Introducing Coleen Shin, Artist
Thursday, June 24, 2010
 “Self-Portrait” Coleen Shin V.6.4.
My featured contributor this week is Dallas artist Coleen Shin. Many “Here and Now” readers already know Coleen, who describes herself as an artist and writer living in North Texas who “works days, creates nights, laughs, often.” Those seeing her work here for the first time have something to look forward to.
She’ll be back next week with some of her poems.
In the meantime, here are our poems and poets for this week.
Anonymous Ancient Songs of the Women of Fez
Me somewhere out there
Sidney Wade Monosonnets
Me new things on top of new things
John Poch Why I Just Dropped the Nature bouquet
Me pestilence
Campbell McGrath Dawn Existence Early July April 20 Night Thoughts
Fady Joudah Additional Notes on Tea Atlas
Me how the hell did that happen assessing the day
C.P. Cavafy Days of 1896 Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old A Young Poet in His Twenty-fourth Year
Me i have no good word for crocodiles
C.N. Bialik At twilight...
Me warty-frog fat
Ralph Angel The Blessed Shadow Play
Me the deer still graze
Laura Kasischke Tuesday
Me the woman in the avocado blouse
Jimmy Santiago Baca from Meditations on the South Valley
Me on the Blanco River
Pierre Martory Black Diamond
Me pictures from an american lynching
Norman Stock The Stone House The First Time I Robbed Tiffany’s
Me time was
Sonia Sanchez tanka and haiku
Leslie Scalapino Considering how exaggerated music is
Me when time to cross the last river comes
 Untitled Coleen Shin
I’m starting this week with one of those interesting things I sometimes run across in the used-book store.
This time it’s Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, published in 1980 by Schocken Books. The book includes poems by Enbeduanna in 2300 B.C. to contemporary American poet Leslie Scalapino. I’m using some of the earliest pieces in the book this week, along with the latest, beginning with these traditional songs collected by Mohammed el Fasi in Fez, Morocco early in this century.
The translation is by Willis Barnstone.
Ancient Songs of the Women of Fez
I want to be in a garden with my love, empty. Not even a gardner. I want to be in a bath with my love, empty, Not even a masseur, and I’ll bring him all the hot and cold water he wishes. Even his sweat I’ll collect and put in flasks so it will make me alive. The day I am blind from crying, I will paint my eyes with tears instead of knol.
~~~
I see a man who is dull and boring like no one else.
He is heavier than massive mountains. When he laughs he shakes the plains of Gharb , when he cries the coastal cities tremble.
To look at an ugly man gives me a headache.
~~~
My passion is like the turbulence at the head of waters where oiling rivers sweep away a granite mill.
The sultan of love came to camp in my heart.. I welcomed him and devised ecstatic nights with him, but he debated with me and ordered me to satisfy his every wild quirk..
But he has an untender heart. I beg him. He is iron and gives me neither freedom nor the joy of union. What causes my passion? Is love a joke?
~~~
I want to be with my love in a garden surrounded by pavilions with lovely cushions. In its center are fountains and water jetting up like milk. The nightingale glorifies the orchard and its seven-colored pears with songs.
A young man goes from room to room, gracefully.
The jasmine drops its branches.
Sitting by my friend, I will be healed.
 “Oils” Coleen Shin
I’m not a big sports fan. I follow the Spurs when it seems like they’re having one of their semi-regular good years, but, beyond that, I find it hard to get excited about any of it. That’s especially true of soccer, where two points mean it’s a high-scoring game and fans celebrate ties (and don’t do tie-breakers) just like they won.
I do enjoy sports movies, I guess because, the movies seem to me to be the place where they get the dramatics right.
somewhere out there
this is serious business
somewhere out there interstellar star systems are colliding
somewhere out there an alien race of whoozidoozits is dying, their methane atmosphere slowly replaced by metagaterlon oxygen farts
somewhere out there a spaceship full of Baptists is approaching the water-planet Abosion XII for full immersion baptism
somewhere out there Pat Boone is thinking about a comeback tour
somewhere out there a Republican is suffering from delusions of decency
somewhere out there a bunch of foreigners who don’t even speak English are bouncing balls off their heads and calling it football
i mean this is no damn time for jokes and silly faces
 “Yellow Flower” Coleen Shin
Next, I have some playful poems by Sidney Wade. They are taken from her book, Stroke, published by Persea Books in 2007.
Wade is the author of four previous poetry collections, and has published poems and translations from the Turkish in numerous periodicals. She lives in Gainesville, where she is a professor of English at the University of Florida.
Monosonnets
Pity the Poor Orange
bald white orb
on the table rests
its veined membrane exposed
flayed for zest
Adam and the Snake Prepare to Recite some Verse
Snake says
let’s go mesmerize some pomes
Adam says
I prefer to mammarize them
After the Flood, Frogs
assemble, whirp and fart, dissemble, delve and throng, prolonging the agglutinant song of themselves
The Spontaneous Combustion of a Shopkeeper from Alcohol
He must have ignited red and fast
the crusty knave light spirited at last
Stroke of Genius
windfall display of art
playing a signal part
flaying the heart
of indignant enigma
 “Blue Gertie” Coleen Shin
Time is a really slippery thing to deal with.
new things on top of new things
seems the older i get the faster i get older
time scrunched, like holiday shopping sales - one week it’s Christmas and the next the 4th of July
new things on top of old things and newer things on top of that
this morning at breakfast, three army officers, one old grunt-looking guy like i remember from my own time, and two very pretty young blond women, the two of them at breakfast more female soldiers than i saw in my own four years of service
it’s exciting, this race through the future, every day i can hardly wait for the next...
i just wish it would slow down so i’d have more time to enjoy it
 “Zephyr” Coleen Shin
I have a poem now by John Poch, from his first book Poems, published in 2004 by Orchises Press.
Poch teaches at Texas Tech University and is the editor of 32 Poems magazine. His second collection, Two Men Fighting with a/ Knife, published in 2008, won the 2008 Donald Justice Prize. His third collection, Dolls, was published in the fall of 2009.
Why I Just Dropped the Nature Bouquet
Like a cocoon full of its writhing moth, at the park’s edge, lying beneath a tree a couple struggles almost secretly within the thin white sheet they have brought. Daylight still and nearly home from my walk around this summer-baked Lubbock lake bubbling with methane gas or maybe catfish gasps. I am close enough to see she is on top. In the fingers of one hand I hold what I’ve found: a dove feather, several sprigs of curly willow. And a butterfly wing. Nothing in the other. She must think I’m strange. She sees I see. Where are the police, neither of us will say. She softly sighs something to the man below, but he won’t look over. He is hardly there, his eyes must be rolled back so far in his mind dissolving like pills. In assent, he only nods he mustn’t, for a moment, more or breathe. silly me, I want to comfort her. I am close enough to tell that two wisps of her hair are falling spent over them like long dark tassels of a veil.
We are all close to something here. For a moment, I roll my eyes upward like him, but not as deep into the sky. They are waiting for me to disappear. I am looking away, but I can’t look away. Who looks away at the end of the world?
 “Darkroom” Coleen Shin
Here’s where I piss off all my ideologically-besotted right-wing wacko relatives.
pestilence
i saw this yellow jeep-like rough tough ass-hole looking vehicle this morning
had a bumper sticker on the back said “Constitution Party”
which, if there were a truth in bumper sticker law and the bumper was longer, would have said,
“I Like the Parts of the Constitution I Like and You Damn Well Better Like Them Too Party” which means,
everybody gets a gun and nigger don’t move into my neighborhood cause i’ve got mine and i’ll use it
i know these people - grew up with them - thought they’d gone away but they’re back - pestilence loose in the country
 “Pothead” Coleen Shin
Now I have several poems by Campbell McGrath, from his collection Seven Notebooks, published in 2008 by HarperCollins.
McGrath’s teaches in the creative writing program a Florida International University in Miami. Previous collections of his work include Capitalism, American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago, Road Atlas, Florida Poems, and Pax America. He won the Kingsley Tufts Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
Dawn
5 a.m.: the frogs ask what is it, what is it? It is what it is.
Existence
1.
I had forgotten what it was like to exist this way. I am a different person in Chicago, a little deeper but sadder, melancholic, less supple within my own skin. Strange sense of slippage, returning here, revisiting former lives and past estates, as if the film had jumped its sprockets and the gears of the clattering projector spun to no effect. Exist in the moment, yes, but the past is inescapable, the past is oxygen to the blast furnace of being, uranium to the reactor of consciousness. Should I say human consciousness? Is it so different from bees, lemurs, longhorn sheep? Are consciousness and self precise synonyms? Can we imagine one without the other? Can we conceive of consciousness outside of time or is it a projection of time within us, consciousness my temporal expression as my body is my expression in three-dimensional space?
2.
