Sunday, April 20, 2008

Na Po No More

I'm suspending the NaPoWriMo marathon. I have no problem starting new work, and very little trouble coming up with new drafts, so what this exercise is encouraging in ME is rushed, poorly considered work, when it's really those tenth to one hundredth revisions I need to be pushing. This work is both too hard and too easy... it's hard to get going but it doesn't demand enough.

I am thinking of turning this site over to some exercises and essays on the writing process and the writing life. Posting may be infrequent, unless I really get a buzz going. I have a million ideas--but ideas are cheap. We'll see what pans out.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Friday, April 18, 2008

Nothing Today

All day I searched for a way in, a beginning. or a middle, a loose end... I could not find the shred of a poem in me today. Not a line, not an image. And now I am going to sleep because I have to be up very early in the morning.

Didn't want you to think I forgot. I just came up empty.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Fragment

Walking loose today, I am
lacking in discipline.

I take the momentary effect over the whole--
sloppy, extravagant, yes

the light is too strong
unruly through the bare trees.

Spring I return to you. I am lame.
I am also mentally ill. Someday I will cry

out I cannot bear
this loneliness. Stubborn, stubborn,

I said not him, not you, not this one, not that.I am waiting only for you.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

For My Lovers

Rosemary in my hair
whispered me spring, green spice, how I ache
for early green, bolt of flower upstart
and repose of sun. See, I have

undressed myself of layers, shined my nails,
rouged my lips, remembering
our secret lives, our rendevous in rooms
hidden and quiet, though everyone saw.

I swear, goddess love me, I've never forgotten you.
This is not frivolous, how life quickens life.
My flesh reveals you to yourself, your soul
and we have met beyond and come again, my love
my loves, my love.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

"And Here Face Down Beneath the Sun..."

The light is coming up over you
as you sleep, worn out from travel,
the day's work still ahead.
Always something carried
over, it seems, always yesterday's
work unfinished, weighing on
the day to come,
where now you sleep,
the light coming up
around you, deep blue
of heaven cracking
on dresser, mirror.
The ocean is cold here
and vast, it suits you
and because it opens it is enough
for you,
the great wildness of it without feature,
raw with light,
white clouds and the boats on the water,
light floating on sky that is water
and you sleep as it gathers around you
great and calm;
the day isn't making any deals
and as it opens the sky
seems to grow hazy, light spread behind
and around the clouds, marine layer with greys
and grey-blues, and spots of white and all still so quiet
though inside your mind the silence has grown dull
with dread for the work to be done
and for the work still left undone,
the body's tired cells churning
out of duty, though once love burned there
and smoulders still,
smoky, with taste of charcoal on the
lips. Sunk in sleep, still the day
holds a tenderness
out to you and you don't quite refuse it, you
want to go out of yourself and meet it,
as you will meet it soon,
the gulls crying out and the taste of salt
and seaweed on the air heavy with dawn
and the damp boards on the sides of the
houses just off the boulevard, grainy, and the traffic
that never stops, louder, heavier now, the light on the wall
and around your shoulders, a few
more minutes
until night turns away completely and you wake to
coffee
and accept the yoke, said to be easy, and bear
the light burden; with compassion morning bends
over you though you do not see, the kiss
of cloud, first sun, kiss of salt air, what
spirit flees now, shy to be seen, bestowing,
claiming nothing. It is the secret heart at the center
that keeps you, though you do not know, that carries you
where you can not go.

April Ides

this is yesterday's poem.... I didn't get it posted last night...


April Ides


Bright blue cold and men out working on the lines
in such weather, twenty degree April morning!
The lines strung through the forest, invisible
forces, touch them and connect. They sing
to us: This is the day

that the Lord has made. I am the Lord,
though sometimes you don't think so.
I think a poem should have trees in it
most of the time. I write my poems in a trance
because there's too much to think about.

Light in a window before dawn, and then dawn...

