ancient

Spent a rainy Saturday wandering among ancient Greek and Roman artifacts with W & S. The Metropolitan Museum was packed. We looked and talked. It was a good good day. Later I thought of this poem.

          Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head 
with eyes like ripening fruit.  And yet his torso 
is still suffused with brilliance from inside, 
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power.  Otherwise 
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs 
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced 
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders 
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself, 
burst like a star: for here there is no place 
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Marie Rilke, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

away

Happy Molly Bloom's Day

and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

nature

A POSITION AT THE UNIVERSITY

 By LYDIA DAVIS

I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I

think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise

when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for

instance that I have a position at the university: the

fact that I have a position at the university will appear

to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a

position at the university. But then I have to admit,

with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a

position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps

I really am the sort of person you imagine when you

hear that a person has a position at the university. But,

on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person

I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at

the university.  Then I see what the problem is: when

others describe me this way, they appear to describe

me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe

me completely, and a complete description of me

would include truths that seem quite incompatible with

the fact that I have a position at the university.

NB: I don't in fact have a position at a university, well, maybe sometimes, in that I teach every other semester or so, on occasion, a writing course so does this make me someone with a position at a university because in fact it is a university and I do on occasion teach there so perhaps I am, like the prose poem character, a person with a position at a university although my position comes and goes but perhaps that doesn't matter in the definition of a person with a position at a university. Indeed, I could be considered by some such a person and this is what happens when you run and listen to poetry and poets talking about poems you come back and write stuff like this.  I like the poem though because it pokes fun at people with positions in the university as well as people without positions in the university.

more

Because these will be gone soon, ruined

by the wet weather and because then their

smell will be gone and the honeysuckle

will soon follow, the days to grow shorter

and I can already sense the end of summer,

saying the word

August today was wrong.

Field of Vision

And if the bee, half-drunk

on the nectar of the columbine,

could think of the dying queen, the buzz

of chaos in the hive, the agitation

of the workers in their cells, the veiled

figure come again to rob the combs --

then would the summer fields

grow still, the hum of propagation

cease, the flowers spread

bright petals to no avail -- as if

a plug were drawn from a socket

in the sun, the light that flowed into

the growing field would fail;

for how should the bee make honey then,

afraid to look, afraid to look away?

By Eleanor Wilner

from her book The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

PS You should check out qarrtsiluni. 

Some pretty good reading. Go there now.

list

I know, I know. I shouldn't write about wild roses, much less 

honeysuckle. Aren't we so over roses and honeysuckle? 

But when I run their scent gets me high.  

Especially in this morning's humidity. Drunk on flower scent. 

All along the roads that are part of my loop. 

This won't last. I'm not complaining. 

Summer reading is on my mind. A partial list:

Song of Myself

Biography of Whitman

Anthology of contemporary poems inspired by Whitman

(In preparation for fall exhibition at the Museum where I work)

Bosworth"s biography of Diane Arbus

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

I think these will get me some mileage. There are more.  

economics

The new qarrtsiluni is up.

Take a gander.

Or more.

more

Twinned

To exist wholly in another, seamless,
mirrored. Think of the hive,

at each turn we find ourselves, not
a version, not a replica,
but our whole selves. Love,

you claim, comes close to this,
no space,

between your words, a hand

over the other's heart. How do you live
with this distance? I have you, she
thinks, or, I know you,

but she can never say, I am you.

Nick Flynn
(from Blind Huber)

reading

Swarm

When you see us swarm--rustle of

wingbeat, collapsed air--your mind
tries to make us one, a common

intelligence, a single spirit un-
tethered. You imagine us merely
searching out the next

vessel, anything

that could contain us, as if the hive
were just another jar. You try

to hold the ending, this
unspooling, make it either

zero or many, lack

or flurry. I was born
you begin, & already each word
makes you smaller. Look at this field--

Cosmos. Lungwort. Utter each
& break

into a thousand versions of yourself.

You can't tell your stories fast enough.
The answer is not one, but also

not two.

Nick Flynn
( from Blind Huber)

scale

as in an economy of

The first week or so of submissions for the upcoming issue on "economy" for qarrtsiluni has offered up a range of work -- from flash fiction to photography. And I've been reading and grading papers and portfolios -- so my eyes are watery with words.  Plus I decided to look at Nick Flynn's collection Blind Huber for a way into a project of poems I started during the days of napowrimo. His is a book of poems on bees and a blind 19th century expert. I'd read it and heard him read from it years ago, then it occured to me that book could offer a path into the poems I drafted. 

Here's a poem selected as one of the Discovery winners. 

Repercussions of the Current Import/Export Ratio

      By Jynne Dilling Martin

They smuggled turnip seeds into the new world by

sewing them in a hem. Welcome, the customs official said.

There is a mystery about people when they leave us: how does a

skipped stone pick the moment to sink?

A donkey drags a plow through the dirt. Later in life at the circus he

will learn to do mathematics with his hoof,

stomp out answers to questions of addition and subtraction,

astonish crowds with his understanding of these problems.  I draw

images of who I used to be and drown them in the lake;

I bind them to rocks to prevent them from ever resurfacing.

The customs official sinks crates of contraband into the sea

and wonders where each bullet might have been bound;

the fireworks he hides and explodes the following summer,

his face becoming the strangest colors beneath the bursts.

The snake crawling out of her skin pulls it inside out

like a nylon stocking: I wonder who would recognize me now.

Sometimes seeds lodge deep in clothing and years later sprout

out of gravesites and dresser drawers, turnips for lunch,

turnips for soups, turnips for dinner. I asked the donkey the odds

you'll ever come back. I waited for his leg to lift.

submit

the port of diminishing returns -- Miranda Lake


Send your poems, prose, photos, videos
etc. to the upcoming qarrtsiluni issue:

ECONOMY
Economy has its roots in Greek — oikos and nomos — meaning the principles necessary to maintain the household. It’s a thoughtful word. The study of economics, until the 18th century, was a branch of philosophy.

And it’s the word of the moment. It dominates the evening news. It’s determining how we spend or save; whether we remain in our homes, keep our jobs. It has governments around the globe cutting, bailing and re-thinking spending plans. It’s full of associations: think Wall Street bull or bear or greed. Think sub prime mortgage. Then there’s the technical jargon: quantitative easing, collateralized debt obligation and the fallacy of composition all seem ready for metaphor.

With this in mind, we urge you to think broadly, associatively and imaginatively about this touchstone word. Consider economy of movement, expression or effort. Think fuel, cash or gift economy. In your investigation, remember the epigram and the epitaph, both concerned with the economics of composition. Think about how the subject might inform style, as well as content.

However, don’t be burdened by the word’s current negative connotations. For Hannah More, a 19th century British religious writer and philanthropist, the word resounded with hope. She described “the economy of the heart, which saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.”

I'm co-editing with Anna Dickie.