Acceptances, fall & shining

There's been a lot of lovely acceptances in my world lately - I'm just quiet about them. Here's some poems of mine forthcoming in Winter/Spring 2011:

~ long poem (5 pages!!) called River-heart, Radio in OH NO Magazine

~ in Lo-Ball Magazine, my poem For Derek, Missing for 8 Months

~ in The Normal School, look for two poems - The Closest I Come To Prayer These Days and The Night Life.


Also, not sure when this will air but, while visiting Pittsburgh, I'll be taping an episode of Prosody down at 91.3 WYEP, with guest host Renee Alberts, a woman who I think is fast becoming one of Pittsburgh's poetry saints, who, among so much else, curates a free poetry reading at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, each Sunday afternoon.

Speaking of Pittsburgh and kind stars, a holler of congratulations to dear mentor Terrance Hayes, who tonight won the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry . Not just a mentor but a gracious, funny, generous guy and a good dad to boot. Hell yes, Terrance! Well-deserved, to put it mildly.

Woman Walking On The Road - by Terrance Hayes

We were in the car. We were heading home when Christian
with his wholly American name & manic chatter told his
girlfriend
the woman we saw walking on the road with no umbrella
was a sign of torment. We were in the backseat⎯
you with that face making the windows & the black world
beyond the windows beautiful, the roadside figure of a woman
in the rain beautiful & I knew later I’d be writing these lines,
caught in that space between personal & public:
a woman’s torment or symbol of it & our love & goddamn
everybody’s sins scribbled here for show. We were in the car
heading home when Christian said the woman on the road
was probably fresh from a fight with her husband,
but he didn’t say his fists gave his last girlfriend bruises
& I didn’t say it either… The woman was walking alone
on the shoulder & meant something different & utterly the same
to each of us⎯ her lit up life & husband left looking
from a window, as I have looked from a window, guilty.
But Guilt ain’t nobody’s business. We were in the car, we saw
a woman walking on the road. There was a woman who,
after our quarrels, would steal my car, a little blue Datsun
with a dented fender. She’d drive from our dorm to the blank
streets
of the town we lived in; she’d drive past the empty classrooms,
the soccer field, to God knows where & I wanted her, then,
away from me⎯ two red lights, a tired engine leaving smoke.
But one night I groped in the darkness beneath my hood
until I disconnected something & if there is such a thing
as malice,
that was it⎯ a man sabotaging his own car so his lover
couldn’t run…
I’m shaking my head because I want to say I’m different now,
like Christian⎯ someone with a new face beside him & a pain
no one can see, perhaps, settled in his chest. Your new face
beside me. I am damaged, I have bruised. We fought over
something
stupid & she came so close I knew she could smell my blood.
Have I come far enough to say I hit her; to say my hand left
a cloud
on her cheek. Have I come far enough to say, I’m sorry?
We were
in the car, you with that face making the windows & the world
beyond the windows real; the figure of the woman on the road
telling the truth. Once in my small brutal past a woman left me,
walked from my lit up fingers to the street with a storm
on her face.
It was raining. I watched from the window & could not follow,
my car sat in the lot disconnected, unopened, unmoved.

Nous sommes ambitieux, mais nous sommes aussi fatigues.

In Texas, I am more aware of my silence. Some days I speak to nothing but the cat, move my voice around little spaces of song. Because I am learning French, learning to read French more than learning to speak, my old audition standard "Chanson" (from The Baker's Wife), is on a loop through my head. It begins,

Chaque jour est un jour,
comme les autres doux jour -
le potage, l'ouvrage,
peut-etre l'amour,
le soleil, il voyage
le monde fait un tour,
ansi c'est tourjours le meme...

Mostly I speak on the phone those far away, California or Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or New York or Wisconsin. It's not bad. There's a flurry of writing, flurry of sound.

Two poems from my odd collection of angels. One from Jim Daniels' Places/Everyone , and one from Nick Flynn's Some Ether. Both of these poems contain a type of silence, a type of refusal. It has to do with what we can stand, what we can't turn away from, what we must watch, what we must allow, what we allowed - thinking it wouldn't, couldn't last - within us taking root. What was torn into us, & changed sight... the writing I love best - it's always desire, wound, scar or balm.. or something in between..

March 17, 1972
by Jim Daniels

I stood for a long time
watching lights smear the wet street.
My feet planted themselves in mud.
Police radios squawked against each other.

The pint in one pocket
tugged down my jacket.
I felt its weight
cold in my hands.

