Posts for June 15, 2023 (page 9)

  ” I write to keep my feet on the ground. I write to keep myself sane.” Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate. (From an interview with Kentucky Writers Roundtable.)

soft 
creature
spills across my railing
i coil on the bedroom floor where
Jane cut away everything

i notice limbs red–
bending as they
sway outside
carefully they’re here
for us they’re here and then they
uproot

i return to the pond’s rim

there are the daffodils
whose bulbs we dipped in
what was left
from her bottle

the pond
shines
i invite her in and now
the creature adorns
my sill

Scuffed canvas, worn sole
laces sprawled across the road.
Such mystery! Where
is its companion? Tell me,
how does this always happen?

1

Today I saw the white flash card
of an eagle’s head soaring in the thermal
currents above my forest cabin. He’s a familiar
sight now. During the pandemic
I started calling him a friend & named him
Henry. I’ve seen him diving for fresh
bass at Owsley Lake, emerging
from the black-green trailing strips of Curlyleaf
& Starry Stonewort.  It’s my fifth year
living on the mountain. I’m learning
& Henry’s part & parcel of it.

2

Mario, my neighbor, insulted me
for wearing a hand-sewn polka-dotted
cloth mask to Dollar General.  I stopped talking
to him for a year. I drove by his farm
every day, saw him feeding
his horses & haying, but I rejected him
like a toxin. When I found out
he had cancer, I felt ashamed. I softened
& realized we share common threads.

Mario didn’t get better, he lost muscle, spirit
& strength. Stayed indoors & his kids began
to take care of him. We didn’t talk much
but I offered stew & cookies. Henry,
my eagle friend, circles the homes
on Owsley Fork Road, including Mario’s
old brick ranch, now empty & dark,
although his four sons
still work the land.

Certainly this shit ain’t servin me 

Just burnin me

It’s turnin me 

Into somebody 

I aint wanna be

The world keep turnin G

The world been gangster

Way before the manger

We gangster with the world 

Now the pigs done pulled up

On the Animal Farm 

Nature lead us to our slaughterhouse 

A.I. sanctuary 

We bought into bein bots its gone south 

Bar of soap Grammy washed out

My dirty rotten mouth 

When her soap opera went to commercial

Thinkin bout it sittin in her old home with cottonmouth 

Love is universal 

Good behavior what got em out 

Unpaid labor system coppin out 

They only fuckin with you if you poppin now 

Then behind ya back try to knock ya down 

Bein fake now seem like erybody got it down  

Aint gon bow down and kiss ya ass

You can kiss my ass 

Im spittin glass 

see yourself in it 

Get the cash 

Less you want the hell of it 

Lit a match 

To the gas of your selfish grip 

I aint done for myself in a grip 

Fell into the abyss

of a lot of shit I never dealt with 

Started to resurface 

Sometimes we gon feel worthless 

Your job isn’t what your worth is 

Just try to live in your purpose

Feel like I might always be searchin

Timing ain’t never gonna be perfect

But even if there ain’t a purpose 

That don’t make this all worthless 

Harold Lloyd, Student

(from the 1929 book “I was a fool and what I have seen has made two fools of me!”)

                                                 (Poem at Play)

Do you have the umbrella?
Avez-vous le parapluie?

I don’t have the umbrella sir, no sir.
Non, monsieur, je n’ai pas le parapluie.

Alicia, I have the hippopotamus,
l’hippopotame for you.
Avez-vous le parapluie?

Oui.
Yes.
Si.

What, which, who dared, and whose.
If long lizards are my bosom brothers,
basically are the beetles friends of yours?
Were you to blame for the rain?
You never were cause, never the blame for rain.

Alicia, Alicia, I was, it was me.
I, who studied assiduously for you my sweet,
and for this. An unconscious fly, the nightingale of my spectacles
     flowering. 

29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22.
2𝝅𝚛, 𝚛𝝅2
and Nebuchadnezzar became a siring mule
and your soul and mine a real bird of Paradise.

And the fish weep silent tears in the Nile,
and the moon never sets for the dahlias of the Ganges.

Alicia,
why do you love me with that so sad crocodile air
and prolifically profound pain of quadratic equations?

