Salem, MA’s North Shore Art*Throb reviews A Bow from My Shadow. Read how Luke Irwin’s poetry “cuts the tapestry” of Alex Miller’s:
New Review of the Chapbook
Reply
The Priests in the Trees
The priests in the trees
have changed their robes,
their yellow
substantiating earth,
to the brutal temple
of the woods have
brought back gold,
lit the branches’ tips.
In wind the sticks
have conclave
debating the
splintered month,
at last issue
a crown jeweled
with cardinals
whose gold melts
through the rusting dark.
The priests of
burningbush
render God’s voice
in blood colors,
shear down the veil
that parses hung lofty
from earth-bound,
to the undone temples
of a copse have brought
back music,
frozen the cardinal’s heart.
Author’s Reception
Announcement: An author’s reception and reading of A Bow From My Shadow will be taking place Saturday, November 30, 2013 06:00 PM – 08:30 PM, Asheville, NC. Alex Miller of Third Cardinal (and Luke Irwin by webcast) will be reading from their newly released collection. Space is limited–contact the authors for more details.
Link
The Curator’s Seth Morgan reviews A Bow From My Shadow, the new collection of poetry from Third Cardinal’s authors.
The Book is Out!
The poets of Third Cardinal are proud to announce the release of A Bow From My Shadow, a collection of poems in dialogue from Ecco Qua Press. Generous customer reviews are already starting to appear. We thank all our readers here for their support and attention, and ask that if you have enjoyed our writing these last few years, you will invest in this richly printed little book.
Book Out Soon
“A very provocative little book!”
– Bruce Guernsey Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University
Just a reminder that A Bow from My Shadow, a book of poems in dialogue from the authors at Third Cardinal, is out October 1st from Ecco Qua Press. It represents years of work, to which all of our readers have contributed, and we’d be honored if you’d pick up a copy. You can search for the book at Amazon.com and Barns and Noble, or find out more and buy direct at http://eccoquapress.com/.
At Castle Neck
A wave’s white flag unfurls against the headland.
We’re pleased with summer’s long foreseen surrender;
hot noons betrayed by maples fringing umber,
horny insects dying in the wetlands.
You told me victory can read as loss—
The pale moths of our days mating in long
grass until their sailcloth bodies fall
apart. That will be the way we gloss
a season. The way I’d name your legs
laid down together dawn horizon,
or you my beard a tangle of black weeds.
For both of us, the ocean’s tannin dregs
will mean September. But you? I won’t rely on
Proserpine’s name to frame you. Of frames you have no need.
Link
For those of you falling in love with bloggers all the time.
Book
The Loaming
Behind the grumpy
Powder-blue rototiller,
Interned in dust and
Shriven by the bloody
Stations of Essex county biting flies
Across my shins,
Hangdog to its blistering
Handles, I level bone-jigging,
Snarling progress against
The fastness of buried roots,
Wheedled stones and
Disobedient hedgerows,
Working the lines at Bothways Farms,
A wind-whipped acreage running away
With the declining light.
Here turned up loam ensconces
Me, black with fertility, a touch,
A labor bordering on
The verbal, in a rot-
Pungent atmosphere both
Suggestive and inarticulate,
Where I can sweatily
Follow through the mental
Seed-death in these trenches
That will raise me up another season,
Baskets heavy with a harvest of words
Equal to the speechless.
#GrowCurator – A Word from Editor-in-Chief Aaron Belz
Brian Starts a Blog
Click and Read:
September, Inverness
Tomales Bay is flat blue in the Indian summer heat.
This is the time when hikers on Inverness Ridge
Stand on tiptoe to pick ripe huckleberries
That the deer can’t reach. This is the season of lulls—
Egrets hunting in the tidal shallows, a ribbon
Of sandpipers fluttering over mudflats, white,
Then not. A drift of mist wisping off the bay.
This is the moment when bliss is what you glimpse
From the corner of your eye, as you drive past
Running errands, and the wind comes up.
And the surface of the water glitters hard against it.
-Robert, Hass from Time and Materials
Public Books — Books On Books
Public Books — Books On Books.
Worth reading just for the writing.
VI
Back to 1990.
Dreamt I drove over a hundred miles in vain.
Then everything magnified. Sparrows as big as hens
sang so loud that it briefly struck me deaf.
Dreamt I had drawn piano keys
on my kitchen table. I played on them, mute
The neighbors came over to listen.
-Tomas Transtromer, from Sorrow Gondola
Riches, Ready
Riches, Ready
Sovereigns, examine me.
Behold with extreme grace
I do with excellent countenance
countenance extreme poverty,
My stomach’s congress in exponential clamor
My bowels’ traffic in multiplied divisions;
For I have subdivided beans,
For I split tenuous celery fibers into soups.
Sweet ones, present company,
slackjawed birdy, Cappadocians,
I do indeed make do in thorough time.
By your leave, I am artisan and flop.
In pleasant ratio with excellent motion,
I do manifest grim lack thereof;
whose patronymic is oatmeal,
his Christian name, oatmeal
and for call-name, code name,
handle, hashtag, sobriquet,
and moniker hath but oatmeal.
Babies, Dears, Captains, I envision feasts,
whose nightlights perched aloft
fire up the trees without consuming.
A fortune-teller charts his round,
fool in tow. There’s the ripe bank.