Driving from Miami we stopped to watch the manatees that shelter all winter in the Homossassa River and happened upon an island inhabited by monkeys. There was a sign explaining how they had been pets of a local eccentric but now lived without interference on their mangoes and Purina monkey chow. So the myth of a benevolent, all-providing god. But what was the monkey’s opinion of their captivity in the midst of that astonishing, spring-fed river? Were they aware how much their predicament resembled our own? Could they feel the current of time swirling past and around them? Did they even exist? The sign was hand-lettered, the morning silent, the story preposterous though hardly impossible. We saw no monkeys, but what does that prove?
Early July
Showering outside by candle glow: too lazy to change the lightbulb
Jellyfish season - climbing back into this world alive and tingling.
Alone on the beach, one kite and me, drinking beer. Sunset, July 1st.
April 20
Talking in class about rhetorical posture. The students, several of whom are extravagantly gifted, have been so deeply indoctrinated with the depersonalizing jargon of critical theory that they can barely accommodate the notion of authorial agency,let alone the concept of a speaker. Where is the speaker situated in this poem? Not the speaker but the voice. Not the voice but the self. Not the self but the locus of issuance. How can I convince them that poems if texts are human texts, that texts if artifacts are artifacts forged in the furnace of the heart, the soul, the psyche, however you imagine or care to name that machine we hear idling in the engine room at night. Springlike today, near seventy, sunny and blue. Budding trees no longer skeletal as logic. The particular hickory or maple in the alley whose sheaves of hairline branches engraved discrete linear designs upon the iridescent sky has swollen into generality, a fuzzy abstraction. Another week should see the bloom-out of purest whisper-green shoots, darkening all summer to fall.
Night Thoughts
3 a.m.: cheep, cheep. I, too, sing of happiness - but I still can’t sleep.
Why say happiness? Ghost clouds sailing past the moon, sad and immortal.
Whisper of ground mist. Fine contentment where you can. Whisper of ground mist.
 “Drained” Coleen Shin
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001.
Here’s a poem from his book, The Earth in the Attic, winner of the Yale Series of Younger poets competition, published by Yale University Press in 2008.
Additional Notes on Tea
In Cairo a boy’s balcony higher than a man’s deathbed.
The boy is sipping tea,
The view is angular like a fracture.
Surrounding the bed, women in wooden chairs.
They signal mourning with a scream.
Family men on the street run up the stairs and drink raven tea.
On the operating table in Solwezi a doctor watches a woman die.
Tea while the anesthetic wears off,
While the blade is waiting, tea.
The doctor says the woman knows god is sleeping
Outside heaven is a tent.
God is a refugee dreaming of tea.
Once upon a time an ocean married a sea to carry tea around
Land was jealous.
So it turned into desert and gave no wood for ships.
And when ships became steel,
Land turned to ice.
And when everything melted, everything tasted like tea.
Once upon a time there was a tea party in Boston.
Tea, like history is a non sequitur.
I prefer it black. The Chinese drink it green.
Atlas
The end of the road is a beautiful mirage:
White jeeps with mottos, white And blue tarps where the dust gnaws At your nostrils like a locust cloud On a helicopter thrashing the earth, Wheat grains peppering the sky.
For now Let me tell you a fable:
Why the road is lunar Goes back to the days when strangers Sealed a bid from the despot to build The only path that courses through The desert of the people.
The tyrant secretly sent His men to mix hand grenades With asphalt and gravel, Then hid the button That would detonate the road.
These are villages and these are trees A thousand years old, Or the souls of trees, Their high branches axed and dangled
Like lynched men flanking the wadis, closer not to a camel’s neck And paradoxical chew.
And the Villages: Children packed in a hut Then burned or hung on bayonets, Truck tires
Anchoring acacia limbs as checkpoints. And only animals return: The monkeys dash to the road’s edge and back Into the alleyways.
And by a doorstep a hawk dives And snatches a serpent - your eyes Twitch in saccades and staccatos:
This blue crested hoopoe is whizzing ahead of us From bough to bough, The hummingbird wings
Like fighter jets refueling in midair.
If you believe the hoopoe Is good omen,
The driver says, Then you are one of us.
 “TalalaTree” Coleen Shin
Considerations of mortality, here’s a couple.
how the hell did that happen
you open the obits and see him
a guy you used to hang with when you were both a lot younger
and you don’t see the dried-up dead guy in the picture, you see the guy you knew - the fun-chasing hell-raiser and great pal
how can he be dead?
we were live-forever, forever 25-year-old, life-loving immortals, about the last people you’d ever think of as dead
but he is
how the hell did that happen?
assessing the day
it’s a fine day today
the sun shines on all of us, children of the bright...
it’s a fine day, today
three pages of dead people in the paper - only five younger than me and one of those i think was lying...
a fine day today, three pages of dead people in the paper
and none of them was me...
 “Red Belly Mannequin Series” Coleen Shin
Next, I have three poems by Greek poet C.P. Cavafy from Selected Poems, published by Princeton University Press in 1992. The poems were collected and translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrad.
Cavafy was born Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the ninth child of Constantinopolitan parents. His father died in 1870, leaving the family poor. Cavafy's mother moved her children to England, where the two eldest sons took over their father's business. Their inexperience caused the ruin of the family fortunes, so they returned to a life of genteel poverty in Alexandria.
After a brief education in London and Alexandria, he moved with his mother to Constantinople, where they stayed with his grandfather and two brothers. Although living in great poverty and discomfort, He wrote his first poems during this period, and had his first love affairs with other men. After briefly working for the Alexandrian newspaper and the Egyptian Stock exchange, at the age of twenty-nine Cavafy took up an appointment as a special clerk in the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works—an appointment he held for the next thirty years.
Cavafy remained virtually unrecognized in Greece until late in his career. He never offered a volume of his poems for sale during his lifetime, instead distributing privately printed pamphlets to friends and relatives. Fourteen of Cavafy's poems appeared in a pamphlet in 1904; the edition was enlarged in 1910. Several dozens appeared in subsequent years in a number of privately printed booklets and broadsheets. These editions contained mostly the same poems, first arranged thematically, and then chronologically. Close to one-third of his poems were never printed in any form while he lived.
He died in 1933 in Alexandria from cancer of the larynx.
Days of 1896
He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency, condemned and strictly forbidden (but innate for all that), was the cause of it: society was totally prudish. He gradually lost what little money he had, then his social standing, then his reputation. Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year - at least not at a legitimate job. Sometimes he earned enough to get by acting the go-between in deals considered shameful. He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly if you were seen around him often.
But this isn’t the whole story - that would not be fair. The memory of his beauty deserves better. There is another angle; seen from that he appears attractive, appears a simple, genuine child of love, without hesitation putting, above his honor and reputation, the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.
Above his reputation? But society, prudish and stupid, had it wrong.
Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old
He’d been sitting in the cafe since ten-thirty expecting him to turn up any minute. Midnight went by, and he was still waiting for him. It was now after one-thirty, and the cafe was almost deserted. He’d grown tired of reading newspapers mechanically. Of his three lonely shillings only one was left: waiting that long, he’d spent the others on coffee and brandy. He’d smoked all his cigarettes. so much waiting had worn him out. Because alone like that for many hours, he’d also begun to have disturbing thoughts about the immoral life he was living.
But when he saw his friend come in - weariness, boredom, thoughts vanished at once.
His friend brought unexpected news. He’d won sixty pounds playing cards.
Their good looks, their exquisite youthfulness, the sensitive love they shared were refreshed, livened, invigorated by the sixty pounds from the card table.
Now all joy and vitality, feeling and charm, they went - not to the home of their respectable families (where they were no longer wanted anyway) - they went to a familiar and very special house of debauchery, and they asked for a bedroom and expensive drinks, and they drank again.
And when the expensive drinks were finished and it was close to four in the morning, happy, they gave themselves to love.
A Young Poet in His Twenty-Fourth Year
Brain, work now as well as you can. A one-sided passion is destroying him. He’s in a maddening situation. Every day he kisses the face he worships, his hands are on those exquisite limbs. He’s never loved before with this degree of passion. But the beautiful fulfillment of love is lacking, that fulfillment is lacking which both of them must want with the same intensity.
(They aren’t equally given to the abnormal form of sensual pleasure; only he is completely possessed by it.)
And so he’s wearing himself out, all on edge. Then - to make things worse - he’s out of work. He manages somehow to borrow a little here and there (sometimes almost begging for it) and he just gets by. He kisses those adored lips, excites himself on that exquisite body - though he now feels it only acquiesces. And then he drinks and smokes, drinks and smokes; and he drags himself to the cafes all day long, drags the weariness consuming his beauty. Brain, work now as well as you can.
