|
|
|
|
|
A Chilly Day in Conqueso Canyon
Thursday, December 01, 2011 More regular stuff this week. I've been sickly most of the week, so the post this week is a little shorter than usual. But it's all still good. January 1 January 2 January 3 January 5 January 6 Me a cold, fishhook moon From The Best American Poetry - 1994 Tony Esolen Northwestern Mathematics Allison Funk After Dark Me celebrate the process From The Flag of Childhood, Poems from the Middle East Nazime Hikmet Optimistic Man Saddi Youssef Attention Hanan Mikha'il 'Ashraw From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old Suheir Hammad rice haikus Me conscience-wash, cheap, on a street corner near you Kenneth W. Brewer Death of an Owl River Blind Me poor me Hafiz The Day Sky Among Strong Men Me just to prove I can Demetria Martinez Rally Meantimes Me Russian winter William D. Barney Lori Swinging Cowtails and Crabgrass Me summer vacation Luci Tapahonso They Are Silent and Quick Me - “I’ll be there” J.R. Thelin Brothers in Blood: Dorrance and Elvis Me I should feel good about this Simon Armitage The Catch You May Turn Over and Begin... Me a chilly day in Conqueso Canyon  My first poems this week are by David Lehman, from his book, . The book was published in 2000 by Scribner Poetry. In addition to his own work as a poet, Lehman, born in New York City in 1948, is editor of "Best American Poetry" series. He also teaches at The New School in New York City. As a poem-a-day-poet myself, I appreciate the effort that schedule takes. Of course, in his book, Lehman is able to pass over those days when his efforts didn't turn out so well. This is a practice I follow in my own book. My last two books include only 85 of the 365 poems I wrote each year in 2009 and 2010. The rest are best left buried in my personal time capsule. For this week's post, I have selected the first five of Lehman's year. January 1 Some people confuse inspiration with lightning not me I know it comes from the lungs and air you breathe it in you breathe it out it circulates it's breath of my being the wind across the face of the waters yes but it's also something that comes at my command like a turkey club sandwich with a cup of split pea soup or like tones from Benny Goodman's clarinet my clarinet the language that never fails to respond some people think you need to be pure of heart not true it comes to the pure and the impure alike the patient and the impatient the lovers the onanists and the virgins you just need to be able to listen and talk at the same time and you'll hear it like the long-delayed revelation at the end of the novel which turns out to be something simple a traumatic moment that fascinated us more when it was only a fragment of an old song a strange noise a mistake of hearing a phone that wouldn't stop ringing January 2 The old war is over the new one has begun between drivers and pedestrians on a Friday in New York light is the variable and structure the content according to Rodrigo Monnihan's self-portraits at the Robert Miller Gallery where the painter is serially pictured holding a canvas, painting his mirror image, shirtless in summer, with a nude, etc., it's two o'clock and I'm walking at top speed from the huddled tourists yearning to be a mass to Les Halleson Park and 28th for a Salade Nicoise I've just watched The Singing Detective all six hours of it and can't get it out of my mind, the scarecrow that turns into Hitler, the sad-eyed father wearing a black arm-band,the yellow umbrellas as Bing Crosby's voice comes out of Michael Gambon's mouth, "you've got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive, e-lim-inate the negative" advice as sound today as in 1945 though it also remains true that the only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on January 3 The shrink says, "Everything depends on how many stuffed animals you had as a boy," and my mother tells me my father was left-handed and so is my son and they're both named Joe whose favorite stuffed animal was a bear called Sweetheart while I,the sole constant in this dream, am carrying a little girl who has a gun in her hand as I climb a brick wall on the other side of unknown territory but it has to be better than the chase down hilly streets so he arrives late at the library where his son is held hostage he breaks in lifts the boy in his arms and tells the one kind man he had met that he and his brother would be saved but the others who had mocked him would surely die January 5 Every time I hear a new word I see a new color, Joe said in the cab. For example, I said. For example, he said, the word example is yellow, brown,olive & a little white mashed together. And each letter of the alphabet has an age, a sex, & a personality. H, for example,is a lavender girl, fourteen, a friend of the number 4, who is also a girl and also lavender. And I? I asked. I,he said, is a genius, white. January 6 Lunch at SAvoy (the restaurant ot the song, "home of sweet romance," as don by Ella and Louis) with Elliot Figman who says they've got a regular astrology column in the redesigned Poets & Writers I think they should run a different writer's horoscope each issue starting with Richard Howard a Libra and why not have an evening with James Merrill via the Ouija