Footsteps

Ms. Buddha’s coming
her silent rampage
of forgiveness and
tearful smiles contemplate
cookies and sin
not attending to
black crow that tears
space with pierced voice
meadowlark announces
just here and right now
I am the body hyperspace
unvoiced words reach for
you for your terminal
and your fingers and eyes
coffee revs my heart
to sing reach grasp hope
love songs to the impossible
world lit from
a universe on fire
cold and immense
inside a singular point
not dark but without
light as feathers

Poetry Is Like...

Anyone want to match the poet with the statement of poetics?

POETRY IS...

"...a partially descended testicle, embarassment, anticipation and life, all in one crouched form."

"...a big scratchy silver table and then and then jeni read and there was pizza and then JD said stuff and I got to stay up late and when I got in bed I tied the red balloon to the bed post."

"...that deja vu where I'm holding a pen but it's really a wishbone, and all I have to do is decide which verse of the world to write down, which stanza of the mind to salvage."

"...clouds of locusts licking the wind until it turns blue, the sand frozen in sea mist."

"...Lydia at four, when all things are not only possible but probable - and prime numbers have nothing and everything to do...with everything else - when stars are henry in eyes of hazel and words and phrases of cheekbones and grins and chuckles."

"...being dropped onto a charred prairie looking for love like hunger, like water, like a camel whose hump has hollowed out, and then poetry is the mirage of coming home."

Fields Marked By An Asterisk Are Required

An absolution of indifference, perched top-heavy
atop the sunken confines of a styrofoam cup.

Speak or not, breathe or not, parry the words
on the page with keen discernment, or not.

*What do you use to carry the anvil of
choice, and its furthering implications?

The flimsy whim fabric of choosing, woven.
The wind that moves breathlessly

through fall fields full of dusk and miracle
light. Sawdust leaves that collapse, cranky,

red-faced, nap blanket, dreaming in prose.

freewrite

the wind does not need the grass to answer

any more than it needs me
to love the accidental sound
it makes by passing an open window
or its amphibian skirmish across the mouth
of a hollow glass jar

it does not need me balancing
its dry winter beheading of trees
with its lesser signs, the second sources:
little creature bones scattered among the bayonette
still so elegant
and then while I sleep
wind disappears
abeyance so complete
I beg it back
even its vapid form better
than nothing

-Barbara S.

Garvin Mesa

The wind does not require the grass
to answer, but the question is always there
and gone, then back again, persistent,
ruffling blades like hair with an open palm,
posing queries of the daybreak
while the skylark tries to echo him,
asking us awake into the morning.

In the darkness of dawn in the valley
the coal train sings and everyone
listens and responds in kind:
the cicadas lost in tall forests of grass,
thrumming like starting motos;
the cows lowing in nearby fields
wet with cool dew; the odd rooster
at his post, shrill steward of the sun—
every throat as open as an unanswered
question, every sound as full
of asking as the wind.

Emily's Love

The wind does not require the grass,
He has loftier goals,
destinations unknown,
an ocean of air confronts
always itself, wrapped
around the world
with no expiration date
sipping up moisture along the way,
waters fields and junkyards, clouds
perception then suddenly clears
to reveal itself behind the mirror
where mountains accumulate,
stars gain energy and the life
of creation is still as the wind
never is, even on still sunlit afternoons
when birdsong stops, butterflies
close their wings, the gray stripped cat
stares uncomprehending
a mote without motion, silence rules
and this chapter’s done.
The gentlest breeze turns the page,
the grass moves, though She does not
require the wind.

some of us

MEANWHILE THE MONKEYS

Meanwhile the monkeys

Dropping

into our garden

like commandoes

Threaten

us

with memories of the time

we showed

up without pants

They pound

on the tabletops

until

banana cream pie is produced

Monkey see Mountain Dew

Screeches worse

than Niebelungen

Toaster, cat, bowls

and bottles

in a frozen

arc

of juggled

They come right at us,

teeth bared

like dobermans

Monkey say we people around

Laughing

at my minivan

Amazed by my bad

gas mileage

and this need

to carry around

more than one

good ant-collecting stick

They will

not even look

at the collection of clever bumper stickers

JD Frey -- August 12, 2008

PBR night in review: monkeys, rainstorms, yellow jackets and charles wright

 
Charles Wright, from Scar Tissue
 "Our lives, it seems, are a memory
                                               we had once in another place.
Or are they its metaphor?
The trees, if trees they are, seem the same,
                                               and the creeks do.
The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way,
And the clouds, if clouds they really are,
                                               still follow us,
One after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place."

