missing this

away

I know pretty pictures but it's nearly my birthday and it's playoff
season and all of a sudden all the leaves tumbled off branches
in wind andit smells like decay, which I don't mind in fact aside
from the smell of the ocean the scent of fall is one of my most
favorite, and I'm making soup for dinner and will probably go kick
some leaf piles later so there.
(I haven't really been away, just from here, but really
I've been around it's just that sometimes
I don't want to be here here.)

away

Miranda Lake

I'm off for a few days to write, visit, walk by some water,

look at my quote un quote manuscript, clear out a bit.

Here's a poem by Rusty Morrison from her book,

The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story, which uses

the language of the telegraph -- as in "stop" at 

the end of a line -- as a kind of structure for 

connection or maybe missed connections. 

I've just started to read it.

The effect is disarming, somewhat annoying as I imagine

is the intention. She just won an award from the academy

of american poets. The book is published by a press I

admire, Ahsahta, which makes really lovely books.

I think I'll add this to my book bag. 

(Of course blogger screws up line breaks in poems 

like this.)

please advise stop

like water-spiders on a pond the hours pass overhead stop

with each perfected dexterity I thin the surface that carries me stop

traces of an otherwise indiscernible consensus collect under my fingernails please

his face isn't lost to me but traveling now and mostly untended stop

hereafter wil I apply rules and avoid content stop

braid wildflower stems peeled of petals stop

scrub gently with a brush to relieve us of the historical present please

listen for the entire circumference of the screen door's arc but hear only it slap stop

even incoherent babbling is usually phonetically accurate please advise

Swimming

where I want to be


All Wet
by Marie Ponsot

Underwater, keeled in seas,
zinc the sacrificial anode gives
electrons up to save the sunk hull from salt.

The carving of salt water skirls out beaches
where each wave fall can push softly, a long curve in.

Rain widens the waterfall till the stream
slows, swells, winds up, and topples down
onto lilypads it presses forward on their stems.

Carp drowse among stems sunk in the park lake,
their flesh rich in heavy metals. Eat one and die.

A drip from the tap hits the metal sink
& splats into sunlight, cosmic,
a scatter of smaller drops.

One raindrop on a binocular lens,
and a spectrum haloes the far field.

Haloes dim the form they gild but
by its own edge each object celebrates
the remarkable world.

Personal computers make dry remarks, demanding:
Tea, wine, cups must leave the room.

We’re all the wine of something. His Dickens act,
her Wordsworth murmurs, expressed
juices still in ferment when their old children read.

Bones left after dinner simmer down into juices
to make a soup rich as respect or thrift.

As if making allowances
for the non-native limbs of swimmers,
water gives way as I spring into it.

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.