poetry Archives

Attentions

Notes on how to read.

There is a mind that keeps close watch on the dew-slick grass, hopping low, head turned to hear what crawls, to find what fuels the next flight. After this, a watcher in the window, low chirps from whiskered mouth, the fine hairs of the tail feather-tuned with exquisite precision. Another eye will notice how that which manages to still be finely tuned to details in their liquid form while retaining the soft pliancy of a chest-sleeper is enough to swell some subcutaneous expanse behind the ribcage, preparing to soar from what seems to contain its swell. There is temporal awareness, temporary sight. And there is space, breathing enough of nothing to make room for the next renewal.

This is Your Poem Talking

Here we go again. . .

Look, I’m not here to lecture you. If I was, you’d know. Then you’d think, not your wheelhouse, is it? And you’d be right. In lieu of a lecture, I have a proposition. What shall we eat, play, flay today? Sashay, maybe––or love, gut, burrow, swim?

I vote dance. Are you coming? Pray? Oh, I see. You are not going to do any of these, are you? Your face says it all: you’re going to stay right there, aren’t you? Until you figure out the poem.

Sigh. Not that you’re listening, but really? Of all the ways to be, you choose that one. And now you want to know what I mean.

Poem Specimen

Let’s go see the animals!

This is of language, the sound and sight of it, the signature and sign. The undoing of signs. The shattering of symbols, the gong of their echo. Notice this tongue as medium, as manipulated, manipulating music, a polyvalent creature in motion, now still. Oops, there it goes again. Got it. Sort of. To borrow an expression. This is a form of attention. Here, touch it.

Custodians in Transit

Group on the road.

Warm a face, toast a fool, repeat.

One more time.

Everyone.

Here is water. Drink. No, I mean it. We have plenty.

Check the score. Later, stress how little it matters.

Say, who cares about the score? Say, that isn’t what

this is about. Say we are getting close and here we go.

What time is it? How much. How long this is.

Here you go. Make it better. Do you need.

Do you need? Can I bring you. You should

come with. I can bring you. We have.

We have. We have. Take it, someone.

A Simulacrum

Through the fourth wall.

In the beginning, it was all about the spectacle of the created world. The chopping off of parts, the restoration, like Tah-dah! Over time, it became more interesting to work on making the stage disappear, to discuss how the engineering works and who it’s for. With a great show, the performance is always for a specific member of the audience.

What’s worth examining now is not the tah-dah, but the questions–– how is that working? and what’s next? There can be more revelation in how the problems and confusion play out. When someone struggles in a real way, they are less self-conscious. Something peeks through.

***

The title of this post comes from a play created by an interesting collaboration between playwright Lucas Hnath and magician Steve Cuiffo and the voice is adapted from comments made by both artists in various interviews on their developing work.

Abakans

Every tangle of thread.

Where mystery fell marching to

our exile, we lifted its mass

from the ditch to hold

it behind our coats, our lips,

to wrap our bodies

around its form,

for warmth.

Faces may deceive, but the back

cannot lie.

Between us, a single question

loops a mute refrain.

See? See.

***

Inspired by the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz. The title of this post comes from some of the figures that she created.

The Chase

How to work a running stitch.

What kind of poet would I be if I couldn’t fix a seam? You asked, incredulous, adding, you know, it’s not rocket science. When the language got too tight around our necks you said Look and undid the top buttons, like There and How hard was that? and it was obvious we had a long way to go.

I mean to live, you said, and invited us to join you, running––your kites on laundry lines, your great river piping underground, leaking secrets from the dripping faucets of our fourth-floor walk-up. Your hero at the mop, finishing a shift while the oracle she’s come to visit goes fishing for change in her apron.

The legs of our love tended to falter. Fatigued, we wondered how you kept yours onward. Once, ascending a hill, you reminded, don’t look up. You can follow the street as well as the sky, and as we looked for your next words you called back, not even at me, striding ahead. Eventually, we learned to follow the backs of your legs and fall into a rocking trance. The grates of sewers punctuating our periphery, we found our breaths in time with the river below us, and as the miles went on, stitched our single body back to some subterranean source.

***

Inspired by Anne Winters, especially Night Wash.

Beautiful Experiment

A map to the door of a fragile heaven.

This body is a landscape on the move, morphing to elude the easy mark. This animating force is interstitial pressure systems of fluid and light, now dark. This body is history, a possibility. It means to remember with total abandon, something denied.

The vines of my tongue become tethers from which these limbs swing from the branches of a mother rumored obsolete but see my knee where it bleeds, cutting my skin against the rough bark of her refuge, finding mine––now a universe unto itself, now a fragment to rupture the worn sky.

***

Inspired by the work of Felipe Baeza.

Unburied Sounds

In radiant remembrance.

Wolf, you have taken another pelt and I can’t bear to calculate who is the next of our missing to provide it, and now you enter the herd. But I can see the space between your first and second skins and it smells like tainted meat. How weary we are of these poisons. Muscles ache with fatigue. It won’t be long before another surrenders, too tired to keep standing in it.

And yet. Here is an artist whose medium is bombshells. He changes them by touch and attention. This one is a flowerpot, this one a vase. He makes a mobile from the casings. From one that could have killed everyone assembled, he makes a temple bell.

This is no disguise, but an undoing. Here is an invitation to the living, to hear another sound, to repurpose the old husk, to offer instead of obscure. Even to you, wolf. You can take off your cloak, unstop your ears. The bodies you left are still sounding, each a bell.

***

Inspired by the work of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, as presented in a New York Times article I read this morning. The title of this post comes from the centerpiece of an exhibition set to open at the end of the month, at New York City’s New Museum.

Joy of Missing Out

Instead of a poem, this thing.

What are you doing right now? we asked each other and then had to admit it was nothing in particular. With a caveat, of course, that something highly particular would come later––most likely, eventually. Which would have a feel of greatness, or something adjacent.

And so, a suggestion. Let’s go to the roof. That sounded good. We went as we were, thinking Air. Thinking Bird’s Eye View, and its attendant image-phrases: Sky and being Above It All.

There’s a poem here somewhere, and maybe someday I will find it. Eventually. It doesn’t have to do with the sky, though, or the skyline I imagined, or some transcendent epiphany.

It’s about the way that there were rooftops in every direction, all of them with people on them, standing in haphazard arrangements, in their ordinary clothes and various states of unkempt undress. How we were all there, missing something or someone––somehow, but we couldn’t say, so we made a vague music instead of stale clichés, commenting on the watercolor sky, how awesome, and wow, and how lame we felt repeating these expressions. And how we were unable to help ourselves, somehow. And how wonderful it was just doing that. Just wonderful.

***

My encounter with the phrase I borrow for the title (which, apparently, is used in various contexts with some frequency although it’s delightfully new to me as of this morning) comes from a Todd Bienvenu exhibit.