George Quasha: from “Speaking Animate”

G. Quasha: Axial Drawing – Dakini Series 2012

1                                              words under pressure bleed original sense

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.

4                                               seeing 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.

Lawnmower Crow and Dog

Irritated cat 
sits silently

Debbie Calverley

C. Dylan Bassett

Husserl’s Theoretical Horizon, or a Ghost Is a House You Live in

1. 
Ghosts do not happen alone. Ghosts are made 
from rooms and glass and cherry trees. They lie down and become 
horizons. You see by them. 
You remember. 
  
2. 
Some ghosts want to undo you, to take you apart. 
They crawl in cupboards and bang against the wood. 
They rearrange furniture and hide 
your good shoe. You cannot fight them, you do 
not know their names. Other ghosts want 
to hold you together, to bake your favorite lemon cookies 
in the middle of the night and climb in bed with you 
and comb your hair with their glassy fingers. 
You hate these ghosts most of all. 
You know their names exactly. 
  
3. 
You know a ghost and you call her Kate. But Kate is not 
her name. You knew 
Kate before she was a ghost. You knew her square white teeth. 
Now, Kate is a red door shutting. 
Now, she is the room you sleep in. Kate sings 
your favorite song until you fall asleep. 
  
4. 
The ghost is a fixed point. Winter’s 
cicatrix. A cup tied to a rope tied to your neck. 
You wear it like an overcoat. You want 
to explain it, but to point your body toward  
the ghost is language enough. 
  
5. 
You wake up and Kate is still there. She enters 
by way of a mirror. She puts out her hands and tells you “take it” 
but her hands are empty. 
  
6. 
You drive out of town, the ghost 
is snow falling and the ghost is a trackless white 
interstate. Kate tries to tell you something, 
to show you where you’ve been. 
Your favorite song plays on the radio. 
You are not yet asleep. 

C. Dylan Bassett

And now U2's version : D

http://larrylootsteen.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/u2-poem-before-beautiful-day-in-winnipeg/

Me, myself and I

Here Come The Sun

Hit 'ku

It kind of hit me today
I will probably 
never see you again

rain against the window

Debbie Calverley

Frank O'Hara

 . . . I still fear to mention the blue
flowers. They scared me most and I
prolong other talk. There were fields of
them around the place, all blue, all
innocent. The artificial is always innocent.
They looked hand-made, fast-dyed, paper.
They nodded ominously in the sun, right
up to the edge of the concrete ramp, a
million killing abstractions, a romantic
absence of meaning, a distorted prettiness
so thorough that my own eyes rolled up
in fear for their identity and I involuntarily
cried at the thought of tiny mirrors where
the object is lost irretrievably in its own
repetition. Is this how beauty accompanies
fear so it can escape us? Do you think these
flowers could be auctioned tintypes or souls
outside hell? Is blue what they mean by
“shun posterity” and “the price of fame” and
“fear of death”? Have I learned it wrong?

        —Frank O’Hara, out of “A Letter to Bunny”
        (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 1971)

Google Glass

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/john-lanchester/short-cuts

December Love

When, as you will, you leave me in the dust
someday, remember how I carved a heart
in the ice still whiting out half your rear

window, so when you looked back you'd recall
the heart I lost to you & you had left
behind, as you fought traffic down the road.

In point of fact, the heart you took in then
broke yours when it broke into tears that streaked
your vision of the distance you had come
from where I made the gesture you would find

etched on glass as if for good. My heart goes
with you, it said before it melted down
from its own heat as fast as my own words
give me the slip, black ice under my feet.

Randy Blaising
Sweet Crude

Toska

Toska Issue Four - Spring 2013

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

- Vladimir Nabokov

Clenched Soul

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues. 

Pablo Neruda

Last Dawn

Your hair is lost in the forest,
your feet touching mine.
Asleep you are bigger than the night,
but your dream fits within this room.
How much we are who are so little!
Outside a taxi passes
with its load of ghosts.
The river that runs by
is always
running back.
Will tomorrow be another day? 

Octavio Paz

Inspiration (for someone I used to know)

Some flim-flam grand slam, glitchy
as religion, this is, with its chronic

key-and-padlock, hit-and-missy cerebellum,
its sturm and drangish, bum-

rushed, all-thumbed cockalorum. How near,
to use the fizzle of yet another

wet-squibbed metaphor, the tepid fever spike
of a heart-junked hypochondriac

frothing for a blunted, lovestruck glint of moon,
or in a bare austerity squiring a siren

star, rats and blinder moles gathered in a dampish,
lamp-black burrow can,

tittering and stirred like weirder
choirs, rise up mindful and consider fire.

HAILEY LEITHAUSER

To The Reader

You 
don’t deserve to read this.

Women betray women

for men

Men betray women

for women

Men betray men

for justice

Women betray men

for something else

We betray ourselves

to know ourselves

vous m'avez trahi pour lui

il a trahi

I don’t care

what you think

of this poem

Debbie Calverley

There are no Lone Inventors

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/03/nikola_tesla_and_the_myth_of_the_lone_inventor_partner/

Mud is Mud

Clarity is not accessibility.

Accessibility is not simplistic.

Brevity isn’t minimalism.

Oblique is often too much distance.

Less is not always more.

Excess is not experimental.

One room needs to be in relation to the next.

Quantity is not quality.

Distillation takes time.

Ideas in abundance are not enough.

Murky is not mysterious.

Language isn’t firm.

Words aren’t sentences.

A language event is not story but a story requires both event and language.

Under genius one discovers structure.

A paragraph should mean something.

There is no detail too small.

Difficult is more often undercooked.

Action leads to action in language doesn’t mean slapstick or stock.

A meander can have force and intention.

One aside should lead to another.

An end is more often a pause.

Mud is mud is mud.

–Sina Queyras

Casa Blanca - Hedrik Norbrandt

I dreamed of a house by the sea, so white it was no dream.
The summer night was so divinely clear
summer had long since gone.
I saw my love stand in the doorway,
saw her I had forsaken.
I dreamed of a house by the sea, so white,
of my love and the summer night
though it was very long ago
and though it was no dream.

  (Text of the poem in the original Danish)

HENRIK NORDBRANDT
translated from the Danish by Patrick Phillips
When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems 

This Is My Proof

Inside a book
I've been meaning to
read forever, I
come across you

decades later
and find again
words you wrote
to calm me when

we were together:
your photo pressed
like an aspen leaf
I guess I missed.

The scribble across
the back, your name—
if more was meant,
it never came.

There were others
(there's someone now),
same as you.
And yet, somehow

among dust motes,
none of it matters:
a rush of breath
comes in then scatters.

David Yezzi