 “Silence” Coleen Shin
It seems like a really serious problem to me, being up to your ass in alligators. Here’s a very simple solution.
i have no good word for crocodiles
i have no good word for crocodiles,
long scaly creatures with great sharp teeth
who would eat me if they could -
i say save the sweet-eyed bossies who never ate anyone
and eat a croc instead
 “Fling Mannequin Series” Coleen Shin
I have a poem now by C.N. Bialik, from the book Selected Poems, published in 2004 by Overlook Duckworth. It is a bilingual book with the original Hebrew text and an English translation by David Aberbach on facing pages.
Bialik was born in the Ukrainian village of Radi in 1873 and lived in Odessa for much of his adult life. In 1924 he moved to Tel Aviv, where he was a scholar, author, and teacher, as well as a business man, and, in his later years, a revered public figure. He died while on a visit to Vienna in 1934. His former home in Tel Aviv has been preserved as the Bialik Museum.
All the poems in the book are both titled and numbered. This is the 8th poem in the book.
At twilight...
At twilight come to the window, lean against me, envelop my neck with your arms, press your head against mine - cleave to me.
And we’ll cleave with silent desire, we will look up to the awful radiance, let fly our fantasies like doves over seas of light
to vanish in silence on the horizon, in yearning flight, come to rest on purple ridges of cloud, islands of splendor.
 “Dust” Coleen Shin
Of course, you don’t want to eat too much of that crocodile, or other problems may ensue.
warty-frog fat
big windows all around, condensation makes it like eating breakfast in a cloud
oatmeal in a cloud - too much oatmeal in the cloud - and i sit in my booth like a frog full of flies
warty-frog fat
green beyond my natural green
and it’s not easy
 “Mop Water Scum” Coleen Shin
My next poet is Ralph Angel, with a poem from his book Neither World, published by the Miami University Press and winner of the 1995 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.
Angel was born in Seattle in 1951. He is also the author of more recent book, Twice Removed, from Sarabande Books in 2001 and Anxious Latitudes, his first book in 1986, which I have and have used here before. His poems have appeared in many of the top journals and magazines and have been collected in numerous anthologies. His most recent honors include a Pushcart Prize, and awards from the Fulbright Foundation and Poetry magazine.
He lives in Los Angeles and is the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Redlands, where he teaches creative writing.
The Blessed
There is a place, I swear it, where sadness fits, but with all this blood on our hands we choose what to do and make ourselves up.
Ask anyone, and get an answer. The Salsa’s on aisle five, next to the dust mops. Cracked vases and damp hallways -
it’s purely private life. The way taking it easy is absolutely full time. The sign language
of windows and doorways, of a man watching a woman who’s watching another man throw down a broom. Even your faint, familiar voice,
muffled and thirsty, until its sheer impossibility moved me over, and I could hear you.
And in this desert of moss, and mountains, we ear raisins, olives, eggs, because what is solid
has no opening, like mourners who have no mouths and cannot object, and will remember forever.
Shadow Play
She leaves the motor running. I would too. I would like to marry her, that face repeated a million times in this town. In the exhaust next door a man twists his wooden leg into an impossible position. He doesn’t even have to say, “I know, I know, and no body resents me.” He just grins.
On the vendor’s tin scales, daylight shifts and splinters. Blood on the black brick, a shopkeeper sweets glass from his eyelids. A young man fidgets in a doorway, cups his hands around a blue flicker of panic, and leans back into the shuffling papers and footsteps, the noise that opens away from him and is not noise.
Now a cleaning lady stops herself and looks over her shoulder. And so does the mailman, a traffic cop, a kid walking his bike. And the perfect word lodges deep in the throats of businessmen talking gibberish, drawing lines around themselves until obsessed and hailing taxis. Only our loose clothes
between us, the linen tablecloths, white as blindness. Only the putter of canal boats, the vine-covered walls, some cursory glance that empties our eyes, when they meet, of options, and won’t let go. A person who might
grow older. People who will dash their dreams. People who will come back and live in the aroma of bread, in the sound of a thousand doves unfolding he plaza. I would like a glass of ice water. It’s the little thing, when I’m lucky the world comes to me.
 “Migraine” Coleen Shin
Some days are just very nice to wake up to.
the deer still graze
the deer still graze in morning cool on the hillside pasture
they will retreat to the woods by the time i finish breakfast as clouds clear and the sun begins it’s daily scorching
early summer rain has greened the woods and the pastures where just weeks ago bluebonnets held their ground
until, their tenure done - they dropped their seed and settled in beneath the grass to wait their turn again next year
as we wait with them for those few weeks of color...
it is the green that is the marvel now, green, where brown grass and dry cracked earth is the more expected rule -
a premature celebration, perhaps, for the fires of hell could still await us just past the gates of July, but for now, i taste the green of new life in the air and sing the green electric
 “Reclamation” Coleen Shin
Here’s a poet from my library I don’t remember using before, which is kind of curious. Her name is Laura Kasischke and the poem is from her book Lilies Without, published in 2007 by Ausable Press.
Kasischke is the author of six books of poetry and four novels. Her work has received many honors, including the Alice Fay deCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Beatrice Hawley Award, a Pushcart Prize and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers.
She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Tuesday
On Tuesday I catch a g glimpse of him around a corner drinking his own shadow from a cup.
So this is it, the Future, huh? just
a figure in a thin coat waiting for a bus?
From a passing car I hear a song.
Boatman Rowing, Rowing
Cargo full of screamers But he keeps going
~
So why does he drop the cup and run when he sees I’ve seen him drinking from it? Why
this secret-agent stuff, this big hush-hush? I’m the mortal here, the mother, the one
with a bag of groceries, fumbling with her keys at her car’s trunk on an ordinary Tuesday morning, song on the radio. Boatman, rowing. Just rowing. Boatman rowing,
alone across the ocean.
~
So suppose you were given small vial of sea, and in it everything you needed to create the world again, from scratch? Or
the First Seed? Or
the Original Plan? Or
the first song, Knowing
knowing, weary of knowing, the boatman hates his job, but he keeps rowing
~
It’s June. That boy brought up blue last summer from the bottom of the pool, he’s chasing a girl this afternoon with a black balloon. The earth
trembles beneath his tennis shoes. His mother
in the kitchen hums a familiar tune, Boatman rowing. Rowing. Boatman
full of plans, but he keeps going
~
And if you were given a list of the names of those who would die within the year - ?
(Pearl and coins falling from the sky. A loaf of bread that bled when it was cut with a knife.)
No, you would ask for the list of those who’d fall
in love, instead, those
who would be born, get rich. You
would ask to be a child at Disney World again - a frantic child, still, an abandoned child, yes, but
a child nonetheless,
lost, happily, in a land of dreamy kitsch, and a chorus of cartoon animals singing a song your mother used to sing in the car as you wept:
Rowing. Whiners. But I keep going... If you two back there won’t be quiet...
~
Outside all night in the dark a man kept calling to his dog. (The earth’s
tides, the motion of the planets, everything nudging everything else.) So,
when the phone rings in the morning I already know it will be that recording. Rowing
rowing
~
And out the window, there it is, the neighbor’s dog, pawing
frantically at a rabbit hole - a hole which whispers, We
are gone, all of us, like so many Mondays,
but the dog keeps pawing.
 “Potato Roots” Coleen Shin
I have a couple of reminiscence-type poems this week. Here’s the first one.
the woman in the avocado blouse
the woman in the avocado-colored blouse is studying her menu like it was Russian novel
and her dress reminds me of the small avocado orchard down from the house where i grew up - a quarter mile, maybe, down the canal bank from our house, the canal bank built to form the irrigation canal where i spent a good part of my time growing up, where i learned to swim - the old jump in and figure out the next step when the water starts getting in your nose method - our jungle river, this dirty old canal, water pumped from the Rio Grande a few miles away to irrigate citrus orchards and fields of winter vegetables - and us naked kids, swimming in the thick water, along with the snakes and alligator gar and catfish god-only-knows what diseases picked up along the long flow from Colorado mountains, to, a ways further, the Gulf of Mexico
and trees along the canal, hackberry mostly, vines thick as our wrists, good for swinging from tree to tree and smaller vines crisp and porous, good for smoking, a toxic habit of forty years, begun as a twelve-year-old by a dirty canal, beat, finally, at fifty two...
the woman in the avocado blouse, a pretty, friendly face screwed-up in perplexity, trying to pick her breakfast fare, right in the middle, it seems, of a new-day argument with her husband sitting across from her
french toast Denver omelet the Wisconsin scramble
or a good cry
four good choices - pick one, i’m thinking, just jump in and figure it all out when the consequences reach your nose
we’ve all survived worse
 “God’s Move” Coleen Shin
Now I have a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Actually it’s part of one of the two poems that are the book, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley, published in 1987 by New Directions.
from Meditations on the South Valley
X
Barrio Southside used to be called Los Ranchos de Atrisco eighty years ago. Before that, rio Abajo. Names change.