The mind wants to constantly explain these things,
discriminating. Touch the wires and your thoughts
leap out of your body, trembling like sun's light,
like music.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Three Sketches

1. Baker's Store

Mild grey morning,
snow spits from the
blowsy sky.
Black ice pitted with dirt
and grease, bad breath
of transmissions, draws back
like gums in an old man's mouth,
displaying old troubles.

April morning like a bad hangover--
waking to the destruction.
Bottles and cans, trash, tobacco tins.
Does the good we do outlive us
or are we survived by this
stain we make on the world, inchoate
memory of our unthinking?

Big doe grazing on shoots
in the just-cleared garden
of the brick house.
Bounds away when I come down.

A 4x4 refilling diesel at the pump.
Two men stand by watching the gauge
roll, scared by the price of things.
The lights stay on
over the gas pumps into morning,
sensing the darkness.


2. On the Dam

Three steps out and I'm dizzy--
dance with it, don't freeze, be
loose, be light... The water so high
and rushing, snow pack on the
stones and the
stones' disrepair, sliding, pieces
broken off, cracks and gaps. I pick
my way; the water charges
over and through and under, around
the broken dam. It swirls
away like a wind and is never
ending. A small tree
is growing here, roots in the mud
of washovers, up here,
where once men piled stones
to hold back the river.


3. On the Road

I fill a bag with trash
on the way back
up Barker Road. Pick
them up one by one, cans
and bottles, but I leave
the jars red with
tobacco spit,
their lids screwed back
tight, they lie on their sides,
the liquid pooling.

Two beagles running up the road,
broken loose, mud happy,
hunters in off season,
slipped their chains.

A kestrel circling high,
catches a thermal, she has
the large view of the region
in which we are all detail,
mapped. One kestrel floating,
wheels in low, then rises.
Then her mate.

Friday, April 11, 2008

View

I refresh my mind by looking through the open door
from this room as it opens into another room. I am lying on a sofa
as I look across to the next room.
The next room is empty, which makes this even better.
I rest on the sofa, too narrow really, to do more than perch there,
one foot on the floor. I lie back and look into the empty space,
the white walls and doorway, of the next room.
I notice a small insect, some gnat or fly,
moving across the empty space, and this is restful.

When we come to the end of our wanting,
it will be like this. The eye resting on white space.
The pale white space of the window diffusing,
not broadcasting, daylight.

When the argument ends and the office closes
and everyone goes home to bed,
it will be like this. Not caring so much
if things went our way. After so much trouble
not really minding. Just walking into the house
and listening. No one would be there.
Drinking a glass of water in the kitchen
and going straight upstairs.


this one feels spooky-- I wish I had more time

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Bucharest

"You pass through light searching for me."
That whole street had only wedding shops:
froth of dresses in windows, flanked by serious
black suits. I was lost, in a city so old
the four directions had turned circular,
every turn leading back to the center
and the veins in my head were aching, blinding
my vision, though all day I insisted I would be well.

This pain, flint green, slate green,
tracks me down, finds me here
where I want only to disappear
on the far side of light; it nags, stealing
bites from my skin. These spines, they prick

like salt in a cut. Flint green slate green... I told you
I'm a liar. Pass through the grid, searching
for how to go on. Black grilles of iron
clanged down over shop windows closing.
Brides like prisoners behind them, forms without
heads. Why marry? A dream of love.
I was alone and you saw me there,
motionless, caught short, you passed
through light and found me, led me, finally
came to walk me home.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

The Crash

Though I walked away,
still there was something to return for.
One missing glove, a disk
left spinning in the player.
The quiet when the engine cut out,
and just the flashers ticking--
like medical instruments--taking a heartbeat
--drip line of anesthesia--how I slept
then, hanging inside the wreck,
the headlights pointing up
into the soft trees--hemlocks, I want to say--
because of where we were. We? Well, all
of us, parts of the self assembled in concern.

