disculpame.

Nigh on one month; my apologies. More poemish things coming, but I'm pretty offline at the moment. I am in the midst of vacating my apartment and have entered a sort of bardo. Working hard to relinquish material attachments, while simultaneously staving off enlightenment by making cute christmas-y things (photos of cookies and other gifties to come). I can't seem to stop reading books by various child-of-the-earth-american-intellectual-adventurer-Buddhists. Finished two books by Gretel Ehrlich, courtesy of Annie: The Solace of Open Spaces and A Match to the Heart. Now I'm onto The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiesen. Funny how some books make so clear the imperative to be present and still, here and now, yet leave me gripped by the need to move, to push into the new, to see and do and plan and make.

Go, if you must, and see.
But remember to breathe.

A good writer pulls at once inward and outward.

Un(en)titled.

Rather lax about this "every day" endeavor, eh? Here's another off the cuff thing that really needs more work.


In the thick of it:
apple crates filling and emptying,
clatter of pie pans inside
and steam on the windows.
Brittle smell of frost soon gathering
on pumpkins and mums,
Old dog in the gravel drive,
his oily fur smell mingles
with the barrels full of
rotting cores and rinds.

At seventeen, you've received minimal direction.
You crave the strain, the structure, waking sore.
No substitute, no drug as pure as sheer exhaustion.
Your windbitten fingertips, your bootnumb toes
all day long crave that dreamless sleep,
so thick no light can penetrate.

Seventeen years of fretful thought tossed sleep
and only now are you learning the way of it:
how to work yourself til sore, til empty,
how to pour yourself through sawdust,
gravel, compost, dead leaves, dish upon
dirty dish, until you're clean entirely.

Before it turned you loose,
your first long autumn taught you this:
scrub out a rough perfection for yourself.
Live every moment. Do not dwell.

RECOVERY!

Guess what I'm doing. I am rescuing the writing that everyone kept trying to tell me was gone for good! For those of you actually interested in the techie details, here's a run-down. As you probably know, my MacBook was stolen in September and resold in October. However, the thief/salesman didn't bother wiping my hard drive clean (because he could only do that if he had a copy of a Mac OS on CD with which to reboot); he just put all of my folders in the Trash and deleted them. Since retrieving my computer about a month ago, I have been shopping around for data recovery freeware that shows some promise of finding my files. And here it is:  http://www.tech-pro.net/file-recovery-mac.html

It's a program called File Recovery for Mac, and the developer happens to offer a free trial which allows you to search for deleted files and recover any files that are less than 100 KB each. Word files, particularly poems, hardly ever run over 100 KB. So I am sorting, by hand, some 700 word files to figure out which ones are actually things I need to save, and moving them, by hand, onto a flash drive where I can store them until I'm done with the recovery process (I can't save them on the MacBook's hard drive without potentially overwriting the very data I'm trying to recover).

So there's the breaking news. To the service rep at Small Dog Electronics, who said retrieving my files would cost thousands of dollars and I would have to send my machine away for someone else to tinker with it without any guarantee that all the tinkering would work, HAH!

In celebration, here's one of the poems I thought was gone for good:



DEAD TREE

The north wants you.

The west wants you.

The east wants you.

You hunger for here—

this southernmost of islands

in the smallest of counties,

this pettiest of skirmishes

in the thorniest of families.

All you asked was raspberry

and wave,

rock decked with fossils.

All they gave—

a patch, a hesitation,

low snarl, fire doused—

a hiss.

So you leave the smoke behind you,

trailing, bittering the air.

Your difference is this:

let go, sink noiseless,

tap the silence,

simmer,

boil it.

Your sweetness is

a longdrawn labor,

comes but once a year.

Unsure of roots,

eternity,

you drag your feet

through sand and ask

what to do

where to go

whether to go

and what the weather—

What do you bring?

And how do you leave

the cold

                  the dry

                                    the tumbledown

behind?

Lost among promise and conspiracy,

lost without love,

you are lost,

the only map the series

of tactical maneuvers

it takes to live here,

to survive.

