Musette

Poem o' the day

I missed the rain. When I walked out in the dark, the clouds were pulling apart like cotton across the broad twilight. Deborah gave me her ticket to Disney Hall, so it was up near the billows of the ceiling. I fancy that sitting in the hall is like being inside a guitar, the whole chamber resonating. It was beautiful. Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting 2 by Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E minor and #2 in D major. I was stimulated and soothed. I want to hear it all again.

One odd thing about writing these daily poems is the "go with what you've got" factor. I have ideas I'd never play out if I weren't pledged to write *something,* and it's interesting to see what happens when I do. I cling to the "one good line" lifeline--the idea that even in something bad, there will be one good line that will lift something else, become something new. It's probably true. Anyhow, this is a strange one having something to do with the feeling I have that I have always known how to read and write. I wish I could remember what it was like before that.

#22

Unlearning the words

I move my fingers over the letters
as though touch could tell me their deeper
stories again—the stiff disappointment
of M, desultory memory
of the S, the way it loses itself
mid-thought. Once they were the edges of
my fingers, taste of painted wood, smell
of apples. I pull them apart with great
effort now, the diphthongs clinging, shapes
interlocked in chains of meaning that
won’t easily come undone, so
reluctant to yield their first sounds, the
pleasure of an unbroken code, nothing
hidden yet, and everything singing.

After

I really love Dennis Nurkse's work, and at City Lights last year, I picked up "The Fall," which I keep reading. This, from a poem called "Darkness" strikes me tonight. It's a walk home after a home run and a kiss, and it ends the poem.

        "The world was composed
         of leftover trees
         and fireflies from before.

         I was less than the breeze.

         Still the massive door
         swung open at my touch."

"Leftover trees and fireflies from before...." I used to go to an informal poetry workshop of Dennis' in Manhattan. He once said he thought my pieces sounded like poetry translated from another language, which I took as a great compliment. Because somehow, I'd had the same thought about his....  Now I have to figure out just what that quality is, or was.

Poem o' the day

It's late tonight. We visited Mark and Rose in the Hotel Figueroa, curious to see a room. "This hotel is made for night," Mark says. A Cornell box of a place, one of his hotels, perhaps. Or so it seems just below the deep sienna sponge-painted surfaces. Its hallways are places of almost--they almost smell of the '40s and people who might've lived there since then, almost disorient as they switch back, almost lead to Andromeda when they end in the rippled glass that opens onto fire escapes.

Tonight, another sijo. Which, if nothing else, perfectly reflects my state of mind....

#21

As many thoughts as stars

A woman walks out to sweep sand from the desert’s endless floor.
This is her task, a clearing, however temporary.
How the mind, filling itself up again, longs for bare ground, a broom.

And I meant to add...

More falling stars, more sparkling lights.

Another beauty from Astronomy picture of the day.

Earth at Night
Credit: C. Mayhew & R. Simmon (NASA/GSFC), NOAA/NGDC, DMSP Digital Archive 

Poem o' the day

Still looking at Luis Cernuda's prose poems. In a piece called "The Poet," he describes a child happening on poetry, how the boy was --
     "infected with something different and mysterious, which later, on rereading the poet again and again, awakened in him something like the memory of an earlier life, vague and insistent, drowned in neglect and nostalgia."
     I can't get enough of the mood of these Latin writers and their longing, which seems to pull them through the world, into its beauty.

Another sijo today. I know questions are not part of their structure, but they seem to be an inescapable part of mine....

#20

An ending, or infinity

White paper boats carry lit candles onto black water.
Pushed by a breeze or a breath, that most intimate of elements.
When they dissolve into night, do stars fall to replace them?

The fair

I looked for a long time at the pigs at the county fair. The grown ones in their pens were all sleeping, and it struck me that they were all touching--sometimes back to back or spooned, sometimes facing one another and touching hooves. Pen to pen, one would extend a leg to reach another, and the chain of connection was unbroken through perhaps a dozen of the enclosures. It's the Chinese year of the golden boar, the fire pig.

