March 7, 1924 - February 19, 2012

my mother read this poem at my grandmother's funeral today:

The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



There were no nails in my grandmother's coffin. The pine box was put together with pegs, perhaps yesterday, sawdust still lit on the edges. There was no service. We stood in the first few pews of the funeral home, just immediate family, talked quietly, looked at some pictures.

I was on the phone with my mother when she got the call on Sunday, had called her after a week or two of not being in touch. There was no better way for her or I to get the news.

When I first thought about the funeral, I didn't think about the actual act of putting the loved into the ground, didn't think of it at all until my dad mentioned that I should bring a coat to Pittsburgh. We buried my grandmother, truly, at least half of the coffin, my family and I. It's Jewish custom. All of us shoveled. At first hesitant scoops, trading off the shovels, then with greater muscle, acceptance, a job to do, digging into the cold dirt with force, pushing our feet onto the shovel's head so that it broke more earth for us to heave into the coffin. It became something more communal than standing beside the grave. I don't think any of us knew we'd be burying her like that. In funerals on TV, at other funerals I've been to, sometimes there is a handful of dirt cast down, a flower thrown in. This was shared grief in action, as we literally buried our dead. A blessing to take part in that type of closure.

i turn you with slow animals

(& in text version)


This video and this poem make me think of Chautauqua, age 15 maybe and meeting a boy who'd dyed his long hair black and red, how he and Julia (who was fair, whose bright red hair lifted when she ran) were goths in safety pins and purple ribbons and there I was in my polo shirt and brown shorts and we all ran away from club to John's house, smoking cigarettes, all of us laying on his bed together on our backs listening to The Smashing Pumpkins, if you turned your head to the side there was the lake outside down the hill, the sailboats, maybe it was drizzling or smelled like drizzling, like an old house in New York State in August on a warm gray afternoon and then I was being kissed

Oh Absence & a poem by Jean Valentine

Absence in the shape of faith. I stopped trusting what looked stable, what called itself stable, and started to trust those people that owned their failings, that said those failings were inherent, that joked at the idea of their own perfection, their own completion. This tack seemed more real than anyone who said things like "I'm living the dream," or "I've been rocketed into the fourth dimension." This seemed more real than anyone who said, "this is a simple program for complicated people." The thing was - the idea of completion began to seem so entirely false that I started to let myself hang on the edge of things. The air was clearer there, because fewer people were willing to stand straddled between two lives, which was different than the illusion of balance, for this place acknowledged the continual potential a crash. The air was clearer, the sky was wider, the fields looked like I thought Texas would look - desolate, unexpected, small towns rising and disappearing as quickly into the land. Dry fields of machinery, a path of cacti and fossils, a creek bed and beetles, the living wind.


This following poem by Jean Valentine made me cry, albeit very quietly and shortly, in my poetic forms class:


X

I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents did not want his name used publicly. --from an unnamed child's banner in the AIDS Memorial Quilt


The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky.
I remember looking at you, X, this way,
taking in your red hair, your eyes' light, and I miss you
so. I know,
you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway,
whether dead or whether living, real. --Then Y
said, "Who will remember me three years after I die?
What is there for my eye
to read then?"
The lamb should not have given
his wool.
He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small.
Playing with a stone
on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean.

On Major and Minor, by Anne Carson

Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the name of schools of philosophy, mood and not having a mood, the correct ...time. There are more major things than minor things over all, yet there are more minor things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list them. When I think of you reading this, I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra.


-- Anne Carson

I have been living inside this poem by Robert Duncan for a year

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow


as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.



(I have been sick on & off for two weeks. IV antibiotics, fearful nights, hundreds of dollars. I am sitting in my apartment again, feeling sick. I was sick at this time last year, for what felt like months. I don't say this to ask for well wishes. I think I need a medicine man. I need a spirit journey to search into the cause of my continual sickness, why my body so easily breaks down. I need to go into the desert and howl.

In the middle of all this sickness, I saw the best movie that I've seen in a long time, Biutiful. I can't stop thinking about it.

Whole and Without Blessing | Linda Gregg

What is beautiful alters, has undertow.
Otherwise I have no tactics to begin with.
Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes
out of this fever and see the meaning
of my life clearly. A thing like a hill.
I proclaim myself whole and without blessing,
or need to be blessed. I belong to no one. I do not move.
Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet.
and the indifferent sun warms me.
I was bred for slaughter, like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center,
where there are no clues except pleasure.




( listening: Banditas )
( reading: Rules of the Dance )

Meditation at Lagunitas -- Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

A poem by Jane Hirschfield

Sentencings


A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.

