On being the snail

Libra Horoscope for week of July 19, 2007

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, born under the sign of Libra, has been described
by a fellow teacher as “a cross between a cloud, a snail, and a piece of heavy machinery—a true religious presence.” He translates his lofty visions into the most intimate and practical terms, even providing suggestions about how to get more spiritual inspiration out of breathing, eating and walking. Take a similar approach in the coming weeks, Libra. Bring heaven all the way down to earth. Make the smallest details of your life reflect your highest ideals.

summertime and the living

Night

The night is July, the aura is rain.
The bay is always at low tide.
Green slime covers the sand
Where herons stop, look and listen.
The sand is as thin as clay.

Men in the night
Leave their caravans and run
Across black grass
To the River Argideen
To claim a position for fishing
Like waiting at baggage claim.

The people in the temperance hall
Hold a dance that most of them watch
From their chairs bitterly.
They can see their shoes are history.

The world was remade before they died.

The herons on the Lee
Are slick with slime, fermenting.
Lots of money is exchanged
In the medieval town.
Beer is fomented in silver silos
And no fish swim. One day down
Carpe diem.
No one knows what's coming.

The nuclear weapons programs continue.
A boy in a trap drawn by an elegant horse
Trots through Clonakilty.
Men watch and women shop.
Organic food planted in the middle
Of gourmet olives and jellies.
Thanks and help
Are prayer words in fair trade and churches.

Just go in and have a drink at dark.
It's a kind of Sabbath.
In a public house you feel safe with the others.

By now you know the black river has fish
And flowers on it white and shaped
Like strawberry plants.
Two neon kingfishers speed by blue.

Everyone is there for everyone else's fun.
Those men in the night aren't so bad.

A body: this is what it feels
And this is what it feels like.

Sites of massacre and ashes, tin-topped rubble,
Porcelain ovens, jails, a waiting hospital.

Not when it's eternal low tide in a place outside
And birds drain the sand with their appetites.

Fanny Howe

No fireworks tonight

This white unswaying place

I'm sorry not to have written you sooner.
We are peculiar forms, like someone's old papers rifled quickly through
But not read before the burning.
How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a guardedness, expectant, steeply quarried,
The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and sharply gleaming.

How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
And I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so strongly
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.

By Laurie Sheck

I like short stories

A friend sent me this link.
It's Miranda July's website.

noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com

I think I will look for her book.
I liked her movie.

I want to read some short story collections this summer.
Every summer I make myself an unofficial summer reading list.
I guess that's left over from school days. I like to read big fat books in the summer, the kind that take up too much space in the already overstuffed beach bag, the kind that are good to read and read when you have a stretch of time--like at the beach. So what's on my list? A mixed bag. I'm just about finished with the first book, Elaine Scarry's "On Beauty." I'm still debating whether to dive into the second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography on Matisse. I read the first book 2 summers ago. If I decide to, then that could take a chunk of time. Also on the list is Beckett's "The Unnameable." I'm looking for wildness, strangeness. Or maybe "Molloy." I probably need to read a possible text book if I teach my grad class next year. And there are a few books of poetry, including one I'll be reviewing.
I recently heard Michael Silverblatt interview author Christine Schutt on Bookworm. Her short story collection "A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer," sounded interesting. Perhaps I'll dip into some essays. Jeff Wall's "Selected Essays and Interviews" is on a table nearby. Summer's hardly here and now it seems gone.

Heat

from Waterwork

by Sarah Riggs

There are whole swabs of pigment. Colors of skin bending and blending.
Skins not separate from bodies, bodies not separate from skin, and the eyes
set free from judging, the eyes in the body, and the pigments, the pigments
nestled in, drawn from within, drawn from without. The sun, the exposure,
the wind alters our skin. We change, our skin expands contracts stretches
sags, is peeled back, cut off, pierced, heals. Skin, every human has skin,
has color. There are no colors that you don't paint, there's hair in that pigment,
and nails, teeth, corpus, the pigments swirl touch breathe speak, not the
words but the blur. They're screaming, they're exalted, joy, joy in that not
judging, in that over there, and here, closer than here, farther than there.
There are no characters in your painting.

Summer

Spoon and Tree

What gladdens her is the spoon,
with its tiny saucer of remnants,
its slender shaft, scrubbed last—
and now the kitchen's clean.
Clean are the knives and forks
all akimbo in their drying cage
at the window. The spoon
leans alone toward light,
a backyard limb reflected
in its sunken belly, so a
liquid darkness tongues
its curves and bends
along its slender neck,
making the one tidying up blush
at this bed she's come upon—
refractive, gleaming, the old
dream of coupling
here portioned out
in such a strange
supper.

When the light is gone,
the immaculate house hushed,
she puts down her book
and returns, barefooted,
waking the wood planks
to the kitchen. The cupboard,
too, sighs, its ascending note
sliding wind-clean. And even
before shaking whole grains
into her midnight bowl,
she has reached out,
across the ticking, low-watt
world, her warm mouth
clamping itself wetly
around the cooled,
hard truth
of the spoon.

