posting poems for 4/22, 4/23, 4/24, 4/25, 4/26,

Poem for April 22

Iron Motion vs. Robin, Train, Song

Say train this way: loco,
loco, locomo, locomo –
with a French tee-vah
lo-co-mo-TEE-vah, locomoTIve

Can you hear it now, this
crazy train propelling itself
on the tracks

and the little boy in the film
saying it in Japanese,
Do-des’-kaden driving his faux tram
through the slum?
Do-des KADEN, do DES ka DEN

and it is spring and a robin sits still,
high on a fence,
thrusting out his orange waistcoat
tight around his fat spring belly
bright ringed eyes watching,

and the train is charging ahead,
locomo, locomo, locomo
and suddenly the whistle escapes
like an ungodly iron horse screaming.

It covers the robin call
chee-ear-eo, chee-ear-up
And what if the robin
were made of iron
and pistons made him fly?

Just what if we really listened to what is created?
What do you pick?
the little boy in his world
do-des’ ka DEN
where in the dump where he lives,
he has made a tram line
which carries him
where he wants to go.
**

Poem for April 23

Unspoken In the 17th Century Gallery

In the small scene, a man peers
in from a high window
looking down at a man standing
by a poster of an owl, with candlestick, eyeglasses.
The upright man tamps his pipe,
looks at the man extolling his beer
who looks towards the man in a red hat
who looks at his pipe as if a look
were a light passed from man
to man, to man, to bowl of tobacco.
But each eye rolls overboard,
missing the person he should see.

Across the room, hangs a painting
of a man in an armchair,
as if surveying the tavern scene.
Light pulses from his hands,
and the moon of his face
where dutch-windowed lips
look at if they will speak

perhaps to point out
the still life beside him,
with curl of orange, pearlescent oyster
and a smoldering rope hanging
off the table.

If you look long enough
the human surfaces
beyond the paint:
a Willem contemplating
his subjects, Jan, Pieter, Loek.
Perhaps their carousing amuses him,
perhaps he is as unable to see.

poem for 4/24

Penned Sheep

E Each line shall start
W With a capital because
E Everyone knows that rule.

Y Yellow you
O Ochre you
U Umber: the color of you in Fall.

in a nation of

S So little
H Heart
E Errant
E Erring until lost
P People

4/25

C BCD

Children
Before the
Camera
Died

Children
before
changing rooms
dance them into new clothes

Camera obscura
broken
chest for treasures
demands

children
blessed
children
dancing. And so when the

children came home, we
brought the camera on our walk, swinging, skipping, we
caught a few images
downloaded them but now the

Camera is dead.
But it gave us memories of our
children
dancing.



4/26

This spring morning, white drifting,
as if apple blossom straying

but it is snow

the wind twirls white into skirts
without the chatter of bird music

crack of cold shuts down even the tulips
the lilac tightens its purple nubs

snow paints the earth in broad bands.

This spring afternoon,
cumulus puffed into castles

every dandelion has opened shop
basking as if to make daydreamed sun.

what snow? It has spun

into the wild and all is breath

to warm frozen fingers of spring
cool the steaming soup until able to eat.

4/27


60 Seconds
(with thanks to Giuseppe Ungaretti and Gian Lombardo)
Could write
"m'illumino
d'immenso"

four words in Italian which would take
four volumes in English to explain.
Can you hear how the M's magnify the darkness
how the L's push the light inside one self
spread it to the immensity of O
push into it
then out.

Notes on discussion: 4/26

Details:
Barnacle's Son:
I love knowing that Taranto as the most polluted city in the Western Europe, that cirri are not just plural for cirrus clouds, but tendrils.

According to Greek poet Hesiod, she was born when Cronus cut off Uranus' genitals and threw them into the sea, and from the aphros (sea foam) arose Aphrodite.

1954: perhaps: During this year [1954], the seeds of an even worse war than Korea began in Vietnam, were sown as France's Asian colonies collasped into disorder.

** Trombones...
Wynton Marsalis -- making the trumpet "talk"...
"I believe jazz revolutionized the art of music by vesting the individual musician with the authority to 'tell their story' and by positing that an even larger 'story' could be told, by choice, by a group of equally empowered musicians."

Discussion: Lost Horse Press New Poets Series 4/26/2010

What a treasure to discover Abby Murray! Not only do we "experience what life feels like inside us" but she adds layers and layers -- innuendos, mythologies, paves the way for possibilities that come as surprises.

Barnacle: it makes you think about what it is like to born in this age,
And then other ages, and why it is we don't wish to bring children into a troubled world; The sense of mythology (3,000) juxtaposed with contemporary; layers of myth...