* * *

Blinded by light or black cloth—
so many ways
not to see others suffer.

* * *

Too much longing:

it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron.

* * *

From very far or very close—
the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.

* * *

As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,
we listen to the murmuring dead.

* * *

Any point of a circle is its start:
desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring.

* * *

In a room in which nothing
has happened,
sweet-scented tobacco.

* * *

The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents.

* * *

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

Stars you are mine / you have always been mine

The Under Voice

I saw streaming up out of the sidewalk the homeless women and men
the East side of Broadway fruit and flowers and bourbon
the homeless men like dull knives gray-lipped the homeless women
connected to no one streaming no one to no one
more like light than people, blue neon,
blue the most fugitive of all the colors

Then I looked and saw our bodies
not near but not far out,
lying together, our whiteness

And the under voice said, Stars you are mine,
you have always been mine; I remember the minute on the birth table
when you were born, I riding with my feet up in the wide silver-blue stirrups,
I came and came and came, little baby and woman, where were you taking me?
Everyone else may leave you, I will never leave you, fugitive.


-- Jean Valentine
Door in the Mountain: New & Collected Poems

and more..

The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action (excerpt) by Audre Lorde

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.

And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone can we survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

(Originally delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980)

(Thank you to Leigh, for pointing me towards this excerpt.)

For Fall:

[The poet] diffuses a tone & spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power . . . reveals itself in the balance of reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities. (304)

-Coleridge
~ ~ ~ ~



~ ~ ~ ~

Sleepwalk Ballad - Federico García Lorca

~ ~ ~ ~

Two poems I'm thinking of today, rattling around with a wild fever

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?


Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The Inconsolables

I'm about 50 pages into "Heaven's Coast," a memoir by Mark Doty. The book found me precisely when I needed it, in the middle of a season of old trauma and grief. It's an incredibly, incredibly beautiful book. I wrote Mark a note today on Facebook, but thought that I would share it here - why not? The questions I have are so gnawing, I might as well fling them into whatever space is available.

I've been having an ongoing conversation with a friend about elegy, which has spread into a conversation also about consolation and catharsis. My friend's basic thought can be summarized inthat elegy "does nothing" - he finds no consolation in writing poems about the traumatic events of his life, but returns to them over & over involuntarily - this time of year, for both of us, the record skips.

The act of writing elegies for the same event or person over and over seems perhaps to be nothing more than the wild impulse of disbelief focused into page, the clearest, smallest space we can understand, a place where, as writers, we have the illusion (maybe) of manageability. My friend writes with no hope for consolation, with no hope that others might find his work cathartic (if they do, I think he's pleased, but he doesn't "aim" towards it). I haven't quite gotten there - I've an odd sense of responsibility surrounding trauma, surrounding death. I wonder, lately, if my sense of responsibility comes only from wanting the experiences to feel extremely unique - the desire to have been "chosen" almost, as some sort of voice to speak for those unable to express their traumas that are like mine. To have terrible things happen, and to not have a sense that they've happened for a reason - it leaves us with nothing almost, doesn't it? But there must be a space after reason - these things happen...and then life continues happening, and we go on, or we don't..

My friend suggests that there are some of us who are inconsolable, and I began to wonder if what's inconsolable gives us a type of terrible privilege, this sharp access to a sense of mortality, and perhaps, humanity.

I could babble about these things for awhile, as they've been a kind of film over the rest of my life lately, but perhaps as I continue to read "Heaven's Coast," I'll find more answers, or at least different lenses, which, in fact, might be as close to consolation as I'm going to get. Not so bad for a poet.

Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.

From The Duino Elegies - R.M.Rilke

The First Elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.



rest of the elegy here, along with the second (i'm sorry about the mess this format's made of line breaks)

follow

things that inspire me lately.



the Oregon coast

an upcoming tattoo

the wild party

hildur yeoman

They cannot fix you. They try and try,

Days of perspective; let it lay, take leave, let up, get gone; go on.


Station

by Maria Hummel


Days you are sick, we get dressed slow,
find our hats, and ride the train.
We pass a junkyard and the bay,
then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel.

You lose your hat. I find it. The train
sighs open at Burlingame,
past dark tons of scrap and water.
I carry you down the black steps.

Burlingame is the size of joy:
a race past bakeries, gold rings
in open black cases. I don’t care
who sees my crooked smile

or what erases it, past the bakery,
when you tire. We ride the blades again
beside the crooked bay. You smile.
I hold you like a hole holds light.