Dawn arrives, shimmering like a hammered tin santito, dangling from a viga portal, tic-tic, clicking in the breeze against stucco & adobe.
I study the faces of boys playing in dirt yards, and see Cuauhtemoc - images that reflect gold-cuts engraved on medallions in Spanish museums.
Vatos, eyes sleek with dreams, lounge n porches reading he flight of geese above the Rio Grande, look like Netzahualcoyotl.
And thrashing out from the bosque’s wall of trees ad wild bushes, see a man in threadbare clothing, work-worn muscles, eyes weathered as war-drum skins, his skin glowing with sweat like rain on old rocks, and here, you see a distant relative of Aztec warriors.
 “Lost” Coleen Shin
The other reminiscence.
on the Blanco River
i lived on the banks of the Blanco River back in the late-sixties
me, with several hippy-cowboy neighbors, and my dog Sam -
dead broke, living on beans and cornbread and meatless beef stew and Lone Star beer...
after four years of military service, learning to be free again
up all night to see the sunrise on the river, chopping trees
on the island in the middle of the river for a free month’s rent
me and Sam crossing to the island in a tin rowboat, more laying under the trees
then chopping them down, the two of us - old Sam and me - lying in the grass watching the clouds and the sun
passing through the branches, writing short stories that never got any better and poetry that did, a bit...
i remember watching Sam run through a pasture of high grass, chasing
a rabbit, running through the grass, jumping high over the grass every few yards to track the rabbit’s path
the poetry of Sam running in such wild chase, the speed of her running, the grace of her slow jumps
like a French film i saw once of horses in slow stampede, better than any poem i would write that day or since...
 “Doll” Coleen Shin
Now here’s a poem from French poet Pierre Martory, from his book The Landscape is Behind the Door, published in 1994 by The Sheep Meadow Press. The poems in the book were translated by John Ashbery who is also credited with discovering Martory’s poetry in the first place.
Martory was born in Bayonne in southwest France and spent most of his life in Morocco. After escaping from Paris in 1940, just as the German arrived, he joined the French army in tunisia and spent the years after the war working at odd jobs and writing, novels and theater and music reviews. His poetry was his own secret. He never tried to have it published and never showed to anyone who might have been interested. As a consequence, his poetry was entirely unknown in France until this publication in the United States for American readers.
Black Diamond
The peaceful harmony of a Sunday morning Filled with the colors of an apparent silence, The landscape outside green and blue, the sun Hidden behind the occasional chiming from a church and in the bedroom a presence that is leaving, A goodbye floating in the air like The last ribbon of cigarette smoke...
Once the door has shut one is back before the sea Mirror that reflects neither the window nor the world Brutally impenetrable where one can nonetheless paint The dark the flashing and the two infinities the musics the words the unreal and the true The breath of life fleeting vapor the burning heart burnt in the sparkle of a black diamond.
There is a bed in all our days A sudden fall, a difficult descent Always as many days as we live In the hour when we leave day to begin the never finished Apprenticeship of night.
Stagnating in this leisure of our vigil other Pictures that lose us, broken landscapes, forgotten Faces and the monsters of our previous meetings With the images the bedroom wall beams back to us Facing the window of which it is not the reflection.
The enclosed garden of iris and roses of sharon the water in the birdbath where the fat robin fusses The train whistle, the country down to the river The full moon and its eddies of blue cloud All the earth and only we to know that we sleep Always alone, once our eyelids are shut, And the nothingness which will leave off lasting...
 “Alone” Coleen Shin
This is an old poem, written several years ago after reading about an exhibition of photos taken at American lynchings in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly. The pictures, one in particular, affected me deeply, but not for the reason you might think.
I wrote the poem in 2000; it was published in Hawkwind in 2002 as part of a collection of my stuff I called Random Acts of Middle-Aged Reflection.
pictures from an american lynching
it’s not the hanging black bodies that chill me, it’s the smiling white faces below.
so familiar, those faces, the white man standing under the swinging body of the young black girl, smiling, beer in his hand, hat cocked to one side like he was a movie star,
the two pretty girls arm in arm beneath the carnage, smiling, posing for the camera like for a picture at the county fair,
the child in dusty overalls standing at his mother’s side, wide-eyed, holding on to her dress with one hand pointing with the other to the bare feet of the black man dangling over his head.
so familiar, these faces,
like from the family albums I looked at as a child, seeking among the pictures there the story of how I came to be...
 “Anxiety” Coleen Shin
Next, I have a poem by Norman Stock, from Buying Breakfast for my Kamikaze Pilot, published by Gibbs-Smith Publishing in 1994.
Stock, born in Brooklyn, received a B.A. from Brooklyn College, and M.L.S. from Rutgers University, and an M.A. in english from Hunter College. He has won numerous literary awards and, at the time the book was published, was a librarian at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
The Stone House
two men walk by me one carries a rope the other one holds an axe they say nothing to me they only walk by but I am curious I follow them they go to a stone house in my old neighborhood they walk up a back stairway I follow them at he top of the stairs they turn and see me walking up the stairs toward them he is coming, one of them says we meet in a small room they tie me up the axe is not to be used, I am told, only the rope then what is the axe for, I say, I am told, so we would have you here what is to become of me, I say, and there is an odd confidence in my voice you will remain as you are, I am told, your life will not be any different than before I know, I say, I have always known that, and I have always been like this, but never here you are wrong, I am told, this is where you have always been in this stone house, the only difference is that we are here with you know
The First Time I Robbed Tiffany’s
The first time I robbed Tiffany’s it was raining. And it was dark, and the wind was blowing. It was like the first time I had sex. The same kind of weather, the same kind of feeling. Me and the girl in the car. Just like me and the cop in the car, after he arrested me outside the store in the rain. I promised myself I would do better next time. Just like I promised the girl. Just like I promised the cop. It felt like it always felt, me and the cop, me and the girl, me and the rain, and the wind and the darkness, and the robbery I never committed, the sex I never had, the girl I never knew, the feel I never copped, and the rain the rain the rain was ll I knew and all I will ever know.
 “Anonymous” Coleen Shin
Here’s another old poem, written in 2000, and published that same year in Niederngasse, which over the course of several years, published a number of my poems. A very fine journal, publishing in English, German and Italian, it has, I believe, gone inactive.
time was
time was i was a racing car, not one of those fancy european jobs, but an all-american thunder road muscle car like mitchum used to outrun the revenuers, fast, sure, quick on the hills and tight in the corners, with a low rumble at rest that shook the ground, the impatient rumble of a beast held back, poised to spring
now I dream of empty rooms, of time and power flowing away, of grace and essence draining away, leaving a void, an empty shoebox in the corner of a dark closet in a house, vacant, smelling of loneliness and neglect, the odor of redundancy, the closeness of stale air and suspended lives
 “Barfly” Coleen Shin
Next I have some tanka and haiku by Sonia Sanchez. The poems are from her book, Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, published by Beacon Press in 1998.
~~~
you ask me to run naked in the streets with you i am holding your pulse.
~~~
i don’t know the rules anymore i don’t know if you this or not. i wake up in the nite tasting you on my breath.
~~~
i count the morning stars the air so sweet i turn riverdark with sound.
~~~
i have caught fire from your mouth now you want me to swallow the ocean.
~~~
love between us is speech and breath, loving you is a long river running.
~~~
when we say good-bye i want your tongue inside my mouth dancing hello.
~~~
hunger comes on morning sails, . where twilight passes me wide is the river.
~~~
what i need is traveling minds talktouch kisses spittouch you swimming upstream.
~~~
it is i who have awakened in nakedness o cold the morning cock.
~~~
this man has sucked too many nipples been inside too many holes grid locked to many skins to navigate a blackwomansail.
~~~
i am watersnake crossing your long body hear me turn in blood
~~~
have you ever crossed the ocean alone seen the morning cough yellow?
 “Oil Abstract” Coleen Shin
Before I finish up this week with my own last poem, I want to go back to the beginning of the issue and the book Women Poets from Antiquity to the Present, only this time I’m leaving antiquity behind and going to one of the contemporary poets in the book.
The poet is Leslie Scalapino, the last poet in the book.
Scalapino was raised in Berkeley and was educated at Reed College and he University of California at Berkeley. At the time this anthology was published, she taught at the New College in San Francisco and at San Francisco State University.
She was my age, born in 1944, and just passed away about three weeks ago. I just learned that from Wikipedia and am glad I had already decided to use her poem this week.