There’s wine for slurping when awake.
Bonaventure’s Proposition
My first poem in The Curator. Enjoy!
The Principle of Volubilty
An article about when “economy can become a vice” in poetic writing. If you’re already good, that is:
Hillsborough Bicycle
Please check out and contribute to this excellent startup, featuring the poet Aaron Belz and son. They are close to the goal and need readership, a fiver, and whatever else you can spare.
Station Clock Bomber
The sun’s round fist takes one mountain maple by the throat.
Breakfast steams hard in an iron pan, spitting pigfat.
Redstarts and thrushes tune warbly orchestras
among the fiddleheads. Chill of dawn. The cool junipers
suffer their arthritis, turning knucklier in low-bound fog.
My neighbor’s taken him a lantern out to check his chicken fence
for fox holes, walking that gangly shadow down the stubble
of a well-grazed lawn. Then in the distance, a tinwhistle,
the train. It was strange to us at first, who’s kin settled this blessed
muck as a tribe of Irish rejects, records to their names
they’d cross the Atlantic–a salt-slabbed grave without a bottom
–to erase. Then we settled here, and our days were permitted
to wax primordial. So a dawn-to-dusk routine
sprang up in our rudimentary furrows. Then came the city
planner with his tobacco wad, his cash wad and his deed.
Not long after, we got made aware of time, hooking trains
like the sun’s declension hooks the cows
by their shoe-tongue napes, marching them out to feed,
and lulling them again to the companionable shade
beyond a scudded clearing. Time rose from a turd
beside the railway where our kine waited to be packed
for slaughter out in Charlotte, one fly hatching,
cleaning legs and wings, then rising, then another,
and as the swarm filled our ears with predatory ticking,
we lost status–falling from the regency of cultural imperatives
to an amicable enslavement: Some town-wide
doctrine of promptness as alien to us as a separate
hemisphere. Time was an antarctic star rising through Orion.
Now so much is sour–the days packaged like bacon
in cellophane–but not all. I told my neighbor:
Not all. There’s still the statement of dynamite
to be made; proof even this hick excels at punctuation.
So now, the train yard’s absurd dins and silences,
the heft and thunder of iron meeting itself in the dark,
then nothing but the soft snore of cicadas. I’ve planted
enough year by year, only to reap nothing but a long
line of mayoral ink, so now the whirlwind’s seed is going to ground
in the heart of this industry. The station being empty,
I kill no one, or just the shell of me,
rough old corn cob that I am. But it’s a damn sight
I’ll take this clock with me, that’s pounded down our plans
to make a bolt or two in a caboose, or to cast
girders for a mineshaft. I choose this dark depth,
cold as it is, instead: Lighting the short fuse that
makes my name a curse to bless the land.
Finnish
In the dream someone is yelling:
tell us a whorer story
take us to the maul
bundle ‘em in summer
give ‘em grottoes
a fringe goddess, a tower nanny,
corner spinners in palaver,
recalcitrants in wedding shops.
A wake. black silk. clouds. Then, half a wake,
half corpse, half dead, a half a loaf of pumpernickel,
Finnish newspapers, blue appointment books,
mahogany desk, marble tableau, ruin
wears burnt sienna, rests a hand on iron lampstands.
World without end, rain without end
church among blankets, window ajar
smoke from hedgerows, a whistle,
low laugh, people up in the mist
you’re in, you’re in someone whispers
and whispers do a foxtrot, a globetrot,
ripple the gunnels of your mind’s playdate
like bacon seizing up and sparking grease
in the morning of platonic excellence
when light opens and the wake is over
that is, waking up at home to the tiny glories
spilling out, overflowing the rooms, gilt air.
Speaking of a Mammal
So in the ruins of Cracow man turned wolf.
Collecting amber on the Baltic coasts was forgotten,
brief stripe of the lighthouse on wobbling skiff hulls,
glow of a breast when his wife’s nightshirt slipped
like a line of contested territory in her sleep,
the cold faucet water in the morning that was the sign
of society as much as anything else. And here was Crusoe,
Fridayless, wheedling away his weekend under acrid cloud
in the cannoned-out cellars and spent brickwork, hoping to beat
rats to the last stashes of hardened bread. Every tree
in the wind sounded to him like a panzer’s tread
busting a skull. Heroism was gone, unless
there was patriotism in squatting out survival, as was music,
unless the rush of crumbling hotels and theaters
reverting in an avalanche to their charred ordinates
struck some chord in heaven. Afraid to light a fire,
like Peter he rolled scrap grain between his palms
and watched the darting sparrows of the spring
migration begin to find new roosts among gray beams
and the torn ribs of the rafters. Birdsong. Blending days,
last light. The mantle of Adam began to feel heavy.
And if he should see another darting the alleys, another
uprising veteran he might’ve sworn to die for months ago
in the gaslamped offices of the underground, he knew his duty.
The new salute: walk away. The password they each
memorized by one consent: homo homini lupis.
Early
One job is explaining to May
The taxonomy of social medias.
Try to picture a wandering albatross:
How he hefts the sun on his wings
And delivers it post haste to the morning.
Try an Osprey snatching thirty trout at once;
Try reading more of your nature book.
Have you noticed the dancing bees,
Dancing bears, dancing birds of paradise?