board at the Algonquin we can ask him whether he sees Elizabeth and how Wystan is and did he get the heavenly details right in his book what do you think Elliot  Another moon poem for my first of the week. a cold, fishhook moon a cold, fishhook moon floating in a black, star-specked sky... the universal pool of all overhead as I walk the path downhill In the goose-bump cold of this post-midnight, pre-dawn morning… I wander in the star-lit dark searching, as I sometimes do in the night while others sleep, for the answers that even in these late years elude me, searching through the mysteries of night, whether in full-moon light or dim, no-moon dark, for the why’s and what’s of a day in the life of the one among billions that is me - carbon-cluster me, assuming, with the arrogance of my kind, that there are answers that are mine to know  Here are a couple of poets from The Best American Poetry, 1994. The first poet is Tony Esolen. Born in Pennsylvania in 1959, Esolen received B.A. from Princeton and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1987. At the time of publication, he taught Renaissance literature at Parovidence College in Rhode Island. Northwestern Mathematics Hard to say what the natural numbers are. A lot of ones: the snowy falcon, floating Like god over the vast northwest, alone Until the only ptarmigan pokes her head From her rock cover; one mink in a trap, His innocent tracks forever. Twos and threes Crop up, now and again. Teenagers veering Over to Fort Smith on their snowmobiles, To hang like wolves around the Wine and Dine, Jukeboxes, soaked boots, beer, big waitresses. Two bucks for orange juice. The scuttlebutt: Sheila and Gray Sky and her slapstick husband. That's life. Another round. And you can reach Up to thirteen, in the jock-sweat fishing shack Of Lester Manatu & Sons. You rent An outboard, fine. Manatu nods and doesn't Bother to mark you down: his oldest grandson Tallies up the accounts, keeps him in booze; The old man, stubborn, stalls at seventy. He's on the books as Presbyterian, but He never bothered much with books, or words, And she's long dead who once could make him sing. He hauls his tackle box like a limb grown Evergreen out of him these many years He likes me well enough, but he won't speak Other than ordinal words: here, hold this, wait. He walks off to the limit of the world To test, I don't know what, the ice, the weather, An elk-trail molten into nothing. Life Is what he moves in, my old hand at winter, Life like the sweep of sky and plain his figure Vanishes into. with the scattered bloom Of a few numbers, and continuum. The second poet from the collection is Allison Funk. Born in New Jersey in 1951, Funk received an M.F.A. from Columbia and, at the time of publication, taught writing and literature at Southern Illinois University. After Dark She is thinking of the delta shimmering with tidal and fresh water urgings as his hand opens on the flat of her breast bone. So much sediment there, the Mississippi argues its way through the bayous, pausing for the ibis, the tall-legged cypress, the heron that cannot decide, walking backwards, it seems while moving ahead. A million years of water in which sturgeon, carp and crustacean sink and rise with the leaves of the ancient willow, half-dissolved root,pungent bone. In this ambiguous world, both fluid and firm, she drifts between the blurry borders of the current, and beyond, through cottonwood nebulas, pollen, and siftings of alluvial plain admitting love can exceed our intentions, those levees built against flooding. But mainly she is struck by its patient, persistent nature. The constant nibbling of the river like a fiddler crap whose tiny legs (tickling under his beard) weaken a soft bank until,thunder from afar, it collapses into water.  I wrote the next poem in an attempt to justify to myself my abandonment of a poem written just before because I thought it might be hurtful to some people I care about. So much for integrity. celebrate the process I wrote a poem last night, a fierce and fiery evisceration of people who enable bums-on-street-corners with their little cardboard signs to continue in their leeching ways by, dollar at a time, making street-corner begging more profitable to the scammers of the world than actually working, maybe even paying a few dues to justify their artfully desperate existence it was going to be my poem for today but I read it just now, one more time before putting it out for the world to see, and realized that all my pleasure in the poem was the writing of it and that it’s likely to offend some people and that there’s no pleasure in offending people, except, maybe momentarily, if they really deserve it… so, I’m keeping the poem private, hidden away in my guilty-pleasures cave, settling for just the pleasure of writing it… this is not unusual, this greater joy in the writing… many times, I know, my pleasure in writing a particular poem will never be equaled by the people who might read it; in fact, it is the pleasure of the writing, not of someone else’s reading, that keeps me writing… I know poets who are always desperate for approval of their efforts, and are never satisfied, because no matter how good their poem might be, they can always imagine