From Considering how exaggerated music is
How can I help myself, as one woman said to me about wanting
to have intercourse with strange men, from thinking of a man
How can I help myself, as one woman said to me about wanting to have intercourse with strange men, from thinking of a man (someone whom I don’t know) as being like a seal. I mean I see a way a man would, say, be in bed with someone, kissing and barking, which is the way a seal will bark and leap on his partly-fused hind limbs. Yes. Am I not bound, I guess, (I say o myself) to regard him ten- derly, to concentrate on the man’s trunk instead of his face, which in this case, is so impassive. Seriously, I am fascinated by the ways seal moves.
[EPILOGUE: anemone]
“About the night on which a man said he would spend a 100 dollars on me,” a woman described, (and he did use up most of it simply on taxi fares), I was able to describe my feelings:
“About the night on which a man said he would spend a 100 dollars on me,” a woman described (and he did use up most of it simply on taxi fares), I was able to describe my feelings: by saying it was like being an insect who puts its feelers out into the flowers of a plant, and sucks from them, as we were (sucking) from the restaurants and bars of the city to which the taxi took us. All night we were surrounded by lights. As I lay back inside the taxi, just waiting for he man to make arrangements for me (in regard to that part of my feeling, I would describe the taxi as being more like a buoy), I had the feeling (thru-out it) of rising slowly, and of floating along side particular spots in the city. By morning, naturally, I was sated.”
 “Dallas” Coleen Shin
So now here’s my last piece for the week.
when time to cross the last river comes
the religiosos babosos were back yesterday for their Monday breakfast
and i’m sorry to say i'm becoming less and less interested in their conversation as they become more baboso and less religioso
when they first began to meet for Monday breakfast they had good conversations about interesting things worthy of thought and discussion -
now, maybe because they've come to see themselves as off-the-clock on Monday morning, their conversation has become like you would expect from four mechanics or four farmers sitting around a cafe table for breakfast, except that the mechanics and farmers (especially the farmers) would talk more about their trade and livelihood than these guys do...
mostly now it's all about sports, basketball, during the NBA finals, soccer now during the world cup. and, yesterday, golf, specifically, Tiger Woods, and, true to form, they talked a lot his swing and next to nothing about his swinging ways
you’d think a table-full of preachers would have more interest in the subject of sin and it’s consequences when time to cross the last river comes
maybe we don’t need the religiosos to think about it, maybe all we need is for them to do their little Sunday dance, their pulpit pounding shuck and jive, before they hie themselves off to the links, leaving us to get on with our own low-key deep-think, as we do
all of us, in the dark dark night, waiting for the sleep-bugs’ bite, both the converted and the unconvinced, like me, regular human beings who struggle to be better than their nature, sometimes winning, sometimes a lose, sometimes calling the game on account of rain
if it turns out there is a heaven, there will be a place for us there, i’m sure, even the philanderers and whoremongers and preachers and non-believers like me, just a little further down the high table, as virtue, even if only of intent, finds it’s place...
 “Ghost” Coleen Shin
That’s it for the end of the beginning of summer. The end of the end cannot come too soon.
As you may have heard, all material borrowed for use in this blog remains the property of its creators. My own stuff is available if you want (astounding to me, the places i find my poems that i didn’t know about until I google myself), just be nice and credit me and “Here and Now” because I am, you know, allen itz, owner, producer, and captain of this good ship Lollypop.
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Catch As Catch Can Thursday, June 17, 2010
V.6.3.
Before getting too far into the poetry, here’s the commercial break for the week, directed at readers from San Antonio, who will be thrilled, well, maybe not, to know that I have some of my photographs up at Timo’s Coffeehouse & Cafe. Timo’s is on the corner of San Pedro and Mistletoe, a little south of Hildebrand and a little north of San Antonio College and San Pedro Park. I’m pretty cheap, with the small pics priced at $20 and one larger one at $60. There is lots of art and many photographs hanging on Timo’s walls, most of it unmarked. My photos are the black & whites high on the wall behind the cashier.
As for my photos this week, I don’t expect them to be hanging anywhere, ever. I-Photo, over the course of one day to the next, swallowed the last four years of my photos. They’re not lost; they’re just not where their supposed to be and I can’t figure out how to find them. I have copies elsewhere of some of the missing pictures, some I do not.
In the meantime, images for this week are catch-as-catch can.
So that takes care of that.
I don’t have a featured artist this week, or a featured poet. So, for this issue it’s just me and my library friends.
I’m not so happy with what I’ve been doing lately, but my library friends never disappoint, especially one new to me whose book I just picked up this week. The book is What Saves Us; the poet is Bruce Weigl.
Damn, he’s good.
You’ll like him and all the rest as well.
A Home in Dark Grass
A Man Writes to a Part of Himself
On a Ferry Across Chesapeake Bay
At Midocean
Me
the coast is with us today
Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Survival of the Fittest
Tucson's Classic Rock
Me
day 24,387 and counting
Diane Wakoski
The Magellanic Clouds
Me
vagabond mornings
Bruce Weigl
On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Blues in the Afterworld
What Saves Us
Me
tofu turkey
Osip Mandelstam
Verses 1 through 8 from Stone
Me
the Hawaiian shirt plan
Charles Bukowski
Sloppy Day
Me
about spellcheck and other random inequities
Paul Kane
A Murder of Crows
Me
five minutes in the fire with fiona
Gary Snyder
How Many?
Carwash time
To All the Girls Whose Ears I Pierced Back Then
Almost Okay Now
Me
my only excuse
I start the week with several poems by Robert Bly, from his collection Selected Poems, published by HarperCollins in 1986.
A Home in Dark Grass
In the deep fall, terror increases,
And we find lions on the seashore -
Nothing to fear.
The wind rises; water is born,
Spreading white tomb-clothes on a rocky shore,
Drawing us up
Form the bed of the land.
It is not our job to remain unbroken.
Our task is to lose our leaves
And be born again, as trees
Draw up from the great roots.
So men captured by the Moors
Wake in the detached ocean
Air, living a second life.
To learn of poverty and rags,
To taste the weed of Dillinger,
And swim in the sea,
Not always walking on dry land,
And, dancing, find in the trees a savior,
A home in dark grass,
And nourishment in death.
A Man Writes to a Part of Himself
What cave are you in, hiding, rained on?
Like a wife, starving, without care,
Water dripping from your head, bent
Over ground corn...
You raise your face into the rain
That drives over the valley -
forgive me, your husband,
On the streets of a distant city, laughing,
With many appointments,
Though at night going also
To a bare room, a room of poverty,
To sleep beside a bare pitcher and basin
In a a room with no heat -
Which of us two then is the worse off?
And how did this separation come about?
On a Ferry Across Chesapeake Bay
On the orchard of the sea far out are whitecaps,
Water that answers questions no one has asked,
Silently speaking the grave’s rejoinders.
Having accomplished nothing, I am traveling somewhere
else.
Oh deep green sea, it is not for you
This smoking body ploughs toward death.
It is not for the talkative blossoms of the sea
I drab my thin legs over the Chesapeake Bay,
Though perhaps by your motions the body heals.
For though on its road the body cannot march
With Golden trumpets...it must march;
And the sea gives up its answer as it falls into itself.
At Midocean
All day I love you in a fever, holding on to the tail of
the horse.
I overflowed whenever I reached out to touch you.
My hands moved over your body, covered
with its dress,
burning rough, an animal’s foot or hand moving over
leaves.
The rainstorm retires, clouds open, sunlight
sliding over ocean water a thousand miles from land.
I spoke in an earlier poems about the difference here in winds that come in from the hills and winds that are from the coast. This poem is about a day when the coastal winds prevail.
the coast is with us today
the coast
is with us today
and it is not clear -
it is a muggy haze,
with the smell of salt
water pushed across
cactus meadows
rattlesnake spit
cow pie pastures
draped heavy across
our shoulders
with sandbag stink -
coastal summer
is with us now
in this early day in June
birds fly slow,
squat ponderously in the trees,
sing lugubrious songs
cooling breeze
from the north hills lost
in full retreat
The next poem from my library is by Jean-Paul Pecqueur. The poem is taken from his book The Case Against Happiness, published in 2006 by the Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc., an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington.
Pecqueur is a graduate of the University of Washington’s creative writing program where he was the winner of the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize. He teaches Literary and Critical Studies at the Pratt Institute and English at the City University of New York.
Survival of the Fittest
I want to say that I do not know
what brings us here
nor what keeps us indoors
under the harsh, accusatorial lights,
but I’ve got this sinking feeling.
The young red-haired guy on the stool beside me,
he’s been fuming for hours
about how he lost his latest job
because when he digs a trench goddammit
he doesn’t want to hafta fill it in again,
which his partner, a thin-lipped man
in an implausible bad brown suit,
thinks it is damn straight.
And what is life anyway, he erupts,
but one continual lab or of uncovery?
To which I want to say that I do not know
but he has the morning paper
and it’s leading headline screams:
“Seven More Bodies Found
Buried in Accused Killer’s Backyard.”