And as far as I'm concerned, it can also be the year of the piglet, and the runt. David snapped this as I was waiting for the runt to wake up. Its litter-mates all managed to rouse themselves soon after the alpha piglet got up to nurse. Little alpha also walked up and tried to rouse the sow, climbing on her nose, which had zero effect. Runty didn't wake till one of its mates went over and shook him. And then I could leave.

Poem o' the day

Rosemary, who's teaching science now, saw me headed for my writing last night (my expression must've said "Help me!") and dug out a DVD she was carrying around of "Microcosmos" a 1996 French film that enlarges the world of the insects in a meadow. A very early image of thick grass, seen from within its curves, took me right back to lying on the lawn, watching the world. With the sound off, the movie is rich and fairly uncliched. I could imagine being an industrial designer, wanting to capture the gloss and functionality of those carapaces, the sleek curves of the shells. Anyhow, Rose was right. All that looking was inspiring.

Note on the poem: The epigram, which eventually, somehow, will read right into the poem as its real first line, is from a piece in Luis Cernuda's prose poem collection "Written in Water." Cernuda is quite wonderful, as is the book.

#19

Immortality

“…Here’s where immortality ends up later”
                  --Luis Cernuda

in a cheap hotel where water screams
from the faucets, and pipes clank through the night.
Glamour fades, that’s one truth you learn early,
and you begin to admire the
elegant, the functional – unbroken
filament of a lightbulb, blue of a
pilot light. The cracks in the window
lead you to the wasp husks on the sill.
You study what is close at hand, still lifes
of death and webs, and those fragile wings,
transparencies veined like cathedral glass.
Or so you imagine as you find just
one thing on this day to see clearly, just
one thing to remind you you’re alive.

2/19

Poem o' the day

Extremely weary after a long long ride in slow traffic. But, I persist. Sijos help. Yesterday's, I should note, went through many drafts at the hotel. Today's just takes quick shape and will be refined or abandoned later. I think perhaps abandoned, but one shouldn't judge seeds before tending them...

A bee stung me at the Date Festival today. Stung me before I saw it, or had a bit of the fear that goes with "there's a bee to close to me." Sudden slap of pain. Startling.

#18

Stung

A hand swinging through smooth air surfaces with a splinter.
Have invisible bees bristled the air with their stingers?
I prefer the bite of this pain to what we let go unspoken.

2/18

Poem o' the day

We were in Palm Springs yesterday, at a big ol' oasis of a hotel. Before the long drive, I went to the Korean spa with Rose. Soaking in mugwort "tea," steaming in the jade room. Lots of images for a poem in that place.

#17

Bathhouse

The women scrub each other’s backs, the intimacy of friction.
Wordless, this conversation with the hidden, the just out of reach.
Water clouds, clears. How much has dissolved without our knowing?

Crows on the lawn

As we're driving toward the Big 5 in Culver City, I notice a small gathering of people--older couples walking slowly from their cars, even the younger ones deliberate, leaning in to speak to each other, pausing to put an arm on the shoulder of the man who's standing on the sidewalk near the entrance to a building. They're all in black. How often we pass the empty funeral homes, how rare to notice the grieving there on a sunny afternoon.

If I'd been closer to my family, I'd have heard about the death before I heard about today's funeral in Colorado Springs. All the grown children sang. All the daughters sang in their beautiful voices. Their mother raised doctors and teachers and musicians to sing for her when she was gone. The line of cars on the circuitous route to the Evergreen Cemetery was very long, very slow. Wind picked up the snow on the ground. There were 34 grandchildren and one great grandchild, a baby carried by his father. A dinner afterward at the church. My parents took a Honeybaked ham. Everyone takes dessert to things like this, my mother says. There's not enough of everything else. But I imagine there's more serving than eating at the wake they don't call a wake in those parts.  It's quieter. A sleeping.