Not expecting an answer

I’m trying to get better at making turns quickly, to speak compactly and still pack a big punch.  This poem does a crazy good job of that.  It’s by RUTH STONE.

This tedious letter to you,
what is one Life to another?
We walk around inside our bags,
sucking it in, spewing it out.
Then the insects, swarms heavier
than all the animals of the world.
Then the flycatchers on the clothesline,
like seiners leaning from Flemish boats
when the seas were roiled with herring.
This long letter in my mind,
calligraphy, feathery asparagus.

Poem

I’m home today for the first time in years.  Nothing’s changed

and everyone’s asleep.

Even the most ambitious peaks seek only to refold into earth,

to curve around their tips and gap the sky like scansion,

the segments of an orange bending out and

forming a peel in all the right places before meeting again

at the soft white spot in the middle.

A photograph of prayer flags shows off rectangular panels in red, green, cyan,

strung up over the ridges of the Himalayas like dirty laundry.

I wish a pair of tube socks could be holy.

Like an outstanding hose in the arms of a tender lover,

feet divert from the vertical gust of our other limbs,

then spray into a particulate blush.

Despite all that rebellion, our bodies are better and more mobile for it.

Still, I wonder if it’s possible to say a thing and mean it,

or if the only solution is to create simply for the purpose of decay

in hopes that over time

we can erode at the growths around our mouths.

Minimalism

I just turned in the first of my six applications for MFA programs.  I don’t think I’ll get in anywhere, not yet, but it’s good to have the practice and to feel a sense of mission.  One of the issues I’ve been grappling with in putting together my writing sample is how and how much to be minimalistic.  It’s much more difficult to measure the merit of a meek poem than a broad, pretentious one.  Here’s a poem by James Schuyler.  It’s called “A Stone Knife.”

 

Sleek as an ax, bare

and elegant as a tarn,

manly as a lingam,

November weather petrified,

it is just the thing

to do what with?  To

open letters?  No, it

is just the thing, an

object, dark, fierce

and beautiful in which

the surprise is that

the surprise, once

past, is always there:

which to enjoy is

not to consume.

 

First off, I love unpretentious depictions of “just the thing.”  I don’t know how many times you can write a poem about “just the thing,” but it would be interesting to find out.  People often talk about how comedy is slighted over tragedy — an aphorism I don’t think has been true for at least 20 years — but I’ve never read an account of how meekness is slighted over grandiosity.  Is that a legitimate complaint?

Placed, & so beyond

(This is a revision of an earlier poem, which I called Poem.)

 

Today I only want to watch movies with James Dean

seraphic and astounded in his big turtle glasses

resembling perfectly (as he eyeballs a script)

the uppityness of a tree root

 

P says

 

stop writing poems I’m cold

 

she’s got cider donuts right off the cart and I’m tempted:

an annual indulgence at just the right moment

the chance to once and for all be appropriate

 

but I’m “too blue”

I’d rather be a poet

 

A room away P strings together a few good words in her usual manner

vigorous as chewing gum

& as pink; like Meg Murry with her cheeks deep in a conical flower

the cup on the stem bending like meter in the brain

 

P goes on phonemically

not initials and their time warp

but mouthing O’s and A’s as broadly and deliberately as a well-educated sturgeon:

 

I love that time when you feel like your essay is just a pile of word-refuse and desultory observations but then it occurs to you that there actually is some sort of organizing theme that you’ve sort of implicitly used. So it turns out you don’t have to scrap it entirely and start over after all.

 

I’m thinking of Hollywood and the way movies circulated in the fifties

their customary lazy descent into repeats on cable

cyclical but not in the way alluded by 35mm

not rolling onwards in any real or poetic tradition but then again

some call that ‘Heaven.’

How do you make a hand

Horace, North Dakota

Poems About Trees

I’ve been reading “Some Trees” repeatedly so this poem holds more water than it might otherwise.  Anyway it’s by K. SILEM MOHAMMAD.

