Monday, February 16, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
January 10th, 2015
Track 2, Sigur Ros, 2001
I keep going back to dark corners in which I've hid
versions of myself - the tobacco fields of Simsbury
the shadows of Elizabeth garden
When I go back I expect
those other girls to have accomplished
a great deal in my absence
one will be training a whole colony of rabbits
another will be twisting dandelions into someone's hair.
I hate to look East, even if that's where
the city is. Its mouth yawns against the dawn
or dusk and rips the sky apart.
My back to the plow, I work the land
while keeping an eye to the setting sun.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
February 6th, 2015
I Could Hear the Water at the Edge of All Things, Hammok, Oblivion Hymns
On Teaching in A Broken Place
after Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End
for Beslan, for Hartford
The cold collects in the empty seats
the window left open
no one tending to the plant
which has been cut with scissors
and the paper is nearly gone.
Their dismembered hands flutter
around the room
to the low rattling of vents.
When we left the city his mother says
from the hissing wind she has become
we forged a home of Serbian
folk songs and cans of soup
and carried it on our backs until
the weather changed.
We left our forwarding address
but no mail ever came.
4 pennies will get you all
around the world and back he says
The sky breaks in the shape of birds
and the last of the rain softens earth
who long ago withdrew her arms.
He is scared they say. The black smoke
is everywhere. He wants a home, they say.
He feels safe with his mother, they say
even if she is made of air.
The coats are for protection they say
but their arms too weak to wear them!
There are ghosts who come to whisper at the
window pane - they are trying to hold their
pencils without any bones. At least we have
our bones and even still the cartilage, I say.
A heart beats against the tile.
It glistens and ticks like a fish on land.
I Could Hear the Water at the Edge of All Things, Hammok, Oblivion Hymns
On Teaching in A Broken Place
after Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End
for Beslan, for Hartford
The cold collects in the empty seats
the window left open
no one tending to the plant
which has been cut with scissors
and the paper is nearly gone.
Their dismembered hands flutter
around the room
to the low rattling of vents.
When we left the city his mother says
from the hissing wind she has become
we forged a home of Serbian
folk songs and cans of soup
and carried it on our backs until
the weather changed.
We left our forwarding address
but no mail ever came.
4 pennies will get you all
around the world and back he says
The sky breaks in the shape of birds
and the last of the rain softens earth
who long ago withdrew her arms.
He is scared they say. The black smoke
is everywhere. He wants a home, they say.
He feels safe with his mother, they say
even if she is made of air.
The coats are for protection they say
but their arms too weak to wear them!
There are ghosts who come to whisper at the
window pane - they are trying to hold their
pencils without any bones. At least we have
our bones and even still the cartilage, I say.
A heart beats against the tile.
It glistens and ticks like a fish on land.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
February 3rd, 2015
Untitled 5, Sigur Ros, 2002
the snow blower outside the window while it was still dark
and the men talking became a story in my dream
they were planning a surprise for their daughters
something like a tea party
and I moved against my sheets
holding a blanket to my chest and thought
how nice, how nice for their daughters
I woke again before I wished
to their shovels
there were many other dreams I remembered
when I woke that are now slipping away too quickly
to catch,
as the snow from my car, as the birds from their
perch - how they swirled like wind itself
last night in the storm and how I wanted to at once
hold them to my heart and join them in their flight
I will always want more than one thing
I will always get stuck, momentarily, in the space
between the two
Alex believes that in Proverbs 11:22 the word
discretion refers to silence, a demure submission
many male biblical scholars believe the same
they are all wrong
it means sense, judgement, the ability, and the right,
to decide.
my youngest sister had been planning her wedding
since she was born and by time she told us,
all the arrangements had already been made
we were all happy, but I wondered where I would
sleep when I came home to visit
whenever I woke to the snow blower
and shovels, I woke to such sadness
that I had to remember I wasn't sad.
I reminded myself and God through my restless
and twitching eyelids that His word does not come
back void.
I prayed for people in a sighing, in a cough,
and worked the muscles of forgiveness
in the depth of belly.
when I was 16 my mother dreamed that you
left the house to go to a boy. You were wearing
a tight tank top; I warned you not to go, but you
flipped your hair and looked over your shoulder
as if to say
no one understands love in youth
and what is true is that love in youth
doesn't understand discretion. But we learn
it somehow, don't we
often through breaking
Monday, February 2, 2015
February 1st & 2nd, 2015
Svefn-g-englar, Sigur Ros, 1999
I.
