Waiting for Sunday

Yesterday yeilds to this Saturday
wounded for our transgressions

Friday was gray, though I wanted both the day and my thoughts
to be black with the fullness of the grief
stricken, smitten of God
and then I beg to be allowed to
surge early to the joy.

And now there is today.
How strange
Strange that there is life
and I am writing,
wishing to leap early to the joy.

The sun came up today, how callous and indifferent:
and my throat stops, small emotion this.
Why was the rain yesterday
only gentle?

despised and rejected
Cold indifferent apathy to
the drama that must claim every eye.
Do you not know that you cannot cannot finish this breath until
tomorrow?

by his stripes
Why did my guilt not stop me still:
a stone like my heart?
One more night and then
I will tell you why--
the whisper I cannot form until
the morning.
silent
The shouting and the bleeding stopped last night.
Now there is only silence
and we are waiting.


[because I am too self-conscious to post this on a public blog]

Just About Perfect

Yes, that's right. Brooks has been offered an Assistantship at the esteemed Catholic University of America. Back off, freshmen ladies! This hunk/superhero is already taken. The D.C. scene had better prepare itself for some high energy poetry and an intellectual-association-making-machine; right, Dana? (I wink prosaically)

Congratulations, Brooks!!

My Poetry Practicum

For my one poetry credit (150 lines), I have decided to write ten 16 line poems about . . . the noxious, the anomalous . . . the odd things of life, and discreetly sublimate them as part of the marvelous. So far I have three poems (below). In addition to these, I want to do one on seaweed, a piggybank, and a hankerchief. I would like to end the cycle with a poem about an inkbottle. While this final one would be more explicitly about the power of writing, I view all these poems as analogies to writing. Right now, I was thinking of calling the entire cycle "The Mushrooms."

The metric scheme is what I call 4x4x4: four feet per line, four lines per stanza, four stanzas per poem. I like to use spondees.

SO, what do you think (a) in general, (b) about the specific poems, and (c) what other "objects" should a use for my other poems? Thanks. These are only rough drafts, so please make suggestions! :0)



The Mushrooms

Under a tree with black branches
and a red lily drooping earthward,
like the last drop of dew in the desert,
sits a punk clump of auburn mushrooms.

This year they wait in prayer in the shade
like a prophet spreading his legs outward
from the trunk to the continents. Next
year, they will reappear in the drawer

of some widowed mother's cupboard,
and she will let them over-ferment
and mince them a day before they rot
and stir in broth like a witchdoctor.

The children and grandchildren that eat them
shall grow pale with delirious visions
and thirst for water to speed the season
to hide the shadow of the shriveled bloom.


The Skunk

He lives beside a patch of moss-bawn
under the spongy redwood log
and circles around a ritual path
in shadowy thickets of scented herbs.

The patch above his shaggy brow
has balded like a friar's tonsure;
he observes a monkish silence
as he shuffles his way beneath the ferns.

Then, his tail lifts and sounds a fiery
silent prayer that sails o'er the moss field,
a slow and steady corrosive bomb,
a spiritual force: fronds bow their heads.

His honest divination floats down
into the valley to burns the throats
and eyes of men who pause and think:
The skunk is omen-making again.


The Patch

When a suit has rubbed and thinned
by daily ferine abrasion and stretch
down to threaded lining and beyond
into vacancy and nothingness,

her needle fastens on the fringe
with a freshly-tanned leathern scrap,
and seals the hole stitch by stitch
hemming a penultimate of death.

So, a patch can save a coat.
A little bargain: a mark of age
that buys another year. It leaves,
not a tattered rag-of-a-man,

just a skid-guard on the elbow,
a great big scab tacked on a ledge,
rough and ready for foreign friction--
bridge-bracing, adoption, mend.

Congratulations Travis!

Travis has been accepted to Florida State University with a full-ride scholarship and a $10,000 annual stipend!!

Self Choruses

.
I.

I want to write a poem, so
I choose an ironic form, as
I talk about writing a poem, it
Happens - my mind the paper reifies;
The paper cradles my print, positing me
To be - became - pale fire again.

