Saturday, April 28, 2012


The Sky at Night

A belated excursion to
the stone collection
of our feelings
Little left here
worth showing
alas
Is there
from an anthropological perspective
a need for love
Or merely for
yearnings easy
to disappoint
Which stars
go down
as white dwarfs
What relation
does a heavy heart bear
to the art of comedy
Does the hunter
Orion have answers
to such questions
Or are they
too closely guarded
by the Dog Star 

W.G Sebald

Reunion
           As the popular girl walks among us with the microphone,
most of our stories are about loss,
or include exquisitely precise
medical and pharmaceutical details,
as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath.
           I came to dance with the Puerto Rican women
of my class of 1967, and to remember a few pals lost in the war,
who had been so beautiful, you were happy just to look upon them,
and one more boy
lost to his own drunken wildness
under a moon who doesn't remember us.
           It's not a going back we long for, but a staying still
for one incomparable moment, all the lost loves' faces
spinning in the mirrored ball.




BRUCE WEIGL
The Abundance of Nothing 

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Confidence Trick

Caught in a world of wrong intentions
she trips over a man next to the curb
reading an outdated paper
about a war that never ceased.

She tries to tell him it’s no longer true
gives up right after he kisses her.

The next day she believes the news too
rolls up her truths and follows him
to an alley where everyone lies
dead.  She curls up beside them

knows nothing about the fact
that his war was never hers at all.

Against the curb he lies waiting
for another victim to trip across
his graceless world.  In the alley,
bodies steam into a cold April morning.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Hospital 1 - Flew Over the Ku's Nest

outside blooms green
inside grimy windows
collapsed veins plume

smell of purple cabbage

Saturday, April 7, 2012

REALLY?!

http://news.sympatico.ca/unusualnews/five_charged_after_chinese_teen_sells_kidney_to_buy_iphone/9e2b2845

Friday, April 6, 2012

Monday, April 2, 2012

Not Beyond All Conjectur3


John Ashbery


Oblivion scattereth her poppy, and besides

it’s time to go inside now,
feed the aggressive pets, forgive our trespasses
for trespassing against us.
                          Other times
monotony is like a cave, the air is fresh,
tedium tonic.
             We lie in a museum of helpful objects,
leaning toward the accomplishment of a small,
complicated task, like sailors in rigging.
Something no American has yet achieved.

Murmurs Of The Earth From This Land



Muriel Rukeyser

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters,
       from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our
       dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot.
We stand as growing women and men. Murmurs come down
        where water has not run for sixty years.
Murmurs from the tulip tree and the catalpa, from the ax of
        the stars, from the house on fire, ringing of glass; from
        the abandoned iron-black mill.
Stars with voices crying like mountain lions over forgotten
        colors.
Blue directions and a horizon, milky around the cities where the
        murmurs are deep enough to penetrate deep rock.
Trapping the lightning-bird, trapping the red central roots.
You know the murmurs. They come from your own throat.
You are the bridges to the city and the blazing food-plant green;
The sun of plants speaks in your voice, and the infinite shells of
        accretions
A beach of dream before the smoking mirror.
You are close to that surf, and the leaves heated by noon, and
        the star-ax, the miner’s glitter walls. The crests of the sea
Are the same strength you wake with, the darkness is the eyes
        of children forming for a blaze of sight and soon, soon,
Everywhere, you own silence, who drink from the crater, the
        nebula, one another, the changes of the soul.

— from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. 

I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus

I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus
Adrienne Rich

I am walking rapidy through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her deat poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell's Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of these underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror

Dreamwood

Dreamwood
Adrienne Rich

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child's older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. lt would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn't revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from thc Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.


