Silhouettes

Alone in your room I touch
panties drying on the heater,
think about your hands on my
hands on your hips. I open your
medicine cabinet, count bottles
of fingernail polish, look at
rings nestled in the corner
quiet like pebbles. The pictures
of your friends in the kitchen,
all in soft clothes, they smile easy.
Their hair tussled. Many people
love you. This makes me happy.
I want to love all the people
who love you. I want to give them
sweaters. I want to make you
laugh gently in front of them.
I want them to see you look
at me. I want to listen closely.
In your closet is a meteor
of clothes. I lie in your bed
and bite my nails. You'll never
find them. Your clothes meteor
is sexy. It makes your closet
feminine. Turns me on.
I don't like the taste
of your toothpaste. I will
still use it. I drink unfiltered
water from your tap. Lukewarm
tap water reminds me of you,
your apartment, morning sun
on your kitchen table, the
desperate space that enormous
table creates between us, ripening
fruit, an origami fortune
teller, a sculpture of a single wing, the setting
for the first time
I said I love you, to you.
The refrigerator motor kicks
on and the overhead light
flickers. I imagine your parted
lips under my thumb. I remember
sitting at that unforgivable
table, heartbroken, I couldn't reach
you, lips sealed, suffocating under
the burden of your insufferable charm.
Out the windows are hungry squirrels
and honking cars, empty
beer bottles, the cuffs to my
jeans wet and matted.
A siren is moving away
from us. A charm on your
necklace. An easel in an
art store, a running faucet,
a saucer of blueberries, slivered
light under a closed door,
the sound of handwriting, the allowance
of outside objects and inside
objects. a voice. This corner holds
me. This corner is infinite.

ER

This Way Out:

Catastrophe happens to you everyday.
12 dyed eggs roll out of the carton.
Whales can't hear your thoughts.
The rope that tethers you is made out of smoke.
Cleaning is impossible.
Riding a bus is the real blessing.
Evaporation is inevitable.
A ring is a straight line
that won't let go.
Another something disappears
but you don't know what.
You are the conductor of immediate space.
You raise your arm and acknowledge the shadows
but can't face the flame that casts you.

ER

Stretch

15 brown Victorian vases
lined up one afternoon
years before we met.
You asked for a motive
and I said,
causality is irrelevant
in poetry, I make
nations out of
hopeful green stuff
tire irons wait
their turn a catastrophe
E.D.'s quick calamity
a photograph of the aftermath
teaches me one way off the wall
you look at the same picture
and see my breath in roses
a wound watch a word
written is not the same word spoken
there are mines everywhere
we have to be careful but we aren't
sure why.

This isn't over.

After Bobby--

Poets
for Robert Dana

A bombed oration tickled me.
Clinked flutes doled out
pointed flirtations.
A contour of life, poetry,
something to shade a body in,
or certainly to illuminate
an otherwise dusty path.
We yowl into it, wait for our own voice.
We chisel ourselves
to death.
We write our way into a shaky grace.
We watch, we listen, we wait in
the corner of a gorgeous room.

ER

3.

I answered the phone
experienced deja vu
watched a squirrel chew
felt embarrassed
investigated you
listened to my name being spoken
held my breath
read a paragraph about forgivness
counted church bells
thought about strangers
rested my arm on a comforter
looked out a window
wanted you
saw the air's infinite allowances
asked for tea
braced my body
against no small impulses.

For You:

Hinge

Love is nothing on this earth
but a way to translate
my raised fists, drawn arrows
fitful tears, taut trigger
weak stomach, puffed pride
gaunt patience into the hushed
mouth that waits for you.

ER

My Latest Effort:

Age

Our coarse intentionality
weakened when the fireworks
reflect on the resting home
windows, my green explosion
reflects our best efforts
at youth--bent over a plastic
cafeteria tray, eating cold
peas, wheeled out of their
rooms to reflect on your red
explosion. Every time I look up
the gunpowder gets in my eyes.

ER

Take your pick:

Now Showing...

David Bates' "Anhinga"

It's small, but I love it, and it's the only image of it I could find online. Try to enjoy what you can make of it.


ER

Photograph, December:

The shade of the pill-
Ow changes over months.
It begins relaxed,
Blue-grey, a cool hint
At blooming.

Her hands shake at the possibility
Of my body. She holds her apron
Like a shield but when I reach
Out I find a rope. I pull her
In and we are bound.

