A rose requires
no one to notice
it bloom; come spring,
it just blooms.
(March 27, 2026)
Category: creativity
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Poem
by
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“and there is only the dance”
—T.S.Eliot
each step in this dance
trembles the body
like little orgasmic ripples
across an expansive lake
a small tenuous call
for a redemptive love
in a fragile universe
fleeing from itself
I believe in the tedium
of individual self-expression
as if it truly matters
truth is a smooth pebble
in an ocean alive with
mundane mendacities
(March 21, 2026)
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There is a difference he implied
between what you do— (write
your poems), and this book—
which had been published
and which he now held out
(like a capitalist Eucharist)
before him as empirical evidence
of his claim’s veracity; the attention
toward profundity, cannot simply be.
Cannot simply happen. As if
there were no luminescence
inherent in the creative act,
no value to the happenstance.
Yet it does happen,
as we happen. The ineffable silence
fills in what cannot be said—
no matter the credentials, or what
god waits to make the first move.
The writing, the process, the evolution
of the text opens the word into light,
and power, and even glory
as has been done forever and ever.
(December 23, 2025)
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I finished Rub Out by Ed Barrett last night. I have no idea where or when I bought this book. But I found it on my shelf a few months back and have been reading at it since then. It is an interesting set of poems as a mystery novel/1940’s crime noir as if written by John Ashbery. I’m thinking I need to read it again, over a shorter amount of time. I also think I should find someone to read it with, so that I have someone to talk to about it. Here is a quote I copied down several weeks ago: “expectation outweighs desire for most of life”
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“You should understand
the way it was
back then,
because it is the same
even now.”
from Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
Today I finished (for RFB) Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko. It reminded me of Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday in the way it blended personal narratives, with native-American stories, and history. The three aspects being, in reality, inseparable. In the case of Storyteller, the stories, poetry, photographs orbit around each other to create the idea of “story” as what defines us in our lives: the past, present, mythic all combine to create the culture we live in as well as the individual person who lives inside of the culture. It is a fairly subtle nuanced book. Silko does not spell it all out in the way Thomas King does in “The Truth About Stories,” a book I finished a few weeks ago. King also blends personal narrative, with myth, and history. Instead, Silko, lays out the parts of her collection in a type of collage, where the various parts generate a collective power creating a larger whole from the smaller parts.
Here are just some lines I underlined as I read:
“But sometimes what we call “memory” and what we call “imagination” are not so easily distinguished.”
“The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined these differing versions came to be.”
“We were all laughing now, and we felt good saying things like this. “Anybody can act violently—-there is nothing to it; but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words.”
“even silence was alive in his stories”
“the memory
spilling out
into the world”
“So they pause and from their distance
outside of time
They wait.”
“laugh if you want to
but as I tell the story
it will begin to happen.”
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I have a Spring cold,
my chest thick with congestion.
Still, I go outside.
One must be at work,they say, for inspiration
to find room to breathe.
Oxalis from mom’shouse in Victoria grows
beneath the iris.
Our yard is chaosplanned out from the beginning;
nature is random.
The roses need to be pruned.A hummingbird whirrs nearby.
(April 11, 2025) -
“You seem quite normal. Can you tell me? Why
does one want to write a poem?
Because it is there to be written.“—William Carlos Williams
somewherefor decades now
it has been there
in this sequence
of unlined sketch books
waiting
unwritten as I write
out of a present
necessity
never knowing the why or how
anxious each moment
it will not
trusting
it will be
(April 10, 2025) -
The thing is you won’t live long
anyway
the thing is to see where you are
While you are—
—George Oppen
fool, look out the window
And write
—George Oppen
You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
― Samuel Beckett
I made the mistake of looking at an old “manuscript” from about 15 years ago. I made it about 10-12 pages in before I ran across a couple of lines that I could call good enough to be poetry. There are about 40 more pages to go. I hesitate to go on. I have always over the decades cycled up and down in my opinion of my writing. I know, every writer has doubts. But that does not make it any less depressing when I am plummeting, nor any more justifiable when I am flying high. I remember Robert Frost saying somewhere that he didn’t write experimental poetry, because experimental poem was another name for failed poem. The poem either worked or it did not. If it did, then it was not an experiment; if it failed, then it wasn’t a poem. The old manuscript was not a poem—which was depressing. Instead it was a series of posturing hoping without hope to somehow adhere from one poem/stanza/blither to another without any real attempt on my part beyond “chance” in some misguided belief that John Cage’s ghost would descend to lead me out of the wilderness of my hubris. I take solace in the belief that I knew it was crap, because I put it away and never really looked at it for the last 15 years. I somehow knew without knowing….I am smarter than I let myself be (to use a mantra I said about my students on myself).* My current plan is to plow through the fallow field, and see if there are some living roots that can be salvaged. It will be a trudge. But then, what else would I be doing.
*They are smarter than we let them be.
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I am Tired
by
I am tired of words,
the anxious necessity
to hear, if only
my own stifled whispers.
I am tired of talk:the exchange and banter
enmeshed in daily
guilts and desires.
I am tired of listeningto my stillborn story,
unsure each moment
if I’ve said it before.
I’m tired and uncertain;there is no end, no beginning.
(July 13, 2024)
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false starts
with tired thoughts
begin
in faltered steps
then end
off trail
vaguely muttering
lost
alone
in the dark
like Gretelwithout crumbs
to follow home
or a Hansel
to hold on to
(June 7 2024)
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he walks through his life
with a string of nows
hanging from his neck
most days slip awayfrom dawn to dusk
without distinction
yet some he can seewith a clarity
which is unmoving
with a cold silencewhich strips away time
like a broken tomb
the past and futurevanish and the now
opens around him
like a white lotusrising from the palm
of his outstretched hand
(November 12, 2023)
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(8 of pentacles-reversed, rider-white)
I’m not sure
why i continue
to write,
to stack thirty years
of notebooks neatly
upon the shelf
like dead flowers
from old lovers—
But I do write,
cutting lines of memory
like a stonewright
with a chisel,
exacting
bits of my vanity
with each stroke
of the pen until
what is left
is, perhaps,
made more
by what has been
taken away.
(October 8, 2023)
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