May 2012
31 posts
3 tags
Strange Sea
Implausible fish bloom in the depths, mercurial flowers light up the coast; I know red and yellow, the other colors,—
but the sea, det granna granna havet, that’s most dangerous to look at. What name is there for the color that arouses this thirst, which says, the saga can happen, even to you—
—Edith...
1 tag
“O, no iron, o Rio, no
red rum murder;
in moon: no omni
devil-lived
derision;...”
– Lydia Tomkiw, “Six of Ox Is”
1 tag
Graham Foust, "Clouds"
Such things as laws fall on us— soft programs, impossible models
unlocked into air. There are nameless shapes. There are tears of understanding.
“Here, catch.” Not a map in the world.
—Necessary Stranger; Flood Editions, 2007
2 tags
Vigils
I
This is luminous repose, neither fever nor languor, in a bed or a meadow. This is the friend, neither cool nor importunate. Friend. This is the loved one, neither tormentor nor tormented. Loved one. Air and world, in no way sought for. Life. —So it was this? —And the dream comes on.
II
Light reverts, over the central joist. From the two ends...
1 tag
Graham Foust, "Sob Poem"
Grief that we should be this. I don’t hate you, broken gift.
The revolution, too, is sad, jealous with and of its growth.
Whole buildings are devoted to particular bones.
*
Start-to-crying’s a wire from the mind to nowhere.
Don’t just say there—signify something. The leaves are on their shadows.
So give down your feather- weight rage.
—Necessary Stranger; Flood...
2 tags
“World was in the face of the beloved—,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:...”
– Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell), “World Was in the Face of the Beloved”
1 tag
Graham Foust, "Commercial"
Are you touched like a drum
or in a corner cutting dust
Are you cranked across the sky
Are you you there
—Necessary Stranger; Flood Editions, 2007
1 tag
Graham Foust, "Country and Western"
The stars
here are hammering the long-abandoned dancehall,
its floor adrift with ceiling, glass,
appliances, and leaves. Take me apart
into my animal, darling.
I am not safe to take apart.
I will sleep with you to breathe.
—Necessary Stranger; Flood Editions, 2007
1 tag
Graham Foust, "Number One Hit Song"
The above is leaf-math, a high block of cottonwood.
I am for volume. I am for tubes in and out of the sick.
If heaven were only where only you could hurt you,
I would touch its dead and broadcast their entire range of breakage.
I would breathe to within a skin’s-width of my sleep.
I would make a little nimbus there, a clear heart for moths to toss against.
Late and unancient, inexact...
1 tag
the cinnamon peeler's wife: Palindrome, Lisel... →
clavicola:
There is less difficulty — indeed, no logical difficulty at all — in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which times goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other … Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
— Martin...
1 tag
Graham Foust, "Just a Voice"
I could not be famous to this place.
Pale with light, I think here—
one eye small, the other swollen—
and I look: you’re always walking. Your shadow
is a sky. You are why
I say entire life, entire world.
—Necessary Strangers; Flood Editions, 2007
2 tags
“She’s taken to sleeping late.
Only recently have I come to stare
on her as...”
– Carl Adamshick, “The Mathematician”
1 tag
1 tag
Sharing Poetry: Albert Goldbarth, "The Sciences... →
sharingpoetry:
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you’re tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance inside themselves without you. Go to sleep. Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch by inch America is giving itself to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness lap at your sides. Give darkness an...
1 tag
Laure-Anne Bosselaar, "Unable to find"
the right way to get out of bed, we watch the shades cut down into thin slices, waver a while, shoulder to shoulder, then join, lazy. Let’s leave this room now: it’s given us all it can, let’s go—it’s Sunday—have breakfast out, find a table for two: two eggs, two toast, two coffees—black. No, nothing plain: latté. We’ll read the...
2 tags
“Upon Kissing You After You Vomited.
Upon Walking You Home and You Pissing
in...”
– James Shea, “Haiku” (via The Paris Review Daily)
2 tags
from Deaf Republic: 4
“You must speak not only of great devastation but of women kissing in the yellow grass!”
I heard this not from a philosopher but from my brother Tony
who could do four haircuts in thirteen minutes, his eyes closed, reciting our National Anthem to the mirror.
“You must drink cucumber vodka and naked sing all night Unite women and boys of the...
2 tags
“I’d like to cap this pen, lock the drawers,
and take my coat off the chair. I’d...”
– Rob Griffith, “Disappearing” (via The Rumpus)
1 tag
“On the beach, close to sunset, a dog runs
toward us fast, agitated, perhaps...”
– Elizabeth Alexander, “Stray” (via Read a Little Poetry)
1 tag
“He offers, between planes,
to buy me a drink. I’ve never talked
to a fireman...”
– Tess Gallagher, “Conversation with a Fireman from Brooklyn” (via Read a Little Poetry)
1 tag
“Water, bone, bed, bedrock—
whatever is underneath, below what’s below....”
– Don Colburn, “There” (via Read a Little Poetry)
2 tags
“He thinks that time will heal. But this is fable.
He tries to call her friends....”
– Todd Outcalt, “On the First Anniversary of His Wife’s Death”
2 tags
Campbell McGrath, "Villanelle"
Bouncing along like a punch-drunk bell, its Provençal shoes too tight for English feet, the villanelle is a form from hell.
Balletic as a tapir, strong as a gazelle, strict rhyme and formal meter keep a beat as tiresome as a punch-drunk bell-
hop talking hip hop at the IHOP—no substitutions on menu items, no fries with the chimichanga, no extra syrup—what the hell
was that? Where...