A sampling of Charles Wright poetry from the Poetry Foundation.
Mark Strand and Chuck Wright reading at the Library of Congress.

TOP FIVE Monkey titles this week:
All's Quiet on the Western Monkey
For Whom the Monkey Tolls
Honey, I Shrunk the Monkey
Monkeybusters
20,000 Leagues Under the Monkey

The Dogs Ate My Biscuits

Just a while ago now the monkeys
ate all the porridge so we’ll have to go
to storage to find something funky
to eat. In the eternal meantime
the monkeys are all frisky,
and leaving them alone
is bound to be risky, but I suspect
it’ll all turn out fine
as long as we don’t bother to much
about the monkeys, just focus
on our own internal flunkies,
try to gain satori
before your mother finds out.
In the morning I’ll slip away
ever so quickly
before the sun does its tricks
and the monkeys come out
to play.

peanut butter orange blossom cookies

Wanted to post this recipe for an unbelievably divine cookie - peanut butter orange blossom! I am in love-love-love with this blog, 101cookbooks.com, and have been looking for an excuse to imitate an orange blossom cookie I tried at the Pearl Street Farmer's Market nearly three years ago, so when this recipe popped up a few weeks ago, I dove right in. For a while, I thought that "orange blossom" was some magical spice I couldn't get my hands on, but after some digging I found that people generally just add some zest and juice to their recipe.

Here's the recipe for Heidi's Peanut Butter Cookies - to "Orange Blossom" em up, I just added the zest and half the juice of an orange in the last step (these are vegan and easily made gluten-free too, if needed). On the right, photo of the cookies enjoyed at the PBR session at Ginny's.

Ships Passing

We navigate along,
the way ahead seeming
longer than the one
behind. We don’t mind
the wind, the choppy
waters. We’re martyrs
of the sea’s breadth. Its depth
is no threat for us who float.
When we pass we wave,
drop anchor for the night,
bump up against
each other’s hulls till light
comes, then pull up
again, and sail away.
Our mast lights signal harbor,
keep the distance at bay.

Poets Beyond Reason Reading at the D-Note

Watch's Face

with thanks to Mina Loy

Whose eyes blur
face time in whirling circles.
Needle-thin minutes

spin, cingular rings
round cohesive anatomy
of disconnected seconds.

Sects of breath reject
each other’s rich witchcraft,
Watching for the errors
their era will aver—

Speak, spoken, spoken to,
broken arcs of time’s
miscellany and moments
of madness

Who regresses sits
atop the apex, amid
lucent truths and silken sex.
Again the circle arcs and peaks,
the needle’s gap lapsed—
again the stolen epoch reached.

A Hallucination While Traveling

A Friday, I think, in Thailand. Somewhere along a three-day journey beginning on a tropical island and ending at my apartment in Denver (empty and overheated, a bursting peach in the dry snow), time blurs and then disappears. 3 pm Sunday will be 5 am Monday, which is like 8 am Friday equaling 6 pm Thursday, and so on.

At a bus depot in Central Thailand we give green ticket stubs, retrieve green ticket stubs, give them again for good, and are then asked for them repeatedly. We are stickered with a neon orange square that must be worn visibly on the shirtfront, stickered next with a fuschia square - fuschia for Bangkok on Fridays, I guess. An eight year-old boy wheels around the driveway on a Batman bike, trying to impress my brother and the other weary, ripe, sun-worn and beach-weathered tourists from Australia, England, Germany, Holland, France, Canada, America. He rides by with no hands, teeth flashing, his eyelids flipped inside out.

Four hours ago it was afternoon, and the bus depot in Krabi was sweltering, overcrowded, and filthy. Colleen couldn't understand the refuse cluttering the edges of everything - water bottles, candy wrappers, plastic cups and napkins, toilet paper, ticket stubs, square stickers in acid dream shades, junk, garbage, waste. "Depots are always like this," I told her. "Any place where people come and then go, where people don't stay, looks like this." A thin, bony, blondish girl in oversized sunglasses leaned forward from her plastic chair and vomited what looked like kinked yellow noodles at her feet. Thirty minutes after she and her hungover friends were ferried away in the back of a truck, a Thai man sat in the same chair, clipping his fingernails, crescents of which flicked from his clippers into the pile of noodles.