Hum like the sky,

electric, hesitant,

unleash yourself at last

and split the trunk,

dive deeper than the roots,

forget the difference

between trees

                  and water.

Forge yourself,

thunder’s daughter.

This is kindling.

This your fire.

Feed something  other than your wounds

with something other than your tears.

None can outwait miracles. 

Few can outwit stars—

first maps—

dying waves, impossible shores.

Strange wakes, to stretch so far. 

Promise yourself you will not marry

                  your future

                                    or your past.

If you must wed,

                  wed not the moment

                                    nor the idea of the moment,

but movement itself,

                  and only if you must.

Marry fury,

marry the taste

of salt and iron

in your blood.

Leave behind time,

its passage your wake,

stare into the sun, forsake

all that refuses to vanish.

Choose distance.

Choose the smallest and lightest

                  of kindnesses.

Abandon even language.

The ridgeline, the road:

                  the only home.

Hold what’s farthest,

                  hold it close.

 

Not on time...

Well, I'm behind  Not on writing, but on typing. I'll blame it on the holiday. Yesterday was devoted to baking vegan, almost gluten-free sweet potato-kuri squash pie, making a big batch of wild rice pilaf, whipping out my gravy making skills, etc. (Note that I hadn't even planned on doing anything for T-Gives.) And Tuesday? Well, Tuesday I was busy helping a bunch of youngsters create their very own zombie-vampire-werewolf-apocalypse theater production. To be continued next week!

Here's a rough sketch of a poem that isn't near done, but getting there:

LATE MIGRATION

This is the town where you used to try to feel at home.

And here, this is the street where you lived.

Empty. It's early. A Sunday, November.

Cars and bodies still tucked away,

everyone holding something in.

You see only a man, bicycling, white beard from chin to belly.

All the factories are collapsing, all the workers gone,

every warehouse left for squatters.

Own kid took off the moment she'd saved up enough to buy a car.

You left once you were sure she wouldn't come back.

Sky is slate today— no— steel. You can taste it.

Blood, iron, and ozone; there's ice on the way,

no immediate sun, but a light, diffuse—

more a property than an entity.

Where have the silences gone?

All hums energy captive,

   taut. The crumbled sidewalks vibrate

like great rough strings. You look up,

   for an overpass? Somewhere to place the blame

for your trembling.

This perfect purity,

   this glistening grey,

this industrial— or once industrial—

   mask of a day

is more— or less—

   than you can stomach.

Your saliva is stale bread

   inside the cavity of your mouth,

catches between teeth,

   you can't rub it out

with your tongue.

   From some corner

windfalls wash in,

   fill your nose, how strange

this wind! 

   Sudden living stench of applerot,

worms, vinegar, soft brown.

   Nutmeg in your mouth,

phantom of holidays that happened here once—

   broken bread and the blood of the Lord,

kettles and skillets, cast iron,

   mulled something,

fire long doused,

   the smoke and steam mingling,

chill warmth, this memory.

  You want to spit it out,

leave the nutmeg and the rot

  of apples and blood and snot

on this sidewalk collapsing

  into gravel and sand.

You want to walk, to bolt out

and forget outright all you brought back with you,

all you fought so hard, all you chalked up as lost,

but you can't run, you can't outrun it,

when it is inside you,

not carved in the pavement

or stenciled on boarded-up warehouses,

the ones where he used to work shifts, eight hours,

stagger back to you, midnight or so,

his breath whiskied, dinner cold.

You gave up waiting,

let him bang around downstairs alone.

He never once hit you

but a chair did, the one he threw, and coffee mugs, 

and felt-tip pens, and utterances cold as stone.

You are here now, not sure why.

Someone has died, not him, he's long gone,

a friend of his, someone whose name struck you,

flashed briefly, now burnt out— a satellite,

signal cut short, still out there, circling and dark.

Only good memories lose their grip.

Perhaps you lose your grip on them.

You reach the apple tree, leafless,

the corner of Wheeler and Frost. Draw closer.

The perfume fades. The branches:

grey upon grey. You want to run,

but not away. A whole life spent homeless.

The bicycle man. A chill in your fingers.

