ghost moon

It's on the way, I tell you I smelled the mud

the melt, the thaw. Spring is out there

tonight behind the moon. Go now.

In the Room of Glass Breasts

By Brenda Hillman

Around each word we're hearing,
there spins an original flame;
the unborn wait in a circle of commas,
upright robins wheel to Wheeler
& termites with arms in their heads
dig under the chairs—

It is impossible to describe the world;
that's why you get so sleepy listening to poetry.
The writer skates but spring takes
the gold (ooo don't let her fall in sequins)—dusk
buzzes in its meaning kit...

maybe you drank too much but that's not it:
the sexy cadence puzzled everyone.
You were drawn to poetry by something nothing
satisfies but poetry: boundless sensation,
an abstract tone—
then one day, two normal words
had made you weep: Unreal...City.... Not
mostly; mostly they didn't make you weep, but still:
Unreal... (then that big pause:)...
City.... Look at that slumped
italic guy over there, waiting to be in a stanza:
Sat low our lord of literature
for he was very tired—

Outside the room, the spell ends,
the vowel of an owl/the owl of a vowel
dives onto a warm body, the ruined gardens
of the state, tended by the great dead—
You were called by a silence you can't understand.
You're grown up now. You can read all night
if you want in the bride's bed—

Much Madness

The Woodmans

I will be seeing this film.

MARWENCOL

The brain is on my mind. Trauma and otherwise.

Saw this movie coincidently last night. Go see it.

Netflix it if possible or whatever. Weirdly wonderful.

Tucson/my brother's brain

The past few days I've been thinking alot about Tucson,

the city where my grandparents, cousins

and other family have lived.

About the saguaro cactus, Mt. Lemmon hummingbirds

and the White Dove of the Desert,

Mission San Xavier del Bac. My grandfather sketched

and painted the church throughout his life.

My grandmother's piano music, the quaver of her voice

as she sang Alice Blue Gown. Her guest room where I

stayed for awhile after leaving college.

The bar downtown where my cowboy uncle

treated me and my friend to whiskey shots.

The Medical Center, where my brother's

life was saved after the accident

that left part of his brain on a pavement

outside the university's football stadium.

Perhaps it's Tucson that bears some

responsibility for my turning to poetry.

After my brother's accident, I struggled

with the idea of plot.

When the fraternity brothers overstuffed

their cannon at game's end so that it

exploded and shattered, shrapnel

tearing into my brother's brain,

the randomness/ its aftermath/ left me unable

to see story. The construction of a novel,

which I'd thought a calling, seemed impossible.

Then stumbling into poetry, the comfort/excitement

in poets like Olds and Graham.

Why worry about storyline, character development,

cause-effect. Poems could be a container

for the non sequitur fragment,

the fracturing of narrative and family.

How incredible to shed those constraints,

which I wasn't much good at anyway.

My ties to the city are mostly gone,

as relatives have died or moved. I haven't visited

Tucson in years. The last time was with my own

young family. There were bees and big dogs

at my aunt's house. My grandmother sang

to us. The downtown was faded. New

developments and mini malls

sprawling/crowding the cactus, coyotes and

road runners. From Tucson, we headed north

to Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, the Painted

Desert and petrified forest, to Flagstaff and

Lake Powell, and Sedona. We stopped at Orabi

where I bought a pair of silver earrings that had

chips of coral in their watery design.

This isn't in order. I don't recall the map

or how we drove. The kids were in the back

of the small rental separated

by a cooler of food and we drove through high

desert country, went fishing and hiking,

spit into the Grand Canyon, headed back

to Tucson before flying east.

I'm not saying anything about the shooter

and what he did and Tucson and I'm not

connecting my brother's accident

to why I write poetry, which is as much

about lack of endurance as it

is about Tucson or the ocean and how

I'm distractable. Plus I like words more

than sentences sometimes.

There's no narrative thread here.

You know that.

kingdom of the invisible

I've been thinking about this story, listening

to Cynthia Ozick read it, pondering how to sink

beneath the crust of the visible, spreading out

some plans for the new year all over the floor,

preparing to assemble.

Listen to In the Reign of Harad IV

And happy new year.

white out

how the snow looks like chalk marks

against the slate night as I shovel

foolishly/joyfully into the wind

merry

Gone but not forgotten...Coney Island's boardwalk.

Some photos from last year.

It's the holidays of course.

Food, family: good stuff.

Merry New Year, Happy Xmas!

Long Night Moon

or Moon Before Yule

or crumpled moon

(To Rebecca who comes up with much

better names for the full moon)