| |
|
| |
|
| A
spark from a lamp post burns through my wrist. |
|
| My
spine's tight and quiet like frozen chocolate. |
|
| |
|
| Sparks
fray like the lines on my palm. |
|
| My
spine is a long road out of town. |
|
| |
|
| There's
a man who loosens the meat from my spine. |
|
| I
want silver needle sparks with glitter inside. |
|
| |
|
| Clogs
on shag rug made the best sparks I've known. |
|
| My
back was a sack for the chips of my spine. |
|
| |
|
| I
bend my back toward earth so toads can hop onto it. |
|
| Grapes
conduct electricity better than you'd think. |
|
| |
|
| My
back shifts like an overstuffed bag. |
|
| I
want gold sparks tipped with red. |
|
| |
|
| A
static halo fringes my thumb. |
|
| My
back's a long irradiated slug. |
|
| |
|
(This
poem was originally published in Mirage #4/Period(ical) #65.)
back
to top
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
| A
lean shifting through the trees a second time. A clot of sun, left
behind, dissolves like sugar. |
|
| |
|
| Each
spark is its own chaser. |
|
| |
|
| Math's
affectation blots through, prompts confusion but stands firm. Knots
in a puddle don't untangle best. |
|
| |
|
| Mortification
provides end points. |
|
| |
|
| Fleeting
omniscience slips back down a glass. Situational flux outsmarts
not by posing and then freezing, but by blowing by. |
|
| |
|
| Drab
elation doubles back. |
|
| |
|
(This
poem was originally published in Mirage #4/Period(ical) #65.)
back
to top
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
| Half
horny, half car sick, I lurch all day like a baby pulled in a red
wagon. |
|
| |
|
| Again
you've earmarked my belly's asymptotic approach to truth. |
|
| |
|
| Magnetic
reefs suck ambition from the fish. |
|
| |
|
| I
mouth the interest I'd feel if my head weren't buzzing. |
|
| |
|
| Two
weeks vacation was not enough for my back to disperse like a flock
of birds. |
|
| |
|
| A
fat child doesn't complain yet that air always tastes the same. |
|
| |
|
| Sex
prolongs the moment when I rescue sinew from the side of a jar with
tweezers. |
|
back
to top |
|
|
|
|
| LOVE
FRAGMENT FOR LAST YEAR |
|
| |
|
Your
footsteps upstairs like a match being struck while I wait in the
basement. Knot of muscle covered by soft sweater. Things you told
me in a crowded room. I saw myself in the extremes of your emotion.
|
|
| |
|
Not
a layer of silence around your flesh but the hush in my own throat
when near you. Park nearby for over a week, sit outside every evening
of firefly season and brush my hair. Snuff out patches of my insomnia
as if dabbing at fire with cheesecloth. |
|
| |
|
Left behind
like a sliver of diamond under a seat in an airport lobby. Player
piano in the driveway like a gutted turkey. I tripped over snow
drifts til I got frustrated.
back
to top
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| THOUGHTS
BEFORE SLEEP |
|
| |
|
On
a visit to the underwater carousel brake testing factory I forget
the grocery list, how to fly, or that daffodils don't grow well
atop sand dunes. |
|
| |
|
Cough
up those assembly line eyes, beware the housebroken promise of an
overstuffed novel, functional as a phone book, aimed at the Chicago
suburbs in their time of learned but hicuppy recovery. |
|
| |
|
Use
a dictionary to squash mice who sashay through swinging doors, press
them there like leaves and only find them again when you're packing
to move to a larger house. |
|
| |
|
I'm
squinting hard and trying to remember not to tie the wolfhounds
even momentarily to a photocopier while bartering with the clerk
or running open-armed down to the ocean where bulldozers move through
water like giant horse drawn carriages, scooping whole waves. |
|
| |
|
Not
much fascination with the mother lode of dwarf stars, sister, just
the flatbed nursery school in the hills where children play pretzel
vendor and line up by height to rehearse forgetting the multiplication
tables. |
|
| |
|
Hey!
