full again

It's a bit too blurry the supermoon photo but you get the idea.
In other news I've assembled/perhaps finished at least for now
the MS. Work on it still to be done. Order. Sequence. Tweaks.
And of course the work of getting it actually published. Still.
The completion is something for now.

So this

I'm re-reading in that I'm returning to past places and here's
one in the outback of Montana.  Oh and then this happened
meaning a poem published, which is newsworthy.

You Take the Diaphragm Out and the Body Opens Like a Book

solstice

Summer Solstice

BY STACIE CASSARINO

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it’s you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

From Alice Oswald’s MEMORIAL: A Version of Homer’s Iliad

The first to die was PROTESILAUS

A focused man who hurried to darkness

With forty black ships leaving the land behind

Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs

Where the grass gives growth to everything

Pyrasus   Iton   Pteleus   Antron

He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashore

There was his house half-built

His wife rushed out clawing her face

Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother

Took over command but that was long ago

He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years

Like a wind-murmur

Begins a rumour of waves

One long note getting louder

The water breathes a deep sigh

Like a land-ripple

When the west wind runs through a field

Wishing and searching

Nothing to be found

The corn-stalks shake their green heads

The first to die from New York State was Petty Officer

3^rd Class Benjamin Johnson

Twenty-one of Rochester

Drowned in the Persian Gulf

When the ship they boarded

Which had been smuggling Iraqi oil sank

Michael J. Jakes   Scott N. Germosen   Peter Tycz

And more since 2001 some 297

And more nearly 7,000 women and men

Like a wind-murmur

Begins a rumour of waves

One long note getting louder

The water breathes a deep sigh

Like a land-ripple

When the west wind runs through a field

Wishing and searching

Nothing to be found

The corn-stalks shake their green heads

memorial

Of or pertaining to the memory

ruins

I spent some time today taking photographs
of an abandoned residential institution in upstate
New York. Closed in 1996. Overrun with graffiti.
Tangle of broken glass and sorrow. Ghosted.

Poem in my pocket today better late than well never?
I've been learning from the late Jake Adam York since last year.

Letter Hidden in a Letter to Cy Twombly

By Jake Adam York

I dreamed I was blind

            but could make a word

by curling a strand of hair

                        into letters,

one at a time. I prayed

            the scales would fall.

At night, I waited for the river’s

                        sentence to unfold,

a tale of snake handlers, the gift

            of all living tongues.

I could write with a tooth,

                        the pencil’s other end,

regardless of the day, could etch

            my poem, salt into windowglass.

Somewhere the lost boat’s gone

                        mineral, petrified

in starlight without a bone

            to autograph. Just

one letter in a strand of code.

                        Given the right oblivion,

one hand can remember another,

                        but tonight, the river

manages only the bark of leather

                        on stone, clap

of footpalms on the bank

            its one strand curling

a word no one’s slow enough

                        to read.

walking on ice

I went walking on the reservoir yesterday. The ice wasn't good
for skating. Bumps interspersed with patches of snow. There
were ice fisher-people types in the distance and lots of gray.
The fisher folks left behind their snow globes: beautiful
round holes drilled through the 10-inch thick ice. Like
looking into a telescope or microscope. Frozen worlds
of bubbles, circles of cold like tree rings. No fish.
While watching the endless Oscars I fiddled in iPhoto.
Such was the weekend.

Joan Mitchell, “La Grande Vallée XIV (For a Little While)”, 1983.

I've always loved this painting.  Here's a poem
from a while ago, published in qarrtsiluni.

After Joan Mitchell’s La Grande Vallee XIV

as if your blue black blur of brush
and paint can conjure swamp

or luminous maple bud,
tree frog croon

as if layers of saturation can restore
the vernal pool that was my all in all

as if your calligraphy of oil and wash
can contain jack-in-the-pulpit

early fern or tad pole swirl
as if the colors, oh your colors

Cezanne blue Van Gogh sun
flower yellow raging across three panels

as if for a while my rough
ecstasy hasn’t dulled to insight.

where

I've been here this week. Writing. With friends. Not a fancy place
but by the ocean. Every day it is there. For a walk or a look.
And not always wild. Horseshoe crabs littering the beach and
someone said it was molting season. I was molting too.
Shedding old visions of the sheaf of poems I'm making into a book.
Reading them over and over. Seeing it was good.
Into the Forest of Revise to clear and clean.
And a plan for what must be upon return to the Land of Work Etc.
The artist Ann Hamilton said, "Particularity
becomes abstraction." That's where I'm heading.