Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go or what you will do . . . —Marianne Moore, "Baseball and Writing" (1961)
are not used to such good seats: behind third base, a perfect view, outfield grass as green as Lorca's Verde que te quiero verde. They feel a bit like Miss Moore, honored by the Yankees in '68 to toss out the first pitch,
dream of "Poetry Day at the Park": a personalized sonnet for the first one hundred fans and free haiku for kids. The crowd raps out rhythms with minibats, signed by the poet laureate, count iambs during the caesura of the seventh inning stretch, recite heroic couplets for the hitter who launches
a long fly beyond the upper deck, filled with visiting midshipmen, white uniforms a blur. They cheer with the sound of frothing waves, a thousand cranes in flight. A forest of blank pages tossed aloft.
Baltimore Orioles vs. Tampa Bay Devil Rays Camden Yards, Baltimore, Maryland August 9, 2005
When the Amish girl gets off the bus she walks over and stomps her small black boot into a drift in front of McDonald's. She is maybe new to winter this far north and wants to know its depth. Its give. Oh, be careful. It already has you by the night of your dress, violet-black with white-dotted print. Jill Osier
Suppose my grandmother whose book I write in still alive wrapped in the red shawl of her ninety-five years fake flowers on her grave. Suppose she had never been born- who would have taken her place? Six children; three his, three hers seventeen year old young hands full with mud of the land. Now consider something or someone you love is gone forever or that they simply had not happened- would you stop to listen to the sound of a train telling stories in the rain and in that instant remember? - Debbie Calverley
How many days has your sun set your sun risen over fields full of surprises a wildflower here a polished rock there bend of a horses neck a paw at the ground and yet everything appears crickets never ending
and you were never anything not a great wind a blazing sun trees waving goodbye a dying summer Outstretch thin air shifts eludes even fingertips Now try and forget Pretend I was never there.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
The biggest coward is a man who awakens a woman’s love with no intention of loving her. - Bob Marley
You'd never know his legs were missing. She had him tucked coyly beneath the nested pine, chin propped on a tiny hand. He sported a painted yellow shirt a blue hat, both worn from years spent in so many gardens. She never did find his legs yet there he was content to lie about in the summer heat never having to run again. - Debbie Calverley
Chirp of cricket rub bee flower hum song blackbird red winged in thin reed lift off train whistle blows weather blue to grey she remembers his voice - midnight runs rain. Debbie Calverley
Page one's a white space for thinking; even here among the evergreens beyond the living room and the white noise.
The guide held firmly in the hand means to see—
Through mist and wind made visible by branches,
do you name a thing and lose other options, counterlives?
Are you in turn a season named and filled with music?
Say then the weather changes and takes the singing elsewhere?
Of fidelity and proximity, the latter is a watchword.
A window. A looking out through lenses that magnify and conjure up an other
in your place or by your side. Two forms. Two matters.
From expectations of pure pop in flowering trees
down to knee-high scrub, with hope and faith I tried to come to terms with what was common.
I heard and sang back a little brown bird: Wish-wish, my little clay-color, coo.
I tried to name what I saw and how I felt and map a purple hurt as presence through winter.
And then that bird was gone. Or the song, or the singing, and what's left
is a field where birds might happen: a mind between living room and evergreens,
A blind so we first see without being seen— not mentioned in books, found only in looking. Michael Morse
I am being followed by a flock of winged words, plagued by their black eyes and beaks. Their tongues are sparks in the blue air and I have heard their songs so often that I almost understand the sense beneath the notes. They make intricate iambic patterns round my head, a lyric latticework, a tilt of time. At night they roost along the window ledge, and though I've nailed my window closed, my last waking thought is always looking for its rhyme. Moyra Donaldson
The trouble with paradise is you never want to be away from home.
I make what calls me out. All gone before you know it.
Words may drop passing color yet seeing you here now are born again, and again. Closing a word in the mouth feels the sound until the tongue can’t stay still.
To unmask is to go silent. Language makes no promise to communicate.
An articulated sound has it own dream in the ear. Her presence in the room gives aroma to the syllables I voice.
Now she’s ready to draw eros from foreign bodies. It starts by focusing on the sounds beyond hearing, still felt.
By she I mean who speaking animate configures. This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through.
Through thoroughly, as a word weighs.
2 a voice scape landing
They’re playing the perfect music for our movie, Rushing to Meet Anima. The rhythm’s spacious enough I slip in the back door without a trace.
The drama is gathering soundless. It lives like that.
I never let go of her hand in my other world.
This I learn from you who read me back.
They say ancient Irish saw serpents where there aren’t any. I descend from there to here where I see what I say even unsounding.
Writing I extinguish my voice but there is calling you hear.
Falling apart is syntactic. Writing at the edge of collapse is surrender.
Saying depths in a tongue all hands puts the cards on the table over the edge.
Time to stop asserting order where it’s already in waiting.
Write this off as of a poet or one inspired by being written through.
3 time has its ins and outs
A sacred grove takes refuge in the voice.
A language hasn’t come through to itself if being inside isn’t self-instructive. Syllable by syllable earwise spreading orders the cells.
What configures signs, time switching subjects on the line like my life. It seems the same is saying there were no same.
A journey ever worth taking records itself within your hearing even now. “I will always have been here before with or without you.”
Gnoaxial poetics, for want of right naming, finds pulse in grammatical drift.
The more she says the more I find configures. The new singular noun soon plurals.
I’m beginning to recall the forgotten adventure, long since signed for. The time of our playing recalls us back together.
This very time turns into space in our search for self true north. Her tone is dissecting the next move out before.
The tense is two timing us.
The experience beyond reportable experience is self sensing. Real work is indefensible.
4seeing through hearing
Now to dowse the poetics of the poem to come. We hold these principles to be self evident—in order to be self evidence.
Configuration is parthenogenetic. We’re talking fate here. High flying biology. Bios mating logos. Flowering, percipiently imaginarily auto-erotically speaking. It sees and knows what it’s doing not a moment before.
We call back to our other us through the air pressed into sound. I’m just trapping animal life in its resound here.
Our group gives the dream time. A date’s charge belongs at heart to anytime.
Our only mythical bird is fleeing the page as we speak. It makes a very very very fast line out. Sculpting hands in the saying.
Not every finger is instantly intelligible. Signing principle, it calls itself, and hands itself over.
5 undesigning music
Watching your dancing feet is its own dance.
What if everyone talked funny at once. I’m willing to avoid special pleading but ignored distractions will have their say.
Sudden behaviors may be of unaccountable origin. Tongue the surface long enough and you bleed old demons long in exile.
Learn from the dog to dig up old shame, then bury it where you want it. If you find a guy’s personality be sure to send it back.
Meet you where we know each other.
Beautiful music takes me away rather than throwing me further in. Clamoring lines cannot disguise the sound of one mind slipping.
The center is holding just fine, yet the periphery is forgetting where it is.
Freudian slips of the hand put your mouth on your money.
Also note paradisal memes at the tip of the slip.
Life goes on … off … on … off.
6 scared sacred
What am I hearing with these other ears?
Prepare your mouth with pre-carnal intentions. Poetry valorizes childhood because children make language.
First language.
It gets you little again to be verbal.
I can’t deny my excitement upon reaching the threshold of carnality. No more hovering over secondhand bodies.
The heart is the organ of consorting.
Life is intelligent means it knows where it’s going but I don’t. Fearful asymmetry.
Contacting the word’s core intent to mean itself is poetic insistence.
Logophagi know that certain morphemes are more delicious than others.
No truth behind the poem, only forward in its own before.