May, a recent five, acquiring a sense of shy,
Giggles small giggle bubbles. I smile smoke rings.
Robins on bright lawns. Cardinal in a Maple.
We’re quiet under leaves, in white light;
We almost breathe the ether of disproved forms.
She smiles, sudden, old. Warmth, a bee dance
In earth— the half-lit beacon and half-doused.
History Lesson
A long time ago,
before there was skyping,
there was scalping.
People used to say,
“I have to get ready for my scalp date.”
And girls would do their hair
with special care.
Because even long distance,
scalping was something
taken seriously—
Just like we do
with skyping today.
Nesting
In the still cold, freshwater-crisp
dusk, oaks push a birth of leaflets.
Out too late, past the park’s hours
watching the thrusted rockets of song sparrows
spear the roughage with their bodies’
brown crud. The quiet is packed with lust.
Shit-thick scraps are being gathered
for the homemaking: last Autumn’s
trampled tawny, wire bread bag ties, selvage
of moldy straw they will whirl into
cradles. Heron-tense, evening fishes
for the original star. Wing shiver and cheeping
rev down in the undergrowth, where a bridle
path unravels through breezy lung-scalding chill:
voice of April fiddling at the pan-pipe cattails, luring me out
with her moodswing charms, her reddened fingers.
Rain Writing
All night, tree-lash,
marionette spider, bulged shadow
dancing shapes of torqued limbs against the window.
April, in his iron crown, leans on a nimbus,
widens half-hail payloads against our shingles.
Groaned arguments of rain icemelt
through oaken curls. The ten plagues of sleet
are rehearsing in the hedge, darkening
their moans into spirituals. Something tries
to escape from my pen: a black translation.
Nothing does.
And afterward, in peeking moon
the slapped leaflets convalesce
like new crystal thrust up from a cavern–
life, green-hardened
and thriving, neat as print.
Finals
I’ve been reading Heidegger :
“Pain gives of its healing power
Where we least expect it.”
And Isaiah:
“Peace, peace to the far and to the near
And I will heal him.”
Maps and Plans
Grandfather would instill himself long hours in the whining rocker
Giving thought absently to the wind’s manipulations,
Considering her forward way with his cigarette smoke.
He would judge the uneasy melancholy of unfinished summer,
‘Visioning himself king on the throne of nature
With the great Douglas Firs girt in green, thickly bowing
Low to him over the fern beds in stormy supplication.
He would ‘vision a lover he was of yet to make acquaintance;
Mostly perceiving her mouth, watching her tongue gather the sunset
Then diffuse it back in words, as an opal reflects in colors:
Various and unsullied. Words she gave had a way,
And their way tugged his soul. They were lustrous.
So at dusk in the still of time, yet with night quickening,
He would ease the chair to the rhythm of their manifestation;
He later related his thoughts on those evenings before his death,
How life took shape before his mind’s eye as a spectrum,
Which he claimed defined the peculiarity of existence.
It spanned red to violet in seven decades, black at both ends:
The dark where it sprang from and the end light so bright
His eyes believed it to be dark again, for which I told him
You’re a damn fool.
But that was the nature of his mind;
To negotiate for life with pictures and thought games.
When the sun had gone completely, he slept.
His left hand dangled down to the dusty porch
Where the hand’s index fingertip brushed it.
Each night it felt the same spot, stained it with oil,
Which he joked was his mark on the world.
Job Search
Ego Boost Maneuvering Holistic System
earnestly seeks people with Straight Assessment Capability Mileage Plans
with access to Frequency Shared Amount Smartwell Idea Streamlines
and meaningful Engage to Empathy Status Ratio Ideal Sensitivity Quality Levels.
We appreciate items with Locus Features Strategy Optimizing Scenario Fields.
Spring (A Poem Written in the Earshot of Children)
Spring,
Of course! Spring.
It jumps to mind–a forgotten name.
The spit-shined coin of Spring
turns up just where you had left it.
One morning you walk along
a sheeny fence at field’s edge
watching the cows munch
and realize
your jacket is still on its peg.
Suddenly unhunched cranes
drizzle their blue tassels
in warmer marsh.
Softening lumps of glacier drip dangled
from pine tips. Things have
woken from the pools
happy to be devoured.
The neighborhood’s voices
dart
like goldfinches through tree fingers
quickening with resin. The sun rosins
his bow with saffron pollen, tunes the birds, smears muddy roads
in spilt honey.
Spring is shaking your elbow in the morning,
or throwing rocks
at your window.
It arrives like your cousin fresh from a growth spurt
with her ankles showing,
strong, deliberate,
the first ant claiming the arctic
of the kitchen counter.
Tuesday Thing
My Tuesday thing
Is to call 234 hotlines
And my favorite is about cabbage stewing
I’m looking forward to Wednesday
For when I call you
To tell you something special
About chiffon shoes with tiny chains
You’re my chiffon and chain I will yell
When I tell people about the whole joke,
I explain that sometimes
There isn’t a hotline for all real life scenarios
You have to get by with cold turkey dumpling stretches
When you can’t do cabbage stewing trickmaster muscle patterns
Link
I’ll be in this one. Cancel your dates and attend.
