September 27, 2006

The Nearest Simile Is Respiration
                         To poetry 
I was boozed I was doped I was maybe
a floozy before you knew me, loose
leafed like autumn and most of the books
of the Old Testament that fell out 
of my father's Bible. I had a body.

I had a habit of hauling my telescope
into the outskirts, ransacking all 
the toothsome blackness for what: a reason
not to do me in. Proof I was more 
than the seasonal ragbag detritus
choking the rooftop gutters, more 
than a piece of the cosmic dust 
in some ruined philosophy. 

I could not be consoled by the universal
Sisyphus in us all, the dung beetle
nuzzling its putrid globe.

I could not hitch my wagon. The stars
and stars abrade my notions of my Self;
tricuspid Eros chewed me raw; Jesus
Christ rubbed mud in my eyes, and I saw
not. I did not see.

But with you! my sweetheart hairshirt, 
my syntactic gondolier, ruffian for hire, befoolable
irresolute Chanticleer: with you, I back-float 
the massy and heretofore unnavigable childhood
algal blooms, where no fish swam. No fish 
have swum that Mississippi.

With you, I forgive my father's notes 
to NASA, the self-inflicted swastika tattoo,
my sister's coked-up juggernaut cannonball
into the afterlife. 

I forgive the afterlife, 
resurrect John Lennon and the jukebox
at the Quik 'N' Hot, infect myself 
with a rare strain of tarantism. With you, I dance
the summum bonum. With you, I am greater
than or equal to the lack, and luck is weather
that permits my red begonias.

• I heard the poem in my head as if it were rolling free-form from the lips of a street rapper, ad-libbing, trying to hit the big time and hoping for a taste of the good life. Then I looked at the links and found it was a young white woman from North Carolina. Odd. Don't know why I heard it that way originally, it was just the cadence I put to it when reading it I guess.
• nice one.
• Must have been the formatting, CLF. There's a tradeoff when using the "pre" tag.
• Pete, You seasonal ragbag detritus. If we all posted poems as a FFP, they'd call this PoetryFilter. We've got four poetry posts: use 'em. Not everybody likes poetry. Not me! I huff the stuff whenever I can gets me sum. Great poem by the way. Funny, Frogs, I don't hear a voice or picture a poet--the poem stands alone in time and space. It can be disconcerting to have encountered something prior to hearing a reading. Nevertheless. Put your pants on, go forth, and poesy no more.
• I know, I know. I thought about tucking it into the liberry of congress thread but then I thought - hey, let's shock people, right? A poem right there on the FP! A Front Page Poem! Yow! Plus I thought it was the bees' sneeze. Or at least he suggested the site that it eventually was on.
• Nice one, petes!!! ;]
• Awesome. It's like a threesome between Alan Ginsburg, Lord Byron, and Walt Whitman. I find myself visiting the existing poetry threads less often because they tend to load slowly.
• You took your scolding from the old hag well, Pete. Here's a poem because you're so good natured: Complete Destruction William Carlos Williams It was an icy day. We buried the cat, then took her box and set fire to it in the back yard. Those fleas that escaped earth and fire died by the cold.
• Moving the Hive The queen sleeps in my palm through the forest. Her workers are dark ribbons that follow us asking one thing. Let her go let her go let her go. They are black wool covering my hands. I wear them as a field wears dust in the dry summer. I wear them as the river wears its speed. Their wings -- I hear them as a house closed for the season hears its last voice. When I release her and she stumbles to the new cells it is the future I lock her in, another meadow where again bees fall like fire on the exposed flowers. -- Frank Huyler.
• Okay so now we have *five* poetry threads!
• Wait, which ones are they again? (links please?)
• Hive no idea which threads are being referred to, StoryBored, but here are some general and some on more particular subjects: #552 (on lemmings), #2378, #3209 (sea sloths et al), #3403 (of lobster), #3466 (kakapo), #4318, #4405 (snivels about missing socks), #4446, #4724, #4726, #4994 (more sock-laments), #5101 (on bears), #5189 (light verse), #5779 (on vampire vegetation), #7219 (for tree-lovers), #7962, #8131, #8607 (cat), #8947 (Sappho), #9043 (beaver),#9048 (rhino), #9049 (clam, some bearded, some breaded), #9050 (pink foods), #9317 (limericks), #10478 (like Zorro!),#10844 (green pigs - marvellously illustrated!), #10858, #10866, #11686, #11861, #12196. And doubtless more are out there, waiting to be stumbled over.
• beautiful "Moving the Hive" bees, thanks! I think a case could be made for a poem-as-FPP just because. It's not PoetryFilter but then again that is kinda one of the best things about it. It is. Kinda. Sometimes I think coolitudes like that WCWilliams beauty ("Craikey! What a little beauty!") GramMa posted get lost in the liberry thread or something. To the general Monkey Populace that is. Why not? Slap one on the Front Page, see who salutes. Although it's bound to be The Usual Suspects, who knows who else may happen in.
• Beats 9/10ths of what's posted here...what's the beef?
• Oh, Brave New World that has such Pete-pul innit!