Ambulances took away two injured,
one dead. Friends. Five men pushed
the crushed car back on its wheels.
A wrecker hauled it away

Show's over, boy, a cop said.
I yanked my feet out and turned
away. I can tell you this
years later. You've probably
been there:

on Alvina, the sharp curve
by the Dairy Queen, the stump
next to the ditch.
An older brother's i.d.
Someone's father's car.

Maybe you walked home
a different way. Maybe
you didn't stop to sit
on a swing behind the grade school.
Maybe the rain stopped
on your night.

Me, I banged myself
against a cyclone fence.
I finished my bottle
and fingered old stitches.
I wouldn't be smart again
for years.



Emptying Town
by Nick Flynn

I want to erase your footprints
from my walls. Each pillow
is thick with your reasons. Omens

fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman
in a party hat, clinging
to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows

creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, "Stop!"
and I close my eyes. I can't watch

as this town slowly empties, leaving me
strung between bon-voyages, like so many clothes
on a line, the white handkerchief

stuck in my throat. You know the way Jesus

rips open his shirt
to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny,
the way he points to it. I'm afraid

the way I'll miss you will be this obvious.

I have a friend who everyone warns me
is dangerous, he hides
bloody images of Jesus
around my house, for me to find

when I come home; Jesus
behind the cupboard door, Jesus tucked

into the mirror. He wants to save me
but we disagree from what. My version of hell
is someone ripping open his shirt

and saying, Look what I did for you. . .

Birthing

The skies must hold an arrangement of stars specifically constructed to bless those children born today, any August 10th, with both extraordinary talent and extraordinary kindness. Today is the birthday of poets Mark Doty, who is turning 57, and Matthew Siegel, who is either turning 26 or 27 (?). It is one thing to be talented. It is far greater (and more rare) to be both talented and kind. The world, and the poetry world, is better off with the presence of these two in it. As far as I can tell, birthdays, at their best, are an embrace of the day, and really, time itself. For this reason, Dear Mark & Matthew, I'd like to give you this poem (whose form, unfortunately is not quite in tact in this context, but can be also found here,) by Nazim Hikmet, who, for those unfamiliar with his work, is a Turkish novelist, playwright, journalist and poet. For me, this poem is an embrace. I hope it will be for you as well. May your birthdays be happy indeed.


Things I Didn't Know I Loved
by Nazim Hikmet
translated by Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing

it's 1962 March 28th
I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don't like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn't know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it
I've never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

and here I've loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can't wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you'll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I know this has troubled people before
and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before
and will be said after me

I didn't know I loved the sky
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard
the guards are beating someone again
I didn't know I loved trees
bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino
they come upon me in winter noble and modest
beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish
"the poplars of Izmir
losing their leaves. . .
they call me The Knife. . .
lover like a young tree. . .
I blow stately mansions sky-high"
in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief
to a pine bough for luck

I never knew I loved roads
even the asphalt kind
Vera's behind the wheel we're driving from Moscow to the Crimea
Koktebele
formerly "Goktepé ili" in Turkish
the two of us inside a closed box
the world flows past on both sides distant and mute
I was never so close to anyone in my life
bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé
when I was eighteen
apart from my life I didn't have anything in the wagon they could take
and at eighteen our lives are what we value least
I've written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I'm going to the shadow play
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather's hand
his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
with a sable collar over his robe
and there's a lantern in the servant's hand
and I can't contain myself for joy
flowers come to mind for some reason
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky
I didn't know I loved flowers
friends sent me three red carnations in prison

I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I'm floored watching them from below
or whether I'm flying at their side

I have some questions for the cosmonauts
were the stars much bigger
did they look like huge jewels on black velvet
or apricots on orange
did you feel proud to get closer to the stars
I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don't
be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract
well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to
say they were terribly figurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them
they are our endless desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad
I never knew I loved the cosmos

snow flashes in front of my eyes
both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind
I didn't know I liked snow

I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherry-red as now
in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors
but you aren't about to paint it that way
I didn't know I loved the sea
except the Sea of Azov
or how much

I didn't know I loved clouds
whether I'm under or up above them
whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts

moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois
strikes me
I like it

I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved
rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette
one alone could kill me
is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks
I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty
to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return

19 April 1962
Moscow

A poem by Terrance Hayes, one of my mentors ( for all this poem embodies & more)

Arbor for Butch

a pecha kucha after Martin Puryear

[VESSEL]
I am with my newborn son and the man blood says is my father
in a shit motel and if each of us is, as I sometimes believe,
the room we inhabit, he is a bed used until it’s stained.
Even if I knew this first meeting was our last, I would
have nothing to offer beyond the life I have made without him.