Breviary
Quote
Lord, I give thanks to You for syringes with needles thick and hair thin, bandages, every kind of Band-aid, the humble compress, thank you for the drip, for saline solutions, tubes and above all for sleeping pills with names like Roman nymphs…
Zbigniew Herbert
Sign and Signified
Later he would reveal that the campaign
had been largely farce.
It had been a pleasure to pretend
that the squares routed near A—–
and outside B—- during numerous engagements
had not been ordered to disperse
after briefly engaging or receiving minor casualties.
Even the families of the dead eventually learned
that there had been no war
other than the elaborate sham—
the blue and gold brocades, the signs and standards
maneuvers, counter marches, plumes, parades—
even the sealing wax was not sealing wax,
which, like the congealed blood on a surgeon’s frock,
both legitimated and defied death,
Contrived dying and denied dying
while authorizing both and permitting neither.
No, there were no acts of war;
No blood-soaked missives came or went
or appeared sudden and sharp to splash the ranks.
But who could tell the difference?
In the no man’s land between what happened
and what was forbidden to have been.
It was whims and children’s errands
lived and executed upon satin charts for pleasure.
They were scarlet intestines and black bile
Chained and choking in the mangled smut of battle;
Horses and men screaming in a narrow defile.
But whose horses? What men? And which were which?
Later, the emperor,
addressing the battalions
seeing the wounds it had sustained
knowing which were illusion
reminded us it was a sham campaign—
Refusing the weight with pithy conclusion—
“no glory lose, no glory gain.”
Guilt
You said, the water will be slave
to nothing. The rain heard
first, burning in the woods,
then its tambourine in the gutter.
You stayed out standing
too long. The sins of perfection
gluing riff-raff down to the driveway.
By your feet, a leaf got dappled,
damp, damper.
Haiku: Five Desires
1. Newbury Street
We shop for shirts, rings,
half aware it’s we who’re in
and out of season.
2. Thirst
Vermeer’s plump milkmaid,
white as the cream she’s pouring.
In dreams, she gulps it.
3. Make-Out Bench
June. The Tennessee
wading a thicket of stars.
Her skin. Fresh coffee.
4. Flaneur
Walter Benjamin
paced his narrow library
looking for arcades.
5. Travel
That globed, rising light–
was it the moon, or a sign
over the highway?
K
Quote
K (kā) verb, K’ed, K’ing. 1. Baseball: to strike out. 2. to fail, to flunk, to fuck up, to fizzle, or 3. to fall short, fall apart, fall flat, fall by the wayside, or on deaf ears, or hard times, or into disrepute or disrepair, or 4. to come unglued, come to grief, come to blows, come to nothing, or 5. go to the dogs, go through the roof, go home in a casket, go to hell in a hand basket, or 6. to blow your cover, blow your chances, blow your cool, blow your stack, shoot your wad, bitch the deal, buy the farm, bite the dust, only 7. to recollect an oddball notion you once heard as a crimeless and un-K’ed child but found so nonsensically paradoxical that you had to ignore it or defy it or betray it for decades before you could begin to believe that it might possibly be true, which is that 8. to lose your money, your virginity, your teeth, health or hair, 9. to lose your home, your innocence, your balance, your friends, 10. to lose your happiness, your hopes, your leisure, your looks, and, yea, even your memories, your vision, your mind, your way,
11. in short (and as Jesus K. Rist once so uncompromisingly put it) to lose your very self,
12. for the sake of another, is,
13. sweet irony, the only way you’re ever going to save it.
–David James Duncan, The Brother’s K.
Barn Owl
Sometimes close to sleep under the bedroom’s
beveled wall, though the window
I kept open in all weather but a storm
belted the torture-screech of a witch
at the crushing stone; something like steam
ripped through a narrow hole,
and I knew a rabbit was under the owl’s claw.
No fear to it. Past the foot of the bed
the wooded law dealt quick, leaving only a pelt,
without justice or hate. The blanket’s
weight felt good on my shoulders, quiet closed
in thicker, grape-scented; sleep’s wings swept down in the dark.
The Quote
Quote
It causes us suddenly to breathe a new air, an air which the poets have vainly tried to situate in paradise and which could induce so profound a sensation of renewal only if it had been breathed before, since the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
-Marcel Proust, Time Regained.
Proust Ghost
We step into Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea. Proust’s ghost passes through the wall and whispers: “The person with whom we are in love is to be recognized only by the intensity of the pain we that we suffer.” Then everything is “kisses four” and “elfin grot” until we wake up to watch the rockets in Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold.
Cat
cat and I are so old
we have to share binoculars
to do our reading
cat asks
what’s the being of this appearing?
I say
what’s the bearing of that herring?
Hilary
Hilary of Poitiers is in Heaven,
He lets a rope ladder down to my room.
Hilary, I am drinking bourbon.
Hilary, is the ladder a test?
Is it to see if I believe in evangelical grace,
The kind with no climbing.
If so, it is illusion and moonlight.
Hilary, is it language? Or Time?
Creatures Tools? Fabrics of being?
If so, it is illusion and moonlight.
Hilary, I am a Platonist when I drink;
I am illusion and moonlight.
But you make me weep real tears
They fall like oceanic planets gauging the abyss
One follows another like beads or
Emanations, waves, ladders, the Chain
Anchoring illusion to uncalculated bliss
Fresh-Pressed: Poems Published in Pif Magazine
We’re glad to be in Pif Magazine again!