We wear our hats and ride the knives.
They cannot fix you. They try and try.
Tunnel! Into the dark open we go.
Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.

to rest upon

Sometimes I can't articulate the Much To Say. Lately other people have been offering the words & sounds to me of others, and that's what makes sense. It's okay to take a little rest from explaining.

---Five Remembrances offered by Thich Naht Hahn
(sent to me by my friend Rob, he of the motorcycle & bicycle & yoga mastery; who was once a painter, who is deeply kind.)

1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.


--Vic Chesnutt (introduced to me this week by a friend, he of the almonds, cold wind & empathy.)

Funny, strange, sad. Brilliant. Here's his Daytrotter session with Elf Power.

slow leaving a goodbye to things

I'm terribly sad, chickadees. At 87, Jose Saramago has died. Every so often you find an author who transports you entirely - who you can barely imagine except as a kind of intuitive magician or unreal character themselves - someone whose mind you might get lost in were they not so masterfully guiding you along. Jose Saramago was one of those authors. I first read Blindness in high school, and immediately began to slowly collect his works, reading each voraciously, slowing as I neared each ending, wanted each to never end. A true storyteller, a true inventor & artist, a humanitarian. I don't think I can write an accurate description of just how much he means to me. His newest book, "The Elephant's Journey," will be published in September - his last gift to us. Thoughts on Saramago's death here. And here, Saramago's Nobel Lecture from 1998. Rest in peace, dear Saramago.

Over at Gigantic Sequins, we are just finishing up our 2.2 reading period, which ends officially on June 30th. A few days ago I was talking to Kim, our editor-in-chief, about exactly what it is Gigantic Sequins is looking for, and our conversation planted in my head this idea of an aesthetic-based community. Perhaps this description leads towards sounding superficial, but what Kim had expressed was that she wasn't simply interested in publishing poets writing poetry, and fiction writers writing fiction, but the writing of artists & musicians & all sorts of creative people. This desire to publish more expansively, not just as a literary journal, but as a journal of arts & culture, is what sets Gigantic Sequins apart from the clambering crowd of lit mags - basically, we're invested in publishing any sort of excellent & thoughtful writing, from classical verse to essays on film. And you still have until June 30th to submit!

I am slow in the world today, brimming with endings and beginnings.....

there are two things I want to remember

In the City of Light

by Larry Levis

The last thing my father did for me
Was map a way: he died, & so
Made death possible. If he could do it, I
Will also, someday, be so honored. Once,

At night, I walked through the lit streets
Of New York, from the Gramercy Park Hotel
Up Lexington & at that hour, alone,
I stopped hearing traffic, voices, the racket

Of spring wind lifting a newspaper high
Above the lights. The streets wet,
And shining. No sounds. Once,

When I saw my son be born, I thought
How loud this world must be to him, how final.

That night, out of respect for someone missing,
I stopped listening to it.

Out of respect for someone missing,
I have to say

This isn’t the whole story.
The fact is, I was still in love.
My father died, & I was still in love. I know
It’s in bad taste to say it quite this way. Tell me,
How would you say it?

The story goes: wanting to be alone & wanting
The easy loneliness of travelers,

I said good-bye in an airport & flew west.
It happened otherwise.
And where I’d held her close to me,
My skin felt raw, & flayed.

Descending, I looked down at light lacquering fields
Of pale vines, & small towns, each
With a water tower; then the shadows of wings;
Then nothing.

My only advice is not to go away.
Or, go away. Most

Of my decisions have been wrong.

When I wake, I lift cold water
To my face. I close my eyes.

A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?

Because there are faces I might never see again,
There are two things I want to remember
About light, & what it does to us.

Her bright, green eyes at an airport—how they widened
As if in disbelief;
And my father opening the gate: a lit, & silent

City.

It's Never That Easy

These poems were up for a hot minute at Leigh Phillips' blog and are as precise & astonishing as she is.

White Dog
by Carl Phillips

First snow—I release her into it—
I know, released, she won’t come back.
This is different from letting what,

already, we count as lost go. It is nothing
like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what
losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes:

I love her.
Released, she seems for a moment as if
some part of me that, almost,

I wouldn’t mind
understanding better, is that
not love? She seems a part of me,

and then she seems entirely like what she is:
a white dog,
less white suddenly, against the snow,

who won’t come back. I know that; and, knowing it,
I release her. It’s as if I release her
because I know.

Mantra

by Ruth Stone

When I am sad
I sing, remembering
the redwing blackbird's clack.
Then I want no thing
except to turn time back
to what I had
before love made me sad.

When I forget to weep,
I hear the peeping tree toads
creeping up the bark.
Love lies asleep
and dreams that everything
is in its golden net;
and I am caught there, too,
when I forget.