Musette

May 6 poem: Our waveform story (cutup)

 

This one sat on my screen for a while for no special reason besides other distractions. It was written quite some time ago, and I'm finding things to enjoy as I look at it now. I see there a description, of sorts, of my way of composing. Its words are drawn from pages 236-237 of the desktop encyclopedia, brocade to Brookings Institution.

 

Our waveform story

Verse alone began to suppress the wave nature of sprit, a lost part of speech. It was easier to face complications in free-flight exhibits, colored bracts—toxic ornamentals. Matter-waves moderate the ordinary, its duality drooping in the downy cheatgrass below. Creation, thin or fleshy, desires a new truthfulness, fleshy, more readily made into netting. Custom may lead to a figured injury, or ornamental complications. On one side: the spell of the low-lying ideal. Below that: flat satin emulsions of proof. Contrasting sepals and petals of the sonnet bell sleepwalkers, cast bluish shadows of a courtly ideal. Their metal changes valence when struck, poems wrought into spoonlike forms with pipe-fittings and copper turbine blades. In their deep salt beds, pure desires forage, weave convolution into dream. The mythological does not occur free in nature. Yet it buds.

 

Image by Oberazzi, via Flickr.

May 1 poem: Our task (cut-up)

My work life began to intrude on the writing of April, so much so that while I worked on pieces, I didn't post them. So I'm reaching back to my cut-ups project and, looking at it from this distance, enjoying it. The words here are from the desktop encyclopedia, pages 580-581, fin whale to Fisher (as in chess player Bobby).

I was at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on the USC campus yesterday for poems by Chase Twichell and some unexpectedly fascinating work by Daniel Tiffany, a USC prof, who read from Dandelion Clock and other books. Most interesting were those Dandelion Clock pieces which begin with lines from Old English and spin out sound- or sense-related paths from there. No doubt it was that listening that brought me back to my own experiments. Also heard Patti Smith and Dave Eggers talk about the passion that is art, whatever one's art may be. The two of them are generous souls, so inspiring, so spacious.

 

Our task

Devotees may wait years for the beauty of open craters or the sparks of luminous beetles. Those who lack faith have other means of escape: Rockets of colored salt, a rubber carriage, exclusive molecular structures. A godlessness large enough to spread thinly over the 13 level  realms  will be allowed to exit the next without injury, or enter the private network of innocence without ordeal. Purification tends to cause a severe sting, conspicuous circular scars. Do not recoil from salvation marked with orange or yellow. Common fields and ash may lie outside human control, awaiting the pollen and nectar of mating, elongated sandspit as nest, wild magenta scrub as body. The air flashes, clearing forests, seed and fire synthesizing each other. Leaves fall. Time will burn our private egress, our dormant fireseed. Watch for light-producing signals, for warmth. Eat.

 

Photo, of fireworks seen aslant, by Peter Harding via Flickr.

For as long as desire persists

For awhile, I was doing a lot with cut-ups, a favorite exercise being to copy a couple of randomly chosen pages from a desktop encyclopedia and rearrange the words, making them the universe, and vocabulary, of the poem. I'd thought of them as a little odd and obscure, but in digging back through old work with an eye to revising, I've actually been interested in these pieces. This one caught my eye recently:

 

For as long as desire persists
Heaven is round, a light, elastic ball
said to consist of 300 rooms. We use
the term “love” for this filmy tissue,
a silken tent with great tensile strength,
the cleverness of the divine
written in repetitive motions: ecstatic
dancing, deformation and flow, the
polyphony of mathematics, its low, gliding walk.

A whiplike strand sliding within
brushes against melancholy, an
inflected form of wisdom
perceived as a continuum, a closer fusion of parts,
a free state of transformation. Prayer
wraps the circular architecture,
strong enough to open a human
to a charismatic god, a landscape
red with pain, a removable core.

Reverence is an occupational disease
that makes farmers of conquistadores.
The shock of contact deepens the channel,
and every thought is a vector.
The object is a closer fusion of parts into life,
definite or indefinite, completed or not,
recurring or occurring once. The object,
ladyfish and euphonium, is to turn toward
what cannot be acquired.

   (Photo by Natasha Wheatland via Flickr)

A year's worth of poems

I got my first look at this lovely project last evening, when all the poets (save one) read their calendar pieces. I'm liking the idea of living with one poem for a whole month as it sits on my wall, catching my eye at odd moments. All the poets are from L.A. County, and a sense of the place and its distinctly observed worlds flows through, though the poems are quite diverse. I was pleased to be in such good company, and quite tickled to be "Miss May."

Here's one of the poems I read, not a new one, but one I like:

When we were snow
We dreamed cold streams had crystallized us,
fractals in radiant bloom at the
borders of these temporary bodies,
our vague shapes edged with infinity
and tossed back into lightness, into
exquisite refraction, and we could
see ourselves that way for just an instant
before the slow drift, the gradual
return to yet and almost, to time
as it blows across our path, measuring
our scattered fall, the span your words have
traveled to reach me, to crack our frost
walls and set us gently in our bed
again, warm beneath the dark sky, this storm.

 

Wanting vs. having

The trees in this photo are nothing, really, like the ones in my mind, where it's night and the boughs of lavender are closer to gray, catching the light of odd streetlamps and the occasional passing car. Those night blooms are the ones that finally caught my imagination, and wound up in this poem—which is only so much, really, about jacarandas at all. I pull it out today because it's in a calendar that features poems about L.A., and I'll be reading it at Skylight tomorrow. More information about that project is here.

 

Today, I want what I have

Purple fills the gutters—jacarandas,
blossoms descending against the gray.
Chalked beneath the trees, the outlines of
cars and our own sleeping shapes, scattered
in the night. We lie waiting for beauty
to alight,  sticky, blinking
into skin, the house tinted, sky swaying
with drifts and flight. How often the blossoms
have disappeared as we wandered, lost
beyond these streets, longing for some other
miracle—the migration of monarchs
or the scent of a lost year’s perfume. Is
it your touch or this petal breeze that
pulls me back?  This time, I hold out my hand.

 

(photo by ccharmon via flickr)