Alex Miller: Her Pure Exclusive Music
“An air conditioner whirs
baritone in the bay window,
the couch where she sits
throbs in sunlight, songbird-
egg blue…”
Luke Irwin: The Mannequins at Delphi
“Headlights purchase being,
dealing cars by night lengths.
I am transacted across lives
for economies of passengers.
Once I am my daughter…”
Link
Alex and I have poems in this month’s PIF. Both poems will feature in the (upcoming) book, so see what you think.
Unheroic Simile
It was like love, the bite of that splinter,
when the pick’s handle snaked across
my palm driving in an inch of hickory.
There wasn’t much to do. The wet ditch was still
half dug we needed to lay the piping through.
I put my wound against the wood and heaved again.
In Review: Bruce Guernsey’s From Rain: Poems, 1970 – 2010 (2012, Ecco Qua Press)
“In the autumn of last year, Bruce Guernsey enjoyed an attentive audience of several dozen, who lapped up a smolderingly dramatic poetry reading from his new retrospective book From Rain at the home of one-time Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick. Guernsey was introduced by Wendy Murray, who is both the mind behind the quarterly Ellery Sedgwick literary workshops at Beverly’s Long Hill, and the editor-in-chief (in fact the only editor) of Ecco Qua Press. It isn’t easy to make a poetry reading much more than an exercise in endurance for the audience, but Guernsey’s work was every bit as good as his delivery. He is a rare entity: A clean, rough, visionary poet in the classic American style, heavily anthologized and endorsed by Pulitzer Prize laureates, but so humble as to sometimes fly far from the eyes of the literary press, and so under-appreciated as to hit walls in every direction when he wanted to publish a retrospective. Put simply, he is exactly the kind of author Ecco Qua Press was created to find and publish. The right man and mechanism have met each other at exactly the right moment…”
Read More at Art*Throb.
Range Rovers
I spent our winter’s nights
Each in the open belly of a hamstrung horse—
Warmer when they’re kicking—
Luxurious viscera tended to my torso.
The night I cut and found a foal I said to heaven:
Here’s the uncanny metaphor for love.
I found devotion in horses’ bowels.
Some nights the convalescing dead rose up
Huddled, shook like newborn bats
I watched them tremble up to heaven
Through air frozen into ether In the sky
That winter I never saw the sign
Giving Constantine’s donation.
Later we laid ourselves in fallen drones
By light of flickering engines
Later, were Range Rovers to the Hilton
Staring down the Holy See.
Homo Homini Lupus
Vincit Qui Patitur
Diurno Elegies, Summer
The church with a white, luminous steeple
Did not seem any more comfortable
Pointing to the summer’s unraveling
And, later, I felt the need to look behind me
Back into the city and down the gray alley
Where I had watched the tide lift it
Like a woman lifts a pearl, or a thief.
But I stood, still, facing a forest of white pine
I knew the names: light and time.
Grave beauty, most beautiful in your harridan
Departure, I laugh at the idea of a magic quest
Or sacks of treasure I might have unearthed
Had I looked or taken the burden of your spells—
I even laugh at the words to name them.
But your memory remains nestled in me as a peace
Almost to the point of dishes nestled in their cabinet.
Guardian Angel
In my dreams my guardian angel takes the form of a woman,
Not always the same. He knows that I, a fleshy creature,
Need a lover’s touch. We don’t make love.
But there is closeness between us, and understanding.
I never believed in the presence of angels, but my dreams have changed,
And when, recently, I found an underground grotto filled with treasure,
And we were moving the sacks together, I asked him
For one more moment of the dream, which gave me peace.
-Czeslaw Milosz
Oh Sweet Arab Sauce! (Being the Second Part of the Coffee Cantata)
Oilslick of the brain’s engine
Who left your paper cave
With its cleverly emblazoned sleeve
On every curve of my long commute
Be quicksilver to my hair of the dog Monday
Let your groundsy bottom make my ethic
Bottomless as Oprah’s riches
Everlasting as a Mercedes Benz
Invert my work and play, tighten your fist
Around my pen, inscribe the progress report.
Selah
Dripolated from the appliance’s teat
When I lay lip thirstily to you
Invert the gravity of attrition
Smash the normative rhythms
Of Owl and Songbird
However I might complain about it later
Do for me oh sweet Arab sauce
What I shuddering asked you not to
Last night in bluish glow of nightstand clock
Set slumber aflame in a sappy bonfire
Of glorious crackling workaday cheer
Be my Christmas on eternal loop
Except a Christmas of the cubicle
It is quieter here my sweet-tongued genie
Now that I have arrived from the drive-thu
Without my former troubles, galvanized awake.
Good Brew, extend it
Dark sap of the world-tree
Thick blood of my heart’s heart
Purifier of my lowest bowels
Sweet sweat of my concentrate reason
Let your sable juice enact truth
Proclaim sustenance to morning
Sustain the razor edge of thought
Quake the boughs of night in wakeful storm
Palpitate my synapse, shake my legs
Selah
Good brew, extend it, dark energy
Black hole of alert gravity
Suck the light of reason into my soul
Let my heart dance eternal quadrilles
With the acuity of 1000 Brahmins
Your catholic congregation
Huddles in your temples
Be the fuse, powder, powder keg,
Explosion, spark, flame
Ignite the sleep we bring
In its ash plant a bean of wakefulness
May the steam of espresso
Be the sparks of outrageous voltage
Good grounds of remembrance
Your sacrifice becomes our noble hope
Brawny elixir. Ebon alchemy.