Outside the bar, the off-white and badlands-
pink strip malls spread
like a preprogrammed crime spree
while the partner continues his dreary countdown:
Dozens of teenaged goons with American guns
and wet dreams, ha-ha, of fields full
of hundred dollar bills, boys really, yesterday
they soiled themselves with their neighbor’s blood.
Can you believe that?
Yes.
Yes I can believe that.
Tucson’s Classic Rock
which scary dude, quoth Maggie
which judgment legislating for feeling
on which watched and worn-out corner
in the slowly draining light of June
the palmetto frond
is a roach scaling the wall
in Tucson
in June the wind smells of creosote
it smells of ozone and of trouble
but you get used to it, quote Maggie
as in - it becomes you
like an old habit of blackish-blue skirts
it becomes the music you move to
Tucson’s classic rock
fuck you, screamed from a passing car
please, oh please, whispered in reply
Everybody’s got to believe in something.
day 24,387 and counting
another
day,
another
dollar,
a million
days,
a million
dollars...
that’s what the fella
down at the Happy Valley Home
told me...
and, depending
on your capacity for
long term planning,
that view can be very
encouraging,
even coming from the
Happy Valley Home cohort
who, if you choose,
can be seen as
not out of touch with reality
but living instead
in a greater reality
closed to the more prosaic
of us -
or not
as for me,
i’m a believer in reality,
but only in romantic affairs -
when it comes to money,
i settle
for no less than the
wildest
fantasies
which is why
i am sure
i’m on the road to riches
every day
and while i may not get
the days i need
to get there all the way,
being on the road
to something good
is better
than being stuck
in the weeds
like a back-roads vagabond
with a flat tire
and no spare in the trunk
i’m a human being
of the American
persuasion
after all -
and, like my kind,
want to get
everything there is to get...
and expect, by god,
to get it! -
day 24,387
and counting
I have a longish poem now by Diane Wakoski, from her book Emerald Ice - Selected Poems 1962-1987. The book was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1996.
Wakoski was born in Whittier, California, in 1937. She received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published more than forty collections of poems, including this one, which won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award. She has also published four books of essays.
Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship, a Michigan Arts Foundation award, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michigan Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Diane Wakoski lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where since 1976 she has taught at Michigan State
The Magellanic Clouds
(for Eleanor who likes to see her name in print)
The photographic plate is blurred.
That blurry area
is where you laughed and
breathed on the plate; lizard skinned
prickly pears roll out of your mouth; a purple bird
twists you tongue with his bak
and crazy cactus leaves of love pin you luckily to
one man;
you have a mouthful of stars when you laugh
and you fall over the milky way at your feet.
Next door the Magellanic Clouds swirl
and try to force themselves into your paintings
but you are too happy painting
little hearts and big hearts and sticking them
all over your husband
who is a river washing silver fish over you in the dark.
Look carefully.
My scream makes a silver line on the graph.
The photographic plate is blurred.
That blurry area
is the Magellanic Clouds
from another galaxy.
Inside me swirls something like the Magellanic
Clouds.
All the animals I ride are found in the Magellanic Clouds.
My life is destined to be a cloud,
galaxies, light years,
removed. The dust storm on the desert. The fog on the river.
A handful of dust with tiny shell fragments.
A gold outline against the sky
How can I explain to you and all the succulent women I know.
Wives, mothers, loved, protected,
by men they love,
having the shoulder to curl their heads into at night.
How can I explain to myself this dust cloud that is my life?
I talk in my sleep just as I talk when I’m awake.
No one listens to me but strangers.
Once a blue vein of electricity came to me in the Magellanic
Clouds
and said there is a price
on everyone’s life.
Uncurling my ears like new leaves,
I looked at my world,
my scarred body,
my missing children,
separation from the men who spoke my language.
The price is to walk
alone
up the stairs,
alone
every night with your candle,
and alone
down the stairs
alone
every morning with white footsteps
and teacups of tears.
In your daydreams you must carry the bodies of your children
wrapped in white and strapped to stiff boards;
people will chase you and accuse you of murder.
The children will sing in your ears and cut you with the
sharp corners of their smiles.
Your songs will be bled out
of you
every day, as you are cut with different tools,
razor blades, knives, scissors, grass, paper, glass.
One day the words will come out of your elbows and one day
out of your knees. Scars and holes and craters will cover you.
When people look at you they will run away
but words,
the words you’ve bought will creep out of holes
like beautiful skeins of thread.
Some day I will vanish in the Magellanic clouds
but will wait in rooms to get inside of paintings.
Even the electricity, the fire
tells me I will
not have to spend all my
time
in the sky.
Someday it will be my breath blurring the photographic plates
and astronomers will say
“See the cloudy spot on the plate?
We once thought it was the Magellanic clouds, but they have
moved
further out
into space.
It is something new, another enormous cloud made up of strange
gases and foreign particles. It is something new
and we have no name for it yet.”
and I will breathe harder,
will blow harder,
will blur more of the plate,
will pass through rooms and rooms and rooms of memories in the
shape
of apples, birds, iron wheels.
The clouds, the clouds, the Maellanic clouds, the clouds in my
heart, the clouds I ride on, the clouds under my bed,
the clouds in my life, the clouds always in
the next room seeping under the door.
I am a cloud,
dust on the desert,
fog over the waters,gases in the sky.
Can there be any
sadness
once I am named.
(1969)
Cats are mysterious creatures, growing no less mysterious as they get old.
vagabond mornings
the old cat
sits by the french doors
in the very early
morning
staring out into
the dark...
so what is she thinking
i wonder
as she peers
into the gloom -
originally
an outside cat,
a calico stray
who circled me, first,
as i sat
on the patio,
then drew
close over weeks, allowed
my touch, accepted, finally
a place of repose
on my lap,
set aside her straying youth
became a house cat,
my constant companion
beside me on the couch
as i watch TV,
watching, straight and primly
posed by the computer,
as i work, beside me again,
on the bed when i sleep...
she hasn’t been outside
in more than two years,
since she became so old
and partially blind
we were afraid she’d get lost
if she went out
and, though she stands by the door
and looks out with such concentration,
she runs away to her bed
if i open the door to let her out -
but she still has her memories,
i suppose,
of her youthful roaming life,
sees them,
against the dark canvas
of very early morning
as she stands by the french doors
and peers so intently out
My next poet is Bruce Weigl, with poems from his book What Saves Us, published in 1992 by Triquarterly Books of Northwestern University Press.
Born in 1949, Weigl enlisted in the Army soon after turning 18 and served in Vietnam for one year beginning in December, 1967, earning a Bronze Star during his tour there. (Two years after I received my draft notice, passing my 22nd birthday in basic training.)
Upon completing his service he returned to his hometown of Lorain, Ohio, where he enrolled in Lorain County Community College. He went on to earn his his BA at Oberlin College, his MA at the University of New Hampshire, and his PhD at the University of Utah. After teaching at Penn State for many years, he returned to Lorain County Community College as the school’s first Distinguished Professor.
Weigl is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, and has also written several collections of critical essays, published translations of Vietnamese and Romanian poetry, and has also edited or co-edited several anthologies of war poetry. His own poetry has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Poetry in 1994, The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets in 1985, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness in 1993, and American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets in 2006.
This was my first opportunity to read his work and I found that I like it. There are two kinds of boomers, those who served, even if never in a war zone, and those who did not. Though Weigl’s experiences were so much different and more frightening and demanding than mine, we are of the same kind. We share a military-issue bullshit detector the other kind most often do not. (Not to be confused with the cynicism that tries to pass for knowingness now.)
On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
At a party of the young Sandinistas in Managua,
neighborhood where the Somocistas had lived
and idled their long cars,
all the pretty people dance the salsa
and toast the liberation with fine rum.
Two winding miles down the hill
a barrio of tin-roofed shacks
spreads itself out like a sickness.
On dirt floors the people keep house,
they fetch their water in buckets,
through a field of garbage they pick like gulls
for a slice of fruit or scrap of meat.
A boy had grabbed my hand down there
and led through the mud and morning
light, proud about something he wanted me to see,
a sewer being dug but now abandoned.
He jumped down into that ordinary hole
and waved his arms
like it was his grave he’d just defeated,
because not having to shit
in the tall grass means something.
Blues in the Afterworld
I remember a wild apple tree
alone in a field where deer had lain
and made a bed in the long leaves of grass
where I slept with a gun
in my hands
and woke in rain
misting on the leaves
and on the hard apple’s redness
abandoned to the rattling branches.
I have to say
I put the gun down
and opened my pants
and touched myself.
The light made me do it,
the loneliness,
and brother crow said something
through the distant, broken trees
that sounded like a warning
and in a wild moment
outside myself
I was trapped in a room of flowers,
their smell too much to bear
like it must be for the dead.