• The Italics Are Mine! 
  
  There was breathing but there were no bodies
  Anywhere to be found & so we switched ourselves
  Down a couple of notches and we barely moved
  And we really listened and this time we really 
  Listened in case we could catch a glimpse or
  Get an inkling or see something around the edges,
  We stayed tamped and dampened and tuned which was 
  Fine which was what was needed to remind us 
  How silent a submarine can be & how slowly one 
  Can remove a glove if one wants to remove a glove 
  Very slowly one finger at a time almost reluc-
  Tantly, so we waited better than we'd 
  Ever waited before or since & then some meteors 
  Started leaving long broad gauze trails in their wakes 
  In every direction we turned to look
  Much of the breathing we'd half-dreaded had materialized, 
  Gasps, audible awes, little sighs, pink squeals, 
  Now and then crashingly thunderous rounds 
  Of applause almost, shocking, and it was.
  

• I stuck this in, petes, since ye forgot to mention the name of the author of the poem above, Dara Wier.
• Ack, thank ye Sir Bees! And also: from Remnants of Hannah Wave Books
• I llappreciate @ the nu bile pome threads Re: the old 1's get sluggush & stutters postpreviewwaits for no one enough already
• A poem on the front, alas Beespeakticles for the posting
• Southern Comfort Whiskey on the rocks. That was my dad's evening drink. As a girl, I liked to hold the glass, feel the cold against my cheek, then lift it up so I could see the light coming through the liquid, golden like the hairs on my father's arms, like the meadow that stretched out behind the barn. Sometimes I'd sip it, and if Mom were out of town, Dad would serve me my own drink, mixing lemon, sugar, whiskey, and water, letting me taste fire on my tongue, throat, and deep inside. Does it burn you, Daddy? No, he'd say. Not with just one drink. Then he'd pour himself another to take the edge off the day. And I'd watch it happen, the edges of the day dissolving, everything that had been the day, moving away from us, no longer true or obvious like the black and white of the clock-hands moving towards bed time. When at last it was dark and late, and all that was left were two pools of lamplight, tiny 40 watt islands, just for us, my father reading on the couch, me on my belly, head cocked sideways, staring at picture books I'd read a thousand times, I'd play a game in my mind, trying to hold on to that moment, make it last, just a little longer, and pretend, this is all there is. Just this, this whiskey light, the two of us alone, together, in a single summer night. Nin Andrews Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics No. 4
• News There's a mountain and a hundred miles between me and the jazz station, but sometimes I can live with the static, a kind of extra-tempo air-drum percussion, the dead singer's voice tanged by smokes and too much gin. Some days, all I want is no news, none of the time. On the other hand, this afternoon it wasn't music pulled me up, but what the field guide calls the black-chinned hummingbird's "thin, excited chippering." It had got itself trapped in the garage, and though the big door was open, it stayed in the window through which it could clearly see a world. By the time I heard it, it was so exhausted it let itself be cupped in my slow man's hands, and emitted, as I closed it in, a single chip then silence. At the edge of the woods I knelt and opened my hands. Not even thumb-thick, its body pulsed with breath, its wings spread across my palm, its eyelash legs sprawled left and right, indecorously. I stroked it as lightly as I could, as I might not my lover's breast but the down made seemingly of air thereon, and twice. Then it flew, a slow lilt into the distance. For a while, even peace seemed possible, in the background Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit." Robert Wrigley Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems Penguin Books
• *applauds* petes why aren't I surprised ye like 'em jazzy?