I am pressed down by the covers with candles on every side.
These are my attendants. We all wait for the storm that I am
imagining as an army of white very very high up, in rings
around the moon, waiting to descend. The sky is a greenish
glow and the whole world seems to tighten itself in anticipation.
When I drove home to celebrate Joshua's birthday earlier,
I noticed, as I always do, how things spread out as I enter
the valley. There are farms at the bottom of the mountain,
the biggest tree in Connecticut rests against the Farmington,
a vineyard stretches itself along the banks.
The fields were full of snow, and as I drove by my favorite
one, the one over which the moon is always hanging low
and swollen, I saw how the sky loves this field so much that
it mimics the color and texture.
Its clouds were gathered like an expansive gown,
or like curdled milk, or like what waves do to sand
at low tide.
In the diminishing light the white of the clouds
and the white of the field burned all the brighter.
When I left hours later, Joshua followed me out
onto the porch in his bathrobe, talking to the last moment
without even breathing the way he did as a child
until I looked up from the ice I was navigating and saw
the waxing moon, nearly full, and silenced him with my
exclamation. He stopped to consider the moon, acknowledged
it briefly and finished his thought on the theories of the mind
we had been discussing.
His voice was very far away because I was caught up in the
light of the moon bathing the world in silver, turning
everything into a remarkable sculpture, gilding the
broken bird bath in the wild rose garden.
The sky vibrates with its frequency and I wonder
what scale it is singing tonight. The clouds have
cleared; the night belongs only to this startling revolution
of light.
No matter how many years I live beneath it, the vastness
of the sky still stuns me.
II.
This morning I read Pound's Cantos III and tried to be
confused, but I think he was just talking about his life
in moments which connect to broader points in the world.
He was a man like any other human, telling a story
of great importance but insular allusions, reference
points which related back to him and then themselves,
umbilical cords - never free, both ends secured.
The snow is falling very quickly now and I think this
storm will be bigger than anticipated. There are tiny
shimmering sounds all around - my pale hand reaches
absently to my cup of tea and my nails hit the porcelain
in the note of C,
I have turned on the humidifier again because
the heat from the old coils dries out this house, and my body,
a pressed petal, needs to be revived. The water turning
into to steam sounds like a trickling stream that is very
far away.
The furnace roars on and off and I imagine it as a huge
animal in our basement on whose back we ride through
this storm.
And Catherine, beautiful next door Catherine, whose
filmy lace curtain hangs like mist over the loveliest
lamp in her second floor bedroom, who has a small
round window in her entry way like one you'd find
on a ship,
Catherine scrapes the snow off the sidewalk in front
of her house in long strokes which sound like sand
paper dragged across rough wood, like the steady
shucking of corn.
The individual flakes, which are harder than normal,
I imagine their spires as ice, hit the glass of the window
in the rhythm of wind chimes, a percussive scale.
Earlier I misread a Pound line. "Silk tatters"
became "silt talkers". Silt talkers. Silt, the smaller
sister of dirt and clay, the reduction of larger things,
the delicacy of granules. The silt of sound, the silt
of steam, the silt of snow against the pane.
The collected sounds of these smallest things creating
an ambient symphony as I sip my tea, as I wear my
fingers down against these keys.
Svefn-g-englar, Sigur Ros, 1999
I.
I am pressed down by the covers with candles on every side.
These are my attendants. We all wait for the storm that I am
imagining as an army of white very very high up, in rings
around the moon, waiting to descend. The sky is a greenish
glow and the whole world seems to tighten itself in anticipation.
When I drove home to celebrate Joshua's birthday earlier,
I noticed, as I always do, how things spread out as I enter
the valley. There are farms at the bottom of the mountain,
the biggest tree in Connecticut rests against the Farmington,
a vineyard stretches itself along the banks.
The fields were full of snow, and as I drove by my favorite
one, the one over which the moon is always hanging low
and swollen, I saw how the sky loves this field so much that
it mimics the color and texture.