2 tags
Philip Appleman, "Arts & Sciences"
Everyone carries around in the back of his mind the wreck of a thing he calls his education. —Stephen Leacock
SOLID GEOMETRY
Here’s a nice thought we can save: The luckiest thing about sex Is: you happen to be so concave In the very place I’m convex.
PHILOSOPHY: THOMAS HOBBES
Better at thinking than loving, He deserved his wife’s retort: On their wedding...
2 tags
Wendy Videlock, "What Humans Do"
The candlelit after-dinner careful screw,
the under-the-moon shooby doo be doo groove,
the from behind, the sixty-nine, the is there time,
the I need wine, the twisted talking dirty grind,
the Erica Jong zipless screw, the I-got-somethin’-
to-prove ruse, the primal bang, the power game,
the long play, the itchy-ish, sudden-ish roll in the hay,
the take me away, the once a month...
2 tags
“I go to sleep and wake up
different. You make a lengthy
drive across Iowa to...”
– wendy xu, it’s almost my birthday don’t tell anyone (via grammatolatry)
2 tags
“The first piece of skin came off slowly. Underneath, I was many shades.
You...”
– Sarah Rose Etter, “Skin Roast” (decomP)
1 tag
Arkaye Kierulf, "Textbook Statistics"
On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die. So we’re ahead by 3.22, which is good, I think.
The average person will spend two weeks in his life waiting for the traffic light to change.
Pubescent girls wait two to four years for the tender lumps under their nipples to grow.
So the average adult has over 1,460 dreams a year, laughs 15 times a day. Children, 385 more times.
So...
1 tag
Arkaye Kierulf, "The End"
You must have felt it working in your bones. It’s begun: The papers print the same stories over and over, and have you checked
the obituaries? Already, nobody remembers
how their first kiss went. The phone keeps ringing and ringing when nobody’s home. Between our skins is a necessary friction
that separates us forever. Look: space. Somewhere, a lost key. It’s begun: What was...
1 tag
this room and everything in it: Directions for... →
rabbit-light:
Line to be sewn into a skirt hem held in my mouth ever since the unraveling Line beneath a bridge for years without hope I stretched my arms into the river searching for you Line to be sent to the cornfield history is a hallway of leaves. Line written for electric wires your voice inside the no history, sitting still Line for future people inside the work, only my empty teeth Line...
1 tag
“It makes so little difference, at so much more
Than seventy, where one looks,...”
– Wallace Stevens, “Long and Sluggish Lines”
April 2012
30 posts
1 tag
1 tag
“One failure on
Top of another”
–
A. R. Ammons, “Their Sex Life” (via Read a Little Poetry)
2 tags
“I have defeated weather. My sweat
beginning to choke some strangers, my sweat...”
– Drew Kalbach, from “Distance: Bound and Gagged but Still Enjoyable” (Birdfeast, Winter 2012)
1 tag
so much joy it hurts: The Mail Order Bride... →
kathleenjoy:
Mother he is A gentleman of honor he is A builder of ships My hands have gone Coarse, upholstered in Orchard, mending, churn My corset has Collapsed, spider heap I freckle, I lengthen, I watch Other wives, the sweep Of their skirts, their flocking I am compassless, astir, A map trembling Mother I’ve grown Taller I’ve let down my hems I am fruit-stained Mornings, my harvest: golden...
2 tags
Sappho, fr. 188
mythweaver
—tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002)
“‘mythweaver: a word ascribed to Sappho by Maximus of Tyre, who says: Sokrates calls Eros ‘sophist,’ Sappho aclls him ‘mythweaver.’ —Orations 18.9 Mythweaver might also be rendered ‘teller of...
2 tags
“I might go”
–
Sappho, fr. 182 (tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho [Vintage, 2002])
2 tags
“Moon has set
and Pleiades: middle
night, the hour goes by,
alone I lie.”
– Sappho, fr. 168B (tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho [Vintage, 2002])
2 tags
“with what eyes?”
–
Sappho, fr. 162 (tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho [Vintage, 2002])
2 tags
Sappho, fr. 149
when all night long it pulls them down
—tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002)
2 tags
Sappho, fr. 147
someone will remember us I say even in another time
—tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002)
2 tags
“neither for me honey nor the honey bee”
–
Sappho, fr. 146 (tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho [Vintage, 2002])
2 tags
“do not move stones”
–
Sappho, fr. 145 (tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho [Vintage, 2002])
2 tags
“stand to face me beloved
and open out the grace of your eyes”
– Sappho, fr. 138 (tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho [Vintage, 2002])
2 tags
Sappho, fr. 137
I want to say something but shame prevents me
yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but rather you would speak about what is just
—tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002)
“Aristotle cites these verses in a discussion of shame… The word...
2 tags
“Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me—
sweetbitter unmanageable...”
– Sappho, fr. 130 (tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho [Vintage, 2002])
2 tags
Sappho, fr. 129
fr. 129A
but me you have forgotten
fr. 129B
or you love some man more than me
—tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002)
2 tags
Sappho, fr. 105A
as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot— no, not forgot: were unable to reach
—tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002)
“self-correction emphasizes desire’s infinite deferral.” —Carson’s note
2 tags
Sappho, fr. 88B
]me ]
] ]you ]
] shall love ]
] ]
—tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002)
2 tags
Sappho, fr. 88A
]
]in front ]toward ]loosen
]you would be willing ]slight ]to be carried
]someone ]more sweetly ]and you yourself know
]forgot ] ]someone would say
]and yes I ]as long as there is in me ]will be a care
]I say I have been a strong lover ] ]painful
]bitter ] ]and know this
]whatever you ]I shall love ]
]for ]of weapons ]
—tr. Anne Carson; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage,...