someone who won’t like this or won’t like that, and in end, because of that imagine themselves and every poem they write a failure… not me… I celebrate each poem i write equally, the good ones, the not-so-good ones and even the ones so bad they should be burned, ashes thrown into a deep and far ocean - all of my efforts alike a pleasure to me , for each one represents to me victory over process, each one has taken me down the shining path of creation I share with every poet to ever write, every creator to ever create along this path all who create pass, a parade of gods, every one of us equal in our creating, and though some are better gods than others, it doesn’t matter, for when you get a chance to march with the gods who cares where the parade ends on any particular day  Next I have another collection, an anthology of poems from the Middle East, selected, and in some cases, translated by San Antonio poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The book is The Flag of Childhood, Poems from the Middle East, published by Aladdin Paperbacks in 1998. The first poem is by Nazime Hikmet, considered by many as the poet laureate of Turkey. Born in 1902, he died in 1963. He was a political prisoner for nineteen years in his home country and spent last thirteen years of his life in exile. His poem was translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Optimistic Man as a child he never plucked the wings off flies he didn't tie tin cans to cats' tails or lock beetles in matchboxes or stomp anthills he grew up and all those things were done to him I was at his bedside when he died he said read me a poem about the sun and the sea about nuclear reactors and satellites about the greatness of humanity The next poem is by Saddi Youssef, a leading Iraqi poet whose work is well known all over the Arab world. At the time of publication, he lived in Paris. His poem was translated by Khaled Mattawa. Attention Those who come by me passing I will remember them and those who come heavy an overbearing I will forget That's why when the air erupts between mountains we always describe the wind and forget the rocks Next, I have, from the anthology, a poem by Hanan Mikha'il 'Ashrawi. Born in Palestine in 1948, the poet was know worldwide for her efforts iin Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations. She received a doctorate in Medieval English Literature and headed the English Department at Bir Seit University. At the time of publication, she lived in Ramallah. From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old Tomorrow, the bandages will come off. I wonder will see half and orange, half an apple, half my mother's face with my one remaining eye? I did not see the bullet but felt the pain exploding in my head. His image did not vanish, the soldier with a big gun, unsteady hands, and a look in his eyes I could not understand. If I can see him so clearly with my eyes closed, it could be that inside our heads we each have one spare set of eyes to make up for the ones we lose. Next month on my birthday, I'll have a brand new glass eye, maybe things will look round and fat in the middle - I've gazed through all my marbles, they made the world look strange. I hear a nine-month-old has also lost an eye, I wonder if my soldier shot her too - a soldier looking for little girls who look him in the eye - I'm old enough, almost four, I've seen enough of life, but she's just a baby who didn't know any better. The last poem from the anthology for this week is by Suheir Hammad. Born in Jordan in 1971, Hammad is the daughter of Palestinian refugees. Her family lived in Beirut during part of the Civil War, then immigrated to Brooklyn. rice haikus we are women simple sugar our morning tea eat rice at all meals we of simple land kept the sugar in one sack rice in another lived off the brown earth gave figs to fidayeen olives and almonds when they raided our homes they poured sugar into rice to ruin them both with eyelashes and teeth we tried to sort it our small grain from small grain now we eat sweet rice with our morning tea eat meals of resistance  This is the poem I abandoned earlier. To hell with it. People shouldn't be so thin-skinned. I'm un-abandoning it. conscience-wash, cheap on a street-corner near you there are those (I seem them all the time) who take great satisfaction in giving an occasional dollar bill to one of the bums who stand with there little cardboard signs on the street corners, I can see them in my rearview mirror, so pleased with their charity, their compassion, such good people they must be, they’re thinking clear conscience on the cheap, available now, at a street corner near you on the other hand, I know people who live a life of sacrifice, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, cleansing the unclean counseling the dim and distraught of mind… these people never demonstrate any hint of prideful self-satisfaction, conscience never clear, being always concerned, not with glory of what they have done but with a constant accounting of what they have left yet undone  Here are two poems by Kenneth W. Brewer, from his book Sum of Accidents. The book was published in 2003 by City Art of Salt Lake City. Born in 1941 in Indianapolis, he lived for many years