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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. 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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