Saturday, July 28, 2007

Off to Provincetown

The Woodsman and I are off to Provincetown early tomorrow morning. My workshop is full and I have two manuscript conferences and a reading. This is my vacation. Actually, I should call it my "vacation from my vacation" since the whole summer is so lovely here.

When I return I will have my first two Vermont College packets waiting in the mail, and it really will be time to get to work. How can my book orders for Fall already be late? Why are students emailing me in July?

Full moon tomorrow--I hope it's clear over the harbor!

What shall I bring you all from the beach?

Friday, July 20, 2007

Part three of FREE BOOKS

Ask and you shall receive:

Creating True Prosperity, Shakti Gawain
Adobe Odes, Pat Mora

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Faith

What world do you believe, which weather?
An overcast day shows the plainness of things,
like roof, chimney, stark. The river
under the highway, brown, choked with grass
standing in mud, and the car behind
pressing up, pushing for speed. Gentle lights of trucks
you have followed as guides in fog and snow,
steady, nosing forward like mastadons
wakened at dusk from their long sleep to reassure us
being leaves an imprint, all forms held
in the memory of mud enfolding time.
It's dusk, you know this road. You don't know
which world this is today, whether that black dog
regarding you from a doorstep is the buddha
or guardian of thieves, or just a black dog,
or if their is any difference really.
How can we say there were angels present at the creation
if there are no angels now? Every question
ends in unknowing, the vastest place,
ample and newly unrecognized,
though you believe you are following
a familiar road, going home at dusk.

Untitled

Now I am calling to my old loves,
asking them to help me remember myself, to redeem
whatever compromise we traded for joy.
It is not too late to remember and turn.
I live alone and a bird comes to my window.
I lie on the grass and the wind plays with my hair.
And if I don't feel a man's weight on my body
again, I won't stop wanting, reaching to taste.
Did you think you could shut up desire,
forget love for the world's body
and still be alive, that it would ever stop
hurting to desire? How many places
have we been lost, running from one another?
I lie in my bed, with the stove squatting black
in the corner, windows painted over with night,
silence of night overhead, then some curious
creature moving in the leaves, in its life,
and I listen. In memory, a small "oh"
when his hand finds the wet place, yielding
to open, breath catches, catches me up.
I won't tie up my hair, bolt the door, or stop
calling into the dark because there is a heart there
still answering, however it seems to have moved on,
however I seem to lie alone, each love in me
more alive. From many, one.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Reading

I am reading: Solution Simulacra, by Gloria Frym. United Artists Books. Recommended. I am learning from her. She does some things I do with language and sentence shifts, only better, more odd, more startling. I have the desire to steal whole lines, as if they were in fact already mine.

S.S.C.F

The trees on the ridge cut back
against the wide cleared plain of vision
and new growth, trees thin
and markedly straight
just trunks, like pencils
standing up, bare stalks
and the brush of leaves
on the top branches like a flowering...

A few white butts
scribble the dirt beneath the bench.
They look clean--tight rolled cylinders
of white paper.
The guard comes twice to ask me what;
he stays in his truck;
his face is sour like old sausage.
I am meeting the bondsman. I give
the guard the name. He owns
the names.

The surprise of a crow
rising immense and ink black
from the low field--wave of his soft wings,
and then a dozen more
and the low sun out of a crack in clouds.
The truck crawls the perimeter
covering sight lines.

You might think they
have some secret in there
--some treasure--
so careful and dour it is,
so tight
with sight lines and perimeters,
almost sacred, and you lose
everything to approach,
You give your name and your reason.
The hair blows against my cheek
from the west. That's the sun
settling, not yet down.
It warms my face, makes me squint.
Razor wire in silver curls
along the wall in straight sun.

The white lines of the parking spaces.
Two flags endlessly pluffing.
Poles, thin shadows.
Waiting a long time
the world all wrong here,
what I thought the world was
the heart of it here, what
was always there. I am being
videotaped as I wait.
They own that; I'm subscribed
in their world. They don't like me
walking around. My notebook and
wandering make me
unpredictable. So I wave my arms.
I'm not accused of a crime
but can they tell me what to do, in small
ways, in large ways, these are the rules
hard kernel in the tooth, the bolt
slung into the wall,
here where there are no exceptions.

Gher the Hound

I woke in bloody sheets,
the bandages undone,
the body's dream of pain
unwound, the torn
flesh gapes and yellow curds
of fat up from the maw swell pale--
the sweet fat that makes the curves of my arm
and calf round lovely, and blood
runs red as blessing
to clean the wound.

what flows away

I was walking
in the high meadow, parting waves
of insects in wild grass. The voice said,
lie down here
and be done with wandering.

My thoughts were philandering like bees.
I was transparent, safe as a maiden
in the garden.
No maiden is safe in the garden.
The animal came upon me and I fought,
and beat at its head and neck, went
for its eyes, red as if his shot-out eyes
bled bright and blood exploded
in his skull, a fiery, baleful light.
Claws ripped my arms
and nerves shot up like flames on a screen.
Dog's breath
on my face, sick with my own
blood on his tongue, so once we owned dominion.

And yes, the fruit turns into a bird
and flies away. The flower becomes a bee.

I am a woman and I would not be
meat for the dead.
Lie down here and be done with wandering
for the kingdom is at hand.