in Utah, where he served as Poet Laureate, teaching at the University of Utah from 1973 until his death in 2006. He attended Butler University and Western New Mexico University in the 1960s, then earned a master's degree in English literature from New Mexico State University, followed by a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Death of an Owl All year she watched the great horned owl of her back yard. Wild and secluded, the yard hid mice. Some nights, she would hear the great wings unfold, fly like a lover's breath in the small death of sex. She would find bones under the red maple. One morning, early October, she lifted the great owl's dead body into her truck. The vet said poison - the sort people use to kill mice. Now the yard seems empty. Nights she cannot sleep she opens the back door, listens. "What is the use of love," she says, "if it has no wings beyond the next breath." The River Blind Before sunrise, he gathers thin dead branches, pokes them upright in the mud among the reeds. He strings brown camouflage netting along the stick points, then drapes his pack, guncase, thermos. He kneels at the edge of the river and waits. He calls across the water, listens for the heavy wings of the dark angel he would kill. And the angel flies from the eye of the sun to where the hunter kneels, and pellets, like prayer beads, fill the sky, strung from eye to eye.  This is a nothing little poem, but i had a good excuse, postaliscious alibiosmos. poor me I’m sick overcome by ennui, postaliscious alibiosmos, and a throat so sore it hurts when I quack, which, us having a very nice rain this morning, I have a great urge to do I would do a real quackerjack job of it I’m sure, if only my throat wasn’t so quacked-up and sorely absent of regular fine and ducktail happy feeling it’s a mess… I’ll try again tomorrow - in the mean time imagine moaning and sniffling and crybaby ouch ouch ouch and alas and aquack poormeing  Next, I ahve two poems from The Subject Tonight is Love, a collection of poetry by Persian poet Hafiz. The book was published in 1996 by Penguin Compass. Daniel Ladinsky edited the book and selected and translated the poems in it. Khwāja Shamsu d-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī, known by his pen name Hāfez, was born in 1325/1326 and died 1389/1390. Much is not known of his life - mythology is often mixed with fact and it is often not clear which is which. He was a Persian lyric poet. His collected works composed of series of Persian poetry are to be found in the homes of most Iranians, who learn his poems by heart and use them as proverbs and sayings to this day. His life and poems have been the subject of much analysis, commentary and interpretation, influencing post-Fourteenth Century Persian writing more than any other author. Let us be like Two falling stars in the day sky Let no one know of our sublime beauty As we hold hands with God and burn Into a sacred existence that defies - That surpasses Every description of ecstasy And love. Among Strong Men My soul is like a young doe-eyed maid With lips still bruised from last night's divine passion But my Master makes me live like a humble servant When any king would trade his throne For the splendor my eye Can see. Call it many things, give your desires polite names If you must; mask the primal instinct from your Reality if you cannot bear the naked edge That will hone your ken against The sun and earth. Among strong men in the Tavern I can speak a truth no one will laugh at: My heart Is like a wild alley cat In heat; In every possible way we conspire to know Freedom and love. Forget about the common reasons, Hafiz, for it only Enslaves - there is something holy deep inside Of you that is so ardent and awake That needs to lie down naked Next to God  Another poor, sickly me poem. just to prove I can cold rain on a cold day... chills fever, aching bones, and I’m out in it just to prove I can, the same reason I’m writing this particular piece of probisquious piffle - just to prove I can such a cause of so many of the stupid things I’ve done - just to prove I can - more times than all the fingers and toes of the “hosanna” shouting hosts on the lower ranges of heaven, trying to gather the attention of the big guy, wanting to move up to the more scenic realms of the forever everlasting - hosanna hosanna shouting almost-angels trying for their wings but to no avail for the big guy’s occupied, counting fingers and toes, just like me, just to prove he can… and I’ll leave him to it cause just because I proved I can doesn’t mean I can do it much longer so… cold rain cold day and this almost-angel returns to his soft and warm lower-level cloud, satisfied to sleep the day away without a better view  My next poet is Demetria Martinez, with two poems from her book Breathing Between the Lines. The book was published in 1997 by the University of Arizona Press. Born in Albuquerque in 1960, Martinez is an award winning poet and novelist, as well as an activist in immigration issues. At the time of publication, she wrote a monthly column for the Ntiona lCatholic Reporter. Rally Handsome as a stringed instrument but your voice, with its aroma of wood smoke and rain is pre-Columbian: a gourd full of seeds, a wood