Trombone: one thing has many faces... How thoughts change; Sid's interpretation that the poem starts the day after the scene, "Since you asked..." and as the telling proceeds, the "fat" part of the trombone, the woozy, hungover feel gives way to the recollection of dancing,
"shaking our hips like they were rolling in oil". The group responded with memories of the cards in bike wheels, roaring twenties dancing, and the fun of watching minnows.


Taking Justice Home: How Esther is Justice -- "I dreamt I would meet Justice in vagrant form" --
and we thought of Esther's heroism, saving her people, and all the faces of a contemporary Esther, and looking at honey and fish from Roshashanna honey to Christ and the fishes --
but realizing the poem has it all in front of the reader, with language that pulls you through the scene and gives you a sense of knowing this woman who lives inside the curve of an old concrete sewer pipe. And dream and reality meld until the rescue mission... and like a dream of Justice creating a new society, Esther will be asked to draw a map of the world but the mystical, is preserved, like Esther's secrets which will be held in a jam jar...

Jesse brought us to Hawaii and Angela gave a long description of the zoo, and how Hawaii has changed. And Karen's poem gave us a chance to discuss "I'm in No Mood to put up with your..."
briefly.

Like all good travels, there's the obligatory end...

poem for April 21

Well, Robert sends a silly link on how to write a love poem... first come the candles and their scents... then taking vowels away, and it gets worse and worse.

If I say, like Jesse Fourmi, "I heaven you" -- one gets closer.
He sees that (in the Lost Horse Press, New Poets Series, p. 41, Final Descent into Maui....)
as "I embrace you, wholly,/ as if inside a shell."

I'm using as inspiration Anne Bradstreet...
To My Dear and Loving Husband

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee,
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
-- Anne Bradstreet

To my dear and Loving Husband

If ever one were two, it's me and you,
and you and me, but don't think unnecessarily
that I think myself the more important gold in the hold
but merely holed, as we are goaled to be whole, cajoled
to we as two halves, swelling to lift any bar
of what we are.

But I can't get this right.
Just, imagine. I blue-spring-sky you
With everything good
That makes you happy
that sunshine moves its hips
And laughs until
Every belled flower on earth rings
blessing its springtime buttons
until they burst.


.

Poem for April 19 and 20 -- Somayyah

Working on this poem, inspired by a story my son shared about a woman theatened by two policemen so that her husband would withdraw his complaint about them.

Complaint

What we call groan
rope straining
between boat and wharf

better describes
that taut heart tether
that pulls at its mooring

vessel constrained or released
without our consent.
What we call sigh

better describes
wind caught in the sail
our lungs tightened

to bear expectations,
only to expel the unbearable
as gulls scream and circle.


What do we call complaint
in this land of blind happiness
restricted to the few?

A woman is near a wharf
where the fellucas are tethered
groaning
below the scream of circling gulls.

She will have acid thrown into her face
and her husband will have every bone broken.
The policemen will consider that this
should take care of the complaint against them.
They have not decided what to do about
the 13 year old son.

**
Other poem (4/19)

SOMAYYAH

Somayyah

Somayyah is walking
near the train station in Ramses Square
where there used to be a colossus
and where feminist Huda Shaarawi
shocked the public in 1923.
Now It’s 2010, and you can imagine
the scream of train whistle, city scramble.

This isn’t Springtime in Northeast America
where forsythia shoots into bright stars
and bells of hyacinth turn your head
but Cairo, where my son
is translating this report.

Two policemen
accost a woman called Somayyah.
They light cigarettes, blow smoke
into her eyes. One pins her down
the other rips off her veil
and a sudden flash of metal
bursts as he says

Today, we’ll just shave your head
and you will tell your husband
to retract his complaint.

They curse her husband
with each lock of her hair
spilled to the street.

Next time, they say,
if your husband does not cooperate
we will douse your face with acid.

But that is not enough
they stub out their cigarettes
on her chest.

And my son tells me,
as he proofreads the words,
how he can smell the burnt cotton,
singed skin.

O Pen : 4/19/ 2010 -- C. Dale Young/ Claudia Emerson

How does a community perceive an individual?

A community of boys – a mean gang… then, trying to raise money to make amends…
What is a joke?
Is it a joke that our expectations of a joke turn out to be hard work…
and just what is hard work?

Song allows us to think about what a bad feeling is like.
How a goat called Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry with eyes like wild fruit, silky hair dark as well water will sing, and the heart dies of that sweetness…
How this dark image will haunt the boys, the little girl, all of use.

“"Song" is beautiful in it's mystery and sense of legend and ambiguity of place and time and somehow that all comes together with something other than meaning somewhere inside me where knowing is not expressed in words. It's like your quote from Mary Kinzie about the stuff of poetry having 'half meaning' -- a way of using words to express something that is not said in the words themselves but conveys meaning just the same.” – a contribution from a reader.


