although

"Although the wind..."

By Izumi Shikibu

Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani

Although I've been quiet here, other places I've been not so quiet. Trying to listen and look and writing a lot. And trying to pay attention, even when there's bouncing from thing to event to moment. It is hot here after a cold spring. Why does the sudden, inevitable jump to heat wave catch us off guard? But that's not what I want to write about tonight. I've started other posts on other days. About process, about Lichtenstein. There's an exhibition of his sketches and collages, late stuff, at the museum where I work. It has me thinking about my writing process. Roy did stuff to shake up his process. He turned the canvas upside down. He cut and collaged brush strokes instead of painting them. So I was going to write about shake-ups. Then this afternoon my friend died. After fighting cancer for 4 years. She was young. With young kids. She was brave and determined. She liked to get to the heart of the matter.  She liked horses and skiing and books. Cancer is a sucky disease. That's all I can say.

quiet

Evening Prayers

I believe my sin

to be entirely common:

the request for help

masking request for favor

and the plea for pity

thinly veiled complaint.

So little at peace in the spring evening,

I pray for strength, for direction,

but I also ask to survive my illness

(the immediate one) -- never mind

anything in the future.

I make this a special point,

this unconcern for the future,

also the courage I will have acquired by then

to meet my suffering alone

but with heightened fortitude.

Tonight, in my unhappiness,

I wonder what qualities this presumes

in the one who listens.

And as the breeze stirs

the leaves of the little birch tree,

I construct a presence

wholly skeptical and wholly tender,

thus incapable of surprise.

I believe my sin is common, therefore

intended; I can feel

the leaves stir, sometimes

with words, sometimes without,

as though the highest form of pity

could be irony.

Bedtime, they whisper.

Time to begin lying.

-Louise Gluck

en titled

Possible next book titles!

My favorites in no particular order

Weeds in a Changing World

Reusing Old Graves

Waterproofing Your Child

People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How

  They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting

  Bystanders and What to Do About It

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

check check check it

A collaboration up at

qarrtsiluni

missing

photo by Ellen Kooi

Seeing Whales

You can go blind, waiting

Unbelievable quiet

except for their

soundings

Moving the sea around

Unbelievable quiet inside you, as they change

the face of water

The only other time I felt this still was watching Leif shoot up when

we were twelve

Sunlight all over his face

breaking

the surface of something

I couldn't see

You can wait your

whole life

*

The Himalayas are on the move, appearing and disappearing in the

snow in the Himalayas

Mahler

begins to fill

the half-dead auditorium

giant step by

giant step

The Colorado

The Snake

The Salmon

My grandfather walks across the front porch

spotted with cancer, smoking

a black cigar

The whales fold themselves back and back inside the long hallways of

salt

You have to stare back at the salt

the sliding mirrors

all day

just to see something

maybe

for the last time

*

By now they are asleep

some asleep 

on the bottom of the world

sucking the world in

and blowing it out

in wave-

lengths

Radiant ghosts

Leif laid his head back on a pillow and waited for all the blood inside him

to flush down

a hole

After seeing whales what do you see?

The hills behind the freeway

power lines

green, green

grass

the green sea

-Matthew Dickman

shoe thaw

Brett Dennen

light

"There is always color, it has yet to become light."

Pierre Bonnard

recitation

Kiki Smith, Getting the Bird Out

Do you memorize your own work? I mean when you participate in a reading? I don't. I know the poems pretty well, some almost by heart because I've revised them so often. But I have a script -- the poems themselves. I read with the pages in front of me for security. There's a lectern maybe. Or I have my notebook or my book, if that's what I'm reading from.

Over the weekend, I recited two of my poems as part of a performance of poems that were organically strung together in a kind of play. There were 14 poems in total, some read by actors, most recited by the poets who wrote them. All were written in response to contemporary works of art in an exhibition at a nearby museum.  

To memorize and recite one's work, I discovered, was quite different than reading it.  I had to lose the line breaks. An audience of non-poet types don't much care about ends of lines. It was hard to lose them. I like line breaks a lot. Maybe too much. I think about the words at the end of my lines, the sound, the air, the enjambment or not. Not that I emphasize the breaks as I read, but they are there and I hear the ghost of them. It was hard to let them go but once they fluttered away, other sounds emerged and then there was new air and I found another voice inside my poems.  Which may sound curious -- that whole thing about finding "your voice." But, that's not the voice I found. Hard to describe.

Which leads me in a round about way to Elizabeth Alexander and how she read her poem on that freezing inauguration day just a week ago.  I don't have anything extremely important or new to say. Just that as I recited my poems, I thought about how she sounded. How we get into a habit of sound, of speech patterns with our writing and reading -- the voice inside our heads that we hear when we read silently is how Tom Lux describes it in his poem. Breaking out of those grooves isn't so easy. I had some help from a theater person. I didn't want to get all performy. I wanted to recite my work in a real way, in my voice but from a deeper more resonant part of the body, the way you reach down a little deeper when you sing. I think that happened. 

poem

Knot Work

(After Ann Hamilton)

Cotton-knotted and witch-white, I'm woven

and worn, fingers thread bare from knot talk,

each plaiting a melody, how I weave a story --

hand-made and mended to the sure-footed--

my lace work a dance, its filaments link

] what's to eat-where's shirt-lunch-home [

form to form. I read knots to decipher

how words pleat like rain over avenue and field.

Forever weaving and unweaving, I study

light's texture in knuckle work: the felt,

the clenched, the cottony stress

of noun, the vagary of verb.

Word-filled, they chatter, their tangled syntax

] worm holes there are holes worm [

warping my knotty grammar,

my embroidered eloquence.

I'm wrought from not-talk, blah-blah

knit into a day's topography.

] feminine chit-chat [

O binary language, memory's ligature strewn

across a table, unmake and unknot 

me as darkness loosens its strands

and blue dawn wounds the sky.

] no worry     stitch in      time to tapestry [

O code of twist and fringe, you are sutured truth -- all lashed and looped

] cloth -- be still I'll talk [

and chattering like old rags.