Well Done

In "celebration" of "Poetry Month"...

I am done with poetry.
Henceforth, I write postmortem.

I am done with poetry
that doesn’t sound like poetry,
and poetry that reads
like grocery lists and Hallmark cards.
I am done with wisdom about life,
and lack of wisdom about life.
I am done with writing nobody reads.

I am done with readings where nobody listens,
where the only voice anyone wants to hear
is their own.
(But I should have guessed—
they are, after all
called Readings, not Listenings.)

I am done with my cynicism,
and with yours.
I am done with the silences
between my words.
I am done with magazines and journals
nobody reads—not even their publishers,
and I am done with publishers.
I am done with the guilt of not reading
other’s work—Who reads anyhow?
And why should anyone?

Here is to Poetry month! Here is to
Poetry Blogging! Here is to
Laureateships and the New Yorker!
Here is to expectations
that always need to be lowered!
And here is to words nobody reads,
and site nobody visits!

I am going back to wax,
back to baking my mother in the oven.
I am going back to my silence,
and to collecting dust bunnies
where the wall meets the floor.
I am going back to knowing
I am nobody,
and you are nobody,
and nobody’s listening…

"The Four Subjects of Poetry"

1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
   
   
2. We're not getting any younger.


3. It sure is cold and lonely
   (a) without you, honey, or
   (b) with you, honey.


4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.

--William Matthews

"How many things have to happen to you
before something occurs to you?"

--Robert Frost

*Excerpted from an NPR interview with Edward Hirsch

Medusas

Here is the silence
fill it with words

out of the shadows falling on this room
capture the day in retrospect

like a lamp that refuses to light
until you touch it


I speak to you
through her these days
and she speaks of her medusa
and how, as always
it wears a familiar face.

I get her the same gift every year
but now my gifts only
collect the shadows on a shelf
She has outgrown them,
but I was away
and now I don't know
what words to get her.

Once more, change the dial:
this time it is the prize
they gave her for her limbs
I wonder if she resents the gesture
or only misses the feeling in her leg.

And now under the covers
where the cold has made a nest
where I have made acquaintance
with the blankness of his back.

Quick, the last thread of light
is dissolving, soon they will fire
the cannon--somewhere,
some other time--
the days all die the same.

Now you can hear the whine
of frigid empty air grazing the floor
It's just you and it now;
don't look; it's not there.

Second Poet Laureate Of The Blogosphere

"National Poetry Month is April and it’s now up to the members of Poetisphere and Poets101.com to decide how the process will be run this year.

In the meantime, let’s get busy nominating. If you know of a blogging poet who meets the following rules then please feel free to leave that poet’s name and complete URL in the comments below. As only Poetisphere members may leave comments, those who are not members may e-mail your submissions to... idleblogs (AT) yahoo.com... [or] e-mail them to another Poetisphere member."
(I'd be happy to relay your nominations.)

Café Lutecia

Here, in this corner, life happens.

Here, beside the dusty faded magazines
of a hundred covers ago,

Here, beneath the posters of a homeland
missed so much it’s been forgotten,

Here, at this table of fading stains
by the naïve declarations of eternity
etched into its face,

Here, did I stop loving you?


Here, where a hundred stories
must’ve begun before,

Here, where a hundred mornings
stumbled across the threshold,

Here, where they draped the mantle
with pictures of what it was used to be,

an etching of a city
that no longer wants to be etched,

Here, in this kitchen where she frowned
over the smell of another place,

where she saw in the face of the eggs
another future gone by,

Did she here ask, Why?
a hundred times before?

Did she, too, stop loving him
a hundred closings ago?

Did she, too, look at those walls
and wonder what else might have been?

What that bridge must have looked like
from the window of another room?

Did she think of why she stopped collecting
mugs, and plates, and figurines?

And how long after that
did it take for the dust to collect?

Did she notice the first time
they looked just like the day before?

And the first time the faces coming in
all looked, like those getting out, alike?

Did she see it like that first wrinkle
that didn’t go with a good night’s sleep?

Like the first time she admitted
it wasn’t the light making that hair look white?

Here, when they turned over the sign,
she must have sat, hands folded in her lap,
like a hundred laps before,

Here, she must have looked out
at the street falling asleep,
at the night gathering
like dirt behind her ears,

Here, she must have wondered
if there’ll be another…

Geography Lessons

To Katy
 
I sat there on the steps
absorbing the rest of the day,
waiting to see you for the first time.
The sun was dissipating with the distance,
turning the sky into a fake purple screen
soon to be erased.
And the cold was seeping in me.

But you were real.
From behind the hill,
huge eyes, and a tweed the color of the sky,
and a silence only the night knows.
How could you live up to your self
when you are so big?
But you do.

Always the night.
That density of the air
when she sang of candles and roses
and voices bouncing off the walls.
You could smell the humidity then
before it collected under your nose.

We were young, and she was young,
and the country was young, too.
The geraniums were blooming from ear to ear,
forced from the ground with too much determination.
I was just starting to know the night.

So how did we get to this?
Sitting each in his couch
on opposite sides of the room,
slicing the silence between us
like a brie,
gathering the distance like dust bunnies
under the coffee table.