It segues beautifully into “Torn”. But first, what does poetry allow us to do? It allows us to ponder how to negotiate passages, find patterns that underlie the unruliness of life.
Curious that C. Dale Young picked Yeats, "Second Coming" for Poetry Daily's April Poet's Pick -- how he had to memorize it in HS, and loved it, without fully understanding it.
**

C. Dale Young –
“Poem” is wonderful, except for one word: people took offence at “clatter” of hummingbird. How the wings buzz, hum, and the bird turns into a B-52 bomber, but the wings do not clatter.
Line… how in painting line divulges the image – so two, the poetic line…
point of view –
you can read only the middle line and it makes sense until the last line of the penultimate stanza and last stanza – how “The sound and the line… are everything)

To demonstrate:
The water breaking / better describes/ the sound of hummingbirds / what we call the horizon/is merely a line above… / … what we call personal,/ … quite unimportant / that which ways welcome.

Another way of enjoying the poem is to look at the metric pattern some might say this way:
WHAT we CALL RAIN
the WAter BREAKing
itSELF into SMALLer SELVES

aGAinst a STOne MAYbe,


The A of What, Call, Water, Small; aGAinst, may; the alliteration of the WH, ll, and S’s; the long A sound of Rain/Break; “itself” a syncopated surprise, as if the enjambment and stanza break annotate the syntax. –

What we call rain against a stone --- is a sound, unlike the sound of hummingbirds for the most part unheard – i.e. we don’t really hear beyond the sound.

George Oppen: “The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.”

James Longenbach: if poetry were to wear an ID bracelet, it would be made out of sonic links, or “the sound of language organized into lines”

**
In Torn: the words are cut.. the narrow alley an ever-patient dangerous passage, and all the healer can do stitch by patient stitch, is to try to restore beauty. Try for perfection, stitch up even the ones who might tear the protagonist.


**
Claudia Emerson -- her book “Figure Studies” does indeed make you think about what we neglect, throw away, in the first poem. Amazing what happens when you put a mannequin in the Motor shop.

Having attended an all-girl’s school, I loved her idea of creating poems about one — she calls it a “surreal sequence featuring girls in a boarding school, followed by a second less-neatly sequenced group of poems exploring women figures in isolation.” We enjoyed all the points of view. She chose slant-rhymed couplets because they look so deliberately made, just as the education is deliberately constructed. For synchronized swimming, note the POV of the surface tension; the personnification of the scull.
We talked also of restraint how she gives line “half-meaning” -- especially in “What they want” -- all the possibilities for “they” which at the end is “we”. The Two parts: auction and the outer appearance of this woman; and then the woman implied in the doll -- The dialogue line in italics: where/ how many days/ my word / my God/ the coffin closed / of course / can you imagine / how sad she died alone — where all the voices meld together like chattering crows picking over the remains.

poem for April 18

My inspiration today was from Nicholson Baker, "The Anthologist" where he draws lines --
what about an anthology of one-liners? That will be tomorrow's poem.
For today:

inspiration from Sir Walter Raleigh

77. His Pilgrimage

GIVE me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage; 5
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

Blood must be my body's balmer;
No other balm will there be given:
Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer,
Travelleth towards the land of heaven; 10
Over the silver mountains,
Where spring the nectar fountains;
There will I kiss
The bowl of bliss;
And drink mine everlasting fill 15
Upon every milken hill.
My soul will be a-dry before;
But, after, it will thirst no more.

** MY POEM

Sunday
-- with a nod to Sir Walter

Repeat all day,
"scallop shell of quiet"
how the music opens and closes
like a dollop of cream, island
belled as eyelet
melting on the coffee
held in a porcelaine cup.

A scallop of quiet,
to remember the gift
of a newborn’s smile,
the don, don, don
of an old churchbelled day
scallop shell of silence
to sharpen ears, shorten the distance,
of pilgrimage to La Compostelle.

St. Jacques and his coquille,
the surprise of oreille,
the French for ear pillowed
in labials purring in the sea.


I don’t want to forget today.
How in the twist before daylight,
A robin was piping to the beat of rain,
how the boy in church
was waving a white rose as if conducting air,
offering it to his sister's nose,
while the sermon spoke about our earth,
How we have failed and are failing
to use imagination failing
to offer a sacred scallop
of connection.


I imagine closeness in the tight folds
of an ear where two kids
Sounds like tickets.
Tickets for two, for talking,
For taking 4 words like
saying 4 words like
scallop shell of silence
called into action:
to scallop
to shell,
to quiet.

-- Kitty Jospé

Adamschick and Mirror

It sounds like magic. Adam's chick -- and Eden and beginnings and what is mirrored --
which world is it in which we think we are living.