Then the room was a boat
on which I sailed
into the hush of a green jungle.
Out of time I was jangled,
out of space
but then just as quickly
delivered back to the empty field
to the bed deer had made
under red apples,
the world light now in some places
and in some places dark.
This is the book’s title poem.
What Saves Us
We were wrapped around each other
in the back of my father’s car parked
in the empty lot of the high school
of our failures, sweat on her neck
like oil. The next morning I would leave
for the war and I thought I had something
coming for that, I thought to myself
that I would not die never having
been inside her body. I lifted
her skirt above her waist like an umbrella
blown inside out by the storm. I pulled
her cotton panties up as high
as she could stand. I was on fire. Heaven
was in sight. We were drowning
on our tongues and I tried
to tear my pants off when she stopped
so suddenly we were surrounded
only by my shuddering
and by the school bells
grinding in the empty halls.
She reached to find something,
a silver crucifix on a silver chain,
the tiny savior’s head
hanging, and stakes through his hands and his feet.
She put it around my neck and held me
so long my heart’s black wings were calmed.
We are not always right
about what we think will save us.
I thought that dragging the angel down that night
would save me, but I carried the crucifix in my pocket
and rubbed it on my face and lips
nights the rockets roared in.
People die sometimes so near you,
you feel them struggling to cross over,
the deep untangling, of one body from another.
It’s getting to where too many of my poems are about writing poems (or not), hardly surprising since writing poems (or not) is mostly what I do.
I’m thinking it’s getting to be time to do something else for a while so I’ll have something else to write home about.
tofu turkey
twiddling
on my laptop
checking all my favorite
sites
reviewing my bank account
my credit card balances
killing time - well, no,
not exactly -
smothering consciousness
would be more like it,
trying to let free
from it’s moan-a-day cage
that tiny sub-section
of electric tapioca
that channels poems
not yet written,
floating,
as they do
in the ever-ever land
of poetical mushiasma,
there for the grabbing
if you can find them
like fishing for invisible fish
with invisible bait,
patience is the key -
wait them out for they will come...
though sometimes
the day is just not long
enough
for the waiting
and tofu turkey
from the freezer
is the best you
can do
I have several verses now by Osip Mandelstam from his first book of poetry, Stone, first published in Russia in 1913.
Born in 1891 in Poland, Mandelstam was raised in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a prominent leather merchant and his mother a music teacher. Mandelstam attended the renowned Tenishev School and later studied at the Sorbonne, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of St. Petersburg, though he left off his studies to pursue writing. His second book, Tristia in 1922, secured his reputation, and both it and Stone were released a year later in new editions.
By this time the Bolsheviks had begun to exert an ever increasing control over Russian artists, and Mandelstam, though he had initially supported the Revolution, was unwilling to yield to the political doctrine of the new regime. He published three more books in 1928—Poems, a collection of criticism entitled On Poetry, and The Egyptian Stamp, a book of prose—as the state closed in on him.
Mandelstam spent his later years in exile, serving sentences for counter-revolutionary activities in various work camps, until his death late in 1938, in the Gulag Archipelago.
The poems in the book, untitled, though numbered one through eighty-one, were translated by from Russian by Robert Tracy.
1.
A tentative hollow note
As a pod falls from a tree
In the constant melody
of the wood’s deep quiet...
1908
2.
In the wood there are Christmas trees
With golden tinsel blazing;
In the thickets toy wolves are grazing
With terrifying eyes.
O my prophetic sadness,
O my silent freedom
And the heaven’s lifeless dome
Of eternally laughing glass!
1908
3.
In a light shawl, you suddenly slipped
Out of the shadowed hall -
We disturbed no one at all
Nor woke the servants up...
1908
4.
To have only a child’s books for reading
And only a child’s thoughts to nurse,
To let all grown up things disperse,
To rise out of deep grieving
Life has made me mortally weary,
I will take nothing it gives,
But I love my land, poor as it is,
For I’ve seen no other country.
In a far away garden I swung
On a plain wooden swing - I recall
Fir trees, mysterious and tall,
In my vague delirium.
1908
5.
More delicate than delicacy
Your face,
Whiter than purity
Your hand;
Living as distantly
From the world as you can
And everything about you
As it must be.
It must all be like this:
Your sorrow
and your touch
Never cooling,
And the quiet catch
Of not complaining
In the things you say,
And your eyes
Looking far away.
1909
6.
Against pale blue enamel, the shade
That only April can bring.
the birch tree’s branches swayed
And shyly it was evening.
The pattern, precise and complete,
A network of thinly etched lines
Like the ones on a porcelain plate
With its carefully drawn design,
When the dear artist creates
The design on the glaze’s hardness,
At the moment his skill awake,
No thought of death’s sadness.
1909
8.
A body is given to me - what am I to make
From this thing that is my own and is unique?
Tell me who it is I must thank for giving
The quiet joy of breathing and of living?
I am the gardener, the flower as well,
Never alone in the world’s prison cell.
My warmth, my breathing have already lain
Upon eternity’s clear pane.
Imprinted on the glass a pattern shows
But nowadays a pattern no one knows.
Le the dregs of the moment drain away -
the pattern’s loveliness must stay.
1909
I hate and fight summer every year, and lose. So I’m thinking I might try a new strategy.
the Hawaiian shirt plan
it’s kind of an
orange/yellow thing
with palm trees
and some kind of
liquor bottle
with sailing ships
on the label -
it’s one of seven
Hawaiian shirts I bought
a couple of weeks ago -
the one i have on today
part of my new
strategy for facing
South Texas summer -
embrace it!
no more hiding
from summer and its heat -
instead, i will
embrace it -
i will sweat, just
as one’s supposed to
i will wear my salt-stained
Hawaiian shirts daily;
i will work at least one hour
per day in my backyard
in the cinder-toasting sun
as lightly dressed as allowed
by law, my fish-white belly
will be brown like the pecans
that fall from the tree, my
feet will become summer rough
again, my hands black & bruised
from digging in the dark soil
and sharp caliche rock
I will be like the ancient peoples
who made their hard lives here,
among the cactus and hills,
rocky meadows, summer heat
and north winds of winter
i will be seven years old again,
when summer was my friend
i will be summer
Here’s Charles Bukowski with one of his day-in-the-life poems. This from New Poems, Book 2, published by Virgin Books in 2003, the second of the very many posthumous books of his poems. A difference between these early books and the ones that came later is that these poems were selected by Bukowski himself.
Hank Chinaski has another day at the track.
This poem is considerably longer than many of Bukowski’s works, but then it seems like it must have been a long day.
Sloppy Day
I had been up until 3 a.m. the night before,
heavy drinking: beer, vodka, wine
and there I was at the track
on a Sunday.
it was hot.
everybody was there.
the killers, the insane, the fools.
the disciples of Jesus Christ.
the lovers of Mickey Mouse.
there were 50,000 of them.
the track was giving away
free caps
and 45,000 of the people were
wearing caps
and there weren’t enough seats
and the crappers were crowded
and during the races
the people screamed so loud
that you couldn’t hear the
track announcer over the loudspeaker and
the lines were so long
it took you
20 minutes to lay a bet and
between running to the crapper
and trying to bet
it was a day you
would rather begin
all over again
someplace else
but it was too late now and
there were elbows and assholes every
where and
all the women looked vicious and ugly and
all the men looked stupid and ugly
and suddenly
I got a vision of
the whole mass of them copulating
in the infield
like death fucking death,
stinking and stale;
they were walking all around
belching, farting
bumping into each other
gasping
losing
lost
hating the dream
for not coming
true.
then
some fat son of a bitch with
a pink pig’s head perched
on his body
came rushing up to me
(why?)
and while
I pretended to be looking away
and as he closed in
I dug my elbow into his gut.
I felt it sink in like he was
a sack of dirty
laundry.
“Mother,” he gasped,
help...”
“you all right, buddy,” I
asked.
he looked as if
he was going to puke.
his mouth opened.
he cupped his hand
and a pair of
yellow-and-pink false teeth
fell into his palm.
I walked on through the crowd
and found a betting line.
I decided to bet the last 5 races
and leave.
the only way i would stay
would be for $900 an hour
tax free.
20 minutes later
I had made my bets
and I walked out to the parking lot
and to my car.
I got in
opened the window and
took off my shoes.
then I noticed
that I was blocked in.
some guy had parked behind me
in the exit aisle.
I started my engine
put it in reverse and
jammed my bumper against him.
he had his hand break on
but luckily he was in neutral and
I slowly ground him back up against
another car.
now the other car wouldn’t be able
to get out.
what made that son of a bitch
do that?
didn’t he have any
consideration?