Still something to return for--the congregation
of that moment, the woods' cathedral
and the journey home interrupted. This then
was destination, wool coat wrapped my bones--
it would have been enough. A tenderness, a gathering.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

OK, I'm hating this...

I am not writing at ALL what I want to write. Maybe I'm emptying my brain of a lot of stuff I need to get rid of first, before the good stuff comes. Rebecca Radish speaks of the "essential shit". Everything seems to be coming from a negative, smartass place--maybe this is a defense reaction to the vulnerability of posting everything so fast, unsure of it. Or maybe my inner asshole is just on the rampage.

How is it going for the rest of you?

Notes for: Serenity Twelve-Step Raga

2. Morning Paper: The Bleeding Deacons

The accused has four hundred knives and (including, sic.) other pointed utensils in his motel room and will be remanded after threatening to decapitate the dog who barked (cont'd p.3)

at him from a car, taken in after calling the arresting officer peckerhead and brandishing a shiv like a showoff in face of clear orders to desist. [here text becomes unrelieable] Later making faces at the dog in custody.

Defense asserts that as an artist accused requires such tools for his livelihood, and stored (collected, sic.) such in his room though in parole violation re: technical weapons possession, no intent, yet his requirement to rehabilitate and secure his means of support and income contributing further in furtherance of goals of release as outlined by court

supercedes definition of weapons violation. "The court is not aware of any gainful purpose to using a sickle in April."

Monday, April 7, 2008

That In Me Sings No More

Thinking if he will change I can change, and the new life risked,
claim the jackpot and live like a goddamn tree
full of birds, you know
always singing to the dawn. And if he comes
forward I will come forward as if it were a dare to say move
over in ecstasy but only when we all agree and we step out
together in some crazy unisong.

Eros, I don't care anymore who you are. Return and lie
beside me, golden in the dark. You mystery, abide.
At dusk come nameless, visit my reverie by day, stroke my
imagining and leave nothing ordinary, nothing as ever was, be thou the
enchantment and mortal peril.

Morning is lead without you. .
I can't bear another day alone.
Thinking I change when the season changes, thinking he
holds it, hidden, denies and must yield
his secret, then there is

no secret.
Thinking nothing can change then it does.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Don't Drink and Post

A Bar of Hotel Soap


Remind me how much I hate spring.
Skunking the dog. Melting the drive.
Potholes torn straight through to Hades,
evidenced by steam rising. This poverty.


A bar of hotel soap I might consider
a gift at this juncture.
A stone, a leaf, a bitter olive rolled
under your foot. Crushed, slivered,
it would depend on the spirit

in which it is offered. A crown, a clot,
baby's heart on a stick. Don't take it
personally--name no simulcurm this

token of my esteem

What a fine mesh
you've gotten us through this time,
Ollie.

I see myself in the airport hotel
alone, desolately glamorous, B-
movie magic lounging on cushions while the jets
taxi loudly below in meaningless urgency,
holding back all that power of
ascent and gunning
while runway position is assured.

Which sounds inside the room with the great bed
of engine noise. A great debate of dinosaurs.
What brutal concrete.

I signed a non-disclosure agreement with
reality. I am the desperate one driven to deals,
debtor and survivor. I am the one
who with raw need most keenly sees
what must be done. And shaves

the point and splits the hair, loads up
on hotel soap like currency-- you're the one
could get this past security. You
wonder you, you pay
for everything with your good looks.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Without Transport