The first time we kiss she
Is a ghost and I am a gambler.
We dream about vacations.
I speak when there’s nothing
To be said.

Pillows inflame, puff out
A little and the sun sets
Her bed ablaze. I watch
But can’t speak. I grit
Down hard on this desire

But I don’t know how
To stifle it. To be in love and
Miserable is the same as
Being in love and joyous.
She teaches me the truth
By saying nothing.


ER

A "Birthday" Present:

I wish you satisfaction, but cannot
find a box big enough so it lays
all over my floor and sighs.
I wish you joy and
that's what this flapping
noise is about. Hundreds of
wings stir the air and will not
be gift-wrapped. I got you
poetry so sloppy and wet
so nubile it needs a nursemaid
and shackles.
I wish you wishes of all sizes--
pick them up while they are hot
and you are young
enough to waste them.
I wish you peace but don't know
how to leave you alone, tell me
how does a sailor leave the sea?
She doesn't: the depths so-far un-
touched but loved, its swells the biography
of her life, its whimseys keeps her afloat.

ER

2.

Our skin pressed
together makes raw
material for words.
You find graphite
between the sheets.
I examine it--
you do the accepting.

1.

I watch the light
travel down you
as though it asked
permission, and you
gracious, benevolent,
gave it, now a fugue
of slivers in your eyes.

Before I run off to work:

Blueberry
It's our password.
No logo in the sky.
We are going to spill.


ER

Do go on:

"There was one book I read not only at the right age, but on the right afternoon, in the right place, at the right angle. I read The Waves on an island, on a plotless day, when I was twenty-two years old, sitting on a terrace from which I could see in the distance the ocean, and the horizon where it met the sky and the changing light that played there as the sun climbed to its zenith and descended again while I thumbed the pages and my blood pressure washed up and down with the words. The Waves is not one of my favorite books. But my memory of reading it is. I was very silly when I was young. I have that to be thankful for."

-Mary Ruefle, from "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World"

Yes, this is an interesting idea for me: having a favorite memory of reading a book, that might not necessarily be one of our favorite books. So often the experience of reading is tangled inextricably with the content of the text. So, I was trying to think of an experience of a book, which I loved, but the content of said book left something to be desired: Jack Kerouac's Satori in Paris.

Kerouac for me, like many young, red-blooded, hot-headed Americans, had seminal influence over me in my early twenties. On the Road, yes, I will get in this line, changed my life. It is my go-to read when my life is falling apart. It put me together, put me in a context, that of Ginsberg's "Angelheaded hipster searching for the starry dynamo," at exactly the right time, when I could appreciate being there. I love On the Road, and Kerouac, but did not love Satori in Paris, it was a sketch of a novel, one thin and lack-luster: after OTR and Dharma Bums, it falls frail. But the experience reading it was phenomenal because I took it with me to Paris.

I was 22 and "in love with my life" and I will hopefully always remember lying in bed, patio door ajar, sunny afternoon, sweet, unseasonably warm breeze toying with my feet, children running around in the playground below my window, hollering in French, did the air really smell like baguettes, or did I impose that? And I laid there for hours, read the whole book in (almost) one sitting. The book wasn't great, but that afternoon I felt alive in that great electric way we all feel from time to time, when we are in our early 20s or in another country or in love or writing a lot, or well, or well enough.

I showed you mine, now tell me yours: tell me about a time you read a book in which the experience was exhilarating, but the text was not the reason for the excitement:

And so:

Stranded

Our looking-in cultivates
Heroic moments.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait.
Apology is not the only
Missing piece—our histories
Unsettled. There are
Elixirs to consider.
Thumbs need hitching
If we’re gonna get out.

ER

And then there was:

Stranded

The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait.
Latitude is not the only
Missing piece—our histories
Unsettled. There are
Opposites to consider.
Thumbs need hitching
If we’re gonna get out.

ER

But oh, "opposites" is really only a place holder until something better comes along; aren't we all?

I'm still squinting at it, there will be touch-ups:

Stranded

The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait—
Gibbons move into place,
A sweet connection colors
The harness grazing face.
Latitude is not the only
Missing piece. There are
Impulses to consider.

ER

About Love:

"But as Thomas Merton said, one day you wake up and realize religion is ridiculous and that you will stick with it anyway. What love is ever any different?"