• Roll Call Red Wolf came, and Passenger Pigeon, the Dodo Bird, all the gone or endangered came and crowded around in a circle, the Bison, the Irish Elk, waited silent, the Great White Bear, fluid and strong, sliding from the sea, streaming and creeping in the gathering darkness, nose down, bowing to earth its tapered head, where the Black-footed Ferret, paws folded, stood in the center surveying the multitude and spoke for us all: "Dearly beloved," it said. -- William Stafford
• :)
• Observation If I don't drive around the park, I'm pretty sure to make my mark. If I'm in bed each night by ten, I may get back my looks again. If I abstain from fun and such, I'll probably amount to much; But I shall stay the way I am, Because I do not give a damn. -- Dorothy Parker
• "If I Don't Meet You in This Life, Let Me Feel the Lack" Not there is almost no sound and at night I am not afraid. The next world will be made of paper and everything will have the capacity to fly. Promise me it will be there as it is here -- the raspberries climbing the trellis, the rivers blue scripts. Because every story has two endings, I see your body breaking down, I see you soaring in the light. Be taken with me. Come pouring down unified. -- Amy Quan Barry
• Hummingbird We buried the hummingbird in his mantle of light, buried him deep in the loam, one eye staring into the earth's fiery core, the other up through the door in the sky. His needle beak pointed east, his curled feet west, and we each touched our fingertips to his breast before lifting them up from the darkness to kiss. And from our blessed fists we rained the powdery dirt down, erasing the folded wings, the dream-colored head, tamping the torn grass with the heels of our hands, our bare feet, summer almost over, swaying together on the great ship of death as clouds sailed by, blowing our hair and the wind walked us back to our room. --Dorianne Laux
• beautiful and sugarless
• Apology to the Wasps Terrorized by your stings, I took out biochemical weapons And blasted your nest Like it was a third world country. I was the United States Air Force. It felt good to be so powerful Until I saw your family Trailing shredded wings, Staggering on disintegrating legs, Trying desperately to save the eggs You had stung to protect. --Sara Littlecrow-Russell
• when trees were dogs and we were trees when the gods get stoned they stick together like trees and bark like wooden dogs throughout eternity best we can do is carve our love in stupid hearts and roll over on our side of the bed be she ever there or not and try to remember when they were us and we were them and could not be separated -- ray sweatman
• *howls*
• Stuffed I put two yellow peepers in an owl. Wow. I fix the grin of Crocodile. Spiv. I sew the slither of an eel. I jerk, kick-start, the back hooves of a mule. Wild. I hold the red rag to a bull. Mad. I spread the feathers of a gull. I screw a tight snarl to a weasel. Fierce. I stitch the flippers on a seal. Splayed. I pierce the heartbeat of a quail. I like her to be naked and to kneel. Tame. My motionless, my living doll. Mute. And afterwards I like her not to tell. --Carol Ann Duffy
• The Petelia Tablet Inscription on golf foil from a tomb in south Italy, perhaps 4 the century B.C. You will come to a well on the left side of hell's house. A white cypress stands by it, luminous, pale. Stay clear of this well at all cost. Don't drink from this well. You will come to another; where cold water flows from the marshes of memory. Sentinels stand there. Say, "I am earth's and the starred sky's child, but the sky's blood runs in my veins; you can see this yourselves. Thirst dries me, withers me, gives me this instant the cold water flowing out of memory's marsh." They will give you water from the sacred wellhead and you will be known .... heroes from then on. ............................................ going to die ............... this writing ................ ..........................the darkness closing over. -- Anonymous, translated from the Greek by Robert Bringburst