fflute when ou say justice the word is tough as a leek, true as Tewa in a world where Wall Street memos have obliterated the memory of corn and a Brazilian tribe that has no word for war now clouds with their manes and black nostrils turned to the whip of your voice race south hauling faxes, press releases to a land where l virgen de Guadalupe wears a Zapatista ski mask and makes her appearance on laptops in the Lacondon hearing you, my shoulders ache remembering when they were wings I would speak too, but my truths emerge silently in typos: Chiapaz, the z breaking out peace a crowd moves like a ship beneath a sail of signs silverfish microphones leap from the eddies you lead the chant, "We are all Marcos" I want to believe it is true: that we can become the man/the woman whose mouth is an X whose eyes circle our little world like planets whose dreams are hot and black as good coffee but with room for nutmeg and milk space for even better dreams you are far away again: I mail you these words after this, no more poems about love if a poem is not itself love it is noise easy as carrying a sign for the descendants of my ancestors, still landless the hard work is the wait, the endless breathing upon the brown egg held in our hands, warming a world as breakable as a rib at the end of a rifle butt passing the egg from hand to hand to hand until the quetzal's wings open like cathedral doors I have no proof this day will come, all I can give you is a sign, all I know is what I have seen in my poems Meantimes The questions catch us off guard, a dust storm we drive through Although headlights are powerless against beating grit You wonder if you want me in the passenger seat If the fights about stopping and asking directions Say something larger, meaner about out journey 2. A fog of newspapers between us, horizons of headlines Not even the obligatory remarks about Rwanda, the weather One day, who knows when, our star died Is the dark light now visible to our disbelieving eyes? 3. I offered you rosary beads for the rearview mirror tear gas on a key ring She would give you an arial view of your life, a hammock of stars 4. Can love be reset like a bone? Is the will a strong enough splint? Can we put in another well? When water tables drop, is it forever? 5. Do we have the courage too let the questions hang on a wire like carne seca until the sun speaks to us in the savory dryness? Do we have the courage to raise questions like children, let them grow into their own answers? 6. Lightning breaks the locks on our hearts Thunder breaks into the safe of night Seed spills from bruised fruit, as we wait for the sun to reweave itself across the loom of the sky  Still sick, weather not cooperating, but at this point, well enough to complain about. Russian winter we have a week or so of Russian winter ahead, cold, overcast, dark nights and dim days, days blown chilled as from Ukrainian steppes, though without the snow and the German soldiers frozen therein like in the war movies - gulag weather, Solzhenitsyn and his refusenik cohort just around the corner, dipping their brown weevil-bread into their thin ration of winter gruel … and I am fit for the day and fit for the company… a head cold set upon me Friday afternoon, after I drove to Austin in very bad weather and since then that head cold has organ by organ taken the rest of my body, like Wall Street occupiers building little barricades and otherwise disrupting the normal flow of my bodily functions, like breathing and sleeping and dancing bare-toed in the ice-cube puddles left by last night’s late rain so that I sit here this morning, blowing, snorting, dripping, sneezing, coughing, all in a circle of an informal containment zone as people come in and head immediately to the corners of the room furthermost from me… I had plans for the day, as I had plans for the weekend, a photo expedition into Conqueso Canyon for pics for my blog… yes, I had plans, and if there is a god somewhere watching, he laughs and laughs, going aha-aha all pouty-red-lipped like the sexy long-legged back-up dancer for that rock band Horndog and his Hip Hop Huksters I’ll probably stay home in bed instead, give-up give-in sleep  Next, I have poems by Texas poet William D. Barney, from his book A Cowtown Chronicle,k published by Browder Springs Books in 1999. Barney was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1916. His father, an aspiring semiprofessional baseball player, moved the family to Texas, in 1928 for the opportunity to try out for the team there and to find employment in the Fort Worth's thriving oil business. Barney attended Fort Worth's Central High School where he first expressed an interest in writing poetry which became his life's work. He attended Texas Christian University for a time, but made his living as a postal worker from 1936 until his retirement in 1971. Barney's interest in poetry resurfaced after high school, and he wrote poetry throughout his postal career and upon his retirement. He became a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Poetry Society of Texas, and was elected as the president of the Poetry Society of Texas in 1952 and 1953. Additionally he received the Robert Frost Award, presented by Frost himself, for narrative poetry