Musette

Poem o' the day #13

This is the view through the window I had in mind., one I'll never tire of. It is, of course, from NASA and the Apollo 17 guys, the ones who changed our picture of ourselves.

#13. Earthbound

Guilt weighs at their fragile necks, pulls them
closer to the ground, the old women
bent, the men pressed back like astronauts,
immobile in their seats as they try
to escape Earth’s gravity. Release comes
with distance, recasting the familiar
world, its wholeness finally visible
beneath the swirling clouds, a gentle
turning. But few look back through the small
window to glimpse the sight that would free them.
Tonight, walking into the cold, we are
caught in the pull of the small—a cough,
a bill, the approaching storm. The sky
shatters around us. We forget to look up.

4/17/07

Poem o' the day #12

A workaday poem, made in the workshop from what was at hand. I don't claim inspiration, but I do think about these things...

#12. Surfaces

This is the hollow world: clear-cut edged by
phantom stands of trees, view from asphalt
lush until the summit, T-shirt lifted
to reveal the wound—extraction and the
hasty, gaping scar. The ground’s gone rocky,
dust rasping in ravines once hushed with
moss, though the land is still imprinted
with pine shadow, cracked clay holding in
the heat, all yielding burned away. Softness
disappears, from air, from us, from all we
breathe and touch, a loss so deep we run
back to illusion—the outline of
a forest, imagining the part
to be the whole, and, like us, safe.

4/16/07

Poem o' the day #11

So National Poetry Month is also NaPoWriMo, that is to say national poetry writing month, which,I discovered late in the game, has dozens of people writing a poem a day for the 30 days of April. At some point I'll look them up, maybe even link to them. I'll be lucky to pull a full 30 out of the hat. I'm still aiming for something more like a regular practice, and currently am looking to poetry as lifeline. When all else fails, the imagination throws down some thread to grasp, weaves it into a world, offers shelter.

Spent the afternoon with the Grains of Sand, just a few of us today, doing riffy writing off each other's lines, delighting in the beautiful strangeness. So this one is dedicated to Brett, who offered the title and said "Go." There's probably another 14-line stanza that would complete this...

#11. Eve was framed

The tree was only blooming then, the wasps
not yet inside the fruit, the asp bent
round her gorgeous bicep like a vine.
She had no need for more, had long since
dreamed the names of every living thing,
slipping the libretto back to God, who
sang it—crib notes—for his lowly man. Not
that it sat well. A smart girl can be
insufferable. So you ruin her with
whispers, spill red wine on her unstained rep.
Perfect knowledge is no guarantee of
bliss—that she understood. Still she was shocked
to be duality’s queen. Good/evil?
She didn’t lust for that. No. She spat it out.

4/15/07

Poem o' the day #10

More war. And yet I have faith in us to see it and choose something else. This video is a good one, and if it goes away, here's the link to "Bombs" by Faithless.

And here's the 3rd of the poems from April 11th's news:

#10. Wake

The elements have gone bitter—fire
to ash, air to smoke, earth to split flesh,
blood to rust water. A man’s sick mother
dies and there is no safe place to grieve,
the way home blocked by burning trucks, burning
bodies in the street. Still the son goes out
for groceries—cardamom and raisins,
a live sheep for slaughter. Ordinary,
the tastes of loss. Mourners come in singly.
Any clutch of men will look like soldiers,
though these friends gather in the garden
to smoke, to pray. Explosions near the house
cut short the wake on this ordinary
day. Bullets in the kitchen walls. Time runs out.

4/13/07

Poem o' the day #9

More news from Iraq, second of the April 11th trio. A "taking in the war" diary.

#9. The only road left

The dead were among at least 55 Iraqis killed in violence Tuesday….
                 --Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2007

Woman in a black abaya, clutching
a plastic bag. In the corner of his
eye the merchant sees her, lone woman
adrift amid 200 men. Someone’s
wife, the guard is thinking, someone’s mother,
watching as they mill outside the station,
these would-be new police of last resort.
She listens as they bluster, the idled
farmers, reaches her fine hand inside her
gown. Becomes fireball, severed limbs,
the bloody shower, gunfire aiming
for her dust and smoke. Another 19
die, just here, on this day. Nearby, it’s
boys playing ball. One is only six.