• Eggs I was unpacking a dozen eggs into the fridge when I noticed a hairline crack at which I pecked till at long last I squeezed into a freshly whitewashed scullery in Cullenramer. It was all hush-hush where my mother's mother took a potash rag to a dozen new-laid eggs and, balancing a basket on her bike, pushed off for Dungannon. This was much before the time a priest would touch down from the Philippines with a clutch of game bird eggs and introduce a whole new strain of fighting cocks. It would be midnight when my mother's mother got back from Dungannon, now completely smashed On hard liquor bought with hard cash, fuck you, cash on the barrel. It was all hush-hush as she was taken from a truck painted matter-of-factly MILK & EGGS into which they'd bundled her, along with her bike, for delivery to Cullenramer. It would be all hush-hush next morning in the whitewashed scullery where she wrung out the potash rag and took it to another dozen or so new-laid eggs, from anyone of which I might yet poke my little beak. Paul Muldoon Horse Latitudes Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• The Women of Kismayo The breasts of Kismayo assembled along the mid-day market street. No airbrushed mangoes, no black lace, no underwire chemise. No half-cupped pleasures, no come-hither nods, no Italian centerfolds. Simply the women of the town telling their men to take action, to do something equally bold. And the husbands on their way home, expecting sweet yams and meat, moaned and covered their eyes, screamed like spoiled children dredged abruptly from sleep— incredulous that their women could unbutton such beauty for other clans, who (in between splayed hands) watched quite willingly. Give us your guns, here is our cutlery, we are the men! the women sang to them an articulation without shame. And now in the late night hour when men want nothing but rest, they fold their broken bodies, still watched by their wives cool breasts round, full, commanding as colonels— two taut nipples targeting each man. Susan Rich Cures Include Travel White Pine Press
• Teaching the Ape to Write Poems They didn't have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into the chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear: "You look like a god sitting there. Why don't you try writing something?" -James Tate
• Heh. I resemble that remark.
• Ahemhem. Ape & Dr Bluespire's first appearance.
• Oops. I give you more James Tate as penance: Never Again The Same Speaking of sunsets, last night's was shocking. I mean, sunsets aren't supposed to frighten you, are they? Well, this one was terrifying. People were screaming in the streets. Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful. It wasn't natural. One climax followed another and then another until your knees went weak and you couldn't breathe. The colors were definitely not of this world, peaches dripping opium, pandemonium of tangerines, inferno of irises, Plutonian emeralds, all swirling and churning, swabbing, like it was playing with us, like we were nothing, as if our whole lives were a preparation for this, this for which nothing could have prepared us and for which we could not have been less prepared. The mockery of it all stung us bitterly. And when it was finally over we whimpered and cried and howled. And then the streetlights came on as always and we looked into one another's eyes? ancient caves with still pools and those little transparent fish who have never seen even one ray of light. And the calm that returned to us was not even our own.
• Wow. as if our whole lives were a preparation for this, this for which nothing could have prepared us Yep. Know that. Nicely penanceded there rocket. No wonder that first one resembled resonant rememberative recollections for me.
• Let this pandemonium of tangerines be our delight, rocket!
• Youse guys gotta remember, Bees has that photographic memory. Yah can't even slip one of your favorites in twice, cause he'll catch ya.
• Ach, about the only thing bees can remember is when he's posted a poem, BlueHorse. And then only sometimes. Otherwise all is darkness.
• Honey at the table It fills you with the soft essence of vanished flowers, it becomes a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow from the honey pot over the table and out the door and over the ground, and all the while it thickens, grows deeper and wilder, edged with pine boughs and wet boulders, pawprints of bobcat and bear, until deep in the forest you shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark, you float into and swallow the dripping combs, bits of the tree, crushed bees -- a taste composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found. -- Mary Oliver