A Process:

On the composition of Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale:"

"Keats did not record these few hours in 'Ode to a Nightingale.' In the poem, the bird sings 'in some melodious plot / Of beechen green' (8-9), not in a plum-tree. The time is 'night' or 'midnight' (35, 56), not a morning after breakfast. The season is summer (10, 50), not spring. Keats' imagination transmutes what he experiences under the plum-tree. He acknowledges, for this reason, flying up to the bird 'on the viewless wings of Poesy' (33) and only returning to himself when his 'fancy' fails, its spell broken by a word, 'forlorn' (71-74).[...] Imagination ends the experience it initiated. At the word 'forlorn,' Keats comes 'back' to his 'sole self,' that is, the self left alone by its flying double. He becomes conscious of what he has experienced..." (Lancashire)

Or, so often, the act of writing a poem interrupts the poem being written. I can write a poem only when I got to this place, oh, on the left side of my head, three inches or so behind my eye (or so it feels afterwards) where poems, or the words for poems, are made, or are waiting. If I know I'm there I'm no longer there, then I'm in the front of my head. I can feel it afterward, when I read a line back that came from there I can recognize it as having come from that place in my brain--a line that doesn't sound like a poem, but belongs in one because it doesn't sound like a line in a poem. Then I have to get back there to write the next line, sometimes I get back there right away, sometimes I sit for a long time before I let me back in. Sometimes that waiting looks like me sitting in front or a blinking cursor. Sometimes I write through it and lines that want to be in poems, that sound like lines in poems and that's why they don't belong in one, try to sneak in undetected. Most times I catch them, lately, usually I am too tired of fighting with the poem and let in an impostor. But then it usually poisons the poem and I have to start again.

Take now for example, I wrote a "good" poem last night, and a "good" poem the night before, and right now I am letting a new "poem" settle. I wrote it, it is still hot, and has to cool for me to check it for impostors. Let's go see if it's ready...

...
...

...ok, I'm back. Verdict: an eight line poem is comprised of 5 lines of impostors and three real lines of poetry that are nearly ruined. An interesting turn of events: one of the impostors is made real by the deletion of the other 4:

The "Poem:"

The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
Or are filled up while they wait.
Loneliness fogs over me
My posture responds
Suspicions confirmed
Animals wait for the signal.

The Impostors:

Or are filled up while they wait.
Loneliness fogs over me
My posture responds
Suspicions confirmed
Animals wait for the signal.

The lines of poetry:

The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait

The "converted" impostor:

My posture responds

The new part of a poem:

The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
My posture responds

I remember "My posture responds" coming from that poetry place in my brain, but then impostors hitched their talons into the real line and muddled it. However, the word "responds" is setting off the alarms and sounding really "poemy" to me...

I won't here go into your affect on the poem, for "[t]o recreate the nightingale's song, we must listen in the context of human suffering." Your heart of course is the last thing to shape anything I write.

For You:

Sheltered Garden

I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.

Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest--
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.

I have had enough--
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.

O for some sharp swish of a branch--
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent--
only border on border of scented pinks.

Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light--
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?

Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit--
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
With a russet coat.

Or the melon--
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste--
it is better to taste of frost--
the exquisite frost--
than of wadding and of dead grass.

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves--
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince--
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.

O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.

H.D.

A Surprise for You:

Enjoy.

A Great Example of Ashbery:

Some Trees

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

Days and Nights:

“You, me, the broom, my writing, my typewriter,
Florence, the house, Katherine, everything.”

How to Start an Apology:

I am a coward
Too afraid to end this
Or you are in love
Too afraid to end this
We both are curious
You should let go
I should let go
We can pretend
We always pretend
Or feel too much
Or don’t speak
I say too much of the wrong things
We are bound by language
Do not translate
Want everything
Of each other
I fear you’ll discover me
Hiding between the lines
Yes, me, I am the pathetic one
Of course I love you
Want to tell you all the things
Choking me in my sleep
Of course I am selfish
Everyone is selfish
But I won’t burden you
With grand gestures
Or more weak secrets
Won’t trouble you
With more pretext, context, insufferable
Flight for security but here
I am, binding myself
Holding you back
Asking for signatures
Building sandcastles
Writing again
Always writing
Providing goblets and no tonics
Sending pictures and no captions
Of course I need you
But now is not a time or a place
It is a question
It is a position
It is a regret
None of us know
What we are doing
We are all scared
We are all slipping
But with you the slide
Is a dance
The dread is my body
Becoming weightless.