[THICKET]
In the far south where history shades everything,
there are people who fear trees. I once heard an old man say
I may be black as a crow but I’m white inside.
Nowhere else does the sky do what the sky does there
where the graves are filled with dirt the color of fire.

[RAWHIDE CONE]
We drank whiskey until we were drunk as the couple in the photo
my mother gave me to show him, the boy and girl swaying
at the edge of my future. I watched my father curl on the bed
like a leaf drained of its greening as my child cried
the way rain cries when it is changed to steam.

[BOWER]
Because I believe the tree is a symbol of everything,
one of us was the bough reaching across the road as fumes
scorch its leaves. One of us was a door opening and closing
in the darkness, one of us was a boat being carried downstream.

[MAROON]
My father and I sat in a motel room beside a highway
Where his pickup was the shade of a bruise beneath the glow
of the vacancy sign. Where he and his talk began
to evaporate. We were two fathers watching the faces
of two sons where the evening passed as it arrived.

[LADDER FOR BOOKER T. WASHINGTON]
Where the rain comes, long toed and crushing the high grass,
swamping the land, where a slave talked his children
out of running away with the bottom of his shoe.
This is what it means to believe in ascension and fear climbing.


[SANCTUARY]
In the far south where sap jewels the bark, the teeth
of the saws are sticky and bittersweet. But I wanted to carve
a door out of the wood and around that door I wanted
to build a room because I knew what my mother wished for
and I knew from far off what she would need.

[C.F.A.O.]
The arm of the boy falls around the girl heavy as a branch
in the photograph with the gloss that’s been rubbed
clean and the blurred inscription which nearly delivers
its message before vanishing. I drove the long night
to see the face my son and I wear like a mask.

[SELF]
Where history can be a downpour of joy or guilt spilling
its wronged headed desire all over the body. Where
a boy and girl fought in a motel bed to make me, one desire
beating against another. Where my mother seemed to blur
calling him her first lover even after she said she was raped.

[BELIEVER]
In the far south my father, the first time I met him
where for that night and the next one, he’d sleep,
said God made nothing sweeter than pussy. We smoked
our history, we drank to our future until each of us was
a head of steam, clouds above each other’s dreams.

[DOWAGER]
Where the plan was when I saw him to cut off his hands.
Where because of this man my mother would want me
dead, would want no limbs to branch inside her,
no cluster of sound waiting in a drum. Where
she wanted to, but could not shape her want into an ax.

[DEADEYE]
Sometimes my body is a guitar, a hole waiting in wood, wires
trembling to sleep. To identify what you are, to be loved by what
you identify, I thought This is how the blood sings into the self.
I thought what was hollow in me would be shaped into music.


[BIG AND LITTLE SAME]
The first time I met my father I believed I would understand
the line connecting me to him because a man rooted to his kin
can never be a slave. But he was like the road, skid marked
and distant, like the rain breaking above ground and beating into it.

[SOME TALES]
In the far south where as one man swung from the limb
Of a tree, he said I may be as black as this bark
but my heart is light. Where even when your lantern burns
out, they say the flame lasts. Where everyone I know
is ablaze with this story and darkened by its ash.

[RELIQUARY ]
Certain arrangements must be made
if you want access to the past. With his room
without rooms and his truck without gas,
my father was a nail bent in the shaft of a hammer,
a wound the length of a kiss, a mouth bled of its power.

[CIRCUMBENT]
I am with the ones the blood says are mine and if each of us is
as I sometimes believe, little more than a bray of nostalgia,
we are like the village mule chained to its muling. My father
fit a slim ragged hand over the head of my newborn son
and said he sounds like a white child crying like that.

[MALEDICTION]
What if blackness is a fad? Dear Negritude, I live as you live
waiting to be better than I am. Before sleep last night I thought
how it would be to awaken with all the colors of this world
turned inside out. And that was the name of my suffering.

[BASK]
The story my father told me did not reveal one body inside
another, the arms of the boy who would become my father
embracing the girl who would become my mother, it did not hold
the sentence rooted to the beginning of my life.

[OLD MOLE]
I am not doing anything now, except waiting like the bird
who uses the bones and feathers of other birds to build
its nest. I am on my bed of leaves thinking about the past,
how my father dragged his shadow across the room
the way a storm drags its rain.
(stanza break)

[CONFESSIONAL]
Where there were too many trees and too many names
etched into the trunks, where the knots in the wood
Were the scars of old limbs, where, to be reborn, the birch pine
must be set aflame, where the door if I opened it might have
Revealed the love making or abuse still waiting to be named.


originally appeared in APR