II.

St. Vladimir, you bless me with self-
Consciousness; a microscope I need
Today in a neighborhood of Artists.
I peer indiscrimately at pin points,
Like ants dotting a sinewy foot path.
Missing the point, I pray for further ants.

III.

St. Camus - not Albert, too Bourgeois for you -
You bless me with vitals, breath, red dirt and
Bouncing pupils of concern. In the neighborhood of
Dualism, you pointed out the grass and white
Glare of the sun on the garage door. The
Sun goes West, it belongs there for a night.

IV.

St. Iph, living in my house squatting at my desk,
Your sainthood I despise and think it a trick.
Your main trick is memory, an occasional scrouge
On the heart. I associate your conjuring glare
With flickering pictures and my tongue caught;
Mid the racket and traffic of thought, you pinch.


(Hey my lovelies, I composed this during Linguistic class last week. What do you all think? Here are cheats: St. Vladimir = Nabokov, St. Iph = "If.")

Our First Meeting

I'll see you all tonight at Cosi for our first meeting (as an official club).

Love you all.

(Although, if I had to carry you all across a pool of water, there's one I'd carry with extra affection.)

(No, Travis, it's not you.)

between proper notes, taken in linguistics

Hide your eyes and the
words. stop.
Hide your eyes with your heavy hand
Next behind my hair, falling,
meeting over my face—
and the voices (how tired) stop coming from those mouths—
if you look up you can still s e e.

look at the paper
and the ink and the marks, this line that curves: then i (I) am
saying something.
How is it that this—making words—happens?
What would it be like
Not to know?
Not to hear?
in my head, in front of all their voices
when the letters make words(?)(.)

Darcy's Eco Ego

Darcy deserves a round of applause for her excellent presentation reviewing Umberto Eco's Search for a Perfect Language today in Linguistics class today.

Eco's point that there was already a plurality of languages before Babel (see Gen. 10), really through a wrench in the spokes for those in the class that tend to be overly interested in finding a biblically-based linguistic theory. The tenants of such a theory, in my opinion, have made little more than speculative assertions.

At any rate, Darcy did a fine job with the project. I'll be following it up in a few weeks with a report on Eco's The Open Work.

Mutability

Mutability spoke to me
In terms of knowledge, conferrence -
Like a curse coming acutely
Upon the polars of Yes, No -
I will, will not. The median
Of greyness vaporizes in
The new absence of possibility.
Choice brings rotation of Being.

We

We studied tonight up in the blue room.
(That’s what it’s called.) Blue walls and open windows:
A small rectangle in an old house. We
Sat together and read. The air breathed
Between indoors and the soon coming night
And took time back to spring that year.

Things were different then—our freshman year.
We had giddily stepped out of the room
Of childhood. And we’d wavered for a night
Then found each other through the windows
Of art’s communication. And we breathed
Dreams. A group of voices became a we.

So we were cocky, naïve, thought that we
Had gained what we only glimpsed that year.
And we scorned them. Remember when we breathed
Laughter from our front row in that classroom?
If we clung too tightly, recall windows—
Windows with candles—first seen in the night.

And if we our conversations at night
Held too dear, consider (all as we) we
were discovering there could be windows,
not walls. Beautiful glass in a young year.
We talked, scattered all over the plain room,
And out of fear found a place where we breathed.

And over summer ambitious pens breathed
Friendship in idealism. But the next night
It was lost for awhile. We left the room.
Now our talking was almost silent; we
Shook apart a little. Did you mind that year?
Back when we drew curtains in our windows?

Today a fall rain ran down the windows.
It’s nearly over. Three years. Life breathed.
Now, like a circle, save only half a year.
I, you, you, you, we remembered tonight.
The reasons for keeping company, being we.
Us is a quiet possession of this room.

Let’s stop the hours and talk ‘til the next night
And we have to go. But don’t you see? We
Are more than older being in this room.

Reserving Space

Welcome to the Blue Room! This is just a reservation. I'm reserving a URL--carving out space--creating invisible borders where my friends I can share our writing and dialogue about the world. Coming in May.