• To the Bridge of Love
  
  
  To the bridge of love,
  old stone between tall cliffs
       --eternal meeting place, red evening --
  I come with my heart.
       My beloved is only water,
  that always passes away, and does not deceive,
  that always passes away, and does not change,
  that always passes away, and does not end.

  -- Juan Ramon Jimenez, translated by James Wright
• voyage to the end I sin so much harder now knowing what I know a sail snaps in the wind I look the other way, a dream is returning from the year of my birth to be transfigured like a DaVinci smile a nightingale parting the leaves a melody the silver-green of corn husks pouring a river into the sea redeeming the Alamos I have lost Copyright © 2006 Elisabeth Murawski All rights reserved from Elixir
• Caliban at sunset I stood with a man Watching the sun go down. The air was full of murmurous summer scents And a brave breeze sang like a bugle From a sky that smouldered in the west, A sky of crimson, amethyst, gold, and sepia And blue as were the eyes of Helen When she sat Gazing from some high tower in Ilyium Upon the Grecians tents darkling below. And he, This man who stood beside me, Gaped like some dull, half-witted animal And said, "I say, Doesn't that sunset remind you Of a slice Of underdone roast beef?" -- P.G. Wodehouse
• Peace in a time of war A puddle of amber light like sun spread on a table, food flirting savor into the nose, faces of friends, a vase of daffodils and Dutch iris: this is an evening of honey on the tongue, cinnamon scented, red wine sweet and dry; voices rising like a flock of swallows turning together in evening air. Darkness walls off the room from what lies outside, the fire and dust and blood of war, bodies stacked like firewood burst like overripe melons. Ceremony is a moat we have crossed into a moment's harmony, as if the world paused— but it doesn't. What we must do waits like coats tossed on the bed, for us to rise from this warm table, put on again and go out. -- Marge Piercy
• When I Was Gone to Summer When I was gone to summer green as paint, they came and ground the vines to tangled piles. A luna moth clung to the basement wall. When leaves turned red as windows in my chest, they left a bare tree, a tongue dulled without a bell. Where my eyes are shaped to the sea’s shape, nerves took root and wove into my hand. A door grows glossy as blood in the last light, clapboards creamy in the gloaming where I had gone; the summer came, as green as paint, and my hand turned incarnadine. When I pinch a bit of dust and so compress expired stars, let the weight of a bird be the volume of my thought. -- Theodore Worozbyt
• Song of the Abducted The trees are full of owls. At night thousands of them stare at me through the sunroom windows. The phone rings; it is my dead friend, calling from Boston. She talks & talks, but I can get nothing out, I am choking on questions. The owls' heads move so quickly they do not seem to move. It started when I was a child: late one night my father stopped the car at a roadside park & dozed, a silver thermos of coffee in his lap. I slept too, in the back, & woke to a deer looking in the window, its nose pressed against the glass, eyes huge & glossy. The next thing I knew it was morning & we were driving over the bridge into Memphis. Later from a hotel room I saw helicopters a few feet from the window, but there was no noise. At night everyone comes back to me eventually, this one I loved & that one. The air grows sharp as copper & there's a beautiful green light that deepens like water; I move through it slowly but it is not wet & I never surface, no matter how hard I kick my legs. Inside myself I am several hours behind myself. From one summer I recall flowers: sunflowers peering like faces over a fence, knotted peonies fallen on the lawn. For months, after I fell in love, I couldn't sleep until dawn: nothing wedged itself between me & the darkness. But passion dimmed to an ashy smudge on the mirror & through the fanlight I saw a collar of dead stars. The rumors you've heard are true: behind danger lurks danger. Down the street a house is on fire. Red light courses through the room & I feel smoke like sticky oil on my arms, the warm spot where the cat was sleeping. When I come to I am peering into the blue face of the television. There is snow & in the snow a hint of static, something cold & shifty I cannot turn off. -- Aleda Shirley
• Apples 1. The grackles keep their distance. Sharp- winged complainers, they sideways out of reach. If I could touch them I would say bone-light. I would call them warm. If I could hold one I could smell one. I would call it wing-sharp, I would call the smell a name like marrow. 2. Again. The old man rakes his yard. Again, the slick sacks of leaves impenetrable as cairns, the symmetry of them, how countable they are. He is making progress. 3. a grocery list, the words for food so perfect, so three bananas, so soup, so orderly and strange, so apples that I have to write it twice, apples, maybe three times Copyright © 2006 Meagan Evans All rights reserved from Black Warrior Review via Verse Daily®
• ... so grackled ... so raked ;]
• The Waterbed Does New York When I asked you to write a story about your afternoon, I meant something that had actually happened to you. There is a mighty gap between creativity and lying. Waterbeds can not call your bluff, and can not dislike persimmons. . . . I mean there is personification and then there is personification. . . . And a waterbed’s eyes can most definitely not ‘narrow as though in a Western showdown’! Do you understand me?! Yes, Miss. Personification and personification. That much is clear. Certainly. She doesn’t have to sleep with the damn thing, does she. -- Louise Wallace
• Coming Becomes You

  Coming be-
              comes you,
                                little one:
        rockabye world as you lie, and the great pang takes you in
                          waves.       Coming
              becomes you.
  