Leaves stir at your feet. They know as well as you

where one is supposed to go this time of year.

On Time.

WAIT TO RISE

Truly an act of inspiration, this waking.

You take every measure—

the right light,

sheer curtains draped just so,

a minimum of bells and whistles,

just warm enough to appreciate

that you are not cold—

to ensure a certain grace.

You don't want a trace of hesitation,

dragging feet. Not for you

the wry crumpled face,

still crusted with dreams and sand.

You demand a clean break.

A definitive beginning to the day's tale.

The sun must rise: you wait

as for the velvet curtain to go up.

The applause of birds— perfection.

You have been dreaming of this breakfast.

A careful affair, a concoction, a confection,

ponder your reflection— this,

your brush with resurrection.

Dear, bright morning star,

still far to travel, break your fast

but break it gingerly,

or tenderly. You've many hours

still to ravel round that skein of yours.

Only the beginning,

only the next beginning,

only the finest beginning so far,

this wan and winsome morn.

DEAD ZONE

I work in a dead zone.

Signals don't just go silent,

they evaporate.

Not by choice, not my idea

to spend hours here, wondering

whose voice today

intent on penetrating void.

All I can do, keep time, keep time—

who wants it?

The extra tic, hollow and frenetic,

clinging to hip, to wrist,

eyes drawn upward by its circling,

hidden gears pull strong as tides.

Time and tide:

Whither and whence 

this interference?

Clock-punchers, half-hour lunchers,

sterility of 40 hour weeks.

Our square sprawling bodies,

directions quadrant:

weak before the circle

we drew ourselves in sand

that asks us nothing.

It was the nervous tic

of our own hands

that gave us this:

I'll never find your voice

in all the signal chaos mist

but by the grace of satellite

and microchip, my surety

rests alert and tender in 16:56.

 

Mo Pomes.

Canine theme. Two very different efforts.

AMORES PERROS

Sure, I like dogs.

But what I like best

is a dog with his very own

little old lady or little old man.

When I spot one from across the street,

or headed straight toward me on the pavement,

I start to bat my eyelashes,

smear a big gooey grin

all over my face,

and if they stop,

I squat,

hands out,

like I'm the one

begging some attention.

You'd think I'm lonely or something

craving a little softness in my life: soft

pomeranian – cockapoo – lab puppy – fur, soft

little old lady hands with rings permanently embedded, soft

old man cashmere sweater hazed with decades' worth

of pre-war cologne. Little olds and little dogs

walk in special clouds, their own

protective forcefields.

It's a super power,

being cute.

Am I wrong to want

to charm my way into

the inner circle of the elderly

and their surrogate children, so much sweeter

than the first batch, sweeter even than the grandkids?

Third time really is the charm. Good things do come to those who wait.

But I'm impatient, want it now, block the sidewalk,

bold bodily beseeching: Love me, please!

If I had a tail I'd wag it.

I'd roll over—

rub my belly, please!—

I'll lick your hand, take whatever

you want to give me. To hold, to be held,

collar, leash, and all; lilac, bay rum, laundry soap;

let your smells wash over me, security of all familiar

rituals and gestures. Oh, let me be your puppy!

I understand now, what hope there is

lies in knowing that someday

we will all be old,

and some of us

will walk with dogs

to love us and to love.

 

THE MOTIONS

1.

The leaves have gone from yellow,

slick like paper maché still wet,

to brown and alive,

parched leather skittering the pavement:

small animals we only dream to be.

2.

The little red fox was still there,

on the white line that keeps cars

on the Interstate: stretched

and motionless, pelt of flame

unscathed and emptying.

Tempting me today,

as the morning before,

to pull over, stop and gather him,

curl him someplace warm, something says,

He shouldn't be out in the wind and the rain,

he shouldn't be out in the wind and the rain—

But I am not one to tell how bodies ought to leave.

I want not to take him

but to stay

for just a moment

by his side

and breathe his fur,

his flame,

linger in the last

of musk,

against the traffic,

shield his body

from the rush.

To stay.

To have that strength

instead of looking back,

whisking onward,

north, away.

 

Tea Poems

enjoy...