Pellinore’s Wedding
Photo courtesy of http://www.barrieingham.com
“King Arthur was delighted to see his old friends again, and to hear of Pellinore’s engagement.He was the first knight he had taken a fancy to, when he was a small boy in the Forest Sauvage, and he decided to give the dear fellow a marriage of unexampled splendour. The cathedral of Carlion was booked for it, and no trouble was spared that a good time should be had by all. The pontifical nuptial high mass was celebrated by such a galaxy of cardinals and bishops and nuncios that there seemed to be no part of the immense church which was not teeming with violet and scarlet and incense and little boys ringing silver bells. Sometimes a boy would rush at a bishop and ring a bell at him. Sometimes a nuncio would pounce on acardinal and cense him all over. It was like a battle of flowers. Thousands of candles blazed before the gorgeous altars. In every direction the blunt, accustomed, holy fingers were spreading little tablecloths, or holding up books, or blessing each other thoroughly, or soaking each other with Holy Water, or reverently displaying God to the people. The music was heavenly, both Gregorian and Ambrosian, and the church was packed. There were monks and friars and abbots of every description, standing about in sandals among the knights,whose armour flashed by candlelight. There was even a Franciscan bishop, wearing grey,with a red hat. The copes and mitres were almost all of solid gold cloth crusted with diamonds, and there was such a putting of them on and taking of them off that the whole cathedral rustled. As for the Latin, it was talked at such a speed that the rafters rang with genitive plurals—and there was such a prelatical issuing of admonitions, exhortations and benedictions that it was a wonder the whole congregation did not go to heaven on the spot. Even the Pope, who was as keen as anybody that the thing should go with a swing, had kindly sent a number of indulgences for everybody he could think of.”
-T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Early Pug
She says I picked you up but the second day you
You had lost one of your fingers in a cutting board accident
After that I dreamed about gold thimbles for a week
Its what started. Its how that started.
May uncle Katherine bless our endeavor sweetest child
Because you are not without verve or shotguns
Which qualities he possessed in full measure, as a man will.
Roger was an alchemist. He made his pages into smoke
He made the smoke gold errant knights
He cut down uncle Katherine. He left a message on the thorn
Of a white rose bush:
Embalm that old bastard in the juice of the pale petals of this rose bush
Because, let us face it…
The rest of that note is too obscure for the telling. Johnson, another flagon.
Pendragons cooking on the ballpoint spits of the hall fires.
I had a pug and she says I’ll pick you up for the pug’s company
A woman’s way, by the mass. Marry, a woman’s way.
We took to the field in our squadrons
I cannot smell wet earth without seeing blood
In the mind of my eyes and nose. hands shake,
Drenched, drenching. The anticipation of revels is uncle Jackson
With his face in the crystals. Draw, my thought
Draw, be bloody or be nothing worth. Draw, pendragons.
Draw, fast hands, six shooters.
How in an hour cousin Vicky laid waste thirty horse
How James strung their guts on his fretboard,
Plagues, I whispered in the moonlight, plagues
When the rain falls, plagues, in the hayloft,
In the black Mercedes, plagues.
And then I cut my finger off with a knife I bought at Target.
Is that justice, Ferdinand. Is that justice, I ask her.
She says: where is your pug? Where is your little pug?
Seattle Harbor
The sun sackcloths itself, at first, in cedars.
Then a forest fire: blood orange
dashes in spiced haze.
Light broadens
on the white toy houses, the huge Pacific.
Chinese faces, parks and conifers
begin humming underneath the burnisher,
the daily wrestle of earth-cold vs sun-hot
spreads a mat of sweat across the harborside.
Everywhere on yuppie cobble human stink
drizzles the familiar caramel. This is how
they got easterners to pack cattle in ’49:
picture mountainous crabs, fields of vaginal lilies
edging the Sierra, a grating of nutmeg drifted
onto whisked cream like snow–
picture getting daughters
under branches loaded with waxwings in some tuft
of your own acreage.
We know the thirst they had,
filling up their bottles, strapping hope chests
tightly to the cart.
Link
Derek Walcott in 2010.
Deep Covers
for Robert Siegel
The book’s pine musk, just as she’s sleeping,
arouses her. So life gets started,
the pebble wheedling down a ski slope
with snow heavy on the cliffs.
In December, pacing the baroque lobby shuffling
with dresses of the Nutcracker, to the distant fireworks
of champagne opening, at intermission, I dialed your number
about a reference for an application. Death in the click of the daughter’s
lips parting, in the chiffon rustle of background weeping
at my fool’s question, in the wrought-iron sitting-room stovetop,
mexican tile, the window seat she sits on where, as he wrote, a pentecost of finches
visited daily just past the glass, before dawn swelled over the firs.
Robert, that week I thought you still lived
was the last fleck of the comet,
your deer disappearing like sated lust
past trunks straight as columns of print, where autumn moss
still throbbed sudden, green,
straight as lines of the poems I pick up again
as she settles, with sweat on her chests’ concave,
between deep covers and sleeps.