There are dogs. Dogs with fleas, with scars, with gigantic testicles, "showing their lipstick" as one of the girls from Brighton put it, dogs with teats swinging below them, long, impossibly stretched dog tits, dogs trotting, stretching, sleeping, rolling, running, nosing, whining, and scratching, scratching, scratching. You can tell the tourists from the travelers because the tourists sit and scratch the dogs between the ears or pet their matted fur. The travelers sneer, disgusted, and slap mosquitoes with mirthless economy.

On the bus again, I am woken from sleep, probably by the churning of my own mind. After night falls, the squirrels in the works become horses running thunder, and the mental turbines crank out the poisonous product of relentless self-obsession, the agony of a skewed self-awareness, fractals upon fractals of a faulty self, an untidy, unattractive, unsavory, and unsaved self. Over the course of two weeks I have worried that wound like a frayed seam, biting thread after thread as the hem unravels. I worry it still; it requires all my attention, until suddenly my sister stretches her leg forward across the seat of the chair next to me - a seat with the back broken and therefore removed - and rests her foot so that it lightly touches my thigh. The transference is quick; in an instant I am prepared to hitch all of the hate aimed at a fat girl onto the smooth, warm, amphibious curve of a pedicured foot. A pellet of reason within me pipes up against all odds and asks her, nicely, squeaking with niceties, to please move her foot a little to the right so it will not rest on me. Magically, she obliges - and survives.

Later, in the dark, I hear that same sister sniff, and I know without turning that she is rigid against the window in the dark, silently sobbing. An hour later we wait for our bus connection at a terminal, and I ask my mom if Ryan cries for her not-so-nice-after-all ex-boyfriend, though I know well that she could have been crying for the great loss of youth, of innocence, for poverty, for beauty and sorrow and their tiny tangerine dance, for the pink polyester curtains swagged from row to row along the length of the pastel party bus. My mother replies that Ryan was crying for our father, who had died one year before.

That makes me think of our last night on the island, of how we stood in a circle, of how the air was nudged by the gentle lapping of the Andaman Sea. It makes me think of the orchids, the ashes, the ocean, the flame, the pathetic attempt at ceremony, the terrible trial of keeping my mouth shut so as not to hurt others' feelings. It makes me think of how my sister, terrified it would be mistaken for drugs and confiscated, insisted on transporting a tiny portion of my father's ashes halfway around the world in a Burt's Beeswax lip balm tin the size of a quarter. I recall how the ashes ground against each other between the two pieces of metal, sticking them fast so that the tin would not open when it was finally time. I ground my teeth in time with the ash, daring myself to laugh or scream, waiting for the inevitable explosion, some raw impropriety. My mother passed an orchid to each of us, and I observed with clinical surprise that I did not crush it when I took it from her.

In the end the tin was opened and did not explode, and Colleen just reached in and pinched my father between finger and thumb, sprinkling him into her flower. We stared at the actions of the youngest among us, too scared to admit that we didn't have a better idea. I wanted to mention the bones; I wanted to make a joke and describe out loud the rough coarseness, the frank chunkiness of the "ash," but in the end I said nothing. My father was sprinkled into my orchid too, and I walked to the water, muttering apologies under my breath.

"I'm sorry we're doing this; I know how much you would have hated it."

When I put my flower in the water, the first thing it did was turn upside down.

I walked back up the beach to my bungalow and went to bed. The mattress was covered with a fine layer of sand, and my back was sunburnt from persistent snorkeling. I dreamt that night that my legs were coated in sticky beach sand, and I was shaving them, blood pouring out from beneath the blades.

Tonight will be spent on a bus, a twelve-hour ride that launches the long journey home. The only activity good for quieting thunder is writing it down, writing it down just as it happened, just as it seemed like it happened. And if I write enough, sometimes the horses will become squirrels again, sometimes the fractals will become single silhouettes, and sometimes sleep will come and stay.