C offers wisdom in simplicity: “Why burden your burden,” indeed!
Waiting on the weather
report. Come dawn
we’ll know better
but for now it’s
unseasonably warm.
Which makes these words
unreasonably harsh.
Why burden your burden?
You sink stones in mud
to step on, a way across,
why be mean to your means,
unless you seek an end?
The Military Industrial Complex’s CPAs Never Sleep
We so seldom bury people at sea
in weighted shrouds,
preferring instead sealed
containers or ashes
mixed with concrete.
Little girls skip
down the street,
giggling, unaware of their
value on the open
market. Dollars, oil.
Weapons. All fungible.
On the forgotten shelf,
the avocado’s flesh
blackens inside
its withering armor.
How is too much
never enough?
Targets based on
possibilities, innuendo,
cost-benefit analysis:
three men and a camel,
wedding parties,
hospitals, homes.
When morning comes,
they’re still awake,
collating damage, counting
opportunities, massaging
sums, ignoring cost,
harvesting their dead fruit.
This first appeared here in September 2016.
A brief yet detailed review of the Edward Hirsch book I posted about yesterday.
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If one were to judge solely by the mundane title, one might expect this to be a different book—i.e. more along the lines of “Poetry for Dummies.” That’s not what Hirsch is offering with his book. There’s plenty of opportunity to learn to differentiate pentameter from tetrameter or a lyric from an epic poem, but the book isn’t arranged according to such fundamentals. It might even take one a few pages (or chapters) to realize there is an organizing structure. But you’ll get there because of the author’s contagious passion for poetry and his presentation, and an analysis, of many beautiful poems by masters such as Keats, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Neruda, and many others–more ancient or modern and equally or less well-known. In the end, you’ll think…
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In a nod to National Poetry Month, the Poetry Foundation has posted the first chapter of Edward Hirsch’s superb How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. One of my favorite all-time reads. If you haven’t read this book, dip into the first chapter now.
Setting Fire to the Origami Crane (the one floating on Muscongus Bay) at Sunset
Who is to say which comes first, the flaming crane
or the sunset’s burst just over the horizon
and under the clouds? There are causes and causations,
an illness named bad air and another attributed to wolf
bites, neither accurate. There is the paraffin to melt,
and the folded paper resting comfortably nearby, with
a small, unopened tin of shoe polish and the sound of
tears striking newsprint. You know the myth of the
Viking burial — the burning ship laden with treasure
and the deceased clothed in all his finery. But pyres
are lighted to make ash of bodies, to ease the soul’s
transition to the heavens. Think of how disturbing
it would be to come upon the charred lumps of your
loved one washed ashore. And other myths — various
versions of the afterlife created to bend wills and
foster hope where little exists — to which have you
departed? There are no returns in your future, no more
givings, and your ashes have dispersed among the clouds
and in the water. They’ve been consumed by earth and
sky, inhaled and swallowed, digested, coughed out but
never considered for what they were. So I’ve printed
your name a thousand times on this sheet, and will
fold and launch it, aflame, watching the letters that
comprise you, once again, rise and float, mingle
and interact, forming acquaintances, new words,
other names, partnerships, loves, ascending to the end.
* * *
This was written for the August 2015 Tupelo Press 30/30 Challenge. To read the poignant story behind the poem’s title (which I was unaware of), visit Jilanne Hoffman’s blog.
Gaza
We presume affliction by census,
whereas light
requires no faith.
Is the roofless house a home? When you call
who answers? The vulture
spreads its wings
but remains on post. Shifting,
I note minute of angle, windage. No
regrets, only tension. Breathe in. Exhale.
Again.
***
“Gaza” first appeared here in July, 2014, and is included in my chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform.
Ashes
To sweeten the dish, add salt. To bear the pain,
render the insoluble. She envied
the past its incursions, yet the past yields to all,
avoidance to acceptance, trees to smoke.
My mother brought to this country a token of her death to come.
Now it sits on my shelf bearing implements of music.
In her last days I played Sakura on the mandolin,
trusting that she might find comfort
in the blossoms fluttering through the failing notes,
a return to mornings
of tea and rice, of
warmth and paper walls and deep laughter.
Today the rain spells forgive
and every idea becomes form, every shadow a symptom,
each gesture a word, a naming in silence.
Scatter me in air I’ve never breathed.
* * *
“Ashes,” first appeared in Extract(s) in 2013, was reprinted on The Reverie Poetry Journal, and is included in my chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform.
Earth’s Damp Mound
for P.M.
I. February 1998.
That week it rained white petals
and loss completed its
turn, the words finding themselves
alone, without measure,
without force, and no body to compare.
Though strangers spoke I could not.
Is this destiny, an unopened
mouth filled with
pebbles, a pear tree
deflowered by the wind? The earth’s
damp mound settles among your bones.
II. Count the Almonds
What bitterness
preserves your sleep,
reflects the eye’s
task along the inward thread?
Not the unspoken, but the unsayable.
Curious path, curious seed.
A shadow separates
to join another, and in the darker
frame carries the uncertain
further, past silence, past touch,
leaving its hunger alert and unfed,
allowing us our own protections.
III. The Bowl of Flowering Shadows
Reconciled, and of particular
grace, they lean, placing emphasis on balance,
on layer and focus, on depth of angle
absorbing the elegant darkness,
a lip, an upturned glance, the mirror.
What light caresses, it may destroy.
Even the frailest may alter intent.
So which, of all those you might recall,
if your matter could reform
and place you back into yourself,
would you choose? Forgive me
my selfishness, but I must know.
IV. Requiem
Then, you said, the art of nothingness
requires nothing more
than your greatest effort.
And how, seeing yours, could we,
the remaining, reclaim our
space without encroaching on what
you’ve left? One eye closes, then
the other. One mouth moves and another
speaks. One hears, one listens, the eternal
continuation. Rest, my friend. After.
Prentiss Moore influenced my reading and writing more than he ever realized. We spent many hours talking, eating, arguing, drinking, laughing. Always laughing – he had one of those all-encompassing laughs that invited the world to join in. And it frequently did. Through Prentiss I met in person one of my literary heroes, Gustaf Sobin, whose work Prentiss had of course introduced me to. Those few hours spent with the two of them driving around in my pickup truck, discussing poetry, the Texas landscape, horticulture and the vagaries of the publishing world, are hours I’ll always hold close.
Earth’s Damp Mound last appeared here in February 2016. It was first published in the anthology Terra Firma, and is included in my chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform.
Irretrievable
How we grieve the simplest
truth: we are
the scatterings,
relics of
the mind’s
erosions,
less than the sum
of our bodies. I cannot see
the word
but it smokes like
the color green
burning, but not of
flame, and once
the knife enters
you must avoid
its secretion
and peel the flesh
to reveal
what hides within:
the stem’s
purchase, pith,
seeds,
the irretrievable
shape
of a word
my lips cannot
form.
***
“Irretrievable” first appeared in a slightly different form in Vayavya, in December 2013, and subsequently appeared here in April 2016..
O at the Edges 