Variation One

What they said is true: in the moment, no fear.
I heard a scream--a long no-o-o-o!
from my own throat, that would have sounded like terror, like suffering,
to anyone if anyone heard--even I listened with concern,
from that other place where I was turning the wheel
and leaning with the car's flight from one slick
snowbank on the left of the road down the chute
of ice to the other side of the narrow road,
thinking thank god no one coming...as the car flipped on two wheels
and righted itself and spun again going faster.
I heard the long cry unwinding and saw the world
coming toward me at odd and immediate angles, and I steered
steering well adept as I am but unable
to slow the speed at which the steep pulled
the heavy car down the spiraling sides the ice but there
was no fear, just infinite wonder at how the moment unwound
itself in parts, immense surprise and an opening
of time which happened all at once and still in telescoping stages.
Come to rest, I looked up at the sky
because the car was pointed slightly upward, as if broken.
The engine growled and the headlights went out.
I closed my eyes then, knowing nothing
to be done. I leaned my head against the seat
and went to sleep, I had never been so safe.


Variation Two

It's true if you had heard me screaming, hurtling downhill,
and if that had been the last cry and I hit the bank, went over
and never wakened, it would haunt you to listen
over and over in your mind, to someone screaming
her way to death, you would say "terror" you would say died
suffering, cried out, it would hurt you and make you cold
inside and so afraid I would never be able to tell you
it was not like that, that the cry that roared from my throat
was all the animal's surprise and fierce knowing... These
cries, I heard them too, as the world rushed
forward at such unusual angles, faster than
thought and yet discrete, it all happened just inside
a life I was pushed away from at that moment to witness--
If you had heard you would not have known there was no fear
that I was one with every turn and spin and hurtle, safe within it,
as I had never been safe before.
That all that moment blossomed violent and terrible only to amaze.


Variation Three

It was so interesting. Flying out of it.
Glass and lights, and gasoline spilled on the snow.
Today is a ditch.
I've had nothing to eat. I'm not dressed.

There's a smell of skunk under the window.
I remember how much I hate spring.

The Accident

Last night's crash was yesterday's poem. I am home today recovering my spirits and courage. I woke feeling I had just sacked Troy. Today's poem begins soon.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Radio Jazz

This is the most depressing song I ever heard-
Sophistication what a word
drums with no dire, trying to rise up
to heaven without heat, scales and lazy arpeggios
--just cuz I'm stoned
don't say I'm stupid. I found you

jazzing here,
spiteful as a girl--there isn't piss enough
to tell your story. The walls are a-crawl
with the sound of solipsism. The hills
of New Hampshire are jive.

Anonymous email says she's
got your husband now. He's
a skunk. She's a leg trap.
Blow his head off
and don't get too close when it
hits (P U)
home. Seems they're playing that
same old song. Big finish.

[OMG this is tied up too tight...I hope I get past this cryptic phase!]

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

The Farmer Takes a Wife

The Farmer Takes a Wife


What seeds have you started, the gardener
asks the gardener?
The kids down the hill shacked up, dogs and
snow-shoes. Long mornings heaven
on earth then, and the woodpecker with his bright cap
tips his gaze, contemplates abundance,
suet in a cage and off he flies in snowy air.

A certain friendship ends
when to apologize would be to admit too much.
She did so mean me harm. Seed
of my discomfort, stone in the shoe, rock me
down snowmelt, boulders rising black furnaces
storing nuclear heat of space, fields shrink back revealing
bare ground of blast site. What I lack

in subtlety make up in violence.
Snow-fields glaring light on such
a dark day. Black cups of soil, under bulbs'
fluorescent urge, seed sprouts root hair
that splits the rock
upending earth, oh what have you
done this time

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Fool's Prayer

For of pure presence a moment
is all
needed--oh, given!--this
say what I want and have it --scares away -- doubt
the world knows.

Poor fools crying we don't
live forever when most of us don't even want
to live today. The morning a cloud chamber,
snowfields sublime in wet air, scarves unwinding
to heaven, pure
matter ascends. Tug Hill erased,
edges smudged in cloud tops. A crow coughs, tubercular,

then three racing geese go making sky
palpable as they approach and flash into
vision and out.

All night night held me in her arms and cherished
breath I gave away. Freed, I am not needed
here--it's all just offering. If spring
comes, it will be for love.