4/12/07

A step back

Another moment of perspective from our inspiring friends at Astronomy picture of the day. It's the Cone Nebula neighborhood, and the credit and copyright belong to Adam Block and Tm Puckett.

Poem o' the day #8

Today's paper had three stories from the war, each one devastating in its own way. I thought I'd write a piece based on each of them, and call the trio "The news, April 11." Here's a second draft of the first one.

#8. The next lost boys

Each blast makes a brain bounce like a yolk,
fragility hidden in the unscathed
shell. No one sees the ruin till it’s clear:
A football star who now can’t catch a ball.
He can't parse a play in a pick-up game,
can’t get a grip on words. What’s a cherry?
He couldn’t tell you, can’t conjure the
blossom, the color, even a shape.
The sound of it just floats until he
sees it: Cherry, that’s the street where he
got shot. When he’s better he’ll return,
still a Marine, to show more boys like him
how to survive. That’s what he clings to--
evidence of damage, of forgetting.

4/11/07

Poem o' the day #7

With no reference at all to Dylan Thomas, I played with the Tupelo Press poetry contest title: "A process of weather in the heart." Of course, it did not keep its place as a title. This is basically a sketch, but it interests me. Took Sunday off. Looking for ways to make this process feel sustainable, and perhaps a day of rest is one.

#7. What moved through

i. the coaxing
A process of weather in the heart--
some tendril unwinds, probes, curves back in.

ii. augury
I plant the seedling whose first buds never
opened. Perhaps, damaged, it will not tempt birds.

iii. wishful thinking
If only meteorology
were the study of falling stars. I
imagine the maps, streaked white with lights, with
the Leonids’ swarming insistence.

iv. knowledge of absence
All we want is the pelting storm that
will not come. A desert in Chile
has been waiting for a thousand years.
Empty so long, the beds forget their meaning.

v. air masses, their moisture almost human
Fog reaches into the thin canopies,
strokes the spring leaves. They shift like thoughts, lovers.

4/9

Poem o' the day

Sat with Sarah playing with this. Sometimes frivolity seems like just the thing...

#6. Dream endings you never remember

The mannequins in store windows are nude,
which makes sense since you are naked too.
In fact, no one wears a stitch as they
run to finals in the classes they skipped.
One by one they look up, recognize
the answers written there in colored chalk,
string theory parsed in essay-question prose,
Joyce's mystic symbols clear at last.
Luggage, purses, wallets reappear,
and public speaking's gone, replaced by
telepathy. Even bodies streaking
to their doom rebound in thrilling bungeed
loop de loops. The repressed truth of night:
Just past terror is the hidden delight.

4/7/07

Poem o' the day

Started this one almost a month ago. Or met the idea then, anyhow. And maybe next month I'll still be tinkering. To get to the bourgeois pig tonight we walked from foothill to canyon, unlit streets where the air is thick with boxwood and jasmine, and the trees are thick with pale green leaves. I wondered if the trees were flowering, the air was so fragrant, the leaves so bright, their color concealed under the backlit fog. Spring in L.A.

5. Miracle Mile

When the man at the bus stop asks me
about the name, I have nothing to
offer but the memory of vanished
wealth, the swank and strut of well-fed men,
their cowbird love of gleam. But he is
looking for milagros, a sudden scent
of roses, the floors around a bed
littered with the shells of broken fevers,
cast-off pain. Neither of us would discount,
say, a sinkhole that engulfed a house
but filled, in time, with lotus, egrets.
Loss can bring its own potent miracles.
Nothing yet, but we are patient. So
much can happen in the space of a block.

4/6/07

Poem o' the day

I worked on this while sipping the exquisite coffee at Groundwork, that $2 cup made with the famous $11,000 brewing machine. The preparation was a ritual--the warming of the empty cup, intermittent stirring of the water and grounds, the tended steeping. Oh that the writing were as delicious. But the company was good at least. Julia sat struggling across from me, thinking about her boy. I just put words on lines. Thought, "So this is what coffee is supposed to taste like."

4. Non-attachment

Every sequined dress sheds, and the body
beneath leaves its own trail, imprint and smear
of wet contact, slurry of skin, an
endless sloughing, then the fossil record
of shining mica flakes. Abandonment
is nothing personal. Balconies fill
with the feathers of migrating flocks.
Gutters shine with mirrors chipped from cars.
Resolve slips from a hanger, disappears
onto the floor of a closet. Our
incidental detritus, endless,
inevitable. Only the mind
insists that it can grasp. Even as it
flits, drops another thought on the midden.