Marvin Bell selected Carl Adamshick's debut collection for the 2010 Walt Whitman Award.
"His voice is instantly engaging. Sophisticated ear; continuous feeling for measure.
A clarity of complex feelings".

The Solitude of an Apricot -- indeed mouth watering whether you say the "a" as in "apt" or "a" as in hay. We remarked the doubling: away, beyong, back, place placed, Sweet.

Isolated, "Sweet with a stone." is a sentence that bears repeating, sw -- st; ee to O
opening and closing in. And just what is sweet ? "The tender rearrangement of what is missing,like certain words, a color reflected off water a few years back."

And how would that mean to each person in a room? And suddenly there is possibility for time travel -- and what does that mean to someone? What is sweet "with the concession of a few statements, a few lives it will touch without bruising."

What a line. Does this change the way you eat an apricot?
What else has a stone -- what stones can be abandoned, to savor that much more sweetness.

Our flag on the otherhand was over the top. All the shoulds, the imperatives, which of course make the final lines stand out in relief.
Let it be insignifcant
and let its insignificance shine.

I love these 3 lines. "Our flag should be a veil/that makes the night weep/when it comes to dance,/

**
Mirror: Mark Strand

The parallel words of a white room and a party going on...
and what's in the mirror. Flashback. Layers of reality to read, re-read.

Someone asked if this poem have been better in prose? I think the line breaks lose their energy: and the imbedded clauses would receive less note.
leaned / against; hand/fidgeted; space/that might be filled by someone/yet to arrive, who at that moment/could be started the journey/which would lead eventually to her.


Reminded one person of Joni Mitchell : Other people S parties:
passport smiles -- but look where the passport takes you.

Portraits -- 4/22 -- a few thoughts

What does a portrait tell us? What is it that we like (or not) to remember about someone?
We discussed "The Woman's Portrait"; Szymborska
Stanley Kunitz -- the Portrait
Theodore Roethke's My Papa's Waltz
and the love poem by Ellen Bass, "To Praise."

I love Szymborska's poem (translated by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds)
The Woman's Portrait.

As ever, I wonder what the original Polish says -- and whether Grazyna translated it to English, and Sharon added her touch -- and how fitting -- three women speaking about being a woman.

Yes... "must be open to choices / changing, only let nothing be changed".

a Universal woman, no matter who makes the prediction -- how some things are not of choice -- eye color, whether they fill with tears or are merry... with or without reason...
how many children she will bear.
I love the contrast of holding a sparrow with a broken wing along with a meat chopper, a compress, her own money for a long journey, and a glass of vodka.

Where is she running like that? Isn't she tired?

Oh no, only a little bit, very, it doesn't matter.

After a series of 3 options to choose from, there are now only 2:
She either loves him, or has just set her mind.

What is involved with that choice?

And the poem ends with three choices, like boxes nesting in boxes, whatever these complex connections, it is this :
for good, for bad, and for goodness' sake. -- in all senses of Goodness, and the cliche.

For Christ's sake -- for God's sake, and Godforsaken: sake -- Much of the word's original meaning has been taken over by case, cause, and it survives largely in phrases for the sake of (early 13c.) and for _______'s sake (c.1300, originally for God's sake), both probably are from O.N

**
I love that a poem is called "To Praise" -- where the definition of the verb is linked to the desire to praise everything about a lover -- the orgasmic extravagance that brings you to praise. But the title also calls us, to look at how we offer words to praise -- as in
"to a rose" -- how we are writing a letter to this idea of "preis" -- the value, the precious quality in something.

For Kunitz: the poem is about the portrait his mother rips into shreds -- how he takes three angles: the father who committed suicide; the mother who cannot forgive him for doing that -- all of which happened before Kunitz was born... Can you imagine knowing that your father had a name, a life, a story, but it is secret, "I could hear him thumping" -- as if the father the mother refuses, is in his heart... and how she punished him with that slap when he brought down the pastel of the stranger. And that word hurts. Stranger.

My Papa's waltz. The child speaking. An angry mother in the background. You can see him, as high as his father's belt -- the drunken father swaying... and how in spite of all that craziness, the "clinging to your shirt" is a double-whammy of a child's innate love and need for a father

poem for April 17

Can you dance an Exclamation Point?
A nod to Carl Sandburg

Spring is playing scrabble and making up new words
by jazz-knuckled plants, all improvisation
(soft to the touch before they nettle into weeds)
trading eights of exclamations,
verbs for telling your feet to be nimbly-joy-jalla-jokull
coupled to your heart ready to shoot out of its mountain cave
with pieces of spring translating into silky-syllables
of exotic languages, A tango of coy chirrup klakippuhring
and full-throated gusto of the caged tiger sculpture
(on display at the silent auction tonight)
and everything starts to dance with the wind
Faery skursly, fey and unscarcely.