When did the night turn so cold?
It was always silent,
but even the silence sounded different then.

Now you're gone
back to words,
silent, but loud,
smoothing away the folds in the distance.
Sometimes it's not a matter of geography.

Reading Excerpt

As much as I hate seeing myself on video, below finally is a video excerpt from Saturday's reading, upon the insistence of my family and friends in Lebanon, featuring "Tired" and "Tell Me". (Happy Mother's Day, Mom!)



The program was picked by my dear friend, Katy, who came all the way from Sandwich, MA! Here it is:

1. Breathe
2. Seasons
3. In the Making
4. Jellyfish
5. Alkaline
6. The Flight of the Swallow
7. Red Light District
8. Cry
9. Life (Unraveled)
10. Life on a Beautiful Day
11. The Smallness of Life
12. Tired
13. Tell Me

(Ryan, thanks for the footage!)

Reading / News

Hello all,

I will be reading this Saturday, March 18 2006 at 7:00pm at Communitas (201 Sabine Ave. Narberth, PA). I hope to see you there!

Also, I was a finalist in the Mad Poets Society contest for my poem "Life on a Beautiful Day" which will be published in the upcoming issue of Mad Poets Review (late summer/early fall).

And three of my artworks will be featured in the most recent issue of Philadelphia Stories (out this week): two wax collages and a water color (below).

Sandwiched

We picked up a sandwich
at a station a thousand miles from home
--no matter where that may be.
The hills spread, yellow and thin,
underneath our anger.
And just where the plains ended
a new pain began,
of sun, white, and winding stone.

At the top I found you
scoping the world with an ache
I never saw for me.
I looked towards your glance,
the looming towers and dusty grass,
sandwiched between your life
and another you'd rather live,
between the sky
and always somewhere else.

I wasn't panting then,
running after you in every foreign tongue
we didn't speak.
I traced your gaze
like I could never the nape of your neck:
it ended in the shadow of a bell tower,
and began somewhere
far far from me.

Baltic Song

Even though I put on my rare Gaultier
I could still smell the inside of my mouth
coagulate.

I finally figured out why I write about myself;
because there is nobody.
I finally figured out why I stopped writing.

He looks at the cobblestone and says,
I’ve had enough of this,
enough of the brown brick
bouncing in the sheen of the sidewalk,
enough of the bite of winter on windy streets;
I was born where the sun has enough shame
to drop by.

But I have lost my home;
have you seen my shoes?
There on the Baltic it stayed,
but I left.
Now it isn’t anymore.
The streets look like yesterday
did when it was today,
except it is neither anymore.
Now they just look vacant
like eyes on a Friday night
when they’re too tired to sleep.

My mom used to be tall and fresh, he said,
a vision in short hair and a smile.
(But she was always Catholic.)
And then I lost my hair
and something changed in her brow.

My mother said, I’ll tell you a secret
all mothers know:
I still see you as a child
stubborn, with supple hair.
So how is it I can see the grey in yours,
even under the dye?

This smell lasts forever;
that’s why I bought it in the first place.
But it is weighing on me
like a youth that has grown
a buckle too small.
Maybe one day I’ll give it up,
maybe one day I’ll find another.
But for now I’ve got quite a bit
in the bottle left.

The Mountain

It’s my turn
to rise to the mountain
but the mountain keeps rising
ahead of me.


I keep looking at the valleys
spread thin below my feet,
villages scattered in the groins of the earth.

Mountains are barren, I say,
and looking up always makes me squint.

I don’t like breathing clouds,
and I grew up imploring in song
to be rescued from the fog.


I’ve been up other mountains before
and each I descended
with my pride trailing my feet.

I collect peaks for a living,
but the peaks keep moving on.

Down in the valley
I am sheltered from the wind,
I can pretend my hair is supple still.

But up there…

I fear the heights,
the thin air is so forbidding;
and no tiny bud can make it worth my while.


Down there I will live
where the rivers are near
and the sky is far

and I can hear
the bowels of the earth

churn.

Written Out

I thought I’d written myself out
thought I’d written myself out of words
written myself out of melancholy
myself out of friends.
And I had.

Now here is a poem about nothing.

A poem about my father cutting
his intestine out, and my sister
stapling her stomach and sucking
her thighs and hips off.

Here is a poem about my mother’s voice
getting older over the phone,
and gifts forgetting their address
and getting lost in the mail.

A poem about another couple of friends
who are no longer, as of last Sunday;
and another who stopped being
a few months before.

Here is a poem about days slipping
under the couch, and nights
not even good for sleeping;
a poem about not writing poems.

A poem about a few years
not worth writing about
or even remembering;
here’s a poem about not writing.

Here is even a poem
about not even writing to you,
because it would take words to do so,
and I am all out of them.

I have
written
myself
out.

Playing favorites

Katy and I decided to write down our lists of 3 favorite poems & 3 favorite poets as part of our correspondence on Poetship. I, however, couldn't narrow down my list of poems to three, so below are my favorite four; to read more about them check out the post on Poetship. (And of course, I had to add "runner-ups" to my list of poets...) And please let us know what you think; who/what would be on your lists?