I have written a couple of poems about trees

poems about trees and snakes and lakes and birds

poems about nature and life in New England

I write crappy poems and eat babies

if you like poems about trees you’re in for a treat

when I get nervous I get hyper and bump into people

I read to them what MapQuest gave me

round during then in the mom seeker panties

to help me narrow down the slut thing word jobs

rawr I’m too stupid to be able to make my point clear

if you for critique you eventually works at what a

chromosome disorder speech theory itch be responsible

congratulations, really nice birth control

is the most important challenge to vintage porn food stamps

and then I thought only God etc. (i.e. chemicals about progesterone)

the woods are full of police

90% Khalil Gibran, 10% carved wooden men

that can see souls at night

but I, warlike, considering gray cream for attire

enjoying impossible “nudes on ice,” more death

as though your hands were hollow and sequently

the big soprano going back to her church

because her crazy French mom does and no one knows why

brainwashed creationists go ever yodeling to attract

the jolly echo of a forest of orange sauce

“you anus looks like a chicken pie”

I hate you, dig me up

people write poems about trees and the words

are shaped like a tree

kids are stupid

$10

Poem

Help! the woods are full and teeming with critters and I am one of  them,

I’ve got twenty jointed-digits and a set of eyes in a pair of warm baths.

Like drains, they circle timidly and then with greater force, boy these eyes can suck! Then I check and I’ve got a nose with openings, can you believe,

I’m an overstuffed coconut with holes, ready to be de-juiced!

Words are coming out with alarming rapidity; I feel bloated,

I’m concerned something will fall out,

my eyelids are vacillating up and down like punch-drunk tweezers on spring break.

With all these parts, couture’s really evolved since the hegemony of the amoeba.

Hey, wouldn’t it be great if all creatures could be slapped together with the

imprecise clack of a typewriter?

Then I realize, I’m a cool 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit—that means I’m raw!

Now I’m nervous I’ll catch salmonella, I’d be cooked then!

But I’m not cooked,

am I?

I’m not chilly and slick like a cucumber

I’m not steaming and self-assured like a Porterhouse

I’m not polypsy like an ear of corn

I’m not bubbly and transparent like a glass of champagne.

I’d like my soul to be an unbuttoned pair of pants:  alluring enough, perched on a moment that’s both before and after; deliberate, careful and dishabille.

I’d like my soul to be the sort of thing you have to practice for a couple years.

Maybe I’m a bowl of ceviche, neither raw nor cooked,

sour sometimes,

persistently celebratory,

and sometimes occasioning puckered lips.

A little restaurant

The girl in a black in sweater

transient palliatives of French syllables

comingling, “My question you slept

alone last night.”

At intervals impossible limining: euphemism, poetry.

Goats and goatherders in clusters and flat,

the red, its implications, an orange,

letters sans serif (another example) you see all the most beautiful things

they are only examples of beauty.

A scarf with the faint smell of chlorine

basements in vestigial layers

there is a multiplicitous polity of grays

and so many conveyances, the chlorine

and the wetness of it.

Can you believe you awoke with your face flushed hot! and the twine still on

bulbing circuitously.  Ahead of an imprecise countenance and a wagon stick fence

like Riverside park, rickets and staying

somehow.  In a coat with a point and the one hole, loose in the interim

before the swamp.  That’s you not

in a collared and buttoned shirt

the collar goes all the way to the top

beneath a haircut a boy his slimness

of earlobes, flapping your glutenic knuckles

brown counter in grains in everything

mellow feathers

ending on an up isn’t easy you know

the girl eating figs from her tips paints her   carefully

teeth in all the right places, dismantling repeatedly

the traces of stems, pits, a skin formed over your mouth while you were sleeping

but that’s what’s eating for.

While the rocks named singular spaces within

Not a dream, a text message, a poem with its own object, not phrasis tacked on to the hull of a barreled ship and all the men sinking. Nobody speaks of the other meaning of body bag, we all say One body umbrella. Nobody a’more morses weft.

A. stays up late at night preoccupied with the microwave in Back to the Future II, not yet existent. Oh lord, the cinema’s so loud and gay tonight. After talking to A., “microwave” becomes my shorthand for self-actualization. By writing this poem, I am “microwaving.”

The next night
flat on his back
bathed in cool light
he dreams a queer diction in flat affect

Underwear is luddite for tupperware. Panties is chauvinist for saran wrap. Garment’s the inverse of stamping pony in elm. Wet spine is spinach. Spinach is a can in the eye. A horse is a vehicle but a man isn’t. A man is a pocket but a horse isn’t. Car is pouch for fumes-with-wheels. A bowl is a sky without flight. Flying’s unseen for intestine. Viscera bellow hide-and-go-seek. Nausea is nostalgia, microwaved.

Some time passes and A. meets his glittering black cube by the pond. When A. spots his black cube it promiscutes solemnly, “Slim finger,” before settling in a limpid shaft of sunlight on A.’s lap. Then a refrain:

The world spins best when on its fence cuz ye, even brutes have fences.