Sara London

Flowers and history and poetry

I noticed in the long time since my last post that some blogs have pictures of flowers-even gardens. So I'm adding these. The spring has been short here it seems. Snow in April, lots of rain, still some cool nights. Summer next week. School's out. Long days slipping by too fast.
And this poem.

Don't Write History as Poetry

Don't write history as poetry, because the weapon is
the historian. And the historian doesn't get fever
chills when he names his victims, and doesn't listen
to the guitar's rendition. And history is the dailiness
of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. "The
intelligent genius is the mighty one." And history
has no compassion that we can long for our
beginning, and no intention that we can know what's ahead
and what's behind ... and it has no rest stops
by the railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look
toward what time has done to us over there, and what
we've done to time. As if we were of it and outside it.
History is not logical or intuitive that we can break
what is left of our myth about happy times,
nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors
of judgment day. It is in us and outside us ... and a mad
repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder.
Aimlessly we make it and it makes us ... Perhaps
history wasn't born as we desired, because
the Human Being never existed?
philosophers and artists passed through there ...
and the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers
then passed through there ... and the poor believed
in sayings about paradise and waited there...
and gods came to rescue nature from our divinity
and passed through there. And history has no
time for contemplation, history has no mirror
and no bare face. It is unreal reality
or unfanciful fancy, so don't write it.
Don't write it, don't write it as poetry!
Mahmoud Darwish
translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

On Connections

Tomorrow I'll sit down and talk with another poet, Jill Magi, whose new book Threads has just been published by futurepoem. Our discussion is part of an interview for a journal I help edit. She's judging a contest of student work. I'm curious to hear about her process, particularly because she has successfully in this book, it seems to me, used words and visual images. Indeed, the book is described as a "hybrid work of poetry, prose and collage." This is so compelling. I consider myself inept in the making of visual images. In other words, drawing, painting, sculpting etc., while completely appealing, are talents I do not possess. (I'm not so bad in the cutting and pasting department.) Words are the way I make pictures, which lets me play with Horace's idea that painting resembles poetry. So I have many questions for Jill and the chance especially to discuss process and how she thinks about making a narrative or not. And what role collage plays in this making or unmaking. Also, the notion of history and memory. Hers plays out on a large political landscape because of the story of her grandparents and father and their life in Estonia. And autobiography too. She has elsewhere said some interesting things about the "I," a subject close to my heart.
Perhaps an excerpt from her book would be appropriate now.

from Threads

Jill Magi

Amber return, once fluid, hardened breath-trap.

Sap turns to stone as these sounds conjure whose memories?

Air pocket scarred with debris, a dictionary. His voice on tape translates

my flat speech:

too few vowels and endings that stop, closed in by consonants.

Flash card fossils. How to count, the days, the months,

I am a student, where is the bathroom, the night is long,

over the threshold, write me a letter.

Procrastination

Blush gives way to green finally in my neck of the woods and I should be doing a zillion other things on
the list. For various reasons, my zeal to plow through that list is a bit diminished today. I'd rather spend an hour looking out my desk window. I bet I'd see the maple tree leaves enacting their spring fling. The other day I decided I should create a flow chart for my life, a flow chart of what's to come. Is that possible -- to organize the barrage of the mundane with a chart? Well, there's Ashbery's effort in that regard, which I pulled off the bookshelf:

from Flow Chart: A Poem

Still in the published city but not yet
overtaken by a new form of despair, I ask
the diagram: is it the foretaste of pain
it might easily be? Or an emptiness
so sudden it leaves the girders
whanging in the absence of wind,
the sky milk-blue and astringent? We know life is so busy,
but a larger activity shrouds it, and this is something
we can never feel, except occasionally, in small signs
put up to warn us and as soon expunged, in part
or wholly.
Sad grows the river god as he oars past us
downstream without our knowing him: for if, he reasons,
he can be overlooked, then to know him would be to eat him,
ingest the name he carries through time to set down
finally, on a strand of rotted hulks. And those who sense something
squeamish in his arrival know enough not to look up
from the page they are reading, the plaited lines that extend
like a bronze chain into eternity.

Marjorie Perloff says the book-length poem "recalls Wordsworth's Prelude." Which I grabbed as well. Looking for what-something to rub off the malaise. I read over one of my favorite parts, about the dream by the sea--the Arab phantom who gives young William the stone and the shell. And this made me think about books of course, especially the one I'm reading called The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. On how we embue things with memory but they can only organize emptiness as Lacan wrote. Not that I've read him. He's quoted at length in this book, which also explores how the art we make, not exactly but somewhat, fills the void, creates another kind of thing/container through which to consider the emptiness. Kind of like Stevens' jar on the hill idea. But now it's time for the bus, time to leave the aery of desk and tree. Return to the list, the chart. The flow.

on May light

From Cole Swenson's
The Glass Age

A window is always relative to a body, and the body is never
repeated. Thus proliferates. Because every body involves a window
or windows, looking out on the world "at large," as they say, the
body is not single. And though painting was invented to correct
this, it has ended up accomplishing the opposite, making the eye
an errant thing, like that mode of traveling based on forgetting,
which we also call the body," so that these windows bring us back,
but not to us.