                    With horses you come, with arabian
                                      slather with jugular grunts and in
        fretwork, in fistfuls, on Fridays we come in the
                                                  danger and midnight of horses.
                                Coming you come like a spill, like a
              spell, like a spoonful of flesh in the
                          roaring, high on blood
  ocean, come with your horses, you come to be played.
  
                    In after-
                                  come, you nuzzle;
        you nestle and noodle and nest.
                                                          And the ghosts in your eyes
              do their long-legged, chaste parade.
                                Each time such sadness
                                                  hushes me: slow
              ache in your gaze—nostalgia for
                                      now, for now as it
                    goes away.       You're
        beautiful, small
                          queen of the pillow drowse, and
                    rockabye world in my arms.
                                            Coming becomes you.

  -- Dennis Lee
• danger and midnight of horses. Beautiful, thank you.
• An Ideal Lure after John Clare Sun-treeing, a tease, I of ten loves took leave Or held vigils, moored sea-brood for pillow. Woe's ripe swill thoroughly reeks of skunk filigree Like hapless pie-shovelers mewling as they chew And marbled, the stunned sky diminishes the beach. Turned beekeeper on the berry hives of breath And on the brink sea droves in blooming reach Their sting's what's in the way of hot death Wriggled out of smoke-stops ashed, upend their swarm By cattails punking from the steaming marsh While lilies moor their roots their shoreward home And rebel to the very cusp in garish Juiced light they whirl, summer's tribe and fathom While otters writhe, heaving from the bottom. -- Sharon Dolin
• Avant-gardening on my weeping knees tending to the green immargination of the plot I tidy up the loose ends of my lines while all about me twine the scrollwork and fretwork of intelligent and perverse design wing-stroke and piston-stroke play heartburn music on the underside of sense while I pursue the noble and miserable hounds of vernacular economics turning over spadefuls of apparent earth my fat and vocable wealth the soil here is the soul of intelligence a miracle of steadfastness in the windy mess that splatters the whole as I range widely and with complicated passion in the dirty possibilities of the fascinated ground Sidney Wade Verse Vol. 23, Numbers 1-3
• The Joy is Everywhere This coming from a guy who hasn't had sex in a really long time. Well, had sex five weeks ago, once, with a woman in another state and it was like visiting The Planetarium. Fascinating but you don't go back for another seven years. And when I saw the planets this morning I was not a genius. When I heard the birds they were swallows. It was fifty-two degrees outside and the joy was everywhere. And for a long time the sex was everywhere but seven years and five weeks have passed. Now, there is only a bowl of apples on the counter and the hungry body waltzing through today. That was me in a nutshell yesterday after the joy was in my knees and my eye twitched for hours. I'll tell you, not having sex is a waltz all by itself. And then all your married friends say, It's a draft from under the door, sex. What do they mean? Still, they are the married friends and ride bikes together over big hills and into puddles and their joy is a yellow flower everywhere. My joy is an unbalanced checkbook, the bills paid, the smooth river of my ever-expanding body. And that woman in the other state, oh, she tasted so good and had such tropical nipples. They were mangos or something yellow like that when I had sex with her five weeks ago. We won't marry, have farms, buy cars and jewelry. We won't talk about pianos or diapers and we certainly won't ring doorbells. But even when the moon goes down into nothing there is joy everywhere when you are not having sex and just waltzing for hours on end around the world, into the furniture, the moon, the space inside your own feet that is everything. Copyright © 2007 Matthew Lippman All rights reserved from The New Year of Yellow Sarabande Books