4/5/07

Poem o' the day

It occurred to me that I ought to check back to see what's going on with the Tupelo Press Poetry Project. There's another installment, and this time, the titles on which to base a work are:
     If You Only Knew
        Midden of Dreams
        Snails, Worms, and Other Losses
        A Process in the Weather of the Heart
Deadline's April 30. I'm drawn to title No. 4, so perhaps I'll play with it. Meanwhile, a start on a ghazal, which I may expand. I began it about a month ago with the first line, the refrain and a riffed-up list of possible rhymes--a more "scientific" approach than I'd taken in the past. Ghazals open up different corners of the mind, I find, even with planning. They always surprise me.

#3. The world dissolving

The bargain in this corner of the fire-sale universe?
Entropy wrapped in prayer. Feel the pull, the world dissolving.

Land bares its deeper skin, scarred with memories of water.
An endless thirst fills our beggar’s bowl, the world dissolving.

So little binds us: a subtle gesture, a chemical chain.
Then the din of a shattering fractal, the world dissolving.

The jeweler’s floor fills with the dust of flaws ground out of stone.
He loses sight of diamond, sees only coal, the world dissolving.

Our planets spin apart but still we bless them, waterski behind.
Even in longing, love, imagine us whole, the world dissolving.

04/04/07

Poem o' the day

Finding interesting things in my notebooks. By the time the month's out, I imagine every last page will be exhausted.

#2. Ode to the ice cube

Once we built it temples, worshiped its
ephemeral form, mist and drop made
solid in the cool blue dark, blocks veined
with winter even on a sultry
afternoon, smell of snow embedded
in their sweat. That was before freon,
before boxed cold was zirconium
cheap and common, forgotten once
the heavy door swung shut. Once we kept it,
precious, melting among the jewels as
Taglione* did in her glowing
Cornell box, memento of what must’ve
been a dream. Ice could still evoke heaven,
then--receding glacier, chipped from stars.

04/03/07

*note: see "Taglione's Jewel Casket," Joseph Cornell, 1940. It's stuck in my mind for ages, and now has a home.
 

Poem o' the day

I used to help people write self-help books. I may take it up again. I like their ordinariness, their lack of pretension.

Ode to the self-help book

I was a mess, toy box upended,
car wheels spinning as I slid toward
a fall. Rotten parents. Drinking problem.
I loved too much. I couldn’t love at all.
But you, you’d seen it, been there, had no
use for my pity pot, my gloom. “Buck up,”
you said. “I have a five-step plan.” Complex
life receded then, your acronyms
cut through my FOG of Fear, Obsession,
Guilt. I made a list, forgave myself, I
even took another bubble bath.
By the end, you said I’d be brand new— not
loser but the captain of my fate. Once
more you shared The Secret.  I believed.

04/02/07

Our correspondents

The lovely Louise Steinman sent a bit of inspiration that's related to the book she's working on. The drawing came with this note: "...I was thinking I've probably never shown you the Ukranian Egg Cup Woman. I (or rather my friend Chery) found her in an antiques store in L'viv and she became our talisman, our Quan Yin as we traveled to the sites of ancestral massacres. She's a cheery lady: I do't know if her colors will be as bright as they really are, but here's a little drawing of her."

Writing with Julia, Part 3

Just last week I was wondering if I'd ever write another poem. It's that same false thought that blows through when I haven't written in a while, or when I sit down with Julia (it had been ages since we'd gotten together in the garden--things were starting to bloom) and see her zip into a poem while I am essentially writing things that bear a scary resemblance to shopping lists. This one, she said, had a tiny spark in one of the ghazals I wrote in February, a war poem with the image of a girl's scarf in a tree. I'm happy to marvel at how the mind takes a starting point like that and runs. Here's the poem she wrote, which may or may not be finished:

Windstorm

From the window we watch it whip
the lemon tree. The wind has snared
an ugly bag, glaring white in
our green view, but flying
uniform, under attack.
You are on my hip, happy
for once to be held. You point, say,
Bag. I tell you later we will open
the screen, window, and cut it down.
When the wind blows we are transfixed.
As one we hear it tear at what
contains us, watch the tree strain,
threaten to give way. When the wind
stills you ask for it again. I say,
That's the wind. I don't command it.
You ask for it again.