Use that banana to radio headquarters, pass peas over and under
your tongue throughout the rehearsed sales schtick. If caught dead
urging irritability without representation, tell 'em I sent you,
rough and ready, the people's curmudgeon. |
|
| |
|
No
residual fondness for bird dogs truly undermines the catch-22 of
an after lunch polygraph. Rescue's the wrong sort of opening salvo--we'd
end up jammed together against the garage, saviors for future use. |
|
| |
|
These
days, Jake, we're all just a few petunias short of a true bargain. |
|
| back
to top |
|
|
|
|
| THIRTEEN
WAYS OF BUMPING INTO A FOGHORN |
|
| |
|
| 1. |
|
| God
Myrna don't leave me alone |
|
| With
your half sister and the unrepentant foghorn. |
|
| |
|
| 2. |
|
| Without
signal or reservation |
|
| Or
plans for epiphany, |
|
| Sack
racers at the foghorn picnic |
|
| Overshot
their mark with gusto. |
|
| |
|
| 3. |
|
| To
make a valentine |
|
| I
cut words from magazines |
|
| And
glued them to a box of tiny foghorns. |
|
| |
|
| 4. |
|
| How
many horns does a fog have? |
|
| |
|
| 5. |
|
| "All
morning the |
|
| Morning
has been blackening, |
|
| A
foghorn left out." |
|
|
---Sylvia Plath |
|
| |
|
| 6. |
|
| My
unspoken wish: |
|
| That
you lay me on the pavement, |
|
| With
all due tenderness, |
|
| And
slap me with the larger of the two foghorns. |
|
| |
|
| 7. |
|
| A
child strokes the foghorn's belly, |
|
| Shoves
the cooing shoebox under bed. |
|
| This
is the day's final private moment, |
|
| Before
the oppressive tucking in. |
|
| |
|
| 8. |
|
| "Next
I pull the dream off |
|
| and
slam into the cement wall |
|
| of
the clumsy calendar |
|
| I
live in, |
|
| my
life, |
|
| and
its hauled up |
|
| foghorns" |
|
|
---Anne Sexton |
|
| |
|
| 9. |
|
| My
umbrella wouldn't close |
|
| So
I missed the elevator. |
|
| |
|
| If
I sat down, I'd sleep |
|
| So
I kept on walking. |
|
| |
|
| I
stood on the bus in a huge down coat |
|
| Itching,
and determined not to drop the foghorn. |
|
| |
|
| 10. |
|
| We
sang rounds through the traffic jam. |
|
| You
kept time from the back seat |
|
| On
your rosary of foghorns. |
|
| |
|
| 11. |
|
| Sign
on the highway: |
|
| Please
kiss your own foghorn. |
|
| |
|
| 12. |
|
| Rules
to live by: |
|
| Don't
drift off to sleep with an uncapped foghorn. |
|
| An
extra dictionary is more important than an extra foghorn. |
|
| Better
to burn your candle at both ends than curse the foghorn. |
|
| A
chicken in every pot, no garden without a foghorn. |
|
| |
|
| 13. |
|
| Notes
on the fridge: |
|
| defrost
foghorn for ten minutes at 350. |
|
| hey!
your turn to walk the foghorn. |
|
back
to top |
|
|
|
|
| TITLES
FOR MY NEXT TEN BOOKS |
|
| |
|
| 1.
My Life as a Mouth Breather |
|
| |
|
| 2.
Photosynthesis on the Night Shift |
|
| |
|
| 3.
The Hedgehog-Stegosaurus Continuum |
|
| |
|
| 4.
I: The Larva, The Pupa, and the Santa Maria |
|
| |
|
| 5.
II: The Nina, The Pinta, and the Anna Maria Alberghetti |
|
| |
|
| 6.
III: The Larva the Pupa, the Harder They Fall |
|
| |
|
| 7.
Personalities Swell in a Dream |
|
| |
|
| 8.
Fish Tropes |
|
| |
|
| 9.
Yardsale at the Beehive |
|
| |
|
| 10.
New Genres for Living |
|
back
to top |
|
|
|
|
| SCENES
FROM THE LIVES OF GREAT POETS |
|
| |
|
| DENISE
LEVERTOV |
|
| b.
1923 |
|
| Her
mother was descended from a Welsh tailor and mystic, Agnes Jones of
Mold (a town in Wales). |
|
| |
|
| ROBERT
BLY |
|
| b.
1926 |
|
| Poems
that appear modestly inconclusive are, if read the way he intends,
arrogantly conclusive, because details which may seem trivially phenomenal
are untrivially noumenal. |
|
| |
|
| LANGSTON
HUGHES |
|
| 1902-1967
|
|
| In
1919 a sudden telegram from his father enjoined him to be ready the
next day to travel to Mexico for the summer. |
|
| |
|
| JUDITH
WRIGHT |
|
| b.
1915 |
|
| Living
far from the nearest school, she was educated until the age of twelve
by a correspondence course organized by the Department of Education
for children of isolated families. |
|
| |
|
| GALWAY
KINNELL |
|
| b.
1927 |
|
| He
has taught at more than twenty colleges and universities, and remains
a pioneer and iconoclast. |
|
| |
|
| HART
CRANE |
|
| b.
1899-1933 |
|
| He
was the son of a candy manufacturer, a stormy, affectionate man who
felt insufficiently loved by his wife and stirred up quarrel after
quarrel. |
|
| |
|
| JAMES
DICKEY |
|
| b.
1923 |
|
| But
he has not scorned machines, included them rather as part of the nature
with which he wishes to be on terms of extravagant intimacy. |
|
| |
|
| EDITH
SITWELL |
|
| 1887-1964 |
|
| She
and her two brothers, Osbert and Sacheverall, were inseparable as
children and remained so later. |
|
| |
|
| MARIANNE
MOORE |
|
| 1887-1972 |
|
| Unlike
Lawrence, she offers no depth psychology of the jerboa or the fish,
and makes no attempt to share its fundamental drives. |
|
| |
|
| HILAIRE
BELLOC |
|
| 1870-1953 |
|
| His
mother was a descendant of Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen. |
|
| |
|
| CHARLES
TOMLINSON |
|
| b.
1927 |
|
| Tomlinson's
relationship with the objects and atmospheres he writes about is urgent
and submissive. |
|
| |
|
| CRAIG
RAINE |
|
| b.
1944 |
|
| In
1986 he wrote the libretto for an opera, The Electrification of the
Soviet Union, based on a story by Boris Pasternak, to whose niece
he is married. |
|
| |
|
| TED
HUGHES |
|
| b.
1930 |
|
| That
Hughes himself does not often represent ordinary feelings in his verse
does not mean that he does not have them. |
|
back
to top |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
