Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
I seem to photograph the coltsfoot every year — it’s the first flower to bloom on the mountain. And this is the earliest it’s ever bloomed.
It’s non-native, but not particularly invasive here. I think most people mistake the blooms for dandelions (which of course bloom much later). Pliny famously classified it as two different plants, failing to observe the small leaves beginning to emerge as the flowers die. This small fly, however, seems quite unconfused.
Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.
And even then you were talking to all of us, weren’t you:
ghostly presences in a future that we now inhabit,
tumbling swiftly from one gate to another. Last week,
moments before the train departed the platform at the Jackson
Street station for O’Hare and the flight I had no idea
would be canceled three times before I could board— a woman
got on, breathless, asking passengers nearest the doors:
Chinatown? Chinatown? She had on a thin cloth coat,
and her short bob of greying hair was plastered to her forehead.
No one even blinked. Perhaps they couldn’t hear from whatever
was playing on their earphones, or maybe they were tourists
with no idea either. Before the doors swung shut I caught
her eye and shook my head; yelled Red line, red line, and she
darted off. I don’t know if she ever made it to her destination,
whatever that might have been. And in a related meditation
I read how Time is like a river made up of the events which
happen, and a violent stream: for as soon as a thing has been seen,
it is carried away, and another comes in its place… Therefore,
all that afternoon into evening, as thin snow began to fall again
on the tarmac, streaking the windows, chilling the glass,
seats filled and emptied, emptied and filled; and it is
as though the blue light flickering near the ceiling
of the concourse were that same river’s garment.
Passengers anxious about missed connections watched
as TV monitors showed footage of town after town in southern
Indiana hit by a single tornado— New Pekin, Henryville,
Marysville, Chelsea— before it crossed the Ohio River
into Kentucky. The hours stretched, and in their fluid arms
there might have been the call of the mourning dove, there
might have been a sparrow slight as the child borne aloft
before the dark column of air set her down in the field.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
The dark-haired woman with the death’s head
tattoo wreathed by red roses and flames tosses
her three-year-old into the kiddy pool, and moments
later the child emerges, wildly laughing at the other
end of the lane divider. They do it again. Meanwhile,
I’ve recognized the man with the slight limp and
one palsied arm who sometimes works at the bakery
cafe, doing water exercises: walking from one side
of the pool to the other. Children are flinging
pink and yellow balls, slapping the chlorinated water
with paddles and foam noodles. All this, of course,
for no reason other than the pleasure of doing so.
Late afternoon sun pours through west-facing windows,
mellower counterpoint to the sauna-like haze
indoors. What did the bluebird mean by saving
his best song for the bluest sky? Or Marcus Aurelius,
who wrote about How quickly all things disappear,
in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time
the remembrance of them? When we walk out
of the building, there’s light enough still
to make plans for dinner, or a walk, or a movie
at the mall. Everyone has a piece of china
that’s never been used, shirts hanging in the closet
with their price tags still attached. The bluebird
should sing instead: Eat from the good white plate
tonight. Dress in your best coat, your purest cotton.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
We were talking about pets. You told me about a family you knew in South Africa who had two rats, which they called mice because the fellow they got them from couldn’t tell the difference. As babies, tiny and hairless, all rodents look pretty much alike. But they grew into black-and-white fancy rats, and their favorite thing was to watch a human taking a bath.
It was a ritual. They would rush into the bathroom, station themselves on either side of the faucet and wait for toes to emerge from the water, whereupon they would lean over and lick them, their tails stuck out behind for balance. Perhaps it was the hot, soapy water they liked. But I wonder whether it didn’t trigger their parental instincts to see such fine litters of five, small and pink and wrinkled.
Were the rats ever disappointed at the lack of response to their licks—the eyes that didn’t open, the squeaks that didn’t come, the single, malformed tooth that wouldn’t chew? I’d love to have rats someday, you said—they’re very clever! But their lifespan is so ridiculously short.
“We are our own adornments.” ~ Seon Joon
Who collected the saint’s ashes in a heap
at the foot of the stake? So much light,
but remember it was from burning.
In response to cold mountain (24): Dakini.
For background, see here.
When I was a child did you bend back my little toes
and my big toes, then wrap them in a linen bandage
for years? asks my second daughter, frustrated
that there are fewer grown up styles for size 5 feet.
*
A signature may consist of a folio or an octavo.
Sewing through the fold makes a nice journal or book—
you have to take care that the binding tape is nicely
aligned on both sides of sewing, on the spine.
*
A friend chafes at wearing his wedding band in
public; or not at all. I think I’ve only seen it once
or twice: a plain ring with a raised rim in yellow
gold. He and his wife have arguments about that.
*
The gossip of goldfinches makes a single bright thread
in the day. For a change, how nice it is to have warmth
without shadows, quiet talk, no rancor, no regret. I like
that the mull is mesh material glued to the signature set.
*
Here is the bone that burnishes smooth, that lays the papers down
with their marbled leaves. Did you know the word volume comes from
volvere, which is related to scroll, thin sheet of parchment wound
like a blind about its staff? As desire returns to its beginnings.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
This videopoem happened in the usual way: I had some footage (of the Bean in Chicago), plus some other found footage in the back of my mind, and the text grew from that. This video took all of three hours to pull together.
At the academic writers conference I was pulled in many directions, talking and listening, buying and trading, mingling with 10,000 other writers at the world’s largest hotel. I watched my esteemed colleagues preen in the hallways and at the book fair, beautiful in their dark and denim plumage and expensive boots. Conscious of waste, I kept my plastic water cup and carried it from session to session until it developed a crack, and began to drip onto my hand like a squat penis.
“…in which each letter is signified by a random mark.” ~ D. Bonta
If a spiked flare from the sun is a petal
and the petal breaks off from the crown—
If the crown is a wheel run amok
so the road blooms with rusted metal
and bad mojo— Then the firebird will hide
in plain view: tufts of flame trees, glimpsed
as you make your way from afar. Shake open
your map, walk steady along the arrow’s sight.
In response to How to take notes.
Audio Player
Note-taking is a sacred duty. The first secretaries recorded the mandates of heaven, as divined from entrails or the cracks on tortoise shells.
Stay in character. Wear surgical gloves and carry a mute parrot under your hat.
Apprentice yourself to an earthworm, whose assiduous note-taking turns dirt into soil.
Don’t write what you hear—what good is that?—but how you hear it.
Never lift a pen from the page, even to dot an i, lest it become lost in lust for the flange of an ear.
Use unlined stationary and let your letters imbricate to better shed the sweat of your brow.
Staple your tongue to the moonlight until you learn how to shine with borrowed radiance.
The goal is become invisible, like a street photographer in the mountains.
Type rhythmically, in 4/4 time. Improvise a work song to make it go faster.
Have your way with semiquaver and crotchet, but beware the Franciscan Minims of the Perpetual Help of Mary.
Domesticate the hortatory: speak off a freshly laundered cuff, blank of ink.
Get speech recognition software and use it to transcribe whatever you babble in your sleep or in moments of ecstasy.
Invent the world’s most offhand shorthand, in which each letter is signified by a random mark.
There are certain sentences that can only be heard by note-takers. They lurk like puns, disguised as slips of the tongue, stammerings and clearings of the throat.
Notice everything.
Marry the slate to the chalk with a long claw’s screech.