        --Julia Cole

Even starting is catching up

Poetry month again, only this time it's the official month, which made it hard to skip, though of course I was tempted. So, a poem a day. I started working on something yesterday, but there was a long hike involved, whose quite steep terrain hadn't been advertised, and once I finally sat down again, sleep set in. I'll see if I can catch up, though, and make it an even 30 poems... In the workshop the seed was planted for doing praise poems. I thought of Neruda's odes to common things (this translation of Ode to tomatoes was a huge influence on me early on.) But I'm thinking more about common things like--self-help books and Botts dots. We'll see...

Our correspondents

David took this picture from the window of Kathryn's apartment in Paris. Now, with a view we haven't yet seen, she's living in upper Manhattan--the park-y Cloisters part--and she sent this poem. Which made me very happy.

About that Table You Fixed

If you dance on that table you’ll go out the window
you said, making light of your handiwork,
new table leg made from wood you found in the street,
table I found in the street, reason no leg,
but what a find, smooth blond wood,
adjustable for two or four, sized as if made
for drinking coffee in my new alcove,
the orchids breathing benediction
on your morning wet head across from mine.

If I went out the window
would I end up in the New York Post?
Woman falls to death in an excess of happiness
caused by lack of attention to the news about the war,
to illness and poverty, her own aging
accompanied by loss, missed career goals,
schadenfreude, a habit of anger and strain.
An onset of well-being
is more deadly than a speeding truck
if you’ve trained yourself to focus
in the normal way of life.
If I went out the window now I’d float,
arm and leg shaped balloon
pointed at by children
ignored by striding adults
inconsequent and feckless as
an April fly.

Those little flies that flicker,
kissing the glass window pane,
entranced by the sunlight they’ve
just been born to
in the world of manifest things.
And you would ask for the fly swatter,
putting your mug down on the
table you renewed
in the house of the renewed
and I would touch the fingers
that caress my old bones at night
and not give it to you
so the little flies, like me,
can continue their dance.

K. Hayashi
3/21/07

Night mysteries

I'm interested in the idea of unseen selves--perhaps exterior, perhaps interior. And, after reading lots of ghazals, I'm not surprised to see this 14-line poem want, today, to be in couplets. We'll see if it stays that way. I'm going back to 14 lines, mostly, by the way. I liked the short sijos, but they still feel like beginnings of things to me, short 10 or 12 turns of thought. Next I'll find that 14 is numerologically significant, somehow....

Night mysteries

i. insomnia

Thinning sheets of sleep, too fragile to wrap dreams.
Images fall back, into the almost-black.

Waking tired, confused, smells of lost travels
fading before they’re named. Another night razed.

Nature creates its own burrs and thorns to rip
mind’s fabric, make anything cling. Words. A place.

ii. my restless doppelgangers

So much of science becomes cryptology.
Patterns emerge first as pairs of similars,

near–repetitions. Is it just inexact
duplication or subtle variation?

And our own near-twins? They don’t know who we are.
Still they ache, our phantom limbs, those unseen selves.

iii. my own dream thief

The girl in the supermarket had my face,
hovers at the edge of the bed till I wake.

3/23/07

And inhale

Well, that was refreshing. Nice to be back. After the big write-a-thon in December, I took off the whole month of January. I'm still digesting February, it turns out, and I enjoyed the break from writing this month. Missed the daily-ness of it, though. The habit of looking at poetry, noticing what's inspiring, clings. It's an interesting practice, daily writing and small reflections. It seems to make life better. I'm not a meditator, but writing--that seems to be my way.

I'm reading Shahid Ali's ghazals, from his final book "Call Me Ishmael Tonight." We are on a first-name basis by now, Shahid and I. Here are some of the dazzling couplets from "Of Fire":

In a mansion once of love I lit a chandelier of fire ...
I stood on a stair of water, I stood on a stair of fire.
...
I keep losing this letter to the gods of abandon.
Won't you tell me how you found it--in what hemisphere of fire?

Someone stirs, after decades, in a glass mountain's ruins.
Is Death a cry from an age that was a frozen year of fire?

When the Husband of Water touched his Concubine of Snow,
he hardened to melt in their private affair of fire.

and it goes on, surprisingly, beautifully, making the refrain new in every couplet.