in 1961. In 1982 Barney, after receiving the recommendation of five literary societies, became the poet laureate of Texas. During his lifetime, Barney wrote nine books of poetry, two of which won Texas Institute of Letters awards. He died from a heart attack in Fort Worth in 2001. Lori Swinging Under the elm next door Lori swings as she sings; holding the ropes with her hands, her head thrown back so far her beautiful, long red hair drags in 5he dust as she swiings Cowtails and Crabgrass Back when he worked at the Swift's plant (in the refrigerator section) coming out on a hot July evening he couldn't keep his eyes steady. He was afraid to go downtown - the cops would likely pick him up for another drunk. It made him wonder whether the job had giddied his mind. It was famous for squeezing the last full measure out of everything. Even the ants leave bones, but here the bones went into fertilizer. He knew men in the packing house who collected cow brushes (ends of tails) - they used them to fill mattresses. But then (maybe the heat made him think of it) he knew other people who did the same with crabgrass. He got to studying. You can see why someone would find a use for all that hair - nobody likes loose ends - but it took genius to discover a function for crabgrass. It must have been a gardner, like him who didn't know whether to curse or pray when the first pale leaves began to slit brown soil the last of April. Whoever, he must have had a mission, a passion for utility in life, to think of hoeing up the pest and stuffing it in a mattress. A kind of vengeance, being able to sleep on the dry bodies of a weed, getting to hear it groan a little ever you turn to a fonder dream?  It's been really cold and dreary weather this week. Time for a little summer break, from this poem I wrote a dozen years ago. summer vacation it's July and it's hot like the hottest hot in the hottest hole in Hades steaming boiling and I feel like a cut of not-so prime beef on a spit between the flaming sun and the blistering white sand it's a vacation in hell during the slow season when all the good help is off gone to enjoy the cool of mountain pine shade somewhere else there's no damn shade in this place at all I'm trying to read a book the eighth louse book and I'm only half way through this two-week vacation - another crusading lawyer story, gonna save us from something tort reform, maybe, a really dumb-ass book, but the only one at the stop-n-go that didn't have Fabio on the cover ...then she walks by, volleyball in hand, painted toes sunburned nose peeling a little anybody want to play? she asks i lay my book on my round red belly look at her sigh... back to the book the eighth lousy book half way through a two week vacation and it's so damn hot I can hear my coke fizzing in the can  Next, I have a poem by Luci Tapahonso. The poem is from her book Saanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing, published in 1993 by The University of Arizona Press. Tapahonso, a Navajo born in 1953 was originally from Shiprock, New Mexico, where she grew up in a family of 11 children. Navajo was her first language but she learned English at home before starting school at the Navajo Methodist Mission in Farmington. She majored in English at the University of New Mexico, as an undergraduate and graduate student. She stayed on there as an Assistant Professor of English, Women's Studies and American Indian Studies for a few years. She has been an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas and is now Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson where she teaches Poetry Writing and American Indian Literature. They Are Silent and Quick We sit outside on the deck and below, tiny flickers of light appear here and there. They are silent and quick. The night is thick and the air alive with buzzing and humming insects. "They're lightning bugs," Lori says. "Fireflies." I wonder how I will get through another day. "I think they are connected with magic," she says, peering into the darkness. "Maybe people around here tell stories about small bits of magic that appear on summer nights." "Yes,{ I say, "it must be." I walk inside the house and phone my mother. From far away, she says, "I never heard of such a thing. There's nothing like that in Navajo stories." She is speaking from hundreds of miles away where the night is dark and the sky, a huge, empty blackness. The long shadows of the mesas stretch across the flat land. "Someone is having a sing near here," she says. "We can hear the drums all night long. Your father and I are all alone here." Her voice is the language of my dreams. I hang up the phone and walk out into the moist air. My daughter sits there in the darkness, marveling at the little beings filled with light, and I sit beside her. I am hoping for a deep restful sleep. In the woods below, teenagers are laughing and the whine of the cicadas rises loudly, "What is it?" she asks. "What's wrong?" There are no English words to describe this feeling. "T'aa 'iighisii biniiinaa shil hoyee," I say Because of it, I am overshadowed by aching. It is a heaviness that surrounds me completely. "Ako ayoo shil hoyee." We are silent. Early the next morning, I awaken from a heavy, dreamless sleep and outside the window, a small flash of light flickers off and on. Then I recalled being taught to go outside in the gray dawn before sunrise to receive the blessings of the gently spirits who gathered around our home. Go out, we were told, get your blessings for the day. And now, as I watch these tiny bodies of light, the aching inside lessens as I see how the magic of these lights precedes the gray dawn.  