(kj poem a day : April 17, 2010)

Poem for April 16

I like the idea of the Cleave poem (Napowrimo)

Computers mess with the graphics though. I posted this on on ipoetry and the columns didn't stay. Italics disappear -- so I put in quotation marks.

April 16
Along the Silk Road


The job description, to complicate
speak a new language to make a new world
voice like spinning silk
woven from the soul threaded heart to heart

half to understand halved,
have is illusion; just as oneness,
otherness belongs
in each separate part to the Belovèd

like the man searching a lost son. Do you know how the father,
do you know how he found him?
discovered his lost son? The man thought
"Each person before him," "whoever comes before me
he thought,"This could be him," "This could be him."


Kitty Jospé
4/16/2010

In a cleave poem, you read each column separately,
then the third time, read it horizontally. The 3 parts in sequence, for the eye to read below.

Along the Silk Road
I

The job description,
speak a new language
voice
woven from the soul

half to understand
have is illusion;
otherness
in each separate part

like the man searching.
do you know how he
discovered his lost son?
"Each person before him,
he thought, This could be him."


II

to complicate
to make a new world
like spinning silk
threaded heart to heart

halved;
just as oneness,
belongs
to the Belovèd.

A lost son? Do you know how the father
found him?
The man thought
"whoever comes before me
This could be him."

III



The job description, to complicate
speak a new language, to make a new world,
voice like spinning silk
woven from the soul, threaded heart to heart

half to understand, halved:
have is illusion; just as oneness,
otherness belongs
in each separate part to the Belovèd.

Like the man searching a lost son. Do you know how the father,
do you know how he found him?
discovered his lost son? The man thought
"each person before him, whoever comes before me,
This could be him, this could be him."

poems for April 10-15

April 10:
SUN IN THE SPRING WINDOW PANE

Spiders do not lose hair, nor weave
unscripted valentines, unbirthday wishes.

What is spun in the corner , sure as sun
catching your eye, wraps what flies

in swing of silk
dance in the frame.

April 11

What we see, we have already "read" as our visual cortex filters our perceptions down through the doors of our experiences. What we read is immediately transposed perceptually to some kind of image that is compatible with our imagination.

Untitled

I read “loafers”,
and images of bread rise
in my mind and then a tramp
straight out of Frost’s mud-time,
with worn out shoes
the kind with those empty eyes
where pennies are supposed to go;
I am aching
to know if he tossed it
and what kind of wish
he knew

April 12:
(hommage to Abby for the Avocado)
type and tap to tip and tape
as words escape, escape,
scrape below the seascape

and find a story about an avocado
and remember
that this strange
wrinkled testicle of the earth
contains a pit and how countless
trees sprout for the children waiting
to see it split, upward thrust
and snaggle of roots
ready to plant,
for a deeper scrape

April 13
(preamble to poem)
Parable of the Squash and the Tree – From Nasir Khusraw
Have you heard? A squash vine grew beneath a towering tree.
In only twenty days it grew and spread and put forth fruit.
Of the tree it asked: "How old are you? How many years?"
Replied the tree: "Two hundred it would be, and surely more."
The squash laughed and said: "Look, in twenty days, I've done
More than you; tell me, why are you so slow?"
The tree responded: "O little Squash, today is not the day
of reckoning between the two of us.
"Tomorrow, when winds of autumn howl down on you and me,
then shall it be known for sure which one of us is the most resilient!"

**
(My poem below)

A Thousand Years Later

Compare? You and me?
Today is not the best day.

I will practice the 200 year old tree’s reply
should a squash should peer up after the task
of rushing from seed to fruit in 20 days, then ask
What is your slowness caused by?

The rudeness of such a brash remark
is best kindly steered to a kinder mark.

Let squash be squash.
Let oystered shell cloister a pearl.
What remains? Remains.

April 14

Marmeladov’s Loneliness

Did you hear about his oldest daughter, Sonia,
the crying of the half siblings,
the illness of her step-mother,
and how she went out one night at 6 o’clock and returned at 9
and laid 30 roubles in front of Katerina Ivanovna

and without a word, picked up
the green shawl,
put it over her head,
her face to the wall
her shoulders shuddering
her body shuddering

and in that silence Katerina went to her, knelt and kissed her feet
and would not get up, and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

What if she had understood there is good in the worst of us
and how he suffered so, drinking up her clothing
crying out that she understand his stupor
the only way he knew how to suffer twice as much.

What if we understood that?

April 15

One spring day, many years ago,
scent of loneliness, in the woods,
apple blossoms
a fleet of white caps
shredding into the air.

And today, I join the blackbird to look
towards the woods, watch snow
blossom by the birch.