Free Books, Part Two

First to ask gets them


North True South Bright, Dan Beachy-Quick
Light from an Eclipse, Nancy Lagomarsino
I Have No Clue, Jack Wiler
Gloryland, Anne Marie Macari

Untitled

The American landscape painting of our time
should be sketched in a smear from a moving car.
The American landscape of our time is a parking lot
and we all agree we don't like it here
today, we'd rather be in the city, but not
the last city, or any city at war, and particularly not
any place where disaster has cut off the lights.
And I wish I could take off my shoes, here in the
office, in my vastly over-rated position,
exposing my walked-on soles; this is
the only world after all, I know of none better
and if it's what we make it, then any moment is creation.
One cell at a time, one cell at a time,
we are cousins with the trees, evolving
with green, before green, one line at a time
poems are dissolving in melting terraces, fallen
free of history, the news shoots out the lights
and testimony streams from holiday weekend backup
on the bridge and over the nest of the peregrine falcon
baffled into high-rise lodgings. Somebody locked the trees out
and they fumble the window, as if they remembered us.
The world is printed on our bones--today, today,
the blue light on the hills, ancestor of the birds,
the red-tail's wing, down the river vein--
one sky at a time, now is the time before
green, the dark eon, fractal, April's dementia,
stirring, exposing scars, the downed
power line sputtering code--who am I? who am I? --
thrashing, on fire with a holy fit, not consumed, no peace, no peace,
and the seed in self-agony swells, split out of itself
once, once again and again, and the voice of the dead
uproaring: Pick up if you're there.

Books to Give Away

I begin the PURGE.

Voices: Eleven Narrative Poems, James Magorian
Astoria, Malena Morling
Terrain Tracks, Purvi Shah
Kitchen Heat, Ava Leavell Haymon
The Book of the Rotten Daughter, Alice Friman
Floating Girl (Angel of War) Robert Randolph
Paradiso Daspora, John Yau
In Which Language Do I Keep Silent, Earl Sherman Braggs
Tests of Time, William Gass

First to ask gets it--I'll need an address.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Not everything here is a poem. Some are thoughts, some fragments. There is too much struggle to speak transparently. Let me speak through intermediaries.

Shape shifter.


Begin:

Poem

Womb

Bomb

Song

Tomb

Home

Moan

So manypoems


FRAGMENT: a lying bitch, a life sentence. Razor wire glinting in the sun, this is Vermont ? flat plain upon the hill, video watching me move. A door opens--wide, from above, like a garage door, and in the emptiness he stands, not framed, but made small, comes forward, received into the sky he was refused. I stand waiting beside the The Humvee, the bail bondsman in black wrap glasses, the fugitive recovery agent muscling tatttoos, former NFl, runs his fingers throught the other's hair, we sign the deal, we go.

Cameras watch us drive away, silent always awake.

Yet there are birds here, nesting in the flattened sight lines.



STILL: Tonight the black window, the blood too full in my flesh, a neurological event as if, like the lightning storm. Black window. So black a mirror, in color, I wave my arms over my head, weaving, hands limp following. Anenome.

Dread the telephone.

The rain comes up again, blessing, drowning. Thick air, it is feeding us, but like a tube-fed specimen I cannot move. Fattened for the altar. Don't take this personally; we all are that. That Thou Art. Worms moving in the rich dirt, riching the dirt, eat and feed... I am dirty, sweat and oil, sour smell of flesh, my hair limp and dirty, with woodsmoke and exhaust, and oil of hands touching. I breathe out -HA- and sniff the air hard. Hair growing on me, I want to crawl these woods leaning into the house like an animal, sure, growling into the dark.

Worm-white. Mushroom angel thorazine shock white. These separate words will not suffice. yet the sentence locks the cell door. (pun) a phrase a phase... ? I am groping in the dark. Relax: I meant that literally, not having turned on the light when I went to search for paper. Writing here past (beyond) hope.

This will not suffice.

\
__________________________________________
A thing written, not made... (follows)

Three days of rain and wind.
Last night cathedrals of lightning
sculpted the dark:

brief ghostly visions
of distant catastrophes.

"Go and help your brothers, who are on fire..."

Between the first deluge and the next
driving back roads, to avoid
the downed tree, the washed-out bridge, we were silent
leaving the lights of another house,
the supper toasts, the jokes and stories decades old.
It's harder to pray now
when we lie apart in the dark, to say
"we are not so cast out,"
but our sadness is bitter, how bitter

I can not taste to tell you.
A clot in my brain keeps refusing
to move, to dissolve the ancient "this can not be"
with which all who suffer and are torn forever greet
unimagined pain, imagining
it could not be intended for us, exempt: this is our greatest failing
of wisdom, how horror is forever an aberration to us,
to bow and admit
the strange angel who accuses, who prevents

peace and pierces breath and stations us here
in the dark, threading an empty road
beneath apocalyptic firestorms we will pass beyond.

Here where we may not pass, behind us
the tree down on the road, the bridge washed out
the door of the welcoming house closing
behind us, stories going on after, when
we aren't there to hear them.

We lie apart in the dark, afraid
of what is leaving us, of the banging
against the highest wall by the attic stair,
angel of probability I refuse to believe
what is

(I can't finish this right now)

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

You and Lulu

Whatchu doin' with Lulu?
Lulu, who you
don't even care for,
do you?

Eh la-la Lulu,
she pursued you
down Sepulveda Avenue.
Chased you. Wooed you.
Yoo-hoo hoo-ed you.

Whatchue doin' with Lulu, up in Santa Cruz-zoo?
Drinkin' ouzo?
Where'd you run so suddenly, after drinks in Albany?

Totally
lonely
up here on the second floor,
out the door in Baltimore,
neither nor Norfolk, Kansas City two-step, bad bet,
once a night in New Orleans,
with a dinner in between.

Don't you know I'm shook up
from this hookup?
Can't you see through
all her hoodoo?

Stay with me one time,
will you?

I was in my sick bed
I was on the psyche ward
I was at the seashore
I was at a conference,
no one there was making sense
I was home by the phone--
where were you?
Off with Lulu. Well screw you.