We persist and endure, and sometimes forget why. I’ll be there the coldest day of the year so far, and predicted colder tomorrow not so cold as the sixth planet of the 437 thousandth sun of the Alapadadie Senseatory Galaxy, or even New Hampshire or New York or New Padonia in East Texas, but pretty damn cold for here people all bundled up, layered, me, too, two shirts, coat, and my hat to keep my head warm, actually would feel a little silly if any of my friends from northernmore territories were to see me but damnit I’m cold and my nose is running and I have a cough like the sky splitting and I’m out in the cold because damnit I am a human of the being variety and such as we do not bow our heads in defeat just because it’s cold and our nose is running and we’re coughing like an earthquake in southern California (look! there goes San Diego and San Francisco and Cambria and Carmel and San Juan Capistrano [poor birds] and Catchatorie and all the rest) no we do not fold we gather our guts around us and persevere, like Chief Dan George in the Clint Eastwood movie, we endeavor to persevere, persist, keep on keeping on, until the clouds part, the sun shines it brilliant happy face, the birds tweedle-dee in the trees and the marmosets creep out of their snuggly den to eat the birds and bask in the happy, smiling sun (and what the hell is a marmoset, a name which sounds like a musical instrument from Brazil or possible Peru, and do they really eat birds or is that just an internet hoax) etcetera as I said, I am a human of the being kind and I’ll be here till the sun comes shining around the mountain and the old gray mare is back to what she used to be and Ol’ McDonald gets his farm back when the pigs and sheep and cows and chickens declare a truce and all is back to normal with a oink oink here and there discreetly declaring the revolution has left without you and despite it all I’ll be there trying to remember what I’m waiting for  Here's a poem by J.R. Thelin, from his chapbook, Dorrance, Narrative, History: A Chapbook, published in 2004 by Pudding House Publications. The book is a collection of small stories about the character "Dorrance." It probably takes more than one poem to give you a good reading on the inventiveness of this character. If you find the book, I'd say buy it. I can google references to the poet Thelin, but haven't found any kind of straight bio. Brothers in Blood: Dorrance and Elvis As Dorrance was being born, Elvis was being hustled from a downtown Memphis movie theater into a smoking cab, then propped in front of a mike big as a pompadour at WHBQ, the Sound of Memphis, about to become the Sound of the South, and soon the whole of U.S.of A. Mrs. Dorrance, or course, up north, was not listening to Dewey Phillips coax the shy nineteen-year-old truck driver into snarling and yipping live on the air. She was calling for more painkillers since Dorrance couldn't wait to free his ears from the birth canal, was already humming That's All Right, Mama, a mantra to his mother, to all mothers, really, that everything would be changed after today, something in the world shifted, a grace note, a slur, a vibrato twang so exciting you can hear Elvis as explorer, the new terrain, "I didn't know I could sound like that," he's saying, an apology almost, a revelation for certain. At five, his parents sent Dorrance to Miss Ada for piano and culture. Starched little shirts took turns in class: etudes and lullabies, the hush of primer pages where the notes looked like unreachable planets to Dorrance. Kids in kindergarten hadn't begun to dress up like astronauts yet, but they were whirling around the playground, even at Chestnut Hill Academy, shouting out Love Me Tender, no longer a yearning ballad, now a raucous ode to laughing bodies falling to earth in a delicious heap, their teacher giving up and giving in as Dorrance in the dirt nibbles Amy Lippincott's neck, hiccups a hunka hunka sweet nothin's in her ear.  This is an old poem from 2003. The good news is, I can't die yet because I owe the government money. I should feel good about this I'm a liberal for crissake not one of those drop-a-buck-on-a-squeegie-man- for-social-justice-BMW-driving yuppies or one of those graffiti-is-the-art-of-the-dispossessed or a fuck-the-workers-save-the-snail-darter greenfreak but a real old-fashioned NewDeal HarryTruman-LBJ thank-god-for NormanThomas and-why-can't-they mak'em-like-GeorgeMeany-anymore socialist-in-my-heart ACLU-dues-paying workers-of-the-world-unite-and-throw-off-the-chains-oppression progressive liberal sonofabitch and I should feel good about this... but, goddamnit, I hate tax day  I have two poems by Simon Armitage, from his very small book, Kid, published by faber and faber in 1992. Armitage was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden, in West Yorkshire, England. He