Its clouds were gathered like an expansive gown,
or like curdled milk, or like what waves do to sand
at low tide.
In the diminishing light the white of the clouds
and the white of the field burned all the brighter.
When I left hours later, Joshua followed me out
onto the porch in his bathrobe, talking to the last moment
without even breathing the way he did as a child
until I looked up from the ice I was navigating and saw
the waxing moon, nearly full, and silenced him with my
exclamation. He stopped to consider the moon, acknowledged
it briefly and finished his thought on the theories of the mind
we had been discussing.
His voice was very far away because I was caught up in the
light of the moon bathing the world in silver, turning
everything into a remarkable sculpture, gilding the
broken bird bath in the wild rose garden.
The sky vibrates with its frequency and I wonder
what scale it is singing tonight. The clouds have
cleared; the night belongs only to this startling revolution
of light.
No matter how many years I live beneath it, the vastness
of the sky still stuns me.
II.
This morning I read Pound's Cantos III and tried to be
confused, but I think he was just talking about his life
in moments which connect to broader points in the world.
He was a man like any other human, telling a story
of great importance but insular allusions, reference
points which related back to him and then themselves,
umbilical cords - never free, both ends secured.
The snow is falling very quickly now and I think this
storm will be bigger than anticipated. There are tiny
shimmering sounds all around - my pale hand reaches
absently to my cup of tea and my nails hit the porcelain
in the note of C,
I have turned on the humidifier again because
the heat from the old coils dries out this house, and my body,
a pressed petal, needs to be revived. The water turning
into to steam sounds like a trickling stream that is very
far away.
The furnace roars on and off and I imagine it as a huge
animal in our basement on whose back we ride through
this storm.
And Catherine, beautiful next door Catherine, whose
filmy lace curtain hangs like mist over the loveliest
lamp in her second floor bedroom, who has a small
round window in her entry way like one you'd find
on a ship,
Catherine scrapes the snow off the sidewalk in front
of her house in long strokes which sound like sand
paper dragged across rough wood, like the steady
shucking of corn.
The individual flakes, which are harder than normal,
I imagine their spires as ice, hit the glass of the window
in the rhythm of wind chimes, a percussive scale.
Earlier I misread a Pound line. "Silk tatters"
became "silt talkers". Silt talkers. Silt, the smaller
sister of dirt and clay, the reduction of larger things,
the delicacy of granules. The silt of sound, the silt
of steam, the silt of snow against the pane.
The collected sounds of these smallest things creating
an ambient symphony as I sip my tea, as I wear my
fingers down against these keys.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
February 1st, 2014
Piazza, New York Catcher, Belle and Sebastian, 2003
There is something about the seams of worn jeans,
pulling apart from overuse and love, from hikes and rambles,
from falling, from pressing into the floor.
We jumped the fence to see the abandoned highways,
they had never even heard of them, and when we were
done, I got caught in a bramble bush as we rushed out of the woods
and back up the embankment to the monastery grounds.
The prayer trail snaked through the woods,
stone saints gravely standing every ten steps,
and the gravel of the path hissed beneath the
monks feet -
a real monk, in real monkish attire, and here I was
trespassing, and caught in a bramble bush.
I struggled and pulled and ripped my skin and clothes
and finally fell free, tripping up the hill, into the sunlight,
blood dripping from my arm and my shirt hanging where
it tore,
and fell into the circle of his gaze. He smiled kindly.
He smiled like someone who knew, but still
he let me lie and say something about running after
a small animal and getting caught in the prickers.
The boys asked about stories from the Bible to distract
from me as I caught my breath, the monk answered calmly,
still smiling, still knowing.
I would have liked to have sat on the cool stone benches
next to the stone saints as light fell in patches on my
ripped clothes and talked to him about life and God
and monastic existence - I would have liked to have asked
him about Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Sienna,
but I was not myself yet, or rather, I was taking a long
break from myself, and my lips were always sticky
with wine and my body was a beckoning finger.
I had found myself on the other side of my own expectations,
and standing in his gaze, a trespasser, a liar, a
lost girl with tangled hair, I knew a deep grace.
It was a little bit like the alabaster jar,
though it was months later that I would fall to my
knees and weep at the feet of one I knew
but had forgotten.
