Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
What knocks
the wind
out of you?
Bad news
or good,
a fright,
a long-
held
breath
of
grief
or joy
raveling
from the gut?
Keep the middle
way, they say—
though nothing
much ever happens
in that vacant nest.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
The hinge of any moment looks forward and back: the past is behind,
the weekend ahead. On the radio: a soprano’s clear notes scale the crest.
It’s long past summer, but the light at night and cloud formations
look weird. And in the morning, the sky magenta as the sun clears the crest.
Is it time to make a hurricane run? Batteries, flashlights, water;
how about chips, dips, and wine instead of fake chicken breast?
Home late, long past dinner time: I’m foraging in the fridge—
mung beans and shrimp paste, wilted greens. Cold rice, lemon zest.
It must be near my period: I cycle from sweet to salty and back
to sweet. I miss the kiss of wind on my lips. Or just to kiss.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Before I learned geography in school, Hokkaido
was simply my family’s favorite brand of canned
mackerel, opened especially in typhoon weather.
No matter that sheets of cold rain fell and fell,
and indoors we suspected we’d started to smell
a little biblical— And the power went out,
but we had candles, and a can opener!
We could still boil rice in a blackened
pot on the one-burner kerosene stove. Little blue-
fin mackerel, jumping (from which fishing port
off the coast of Hokkaido?) into the net, into
the can and into our steaming bowls awash in black
pepper, white vinegar, and thinly sliced shallots,
you were among the first briny tastes of other
coastlines that entered my mouth. And even now,
whenever rain pelts at the windows and the skies
turn the color of dull aluminum, when the winds
make the trees’ arms rise like wings of cranes
in the marshlands, I think of this word, Hokkaido.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
That calm: before?
after?— The storm.
The pause
that brackets
the feathered cry
at dawn— The rooster
trills Deny, deny—
And still the waters
rush across the pier.
The turnstile
at the station twirls
in place. A wall
is shorn away to show
the flimsy hive.
The branch comes down
upon the roof.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
They climbed to the promontory
and took photographs of memorials,
brushing the dirt aside to read
the letters that told of who
had been there before. She wondered
if the black specks she sighted
above the ridge were vultures; if,
after all this time, such birds
might still take an interest
in cured and leathered bodies,
mummified and resting in their caves.
In the village, the rest house
had no heat. For bathing,
there were metal drums filled
with chilled spring water. It was
the last day of the year—
Bonfires flickered. Frost trails
formed at the ends of sentences.
They were unaware of their own
restlessness, soon to be eclipsed
by the years. Above terraces
lined by hand with stone
upon stone, the occasional burst
of a firecracker. Mostly, the wind.
Or the muffled sound of a gong.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Venturing out afterwards,
we count the bricks torn up
in the last hurricane, note
the welter of leaves stripped
from branches; see, as if for the first
time, stark form— Few layers now
obscure the view, so surface
and foreground more closely match
the underneath. All the gaudy
accessories— frills of russet leaf,
curled copper, tongues of topaz yellow—
recede into silt and verdigris
at the edges. And the water
that with the tidal surge rose
through narrow alleys by corner
restaurants, came up the steps
of a public library built in 1904
(foreclosed a few years ago by the Old
Point National Bank). It barely grazed
the sidewalks on our own street,
though merely a block away
the neighbors had two feet of water
in their garages. And no, we can’t
predict which of these buildings
will sink into the sea (brick or aluminum
siding, stucco, vinyl, fiber cement); which
ones will weather the onslaughts of another
century. Soon after inventories of its losses,
the city and its neighborhoods rumble slowly
back to life. The gulls return—
not that they ever left—
and like us, pick desultorily
through oddments, through debris.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Find the rest in any pose,
the teacher said: as circling birds
eventually come to roost,
as the water’s thrashing
quiets after it, too,
has had its fill.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
This must have been the way the world was made: gleaming with wings, hillsides burnished before their dazzle dimmed. When dunes spat back their sand, we wandered through the vegetation in a daze, frightened by broken-off quills and outsized petioles, assaulted by a flotsam of smells, afraid to touch or taste or gather… What wind wrenched away, we’d have to carve back, painfully, by hand. The schools, the corner fast food places, the notaries’ and doctors’ offices, the grocery stores whose shelves were licked by giant tongues of water— What was it about disorder that brought us to our knees? Gradually we remembered what could be done with mud; which crystals broken off from rocks along the beach might pass for salt. It took a while before we sighted birds. The first bright sun came through thick drapes of cloud that looked like women’s breasts. The shore resembled none that we had ever seen before. Someone began to write an almanac of our days— New kinds of growth no longer matched with our old reckoning of time. Someone took pains to straighten a row of stones above the water line.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
how still, how still you sit
beneath the ticking of the seven-
headed tree; it’s hard to understand,
but just like ours, those tongues
have foraged along the ground
for leftovers, for milky drops
of immortality. O careless and
forgetful gods, you’ve crowned us
with accidents, spiked our appetites,
littered the way with detours
and false starts. No warnings issued
about sharp blades of grass that split
the ligaments in the mouth: and thus,
in dreams, the restless body turns
and hisses, even in brief repose.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form….” ~ “The Solar Anus,” George Bataille
The senator takes to the floor and makes another speech. The birds must know something: they tremble the branches of all the trees, and ripples move through the entire assembly. What is that nervous tittering in the gallery?
If, as Bataille says, the world is all parody and copulation is the principle of all things, then the senator is fucking with himself, his mother, your mother, our mothers, the president’s mother who was also a president, his father who was also a senator, also assassinated like Robert F. Kennedy though in different circumstances and in another part of the world.
You know of course that this is not just word-play. In more than a hundred tongues the world over, this is the most grievous insult a man might give and/or receive.
Which is not the same as saying women cannot find a suitable equivalent.
But, returning to the topic at hand: what is the punishment for the crime of extended plagiarism by copulation or related means?
It is at the very least bemusing (which is very different from “amusing”— though not at all surprising) that a man violently opposed to the idea of women exercising sovereignty over their bodies and reproductive health, could have been so ignorant about where women bloggers write about that sort of thing.
We all think we’re so cool, taking those long silver skewers and spearing chunks of bread, chunks of meat, dipping them into the gooey communal fondue pot that is the internet.
Here is the text I am reading tonight. The lesson is to differentiate the paraphrase from the precis and to write an example of each. The next lesson is proper citation, using page references within parentheses. There is an appendix which tells you how to do this for electronic sources.
One passage reads: “…lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator.”
Which is to say, no amount of alchemical manipulation can change the outcome when you have made a colossal fool of yourself.
The man in the mountains playing a bamboo kubing in the fading light could tell the senator as much.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.