Rare Instance
Each thing we do not earn we prove with grace:
It is the paradox that accompanies the goodness in our world.
If in black tweed that we see her undertake a walk;
if, in a rare instance, we see her weeping:
even the angle of her raised hand, both to hide
and to erase the evidence of her grief
will astound us; she will not stop walking,
she will be determined on a course and
whether it is the dull artillery of calfskin boots
or the sharp firefight of suede heels,
remain convinced: She can weep; she must,
the way spring rain lets an iris weep
when the sunlight still cuts from a clear horizon as it sets,
conjuring gilt fog, refraction from drop to drop,
so much the brighter for the heavy darkness overhead
which, like all suffering, offers a dialectic:
grief itself, more than analogous to landscapes
and to weather, is a garment to be worn and walked in
with an elegance of purpose that refutes both doubt and criticism
until the route is finished or the rain stops,
the tears are dried and she calls for light cashmere
white linen, choruses of lavender, roses bowing in the sun.
Cardinal Wolsey Speaks About Imagining
“Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet’s ground, the flush of the robin’s breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the color of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.”
– Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Archduke
Recently my wall began talking
Calling itself the Archduke Ferdinand
Giving itself airs and eating too much
My wall percolates coffee at night
But it should be sleeping
It hits on the roof and on the floor
It buys bespoke suits
Only to hang them in the closet
Unused and magnificent
You are a wall.
You should know better.
No. I am the Archduke Ferdinand;
I am also the giant Atlas
I am building portfolios
You cannot sleep here.
Guido Meets the Cardinal
Video
From Fellini’s 8&1/2
The Quote
“He took no initiative, for his method of seduction did not follow a set pattern, but each case, above all the first move, was distinctive. ‘In the preambles to love no error can be rectified,’ he had said. On this occasion he must have been convinced that all obstacles had been surmounted ahead of time, since the decision had been hers.”—Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth
Parable Repeats Itself
The mind would clear,
hungering for valleys
where streams pounded sharp
silver as fish scale
but we would ignore it,
ripping out the ore,
grinding it to make coffee.
I sat all morning in the sticks,
umended walls slumping a
prostrate green, and prayed.
No kingfisher flicked his jewel in answer.
Earth poured into the valley, river closed
soil into its cool digestion.
World eating world
made a sound like rain on reeds.
Moles crawled in the nape of soil,
pondering big mouthfuls.
Creation stood to attention
steaming with dawn, each oak
and deer with its perfect portion.
The honeybee unjealously
brewing a lifetime of sweetness
for the casual bear. And good bear kills
sheep for the hive to hollow.
The world presented itself soft and pliable,
tender, black with innocence.
There is a man shaped hole here, I thought,
or should be, picking up my shovel.
Chubbles
I saw you,
I did not think you were named Butters
And, in fact,
You were named Chubbles.
My records show
I have known three (3) Chubbles.
You are the only one I remember.
That dance. That big moon.
Everything cold and blue,
Whispers: Chubbles, Chubbles,
Little one, slim princess, dearest heart.
Link
Cantina
She was married in a cantina.
It was a bar in a strip mall
Next to the big K K-Mart in a village
with three Mexican restaurants
warranting the name cantina.
Fairy tales from the peak years
Speak of a magic stone
hidden, deep. Canting ghosts
led me to her wedding day. I watched
the host pass muster at the mass.
I sat between Marcel and Soren;
We wore Tom, Paul, and Lauren.
Interest Piece from NPR
Cocked crane legs of Gloucester rigging,
hard hats dangling on pegs amidships.
A pickup idles in the harbor lot
and walking with my wife’s hand
we notice the hiccuped shoulders in the cab,
the hand
daubing the driver’s eyes.
Sun-orange on the belly of a gull. The scabby ships
pulled in and dormant–a year of space
to save gasping cod stocks off the cape.
Enough to rust a trawler it would seem.
Whiffs exhale from the muffler.
The schooling cod blue, swelling.
What was it they said
on the radio? An act of salvation.
Many Endure Slaughter
Nature mates the socks.
Socks that cannot find a mate
Are singled out from the herd
Competition is fierce;
Many endure slaughter.
Even mated pairs face danger
Especially if nature makes a mistake
And drinks too many martinis
A herd can find itself stranded
Trapped in the wrong drawer
I have studied this in real life,
But I have never seen it portrayed on television.
If it was portrayed on television,
Children would have to look away.
Responsible parents would cover their eyes
Whispering how that little sock survives
Micro.
My microwave is loud
You could say it is uncouth
But my microwave is not human
Telling the truth will not hurt it
So it shouldn’t be anthropomorphed
The microwave will fax me messages at work
Hello hello hello hello
I hope you’re not talking to the work microwave
It is dirty
Goodbye goodbye goodbye
I will never talk to the work microwave
I will never let it heat up my empty mug
I recite this litany at bedtime
I say it when I wake up
CRIS B
Cristobal Balenciaga lighting a cigarette and plucking a giant tote from the tote tree
You remind me of the shipwrights and carpenters in Barcelona
They used to say: birches ain’t ship, but warp and trick.