There on the honeywheat stalk of grass
the redwing ratchets – then stills
no commentary
on snowy blossom, sliding off the branches.

Silence and a bird swaying.
Drift of spring curling,
repeating.

April challenge -- a poem a day : poems for April 1-9

I just found this --
http://readwritepoem.org/wp-signup.php

and took the poems I read last night, re-tweaked them, and set them up.
I love this idea of writing a poem a day for a month.
Here they are up to today:
POEM A DAY CHALLENGE: =-- joined April 9, 2010

Back log of poems:

April 1 :

Winter Song for my Son Skiing in Val d’Isère

The snow shook serious – none
of that saltshaker-I-have-plenty-of-time-to-drift-
down-
powder-your-nose-with-a-sloppy-kiss- expansion
of flake in lazy wind.

And in this white, my son takes tight turns
down the steep slope
like a clock disappearing
tick,
tock,
seconds scraped by skis

and I follow
tick
tock

and we pause to rest.
Whiteness wraps me a song:
if you are not dance, my love,
be the clay coiling on the potter’s wheel
supple… be unbaked clay

and if you are not clay my love,
be cobalt glaze
reflecting… be illusion of glaze

and if you are not glaze my love
be music and the stars in the dream
of the one who loves you.

And then he is off again,
like a clock
tick
tock
seconds scraped by skis
in the blind white,
bound in the wind.
**

April 2

Prelude to a Winter Rabbit

From our chairlift, we peer
down at commas,
stenciled lines of print—

scampered melody
of rabbit traces
on wind-crested snow,

winter hunger licking
thick meringue
of stillborn waves,

negatives of rabbit prints,
half-cadenced
silence.

April 3

Whitening

Nailing the truth on the head
toothlessly
like bleaching rainbows
to arrive at white
without skinning truth from other’s bones
and you ask white,
absent to explain itself,
(too busy being the sum of all colors)
to declare the rosy udder in milk,
all the purple vetch, the goldenrod,
and all those greens and oranges and blues
lumbered over and chewed,
lumbered over and chewed.

Lumbered truth, chewed until it lies
tenderly, white.


April 4

Notes to remind myself not to take little things too seriously

… for today. Forget counting
the spots of coffee’s dank bitter brew
that flew out of the cup
when the car bumped into two feet of ice

and leave aside counting when you hear
that your mother’s smile has only one
remaining tooth

and if you insist on counting,
look at the sky with cirrus script
and how the wind encrypts wonder,
wild mustard, without asking why
and why it is thus and so

and so, if counting the nth time the dog
has pee’d on the carpet, without intending
to upset, or the umptieth time you re-read
that passage from a day ago,

watch how today, you can walk, ON TOP
of the snow, and how soon, so
and so will sink into a dark gulley,
rim of spring, and then

May, will green-curl spears and spread
to leaf, and lace-edged bells. Remember how

they leave no trace in summer –
leave without thinking,
like today’s snow.


April 5

Tossed off the Cuff – a poem of 60 syllables, written in under a minute

Sixty syllables in one minute?
I’ve written nine in the first line
and see letters fall, like acorn, walnut
as the seconds tick fine, fine, fine
I say, but don’t feel… I’ll never finish
if those are the rules! Re-read
minute as in tiny – cuffed!



April 6

Pop-a-lock and Attending to Spring

What to do as life grows wild around you
and you are locked out of your house
your mind a mill of excuses

fatigue of driving, a funeral service
the lure of
too much waiting for you to do
the desire to linger
in replays of faces over decades.

Call pop-a-lock, and wait, and then
watch the spring
rain washing the swelling
toothy green waves of dandelion

staccato notes in the high grass
waiting for pop-a-lock
with a trowel,
to root out those dandies with their

hard nuts of flower bound like sleeping eyes.
It’s as if Spring has popped its lock,
its wound up clock out of control

last week’s first daffodils no longer
jazz with the sunshine
rain or no rain -- they’ve finished their lick

half of them withered
trumpets petal to parchment
while a new platoon of jonquils croons

by the lilac busting its chops in silence.
The pop-a-lock man’s arrived.
pulls out his kit,

concentrates, inserts a needle,
and twists. Tells how he used
to work for the police, and how

he had to be real quiet
because you never knew
what was waiting behind the door.

**




April 7

Writer’s Guests


Hello thought. Be my guest
but quietly, please,
to make room for the others.

