Posted on: June 15, 2010
Flower Poetry
When the flowers first escaped the row,
having scattered their generatives in time with a good wind,
I used poison to contain them.
All gardeners know you can only own beautiful things
if you keep them in a square.
These were hearty poison-eating flowers, I discovered.
Soon, they made the grounds, even rooting in the concrete walk.
Hurrah for wildness, hurray for its life, I thought,
leaving them be.
I remember too clearly the morning I witnessed
the first flower to get inside the house.
It was growing from the kitchen floor.
I contained this pretty creature by setting a large soup-pot over it.
By next afternoon, the flower had called a compatriot,
and the pot had been overturned.
…
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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
and glimmers churlish in the post-tomtom clear.
That even nothing canters tail-flare
let the shorter race befall, and busy logs
go dancing with their dogs,
and frowning cats, the gentle rats — Dear Blood
it’s genius-wondered is homely bog.…
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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 need to take off in another direction which reminds me that most people can read maps, understand the conventions.…
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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 earth. Timeless,
they were there when life was
but a thought in the mind of God.
As the craft approaches atmosphere
crowds gather at the Dougway Proving
Ground in the Utah desert,
their pupils reflecting its red–
orange glow in the pre-dawn sky.…
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