Le printemps pleut sur Les Anges

Spring rains over the City of Angels
in that sad hour when police
ignore the suicide of isosceles triangles
plus the melancholy of an Englishman’s archlute and logarithm,
and the facial unibusquibusque you carry Alicia, which is to say,
you aren’t so very bad looking if one is looking at all and you are looking.

The moon is high and it is equal 
to the indignity 
of my love, multiplied by a factor of X
and to the wings of the evening that it dies to,
bending over a flower of acetylene fire, burning gas.

Of this, pure love of mine so delicately idiotic.
Quousque tandem abutere Catilina patientia nostra?

So sweet and deliberately foolish,
able to make the squaring of a circle cry
and obligate that dimwit D. Nequaqua Schmit
to unpack the rivers 

of their stars by auction
and those beautiful blue eyes that open skyscrapers to me!
Alicia, Alicia, my love!
Alicia, Alicia, my goat!

Follow me on the air with a bicycle,
although coppers don’t know astronomy,
the police are secretive.

Although they ignore a sonnet
has two quatrains,
and two tercets.

Author: Rafael Alberti
Translator: Manny Grimaldi

“Closer.  Look closer (…)
                I am a star, too.” 
                                
                              –        from Luciferous, 2015

The pale yellow sun dissipates like butter into cloudy biscuits
unnoticed—unseen—behind the house—til my mother’s solar lights
begin to ignite, one by one—her little love letters
to the hummingbirds (that haven’t come)—just like her words
come, one by one, between promises of oh, you’re writing,
I’ll be quiet until she isn’t
and speaks again.

                                   I remember where I was when I wrote
that first (published) PoMo piece, years ago:  I was
housesitting for my little sister, her huge half Beagle-half St. Bernard
sitting beside me, head leaned on my leg, watching
what I was watching—innumerable fireflies rising and falling
over several acres of uncut grass and weed.  The air was no doubt
filled with aphids, and the pulsar-flash of the insects fell like lightning
in their pursuit to fill themselves—fill their need for hunger and desire—
which is to say,
hunger. 
                                                       I was hoping to find love.  I was dying to be seen.

                Where have the fireflies of our youth flown?

                                                                                                                     So many articles
have asked, over the decade that has passed since that night.  And yet, here, now,
even in the depths I’ve roamed in recent months, they are
in flight.  Rising and falling amid my mother’s garden.  Rising
and falling over orchids, lilies, hydrangeas,
gladiolas, lilacs, hostas, peonies,
spireas, and astilbes.                     

                    I try to draw it together.  I attempt to make it all
                    Connect.  The fireflies, the sunset, the flowers.
                    This is the Ars Poetica, is it not?  Revealing
                    where spirit meets tangible world,
                    distilling meaning from the magic
                    from the slow meandering years
                    to see, to snap a photo of a moment
                    and its offspring thought.

Ten years ago, there was (I saw) longing in the lightning.
Tonight, I linger in the thorns of loss. 

But there is beauty.  There is so much beauty.

In the fireflies, the sunset, the flowers.
In the constant interruptions
of my mother
                            there will come a day—not long off—
                            when the lilt of her voice no longer
                            interrupts. 

                                                You’ll remember
                                                this too.

We struggle and we toil and we beg the muse
to give us reason and a means to create
something of permanent worth.
                                                              A poem.
                                                              A photograph.
                                                              A love.
                                                              A life.

Meaning doesn’t require so much work.
Poetry exists in both grief and doubt.

Just like that poem was about fireflies
                        and, inadvertently, the fallen.

Just like this one–about fading light in a beautiful night
                         but heavy with personal loss.

Though the hummingbirds may be fleeting
and the fireflies may be dying.

                                     Though she no longer
                                     reads your texts.

Meaning is ineffable.
Meaning is pervasive.

And a poet is only a poet
who breathes-in experience

and gives it back
in every exhale

as a gift.

We all become elevator music
someday. Electric guitars lay
in stock rooms waiting to be
played again. Replaced by
synth oohs and aahs while
people rarely
look up from
phones to
hum.

There are still days

grey granite
stone cold
last name
same as mine
earth to earth
freshly turned
younger brother
now we’re left
just my mother
and me