**
Thinking about “My happiness, bears no relation to happiness” :
"Adina Hoffman's portrait of Taha Muhammad Ali brings to life character after character, each one viewed with the author's singular humanity. The poet himself is a figure of great originality and integrity, and his life becomes a mirror of a world which we have glimpsed, until now, largely in broken fragments. I hope this landmark book will be widely, and carefully, read."—W.S. Merwin

Another idea: I’m happy has no equivalent in Japanese – maybe “I’m glad” and further,
you don’t express watashi which means “I”. So perhaps “I’m happy” is not the same as the transliterated “I’m glad” which a woman in Japan might say as "ureshii desu".

Thoughts come in and out,
how there is no easy word
to describe a particular happiness
how there is a sense of bonheur
as in, alignment with the hour,
this very minute.

April 8

Writer’s Guests – II

Worry, would you kindly take a number,
row yourself to a seat,
maybe there next to Doubt,

gobbling the very air, not out
of hunger, but to press
the engine of something as irrepressible

as joy— without a sliver
of an almond’s worth of coconut-crusted joie
or crumpled hat of a fortune cookie.

No? Doubt is too loud? Well, reverse,
make WORRY become YR ROW.
Sit next to Dao, and its ten thousand things:

bee stings, measles and barbed wire fences,
conch shells, kittens, daily expenses,

costumes, school plays, tooth-fairy rewards,
moon phases, star gazing and classroom boards.

Thank you Dao. Worry is trying to shake itself
into plural. No? Yes? Worries?


April 9, 2010

If arabesques curled around a key
and goldfish jazzed sufficiently,
a foggy day in London town
might mean that when you’re low
you’re up, not down.

poem that makes me laugh

Written for the fun of it.

Writer's Guests


Worry, would you kindly take
a number, row yourself to a seat,
maybe there, next to Doubt.

I’m afraid today I have no
time and I’m writing.
Here, let me double you

into lining
like this: =D =D
into wide-mouthed, long-eyed D's

gobbling the very air,
not out of hunger, but to press
the engine of something as irrepressible

as joy. Don't! Worry!
J chews, then oy swallows.
Not a bar of song,

not a sliver of an almond’s worth
of joie, Freude, or Japanese ureshii
not a crumpled hat of a fortune cookie.

Joy has turned into a coffee cup,
bacon-stripped to look like marbled
chocolate before it sizzles and melts.

Just for a minute,
look at overindulgence
swelling like a greedy frog

rolling out a sticky tongue
to snare the fat flies, still sluggish
from winter.

Look at Parsimonious
sniffling and staggering
in the lasso of its stingy silhouette.

Look at Busy
snaring l – until it snarls,
disables Linger and Love.

That’s when Worry’s sharp elbows
dig in for a feast.
Something doubles.

Let’s reverse.
Doubt sits next to Dao, and starts to list
ten thousand things:

bee stings, measles, barbed wire fences,
conch shells, kittens, tooth-fairy rewards,
Easter eggs, laundry, daily expenses,

costumes, school plays, certificate awards,
dances, weddings, travels and chances
moon phases, star gazing, classroom boards…

Dao says nothing, which makes Doubt
squirm just a bit closer to Worry
until we shake it plural -- no

worries
left
turned, no doubt, inside out.

Any other guests?

Sonnet 65 -- Fooling Around

So, there on Writer's Almanac is Shakespeare's Sonnet.. and much as David Bleispeil says he's a better playwright than poet, how irresistible to fool around, in 14 lines.
I was told by a few well-meaning Australians that mine was no "true sonnet" -- but here's to fooling around. A little Beatles, a little Shakespeare.

Working with Sonnet 65

As I get older, losing my hair
the ephemerally lovely breezed out to sea,
then do I watch beauty be air
and rage at the siege of battering days, for we

know our stronghold of sinew and bone
ticked into breath, shall be kicked out alone.
I borrow Will’s question and repeat his bid,
“Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?”

His black ink, still shiny, how can it be
his love still bright in this century
not cracked on friable, wreckful rock?

But there’s the ticket, to unlock the lock
that ink waves into depths words only suggest,
so we die, so we love, let beauty take the rest.

**
penned in March 2010 -- copyright kj.

poem on the CD of Cadences that isn't in the book : Yellow Blues

included on the CD of Cadences read before Liubliu (love you) p. 51.
At a peace conference, when the Russian kids said, ya liubliu vas (I love you)
and the American kids understood, yellow-blue bus.

Yellow Blues

Don’t forget, we’re told so often
(color, chords, shapes and word)
as we get older, the details soften.

Rainbow, waterfall, they’re off in
her mind with other bird.
Don’t forget we’re told so often.

Coffee, soap, the new-hewn coffin,
(color, chords, shapes and word)
as we get older the details soften.

Ya lyubliu vas, she would say, and soften
yellow-blue bus, the others heard.
I love you, we’re told so often.

Details of a life will roughen
skin, mute chord, sight, word.
As we get older, the details soften.

To a life, will you toughen,
blacken out memory word by word?
Don’t forget, we’re told so often
as we get older. The details… soften.