Women to make me cut away my eyelids in case a blink disappears them
You cruel ladies disturbed our sawing and our adzing and our hacking, but
Cristobal Balenciaga lights a cigarette and plucks a giant tote from the tote tree
I have teeth, hair, skin, limb, features, and complexion
But the proportions in Barcelona calibrate by higher codes
They used to say: birches ain’t ship, but warp and trick
Paupers are my buddies. Ash and sackcloth are my hankies
I have a flagellation timetable. The inquisition does my house-sitting
Cristobal Balenciaga smokes a cigarette and considers the tote from the tote tree
He wants to know we did right. How we measure in the black
Ultramarine is the bay, I check my spleen level, she’s in that red
We used to say: birches ain’t ship, but warp and trick
Rage, rage, Cris B. because we screwed up the giant lambskin tote
Broke all the ships in the bay and didn’t get anywhere near betrothed
To the bay hotties even when we used your parfums.
Cristobal Balenciaga lights a cigarette, pops a round in the chamber and plucks the tote
He used to say, birches ain’t ship, but I like a good banger, Ima cap you, the rest is rote.
In Defense of Pompous Asses
Alex Miller defends our right to be cranky over art on The Curator: http://www.curatormagazine.com/alex-miller-jr/in-defense-of-pompous-asses/
Instagram as Self-Torture? Perhaps.
An essay on the subject: http://www.curatormagazine.com/alex-miller-jr/the-myth-of-narcissus-goes-social/
Twitch on the Line
Out across salt marsh
the cannibal sun gnaws its skin. Rose and clammy surf.
Nothing else bites–the pro shop expert said:
You are drifting out too late. Mexican chum fishers
wade clutching spin reels, floating beers
and latin smack-talk in the calm beyond breakers.
My salesman had a Harvard air of all-knowing.
Behind him shelves on shelves of well-spun fakes the striped bass
are flirting with then shadowing away.
Adjust the taughtness, keep your line out. Suddenly
I miss the long sounding up your legs, casting
upstream toward warm bracken.
Jess
Sweethart,
is Jessica Simpson having our baby?
her stomach has your eyes
and my toes. What’s so weird
is how did they get there!
one thing, sweets, is she a thief?
to make such child’s play of our love
we promised each other
no one would have our baby
except for you. That baby is ours.
one thing we can know
is that there are some hurt feelings
one night I walked
two blocks in the dark rain
thinking about big pharma
and jess simpson
but I came back, honbear
and we made little pharma
like in the French films
we should have made two little pharmas. What was I thinking.
pack a day says she’s not you
that the jury saves our love
packs us into marriage rehab
and you get a kid in the offing
but maybe you are Jess Simpson
resting your belly on the Elle bar
telling me about my sons and daughters
outnumbering the sand on the seashore
Last Duchess
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat”: such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
Browning
Pre-Order it. Tell your friends. I’m excited to be in this.
Anobium. Issue 1.
We’re also fiddling a tumblr.
New Girl/Tunnel Head Syndrome
She says she’s in the Navy.
I am drinking from a can.
She talks about the tunnels underground.
I go up to get lost in them-
where the lights are long and chilly;
where my thinking goes Pacific;
where I struggle with specifics.
Satin
I am the beautiful woman
Oven’s Vestal Virgin
Refrigerator’s Eve
Dishwasher’s Pandora
Where marble tile
Is mirror to my form,
There I am the she-cook
Counter top cutter
(sleek granite, slick sparklers)
My napkins are silk
As I, to touch, am satin
No man but must be golden
Marked, as my gold plate,
Teeth sunk into the pate.
Watch Aaron Belz read poetry.
Political Philosophy of A Child Prodigy
With thanks to R. Niebuhr and co.
I am facing the ontological looking glass.
In its presence I propose new means and ways.
Is the overtone lucid?
The just society wells up from the swaraj of the soul.
Bad Lady
I hate hiding in kitchens;
I hate kitsch: she is hot.
Looks in my eye, pries
for a soul: I think Souldigger! I think
about internships she mentions
money, vacations, smokes
two smokes to my drag,
teases smoke from an eye,
winks, whips hair, eyes soul;
I hate that kitsch. Soul’s fine though.
Might get cancer though. I snigger.
Standing and Pacing
I prop my head on a tuft of grass growing
At the base of a fence post.
Notice the nails pull from the wood
In weather that’s wet or cool
And leave the cross beams dangling and warped.
In the evening a small bird flies back
And forth, stuck in the loft.
Swallows dip in and out without
Hesitation, building
Nests of hay-straws, regurgitating
And fostering the young.
Inside is refuge and the trap.
Look here, and divine with your only pair of eyes,
Urim and thummim of the gentiles.
You will know it well if you live nearby.
Look here, the small bird tucks and dives
Out the window, under the crossbeam
Into the pines.
DMB
The Caves in Lascaux
On a rain-spent Monday
he went to the movies at theater Paradiso,
Screen 13, to your right,
until the silver screen froze
and blacked out
at the moment of heavy touching.
Great movie, yelled D7.
The darkness in the room
had made that man brave,
safe from himself in this group of strangers
to project a primal sound for the briefest moment
until the projector itself, Kubric-like,
clicked back on,
a point and counterpoint kind of thing
each like the thing
in southern France,
where the white canvas
returned the lovers—
tender now, after the fact,
and he sat there dimly
in a bloom of screen light.
CM
Third Cardinal 