadows have shadows.

They say he's handicapped and dumpster
dives, gets stuck by insulin needles.
His daddy lets him cuss, doesn't yours?

Say you love her even if you don't.

Forked Road

Claire often was said
to be the most
beautiful.  Her mother
kept her in a glass
box on her vanity,
only opening it on
holidays.  She would
rather like to open
books, she said, but
her mother fed her
carrot cake and dropped
a Polly pocket into
her hand.  Her
father was a religious
man and would
read her bedtime stories,
never leaving out the scenery
or unsettling end.
He would leave her
skylight open
so she could see the stars
and get rained on
(never in the same
night).  She lived
like this until her mother
died, and her father, widowed,
married the church.
On her nineteenth birthday
she emerged much
a girl, talked to rabbits.
She never looked
at maps but would
walk in straight
lines and, finding
herself lost, would
nest with the owls
she found there.

Creation V.

(creation five)

From a distance, the earth looks like this:

composed of molecules and atoms,

it tilts right ever so slightly to make

winter and spring,

each opposite to one another and so

attracted.

Making the elements was the hardest part.

The stars brainstormed

for hours,

chewed the erasers on their

pencils, charted up how each would

fit together and decided at last

to leave it up to science.

How and why gravity began only Einstein

knows, though his dust has probably

floated up through the soil

and rejoined the cosmic race.

But through mist and grass and rock and hail,

through salt and weeds and trees,

caprice remains.

So it goes.