elegy

Georgia O'Keefe's Sky Above Clouds

How Beautiful

A personal lens: glass bending rays

That gave one that day's news

Saying each and every day,

Just remember you are standing

On a planet that's evolving.

How beautiful, she thought, what distance does

For water, the view from above or afar.

In last night's dream, they were back again

At the beginning. She was a child

And he was a child.

A plane lit down and left her there.

Cold whitening the white sky whiter.

Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world

To be a sea.

By Mary Jo Bang

from Elegy

Excerpt from Susan Tichy's latest, Bone Pagoda, 

a beautiful, harsh book from Ahsahta Press. 

Corridor

What O'Keefe said in paint is that light lays hands on us

Not that color is event, but the weight of pure sensation

So rubble, when you touch it, could be absolute blue

Otherwise the word remains transparent

As when critics said the poet

Must be equal to what she has seen

An umbrella closes suddenly in the middle of the block

And a forest is not tableau it is a forest

When the hospital corridors ran with blood

They  said think of another image, that one's old

***************

Here's what O'Keefe said about bones--

I was most interested in the holes in the bones--

what I saw through them--

particularly the blue

from holding them up in the sun 

against the sky.

just say no

no na po wri mo for me

Willow in Spring Wind: A Showing

Pointless homesickness. Pointless shudderings.

Wind now clockwise: surrendering this way.

Wind now counter: surrendering that.

Wide tree with its good throat up from the dark

flinging forth embroiderings of inaudibles,

limbs jerked like a cough -- then like a credo, flung --

then broken oars; then oars not broken at all but thrumming in

unison into

the open sea of my

watching.

Clasp me, trellis of glancings,

delicatest machine--

body of the absconding god--

replacing something (I know not what)--

undulating, muttering liqudly...

Is it my glance or is it the willow kneeling wildly now

as if looking for corpses,

dragging its alphabet of buds all along the gravelly walk--

scraping -- ripping -- along the seemingly insatiable

hardness of gravel? Also the limestone wall they slap...

Where is the sharp edge that we seek?  Where

                                 the open mouth? --

the true roughness -- halo distended --

glittering with exaggeration --

dazzling the still philosophies --

by Jorie Graham

swamp pearls

Tromping in underbrush picking my way through skunk cabbage I stumbled on islands of pea green squishiness, where tadpole eggs gestate, about to break out, greenness in general being desperate here for rejuvenation. Strangelets, these beads of life, like the offspring of protons. Go ahead, consummate. 

--what she dreamed of was disappearing into the seen

writes Jorie Graham in "Orpheus and Eurydice" and it's that time of the year, the in between, just before he looks back, in between the before and the after, before the turning. I smell it when I run.  I'm on my way there.

Croon

Finally tonight I heard them -- the tree frogs. An essential embodied sound. Don't you know we have them. Sounds as much a part of us as heartbeat and pulse. There are others, but tree frog croon is deep. Like the hymns we sang every morning at school. Or muffled voices rising from the kitchen. The wind through the crack in a pane. When I hear the peepers it's time to smell mud, to dig, to quit your tent. 

What are your embodied sounds?

sprung

The Woman Who Loved Worms

(from a Japanese legend)

Disdaining butterflies

as frivolous,

she puttered with caterpillars,

and wore a coarse kimono,

crinkled and loose at the neck.

Refused to tweeze her brows

to crescents,

and scowled beneath dark bands

of caterpillar fur.

Even the stationery

on which she scrawled

unkempt calligraphy,

started the jade-inlaid

indolent ladies,

whom she despised

like the butterflies

wafting kimono sleeves

through senseless poems

about moonsets and peonies;

popular rot of the times.

No, she loved worms,

blackening the moon of her nails

with mud and slugs,

root gnawing grubs

and the wing case of beetles.

And crouched in the garden,

tugging at her unpinned hair,

weevils queing across her bare

and unbound feet.

Swift as wasps, the years.

Midge, tick and maggot words

crowded her haikus

and lines on her skin turned her old,

thin as a spinster cricket.

Noon in the snow pavilion,

gulping heated sake

she recalled Lord Unamuro,

preposterous toad

squatting by the teatray,

proposing with conditions

a suitable marriage.

Ha! She stoned imaginary butterflies,

and pinching dirt,

crawled to death's cocoon

dragging a moth to inspect

in the long afternoon.

Colette Inez

rush

threshold

yes it's nearly here or will be and i will too be done with words like freeze and beat and onto words like fern and swoon which are nearly here even though i went over board there with ice and melt but the air forced itself on me this morning and i had to stop from diving into the melt and thaw no matter how cold to open to separate which is why words like chaff and pleat will soon demand my attention

red wing black bird sighting

Undid in the Land of Undone

All the things I wanted to do and didn't

took so long.

It was years of not doing.

You can make an allusion here to Penelope,

if you want.

See her up there in that high room undoing her art?

But enough about what she didn't do --

not doing

was what she did.  Plucking out

the thread of intimacy in the frame.

So let's make a toast to the long art

of lingering. We say the cake is done,

but what exactly did the cake do?

The things undid

in the land of undone call to us

in the flames. What I didn't do took

an eternity--

and it wasn't for lack of trying.

Lee Upton

circle bound

Snow fall/ house bound/ mind stuck -- 

spondaic phrases tromping about in my wintered brain, which is now officially done with snow scenes (we'll see). But the snow has provided time to finish The Sound and the Fury. To think as well about how, in previous readings, Benjy's section grabbed so much of my imagination and memory that I had hardly recalled the obnoxious Jason.  Perhaps there was something new and daring (to the teenage reader at least) about that first narrative, an introduction to the idea of stream of consciousness. Imitation of that style was definitely something I recall attempting. So this is the gift of re-reading. I recall hearing that the great New Yorker magazine writer Joseph Mitchell read Joyce's Ulysses once a year. How much he must have learned returning to that epic annually! An ongoing conversation with the self, with the book's characters and their travels and travails. 

But do you sacrifice reading other books in taking on such a burden? What gets crossed off the list? What book would you read once a year?