Category Archives: character

The Poet’s Progress (from the Old English)

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Word-whip went under world-hearth
Worm-pullers gave turf-warnings
Traveled he the truck-river
Till body-boats grew blistered
Yeast-sweat he yearned for
Work-markers sore missed.

 

Free translation:

The poet went out on a sunny day.
Birds were singing.
He walked down the street
Until his feet were sore.
He wanted a beer,
But had no money.

Blame NaPoWriMo.net, whence I was urged to write “a kenning poem. Kennings were riddle-like metaphors used in the Norse sagas; basically, ways of calling something not by its actual name, but by a sort of off-kilter description.”

Image: Beer Cap, by Jim Titulaer,  published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.

My morning commute is not just as it seems

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If things are as I suspect
There is another world
Where I am the lover
Of the driver
Of the morning bus

Where he awoke predawn
And slipped from our bed

Where a thread of lamplight
Shone under the door
And I heard the soft
Beginnings of the day
As he made coffee
I’d drink later

Where I shut my eyes
As if in prayer
Pulled the bedclothes
Around me like arms
That smelled comfortingly
Of last night’s cigarettes
And sex

Where I lay quiet
Until I heard his cup
Set on the countertop
Until the light went out
Until I heard the door
To the other world open
Then heard the door
to the other world

Shut.

 

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There was that morning

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1.

Then there was
that morning: you, the sun;
and I woke

thinking: the world
will always be this way
full of you.

2.

The waiter came
bringing perfect coffee, perfect spoons,
not knowing yet;

took one look
and gave you your name
saying: Happy Girl!

3.

You, oh you
were my first only; be
my only last.

 

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He said we would meet

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She lingered by the marble stair
till it was full night
and the dew had soaked her stockings
quite through.

Waiting for what?
As it turned out,
only to sit at her window later
watching the moon go down.

 

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The crows all night

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(after Li Po)

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And the crows
flew out of the storm
and took their places
among the branches;

and the sun
at the world’s edge
broke through the clouds;

and she paused at her loom,
the cawing of the crows reminding her
that she was alone,
the jaundiced light
reminding her how far behind
was her home by Qin River.

The mist-green thread she wove
had neither beginning nor end.

The crows called all night long
while the rain fell like her tears.

 

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The fascination

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The fascination of what’s difficult
Worked out all right for you, it seems, old man,
As when Blavatsky’s esoteric cult
Helped you parse George’s automatic hand–

And who would doubt that Truth herself was caught
Dumbfounded in your raveled Celtic knot?

 

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No ideas but in things

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“No ideas but in things.”
William Carlos Williams

All righty then
so say I want an idea
you’re saying I need to
bust open a thing
and find an idea inside
maybe a bunch of them
twisting like worms

and then what?
What the hell
am I supposed to say
about all these busted things
and all these twisty ideas?

Because right now
the place is littered with things I’ve busted
that don’t work anymore
and won’t even stand up
and the ideas
have got into the floorboards
and the bag of sugar
and the mattress.

I tell you
if this is poetry
it’s nothing like what I was led to believe
back when they gave us
that wheelbarrow poem to read.

So tell me
sage of Paterson
tell me
old witch
old doctor
tell me what’s the big idea
mister thing?

 

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The very rich are different

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Paul Allen Yacht + National Geographic headline

The very rich are different from you and me.
They have bigger eyes. And they like what they see.
The very rich are different, they have bigger feet,
They will kick your tin can clear across the street.
The very rich have bigger pockets. They have bigger hands.
The very rich have bigger wishes which are your commands.
The very rich use bigger. What they want, they taste.
They don’t believe in you the way they don’t believe in waste.
The very rich will buy the biggest tree to knock it down.
They’ll buy a bigger factory and say that it’s your town.
They have bigger faces. They have bigger belief.
They may sail their bigger yacht into a coral reef.
The very rich take bigger, what they always can’t replace,
They will leave a pile of dead coins in its place.

 

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The little boy runs back laughing

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The little boy runs back laughing
from the rushing surf
laughing but all the while he knows
the ocean takes what it wants.

 

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Why can’t we read anymore?

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1.

Can books save us?
Chapters? Paragraphs? Words?
Is that overoptimistic?

2.

I feel perfectly engineered, marvelous,
not limited to events.

3.

Our brains, wired to the beautiful universe,
are important: a kind of glue that holds together
the world. I think, and knot together the fabric
one word at a time.

4.

There is a special kind of tool that flattens one self into another;
there are, often, beautiful universes to be found on the other side,
though this constant hopping from one to another is also exhausting.
My days are exhausting days.

5.

I exist, holding together the world.

6.

So I started making changes. Random, usually.
The shocking thing was how I didn’t have to fight time and space.
What a wonderful feeling it was!

7.

My mind, however, remains a problem.
If you have suggestions for that, please let me know.

8.

(I am starting something new here.)
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