April 1, 2010 -- Wallace Stevens -- 3 poems + TSE Burnt Norton

Today's topic was slated as "minding time and mind timing" --and just what is time...
multiplication; how many times; 2 times 2;
music: to measure
seasonal: a time to sow/reap
clock:
earth time: as hours; as shifts; as path around sun
sideral time:
memory
projection
time warp

two poets who experienced the excitement of discoveries which changed our thinking about time; who encountered Eastern philosophy and contemplated the nature of reality.
According to Wallace Stevens, reality is a product of our imagination as it shapes the world.
3 poems :
Wallace Stevens: The Snowman; 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
TSE: Burnt Norton (4 Quartets)

What a delight to spend an hour and a half sharing our perceptions, not in order to
understand the words, and lock them into a cage, but rather accepting that truth escapes words... poetry resists intelligence...

Discussion of Burnt Norton:

We read it aloud, a sentence at a time, rocked in the lyricism and Marge said how she likes to listen to TS Eliot reading, and puts on the record of him before going to sleep,
and that it’s like a lullaby saying, “not to worry”.

We would need to read it again and have years of discussion on this rich meditation.
WALLACE STEVENS
**
The 5 tercet sentence with two semi-colons, 4 commas of The Snowman also addresses time. No memory, only sight and sound: snow; sun; and sound repeated three times, just as nothing is repeated three times. Silence between the sibilance with prerequisites for seeing (one must have a mind of winter to regard; and to have been cold a line time to behold) and a mind of winter not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind – imbedded in the sound of a few leaves which is the sound of the land, which is full of the same wind -- and then one wonders – about same applied to wind, and bare place. And is the listener nothing himself, or perhaps a snowman, who will become nothing in Spring. Such strange fullness in the glitter, the sound, the numb emptiness of winter.

Breaking up the sound reveals patterns in the meaning and tone :
ST sounds.
must / frost / distant / listener : (cold a long time)

S as plural:
boughs / pine-trees / junipers / spruces / leaves: (what is covered)

SH sound
shagged
SN
snow (twice) and Snowman title.

/s/
ice / sun / sound light, reflection, music

/z/
misery / is misery has nothing to do with “is”
The trick of the unending sentence lies in AND. It comes after the semi-colons, in the last tercet, snuggled between an end-line comma and the comma before the second word of the second line, and finally, completes the six syllable count to balance “nothing that is not there”. Jay Keyser explains it in an interview on NPR – how just as we think we understand a sentence, the “and” appears and forces us to rethink what we thought we understood. Here are Keyser’s closing remarks about why it is a perfect poem.

“I once put all the words of the poem on little white cards and made a mobile out of it. It dangled, perfectly balanced, like an Alexander Calder creation. The poem, twisting and turning when I blew on it, became the visual counterpart of what it's about.

But what is it about? The poem is a recipe for seeing things as they really are. To do that, you must see the world the way the snow man does. The snow man is free of human biases. He knows that in winter the days aren't cold and miserable; you are. To see like him, you must constantly challenge your own assumptions. It's one thing to say that in words. It's quite another to say it in the structure the words hang on. No one did it before. No one has done it since. You can measure great jugglers by how many balls they keep in the air. It's the same thing with poets.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5031535
(November 29, 2005)

"Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point." ~ Wallace Stevens

Now, enjoy this poem :

Man and Bottle

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
Who, to find what will suffice,
Destroys romantic tenements
Of rose and ice

In the land of war. More than the man, it is
A man with the fury of a race of men,
A light at the center of many lights,
A man at the center of men.

It has to content the reason concerning war,
It has to persuade that war is part of itself,
A manner of thinking, a mode
Of destroying, as the mind destroys.

An aversion, as the world is averted
From an old delusion, an old affair with the sun,
An impossible aberration with the moon,
A grossness of peace.

It is not the snow that is the quill, the page.
The poem lashes more fiercely than the wind,
As the mind, to find what will suffice, destroys
Romantic tenements of rose and ice.

**
In the West, we might call the Tao ‘the Holy Spirit’ if we were religiously inclined. Wallace Stevens, may have assigned it to the ‘blackbird.’
Marge thought the blackbird could be conscience.

13 ways of looking at a blackbird.
we took just one stanza (XII) asking what does this mean to you:
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

Here are some responses:
the interconnectedness – the meaning of movement; the opposite of nothing; a visual sense of one bird who normally is part of a flock.

The problem of artifice:
The bawds of euphony: prostitutes of harmonious sounds—cry out sharply. I don’t think this is from pleasure. The thin men of Haddam… as in the everyday men of Connecticut whose glass coaches are illusions. The Tao Te Ching says, “Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.” (verse 1)