Sunday, April 1, 2012

Vasko Popa

Give Me Back My Rags

Just pop into my head
My thoughts the better to claw your cheek
Just step in front of me
My eyes the better to snap at you
Just open your big mouth
My silence the better to crack your jaws
just remind me of what you are
My memory the better to dig a hole beneath your feet
That’s how things stand between us


1
Give me back my rags
My raglets of pure dream
Of silken smiles
Striped premonition
And my lace-like sinews
My raglets of polka-dot hope
Of filigreed lust
Calico glances
And the skin off my face
Give me back my rags
I’m asking you nicely

2
Listen you freak
Off with your white kerchief
Don’t we know each other
Together from childhood
Lapping at the same bowl
Snoozing in the same bed
With you evil-eyed knife
Walking this strange world
With you snake in the shirt
Listen double-crosser
Off with your white kerchief
Why lie to each other

3
I won’t carry you piggyback
I won’t take you where you tell me
Even if I were shod in gold
Even if I were harnessed to three wheels
On the cart of the wind
Even if I were bridled to a rainbow
Don’t try to grease my palm
I won’t even with my feet in my pocket
Threaded through a needle tied into a knot
Or whittled into a simple stick
Don’t try to scare me
I won’t even roasted or overroasted
Raw or salted
Not even in a dream
Don’t go on kidding yourself
It doesn’t work I won’t

4
Get out of my walled-in infinity
The dancing ring of stars around my heart
Out of my morsel of sunlight
The rollicking sea of my blood
My flow my ebb
Out of my marooned silence
Get out I said get out
Out of my living pit
The bare father-tree within me
Get out how long do I have to shout
Out of my head bursting into pieces
Out out just get out

5
You get kewpie doll notions
I bathe them in my blood
Dress them in the rags of my skin
Make swings out of my hair for them
Toy carts from my vertebrae
Gliders from my eyebrows
I make them butterflies from my smiles
Wild beasts from my teeth
To hunt to kill time
What kind of game is this anyway

6
Damn your root blood and crown
And everything else in your life
Every dried up image in your brain
Every shifty eye burning on your fingertips
And every step you take
May you sink into three kettles of grumpy water
Into three stoves of omen-fire
Into three pits without name or milk
An icy breath against your throat
The pebble beneath your left tit
And the bird-razor in that pebble
Swoop the blackest of blackbirds to the lair of nothing
To the hungry scissors of beginnings
To the womb of heaven I know so well
Damn your seed sap and glitter
Darkness and dot at my life’s end
And everything else in the world too

7
What happened to my raglets
You won’t give them back you won’t
I’ll scorch your eyebrows
You won’t be invisible forever
I’ll mix day and night in your skull
You’ll come beating your head on my back door yet
I’ll pare your screeching fingernails
You won’t chalk hopscotch through my brain anymore
I’ll hound the fog out of your bones
Slurp the hemlock off your tongue
You’ll see what I’ll do

8
So you want us to love each other
You can make me out of ashes
The trash of my belly laughs
Out of what’s left of my boredom
You can doll-face
You can grab me by the hair of my short memory
Hug my night in its empty shirt
Kiss and kiss my echo
And you don’t even know how to love

9
Run freak
Our footprints bite one another
In the dust behind us
We’re not meant for each other
I see through your iciness
Pace your extremities
This is not much of a game
Why did we ever mix our rags
Hand them over what do you want with them
They are just fading on your shoulders
Hand them over scram into your nowhere
Run freak from a freak
Don’t you have eyes
There’s a freak here too

10
May your tongue blacken
Your noon your hope
Everything black only my chill white
My wolf at your throat
May the storm be your bed
My fear your pillow
Wide the meadow of your sleeplessness
May your every morsel be fiery
Your teeth of wax
Come on glutton chew all you want
Dumb your wind your water your flowers
Everything tongue-tied
Only my grinding teeth still loud
My hawk at your throat
One less horror for your mother

11
I wiped your face off my face
Tore your shadow off my shadow
Levelled the hills within you
Crumpled your plains into hills
Made your seasons quarrel
Kicked the earth’s corners from you
Tied the path of my life around you
My overgrown my impossible path
Now just try to meet me

12
Enough of your sweet-talking immortelles
Of your candied trifles
I don’t want to hear to know
Enough enough of everything
I’ll say my final enough
Stuff my mouth with earth
Grind my teeth
I’ll shut up skull-lapper
Shut up once and for all
I’ll stand just as I am
Without root branch or crown
I’ll lean on myself
On my own bumps
I’ll be the stake driven into you
Into you party-pooper
Into you muddle-head
That’s all I can do
May you never come back

13
Don’t fool with me freak
You hid a knife under your scarf
Stepped over the line tripped me up
You spoiled the game
You wanted my heavens to turn over
The sun to break my head
My rags to be scattered
Never fool with another freak
just give back my rags
And I’ll give back yours