Posted on: December 19, 2009
Community Still
What can the Lords of Everything
about dull eccentricity complain?
A fine shill, which is to see kirtle
cock-eyed and expect its rounding up,
would cheer, would meet the sun.
And then at sacred hoops the banners
stream, and yet no historian
writes with finish the broken
horizon, and these Prodigals replay
their Herculean task unnoticed,
while grownups pass and joggle,
sniff and blow and jo, and shuffle, prattling feet.
Witness, at cost, the skipping girl:
She finds in a book honors
of wet cheeks and high ploys to relief
in bouncing from flue to pratfall; silvers
schooldays yet in stern lessons, polymath craze.
Or coal-boy, rougher than the dirty feathers
of his temperatures, dreams a leaf
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Posted on: September 20, 2009
No Title
You can’t say it that way any more. / Bothered about beauty you have to/Come out into the open, into the clearing,/ And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you/ Is OK
– And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name, John Ashbery
The greatest problem in the arts today is the title; this tag that tells us what something is about: Battle of…, Portrait of…., Bowl of… Of course this gives even the most humble subject a coat of arms, presto a seigniorial dwelling, white picket fence and garden, all the dignity it deserves and Sunday painters so admire. But is this good? This, I would argue, has infected poetics, this aboutness, this supernatural force like it can’t be escaped. It’s the tongue lolling like a lazy sunflower tropistic by default. But now I’m bored with this riff and…
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Posted on: August 31, 2009
THE GIFT
My Lord, what a morning,
My Lord, what a morning,
O my Lord, what a morning
When the stars begin to fall.
–Entrance hymn,
(Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine,
Second Sunday after Epiphany,
January 15, 2006)
After seven years of inter–
stellar wanderings, the spacecraft
that journeyed halfway to Jupiter,
beyond the Earth-Moon Orbit,
came back today.
It bears precious freight—
ageless dust motes, the most
primitive particles in the universe,
gathered from the outer limits—
from the time when there was no time,
when there was universe inchoate—
undifferentiated matter—the becoming thing
that was always there.
It brings nameless particles that existed
eons before our solar system was formed,
before there was water,
before there was…
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Posted on: June 22, 2009
Only Four Colors Left
Clumsy painting of the Self must turn
Into itself and away from vague
Proclamations and generalities
Concerning what it means to live and die
But who would know what we
What I face going into the landscape
Again and again?
Like bitter birds waiting for the scraps
And arthritic hands in the park
Who knows how the snow stops
Coming and coming pushing cars off the road
Or mixing polarities with gray
gray air?
Mine is the issue of the landscape
Not the pattern
It is the slant and the break and the wisdom
Of hills becoming mountains becoming
Slopes
Valleys
Gorges
Sneaking near fault lines
Spraying the open mind with replicas
As contours of itself
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Posted on: May 31, 2009
Alexander Calder, 20th century neglected master, said a piece is finished when the dinner bell rings. Clearly he knew truth was ass-backward. Beethoven’s Ninth is pretty good backward too; maybe better. Poor guy, a captive of his times, pressured by the Imperial Court. He had to code his message but he should have outfaced the constabulary and started with the hosannas and cheering and work back thru the darker parts, slogging thru piles of hubris. It’s clear it’s music about a type of joy that’s temporary. Myself, I always bear this in mind. Anyway it’s finished when it’s finished, when it’s as good read backward as forward. Some agree saying put Molly Bloom at the beginning. Others disagree. They say, when looking at Pollock or Gorky…
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Posted on: April 10, 2009
IT’S A MAN’S WORLD TO THE END OF THE END—
I am a woman. Simply.
To look at me is a sin —
I must be veiled.
To hear my voice is a temptation
that must be hushed.
For me to think is a crime
so I must not be schooled.
I am to bear it all
and die quietly, without complaint.
Only then can I be admitted to the court of God
where I must repose naked on a marble cloud
feed virtuous men succulent grapes
pour them wine from golden vats
and murmur songs of love…
Sholeh Wolpé
__________
Time
That old man sitting on the bench
is you, a little boy biking around
Your hair is now white, spread
by the traces…
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