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Febrero 20, 2012
We Dogs of a Thursday Off
The wine of uncharted days,
Their unsteady stance against the working world,
The intense intoxication of nothing to be done,
A day off,
The dance of the big-hearted dog
In us, freed into a sudden green, an immense field:
Off we go, more run than care, more dance—
If a polka could be done not in a room but straight
Ahead, into the beautiful distance, the booming
Sound of the phonograph weakening, but our legs
Getting stronger with their bounding practice:
This day, that feeling, drunkenness
Born of indecision, lack of focus, but everything
Forgiven: Today is a day exposed for what it is,
A workday suddenly turned over on its back,
Hoping to be rubbed.
by Alberto Ríos
Posted by sarita at 7:24 PM
Fork with Two Tines Pushed Together
It's fast and cool as running water, the way we forget
the names of friends with whom we talked and talked
the long drives up and down the coast.
I say I love and I love and I love. However, the window
will not close. However, the hawk searches
for its nest after a storm. However, the discarded
nail longs to hide its nakedness inside the tire.
Somewhere in Cleveland or Tempe, a pillow
still smells like M_____'s hair.
In a bus station, a child is staring
at L____'s rabbit tattoo. I've bartered everything
to keep from doing my soul's paperwork.
Here is a partial list of artifacts:
mirror, belt, half-finished 1040 form (married, filing jointly), mateless walkie-talkie, two blonde eyelashes, set of acrylic paints with all the red and yellow used up, buck knife, dog collar, camping tent (sleeps two), slivers of cut-up credit cards, ashtray in the shape of a naked woman, pen with teeth marks, bottom half of two-piece bathing suit, pill bottles containing unfinished courses of antibiotics, bank statements with the account number blacked out, maps of London, maps of Dubuque, sweatshirts with the mascots of colleges I didn't attend, flash cards for Spanish verbs (querer, perder, olvidar), Canadian pocket change, fork with two tines pushed together.
Forgetfulness means to be full
of forgetting, like a glass
overflowing with cool water, though I'd always
thought of it as the empty pocket
where the hand finds
nothing: no keys, no ticket, no change.
One night, riding the train home from the city,
will I see a familiar face across from me? How many times
will I ask Is it you? before I realize
it's my own reflection in the window?
by Nick Lantz
Posted by sarita at 7:13 PM
The Place Where in the End / We Find Our Happiness
The history of revolutions is the history of vague ideas,
Shrugging shoulders, not shrugging shoulders,
Standing around, acting without thinking,
Acting with thinking, being penned or penning,
Being a woman or a girl standing around,
A woman or a girl with some flour in her pocket
for tossing up a cloud of flour
to obscure the martial men's sight.
That white cloud of whatever
Among the moving and unmoving bodies
Is that history-like unhistory
of the ahistorical average,
That lovely inexact and provisional something—
weaponized or never.
How totally under-theorized is breathing,
Walking and not walking,
Wanting to have a good time or just having it,
Like everybody is gunning toward Eden
and nobody is in school with their bodies anymore.
The history of revolutions is a history of the orthodox
weeping over their faltering
orthodoxies:
Any precise thing—dumb these days:
The very idea imprinting nothing
on the air between the general buildings.
No human space—a printer's paper.
Nothing exact—impressed.
Ann Boyer
Posted by sarita at 7:12 PM
Green
These coastal bogs, before they settle
down to the annual
business of being green, show an
ambivalence, an overtone
halfway autumnal, half membranous
sheen of birth: what is
that cresset shivering all by itself
above the moss, the fallen duff—
a rowan? What is that gathering blush
of russet the underbrush
admits to—shadblow, its foliage
come of ungreen age?
The woods are full of this, the red
of an anticipated
afterglow that's (as it were) begun
in gore, green that no more than
briefly intervenes. More brief
still is the whiff,
the rime, the dulcet powdering, just now,
of bloom that for a week or two
will turn the sullen boglands airy—
a look illusory
of orchards, but a reminder also
and no less of falling snow.
Petals fall, leaves hang on all
summer; chlorophyll,
growth, industry, are what they hang
on for. The relinquishing
of doing things, of being occupied
at all, comes hard:
the drifting, then the lying still.
Amy Clampitt
Posted by sarita at 7:10 PM
Febrero 14, 2012
Fixed Interval
When he turns fifteen, you'll be fifty-four.
When he turns thirty, you'll be sixty-nine.
This plain arithmetic amazes more
than miracle, the constant difference more
than mere recursion of father in son.
If you reach eighty, he'll be forty-one!
The same sun wheels around again, the dawn
drawn out and hammered thin as a copper sheet.
When he turns sixty you'll be gone.
Compacted mud, annealed by summer heat,
two ruts incise this ghost-forsaken plain
and keep their track width, never to part or meet.
by Devin Johnston
Posted by sarita at 10:53 PM
Febrero 11, 2012
With That Moon Language
Admit Something:
Everyone you see, you say to
them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this
great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who
lives with a full moon in
each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon
language, what every other
eye in this world is dying
to hear.
Hafiz
Posted by sarita at 10:53 AM