received an undergraduate degree from Portsmouth University in geography, followed by a master's degree in social work from Manchester University where he researched the impact of television violence on young offenders. Before he began to write full-time, Armitage worked as probation officer in Greater Manchester for six years. The Catch Forget the long, smoldering afternoon. It is this moment when the ball scoots off the edge of the bat; upwards, backwards, falling seemingly beyond him yet he reaches and picks it out of its loop like an apple from a branch, the first of the season. You May Turn Over and Begin... "Which of these films was Dirk Bogarde not in? One hundredweight of bauxite makes how much aluminum? How many tales in The Decameron?" General Studies, the upper sixth, a doddle, a cinch for anyone with an ounce of common sense or a calculator with a memory feature. Having galloped through but not caring enough to check or double-check, I was dreaming of milk-white breasts and nakedness, or more specifically virginity. That term - everybody felt the heat but the girls were having none of it: long and cool like cocktails, out of reach, their buns and pigtails only let out for older guys with studded jackets and motor-bikes and spare helmets. One jot of consolation was the tall spindly girl riding pillion on her man's new HOnda who, with the lights at amber, put down both feet and stood to stretch her limbs, to lift the visor and push back her fringe and to smooth her tight jeans. As he pulled off down the street she stood there like a wishbone, high and dry, her legs wide open, and rumor has it he didn't notice till he came round in the ambulance having underbalanced on a tight left-hander. A Taste of Honey. Now I remember.  Despite being a little under the weather myself, the weather all around me is wonderful I can't not take advantage of it. a chilly day in Conqueso Canyon I walk the canyon on a very cold day under bright December sun, the brush on either side of me so thick I can hardly push through it to leave the trail a group of deer follow above me atop the ridge six or seven doe and a large buck slip in and out between the trees, their coats merging with the many grays and tans and browns of woodsy early winter, mesquite and huisache, verbana, cypress, bur oak, honey locust, buttonbush and cactus, the tiny, ground hugging pin cushion, the devil’s head, the Chisos Mountain hedgehog, and large assemblies of prickly pear, (nopales - when dethorned, cut into strips and fried, good on their own or scrambled with eggs for a South Texas country breakfast) I see a few small birds, constantly twitching from tree to tree, subdued chatter as they flit through the brush, no other wildlife but the birds and the deer and two hikers heading the other way, back to the trailhead I don’t go far either, still hung over from four different kinds of flu remedies and feeling no better than when I started, just tired, bone-achy tired… twenty-six pictures was what I needed; twenty-six pictures I took, then home done for the day  That's another week gone and counted, not a good week for me, sick with the flu most of the week, but pleased to be almost breathing again at the end. As per normal, all of the material presented in this blog remains the property of those who created it. My own stuff is available to whoever might want it. Just properly credit me and "Here and Now" I'm allen itz, owner and producer of this blog, and, as usual, continuing in my never ending quest to sell books. I note that the books have been well-reviewed in one place of another, except for the second eBook, Goes Around, Comes Around, which has not been reviewed anywhere. If you should happen to come into ownership, temporary or permanent, of that book and like what you read, I'd appreciate your posting a review wherever you got it. If you think it's crap, just forget we ever had this conversation. "Always to the Light"  "Goes Around, Comes Around"  "Pushing Clouds Against the Wind"  And For those of a print-bent, available on Amazon "Seven Beats a Second"  |
||||
|
||||
| Archives May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009 December 2009 January 2010 February 2010 March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010 August 2010 September 2010 October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 December 2011 January 2012 February 2012 |
||||
|
||||
| Links Loch Raven Review Mindfire Renewed Holy Groove Records Tryst Poems Niederngasse BlazeVOX Eclectica Michaela Gabriel's In.Visible.Ink zafusy The Blogging Poet Poetsarus.Com Wild Poetry Forum Blueline Poetry Forum The Writer's Block Poetry Forum The Word Distillery Poetry Forum Gary Blankenship The Hiss Quarterly Thunder In Winter, Snow In Summer Lawrence Trujillo Artsite Arlene Ang The Comstock Review Thane Zander Pitching Pennies The Rain In My Purse Dave Ruslander S. Thomas Summers Clif Keller's Music Vienna's Gallery Shawn Nacona Stroud Beau Blue Downside up Dan Cuddy Christine Kiefer David Anthony Layman Lyric Scott Acheson Christopher George James Lineberger Joanna M. Weston Desert Moon Review Octopus Beak Inc. Wrong Planet...Right Universe Poetry and Poets in Rags Teresa White Camroc Press Review The Angry Poet |
Post a Comment