FORECAST: HEADLONG WITH PATCHY HAZE

It's one of those days

where you eat two bagels

and a stack of pancakes

and hope everything

turns all right without

you doing anything

about it.

You think about doing the dishes.

You think about taking off.

You think about money

and continue signifying nothing.

Line up animal crackers:

count how many headless,

how many whole.

Was waking ill-advised?

Or adventurous, this cruel catching of the tiger

by its own cruel tail?

At least it's not the tongue you've got.

It's one of those days

where the tiger turns out

to be all tail, no teeth.

You pity it, briefly,

then breathe. Thank whatever stars

or starlike beings you see fit to thank.

Root idly among the counter rubbish

to see if there's a bagel number three.

There isn't.

Make tea.

 

TEA SONG

If only I could brew a tea

strong enough to empty me

of every fear and self-rebuke,

leave me steeped

in passion, will, and truth.

If only I were strong enough

my tears might turn to steam

and set me shining, dew-draped, free.

O, to simmer myself

a bolder smile,

a warmer room,

and quieter miles

to go before I sleep.

IT LIVES.

Welcome to the resuscitation of this half-dead blog!

I decided last week to write a poem a day, with some help from the fine prompts at  http://poetry.poewar.com/ and the fact that Gabriel is house-sitting, leaving me with many long silent evening hours to fill with whatever I choose (no bad sci-fi VHS tapes in the background!).

I am going to post two a day to catch myself up, and then things will peter off to one a day, in theory. My hope is that I will be able to avoid all but a minimum of commentary. Let me start things off by warning you that I am not posting these in their true chronological order, but in a sequence with a better sense of narrative. Also, I play fast and loose with prompts so don't expect anything to line up nice and neat. These poems sound somehow... different than my writing from months past? I want terribly to know what the world thinks. So there. So much for a minimum of commentary.

On Loss: First Meditation

You enter the woods with a vision

of the clear path stretched out before you.

The way is soft with loam and leaves.

Light seeps in, its angle sharper, sharper,

sharpening toward evening.

Branches filter out cloud, let gold sluice down.

You walk on.

The path you thought belonged to you dissolves.

Coarse grain, dark and spreading outward, an embrace.

The path is moss, is dead leaves, is earth.

The path is roots and rises upward into trees,

exhales itself into sky.

You belong to it now:

lightless body engulfed by lightless path.

It spreads you out, stretches your limbs compass-like; a rose.

You belong to the four corners and beyond.

Your every breath becomes the sky,

a promise in leaves, and coursing just below the skin.

Owl cry; rough oily engine whine; rustle of small paws; a fire—

all is faraway and at your throat

and in you, smoldering.

You enter the woods as clay, unshapen and soft.

You leave it twisted serpentines, hollows that howl,

etched as if with frost.

Rooted and aloft, you leave the woods but do not part from it.

Walking gentle into golden dawn,

you are the path you thought you'd lost.

Second Meditation on Loss

My words leave me as leaves—

prematurely. I cannot blame the frost.

I wake with sweat wooling my pores,

toss, roll, inescapable animal

fecundity sharp musk.

Precious concentrate, thought:

once honeythick, raw viscous and alive,

now weightless frass I cannot hold,

torn from me by gestures not so strong, even,

as the wind.

I pass a bumper sticker asking,

GOT TODAY?

and think, not really.

Caught suffocating on the past,

its rags—

choked arid dead grass

fills my nostrils

wads behind my teeth—

I stumble drunk on future

into brickstone stodgy promises

rest my head—the pressure!

Choketongued, gaghearted,

bound with jute and lead,

rounding corners invisible,

swept by breath that isn't wind,

fearing the pop of chance bullet,

stray knife, window shatter,

first my limps go wrist.

Static crackles like thunder—

O unfetttered, onslaughtered,

the radio waves! I ride.

Thought rides upon thought—

words not lost,

all breath static, phlegm stymies—

speech my parasite and I, its host,

perpetual standoff,

can't back from the brink—

Dare you to tell!

Not words I've lost

but something hid too well,

strung taught as an arrow

and never launched.