I put my shoes on
got out and let the air out of his
left front tire.
no good.
he probably had a spare.
so i let the air out of his
left rear tire
got back into my car and
maneuvered it out off there
with great difficulty.
it felt good to
drive out of that racetrack.
it sure as hell felt better than
my first piece of ass and
most of the other pieces
which followed.
I got to the freeway and
turned the radio on and
the man told me
I had just won
the first of my 5 bets.
the horse paid $12.40.
at ten-win that was
$52 profit so
I wasn’t on skid row
yet.
by the time
I got to my driveway
the man on the radio told me
that my next horse had
run out.
they had sent in a $75 long shot.
too bad.
I parked in the garage
climbed out
put my key in the front door
kicked it open
got my blade out: over 50%
of home burglaries occur during the
day.
I checked the immediate
visible area
walked into the bathroom
pulled back the shower curtain:
nothing.
I walked out
stood in the front room
and then I heard a sound
in the kitchen
and I yelled,
“OK, FUCKER, COME OUT AND
WE’LL SEE WHO’S BEST!”
there was no answer
“ALL RIGHT, FUCKER, I’M COMING
IN!”
I ran into the kitchen with my
blade extended.
my cat was sitting up on the
breadboard.
he looked at me amazed, then leaped off
and zoomed out of the kitchen
I walked into the bedroom and
switched on the tube.
the Rams and Lions were
playing.
I kicked my shoes off, stretched out
on the bed, said, “shit.”
got up again, went downstairs,
cracked a beer, came up, let the
bathwater run and
stretched out on the bed again.
The QB took the ball
dropped back
looked downfield to pass and
didn’t see the big lineman
breaking in
from his left.
the lineman blindsided the QB
like a trash collection truck.
The QB was making $2 million a year
and he earned much of it
on the play.
he didn’t get up.
he couldn’t.
he didn’t want to.
I could have been a football
player
only my father, the son of a
bitch, said that a man went to
school to study,
not play.
I flipped off the tv
disrobed and
walked into the bathroom.
I turned off the water
tested it with my hand.
nothing like a hot bath
in a cold world.
I got in
stretched out,
the 230 pounds of me
pushing the water
through the emergency drain.
son of a bitch,
why did they build
5-foot bathtubs
in a world of
6-foot people?
nobody knew anything
and they certainly weren’t getting
any smarter.
Well I had fun with this one. The rest of you are on your own.
about spellcheck and other random inequities
my breakfast hangout
opens at 6 am,
which is about as early
as i need anything
to open up
and i got here this
morning
as they were just turning
on the lights
so i’ve been here
almost an hour
and the first other
customer
just showed up
and the two of us
means a crowd is gathering
cause that’s the way
a crowd always gathers
just two then three and so on
think Marx and Engles
just two that turned into a
pretty big crowd even if
it didn’t turn out so well
except for Marx but not
poor Engles whose name
I don’t even remember how to
spell and he’s not in spellcheck
unlike Marx who though not known
for his pleasant disposition
was not Groucho just like Engles
was not Laura but she’s an “I” Ingles
not at “E” Engles and she’s not in
spellcheck either and i just noticed -
and this is interesting if you think about it -
“spellcheck” is in spellcheck even though
Frederick and Laura are not which makes
a twisted kind of sense especially
if you were the inventor of spellcheck
cause i know if i had invented spellcheck
i would put spellcheck in it and i wonder
who invented spellcheck and if the inventor’s
name is in spellcheck cause if i had invented
spellcheck my name would be in it along
with Frederick and Laura cause i’m for
the little guy and Frederick was surely
the little guy at least compared to the big guy
and Laura thought not a guy certainly was little
cause her frontier dad on tv always called her
“Little Bit” which is a pretty good clue
that she was one of the little guys i’m for
like Harry Truman who was a little guy and
especially Martin Van Buren who at five foot four
was the littlest little guy to occupy the office a
whole foot plus littler than the big guy Honest
Abe who was a big guy in feet and inches
and lots of other ways
too
and Martin by the way is not in spellcheck either
which makes four so far people, Frederick, Laura,
Martin, and me who oughta be in spellcheck
but aren’t and would be if i had invented spellcheck
and as to the business at hand
it being Monday
i though i might be able to listen in
on the Religiosos Babosos this morning
but i was really early and they’re getting later and
later and not nearly as interesting as they used to be
anyway
maybe that’s why they’re not in spellcheck
either
Paul Kane is the author of two previous collections of poems, The Further Shore and Drowned Lands. He has also published a critical study of Australian poetry, an edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems, a collaborative with the photographer William Clift and several anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, he has also been awarded Fulbright and Mellon grants. He teaches at Vassar College and lives in New York.
The poem I’m using this week is from his most recent collection, Work Life, published by Turtle Point Press in 2007.
A Murder of Crows
I.M. Fred Goodall
Such a warm day for November - nature
preternatural - two cabbage moths
rise above the garden (where only orange
calendula still bloom), spiraling up
a white double helix high in the air, when
one suddenly drops, the other fluttering off -
lost now in shadows among the pine trees,
its companion invisible in the long grass.
Our world acts as a membrane directing the flow
of time in its singular forward direction,
but now and then something seeps through in reverse,
a backwash from the other side, like a check
valve that fails in the plumbing, or - if it serves
some purpose after all, beyond us - then
like a vitreous fluid weeping unnoticed through
the trabecular meshwork of the eye.
Driving through the black dirt fields a week
later, I recall what you said about
the gathering of crows at Pine Island
this one week of the year, for here they are
by the hundreds, gleaning perhaps, but most
simply still, as if waiting to pass through
to a negative world where they, in turn,
are white, their fluttering rippling time.
Back about ten years ago I thought of using women’s names as hooks to catch a poem.
I especially had fun with the names. imogene gets away clean and running in the rain with ramona were two of them, titles better than the poems they covered. Probably the best of them, flying a kite with katie, I used here several weeks ago. The next one, while not as good, was fun to write.
It appeared in 2001 in the online journal The Muse Apprentice.
five minutes in the fire with fiona
under the table
her leg
against mine
moves
slowly
up and down
reaching for a paper clip
her hand
brushes mine
long red nail
leaving a trail
of fire a scar
smoldering
peering intently
at the paper clip
turns it over
passes
her fingertip
slowly over
the rounded
end tongue
pink against
her lip in
concentration
does she
sneak a
sidelong
glance
at me...
i hear my name called...
for the third time
i realize
and look to the end
of the table past
the double rows
of staring eyes
yes sir
i say
your report
he says
my report
i ask
your report
he says
we’re waiting
for your report
a low laugh beside me
like a whisper
like a breath of
warm air in a
frigid room
later
she said
or
was it just
another
laugh...
I have several poems now by Gary Snyder, from his book danger on the peaks, published in 2004 by Shoemaker Hoard.
It was his first new collection published in 20 years.
How Many?
Australia, a group of girls at a corroboree
Lapland, reindeer herdgirls
China, the “yaktail”
Greece, the seven daughters, sisters,
or “the sailing stars”
a cluster of faint stars in Taurus,
the Pleides,
name of a car in Japan,
“Subaru”
in Mayan, - a fistful of boys -
Carwash Time
Looking at a gray-pine,
chunky fire-adapted cones
bunched toward the top,
a big tree there behind the tire shop
- I’m sitting on a low fence
while a wild gang does a benefit
wash-job on my daughter’s car.
Tattooed and goateed white dudes,
brown and black guys,
I say, “What are you raising money for?”
- “The drug and alcohol halfway
house up the street”
Old Ridge sedan
never been this neat
To All the Girls Whose Ears I Pierced Back Then
Sometimes we remember that moment:
you stood there attentive with clothespins
dangling, setting a bloodless dimple in each lobe
as I searched for a cork & and the right-sized needle
& followed the quick pierce with a small gold hoop.
The only guy with an earring
back then
It didn’t hurt that much
a sweetly earnest child
and a crazy country guy
with an earring and a
gray-green cast eye
and even then,
this poem
Almost Okay Now
She had been in an accident almost okay now,
but inside still recovering,
bones slow-healing - she was anxious
still fearful of cars and of men.
As I sped up the winding hill road
she shuddered - eyes beseeching me -
I slowed the car down.
Out on a high meadow under the moon,
with delicate guidance she showed me
how to make love without hurting her
and then she napped awhile in my arms,
smell of sweet grass
warm night breeze
Some days old days intrude.
my only excuse
life
after real life
lived
in small corners
ambitions
scaled back
accomplishment
given over
to lesser things
poems
once
in a while
one that reminds me
of when i was
good
and life was large
those few
my only excuse
for all the rest
Hasta la pasta. Next week.
Usual stuff - all work presented remains the property of its creators etc.
Mid-summer blahs? A little early, but yes. Can’t wait to see how low I can get by July, August.
But I’m still allen itz and its still all my fault.
Way to go, allen. I solve the summer problem with air conditioning.
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