When I finally stood, He slipped his arm
around my waist, looked down at me and
said, simply, I have been waiting for you.
________________________________________
January 29th, 2015
Peace and Love, Cat Power, 2012
i said lioness
or deer
and laughed at the duality
she said
i see you more as a deer
because you can dance
around life
and even escape
Mel says we have hands
we have hands
i don't know where they are
but we've got them
i wonder how it got like this
so dry
and dangerous
to speak or breathe
and if we feel this way
then how must the children
feel?
the wolves gather
they've been gathering
they have much to gain
from all our flesh
and i want to break my bones
in their mouth in such
a way that it will choke
them
i'm a lover but i'm in it to win
just wait i keep saying
just wait until i'm gone
i will write words that will
destroy worlds
it's in your hands to come
out ahead she says
twice as she slowly leaves
the room
over and over again
sarah palin is a joke
from Russia
her face is shape
of soviet school buildings
all these gifts from Russia
we are still fighting the cold
but now it is here
and
i am more of a socialist than
they'll ever be
bill gates here is putin
they have earl grey tea
and talk about their
stables full of people
saddled in gold leather
i can taste the bridle
but i will only pretend for a little bit longer
to be lead by it
i have drilled a hole through the blinders
see you on the battle field
gentlemen
Piazza, New York Catcher, Belle and Sebastian, 2003
There is something about the seams of worn jeans,
pulling apart from overuse and love, from hikes and rambles,
from falling, from pressing into the floor.
We jumped the fence to see the abandoned highways,
they had never even heard of them, and when we were
done, I got caught in a bramble bush as we rushed out of the woods
and back up the embankment to the monastery grounds.
The prayer trail snaked through the woods,
stone saints gravely standing every ten steps,
and the gravel of the path hissed beneath the
monks feet -
a real monk, in real monkish attire, and here I was
trespassing, and caught in a bramble bush.
I struggled and pulled and ripped my skin and clothes
and finally fell free, tripping up the hill, into the sunlight,
blood dripping from my arm and my shirt hanging where
it tore,
and fell into the circle of his gaze. He smiled kindly.
He smiled like someone who knew, but still
he let me lie and say something about running after
a small animal and getting caught in the prickers.
The boys asked about stories from the Bible to distract
from me as I caught my breath, the monk answered calmly,
still smiling, still knowing.
I would have liked to have sat on the cool stone benches
next to the stone saints as light fell in patches on my
ripped clothes and talked to him about life and God
and monastic existence - I would have liked to have asked
him about Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Sienna,
but I was not myself yet, or rather, I was taking a long
break from myself, and my lips were always sticky
with wine and my body was a beckoning finger.
I had found myself on the other side of my own expectations,
and standing in his gaze, a trespasser, a liar, a
lost girl with tangled hair, I knew a deep grace.
It was a little bit like the alabaster jar,
though it was months later that I would fall to my
knees and weep at the feet of one I knew
but had forgotten.
When I finally stood, He slipped his arm
around my waist, looked down at me and
said, simply, I have been waiting for you.
________________________________________
January 29th, 2015
Peace and Love, Cat Power, 2012
i said lioness
or deer
and laughed at the duality
she said
i see you more as a deer
because you can dance
around life
and even escape
Mel says we have hands
we have hands
i don't know where they are
but we've got them
i wonder how it got like this
so dry
and dangerous
to speak or breathe
and if we feel this way
then how must the children
feel?
the wolves gather
they've been gathering
they have much to gain
from all our flesh
and i want to break my bones
in their mouth in such
a way that it will choke
them
i'm a lover but i'm in it to win
just wait i keep saying
just wait until i'm gone
i will write words that will
destroy worlds
it's in your hands to come
out ahead she says
twice as she slowly leaves
the room
over and over again
sarah palin is a joke
from Russia
her face is shape
of soviet school buildings
all these gifts from Russia
we are still fighting the cold
but now it is here
and
i am more of a socialist than
they'll ever be
bill gates here is putin
they have earl grey tea
and talk about their
stables full of people
saddled in gold leather
i can taste the bridle
but i will only pretend for a little bit longer
to be lead by it
i have drilled a hole through the blinders
see you on the battle field
gentlemen
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