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And the day begins again—
I feed the dogs, then let them out
to patrol the back fence line.
With everything in order,
they tumble into the house,
obliviously happy.
They settle about me
as I read the day’s news
full of deceit and death.
(August 24, 2024)
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Despite what I say
I am happy mostly,
but lack permission
to be so.
I cloak the day
in jaded irony
to mask contentment
against doubt.
Too often fear niggles truth
into a lie incongruent
with the line I follow.
Here is where the metaphor goes
awry, like a compass near a lodestone:
I know where I am going,
but am offered other models
best suited to other’s destinations.
A purpose to my wanderings
is defined along the way,
like butterflies descending
momentarily from their migrations
to alight with a random grace
upon the blue flowers
blooming in our backyard.
(August 20, 2024)
by
What do you enjoy most about writing?
The process of the act of writing. The meditation of writing
by
there should have been flies
but there were none—her mouth
open in perpetual shock
even now sixteen years later
I can hear her whispered
tongue form words from guilt
to be inlaid on my skin like mahogany
and rosewood carpentry designs
embedded across her casket’s closed lid
my life has become my response
exhausted with little left to say
I wait, finally silent, unvoiced
I should have been surprised
how even the flies stopped
(August 17, 2024)
by
it’s enough now
in the late evening heat
to watch the trees sway
in an exhausted breeze
like two drunks in a cowboy bar
as they shuffle desperately
around the dance floor
to a final slow song
longing for some kind of love
before the night falls away
into another morning
where routine smiles
and office chit-chat
mark the passing of time
and no one hears
the chains dragging
slowly through the dust
or the grackles caw
as they settle into the night
(August 12, 2024)
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It’s easy to think
one can change
forty years
of momentum;
that love matters
more than pity,
and time speaks
in seductive whispers.
Yet laughter, always,
is a self-reflective
evisceration
with dull knives,
and what one sees
is only what one thinks.
(August 10, 2024)
“So,”
the writing teacher asked the class,
“who is the ‘you’
in this poem?”
I knew, of course,
the you was me.
When isn’t it?
But who wants to confess
that
in a grad school
poetry workshop?
Too much insecurity
disguised by arrogance
and pretentious blather
to speak to any truth
in writing. It’s just easier
to shift person, than
to use the all seeing I,
even when cloaked
in irony and unreliability.
No one believes that crap
about the speaker and the poet
anyway. Everyone knows
the truth, but won’t admit it;
because then the expectation
would be for the writer, you,
to explain ad nauseam your poem,
that no one understands,
(Not even you). This unraveling
of the poem tediously happens too often
in poetry workshops. I blame
years of literary analysis
for this phenomenon:
What else does one do,
but explain poetry?
So,
please tell us the vaguely ordinary event
that you turned into vaguely
poetic phrasing
which you are now explaining
in a vaguely ordinary way,
so that we may say
we share the extraordinary
epiphany you experienced
in the most mundane manner
and during the most mundane event
of your extraordinarily mundane day
and that you— truthfully, when
all is said and done, which sorrowfully
will not be done soon enough—
,you did not in reality have.
Are you
as tired of all
this subterfuge
as am I?
You are,
And I am.
(August 6, 2024)
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I wait on nothing
as if it were more—
patience is required
for nothing demands
an attention beyond
life’s mundane chores
which interrupt nothing
that exists within
the forgotten moments
when the mind’s silence
turns away from itself
an old man who left the room
only to forget why he left
or where he was going next
(August 4, 2024)
to Sam, at three
the mechanical device
drops marbles down
clicking and clacking
against slanted traps
and runs until they fall
finally into a pocket
without thought or agency
my grandson sees the first
moment he trips the switch
and the first marble falls
not knowing that he is done
for the first marble trips
the next and each follows
without any need of him
yet he flips the switch
again and then again
confident that he is
in this initial moment
the prime mover in control
that sets his three-year old
universe into motion
(August 2, 2024)
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a wet heat hovers
in the morning air
while a slow breeze
curls through the shade
of the live oaks out back
where cicadas chitter
through out the day
and on into the night
cumulus clouds hang
without motion
horizon to horizon
without rain
the earth dries and cracks
days blur into months
(July 30, 2024)
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I’m distracted by a book on the shelf
I read twenty years ago, round about.
I tell myself, “No!”— as if I’m a dog
being trained to the leash. What can I say?
I have no discipline, no set system
to help disaggregate my library.
I follow the lead of my obsessions,
finding patterns in the wind driven sands.
Much of my time is spent in delusion,
the remainder lost in the day to day.
If I could only find that one passage
that one line in that poem I read once—
What with so many paths to wander down,
I’m stunned I make any progress at all.
(July 29, 2024)
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I reread Ongoingness today. It is such a lovely little book. It is a reflection on writing, time, and memory and forgetfulness. On the surface Manguso writes about her obsessively keeping a diary for 25 years. While doing so ,she talks about what it means to exist in time “with each recollection, the memory of it further degrades.” And that we forget, or perhaps not notice, the vast majority of the life we live. No matter how hard we try to document each moment. Well worth reading multiple times.
#memoir#writers on tumblr#sarah manguso#my reading#memory#writing
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The Needle’s Eye has been on my list of possible choices for RFB for several years, because I wanted to have someone to talk to about it. I have read at it off and on over the years. I started over a couple of days ago; I finished reading it today. The label the publisher gave it is essay/poetry. I can go along with that since it is a hybrid of the two. The “essay” parts are poetic, while the poems often provide examples/commentary on the “essay” parts. I would say it is one long poem made up of essayistic sections and verse. All of it connected in an associative melding of tropes and imagistic repetition.
. Howe uses the two boys in the Boston marathon bombings, Sts.Francis and Clare, various film makers, and her own life to talk about the creation of reality through memory, story (fairy tales), history, legend, and personal narrative. I will read it again (it is short 120 pages) before RFB meets in August. I can see reading it again years from now. She ends the book with a quote from St. Francis—What we are looking for is what is looking.
Here are some other quotes from the book: “We keep adapting to whatever we ourselves invented.”
“I think black-and-white film is closer to personal memory than it is to our dreams.”
“Suffering is actually jewel, precious and personal. Some might even say that it holds up the heavens with its radiance.”
“To the human brain, a hallucination is the exact same thing as seeing the world just as it is.”
Around 5 years ago I was lucky enough to attend a week long seminar in teaching poetry put on by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. (Thanks again to the Ann Richards Foundation for the airfare). While there we were brought to the Poetry Foundation’s poetry Library. They have the largest collection of poetry anywhere, housing over 30,000 volumes of poetry. It was overwhelming, especially because we were only there for about an hour. I browsed the upstairs shelves pulling one book after another, and reading a poem or two, then writing down the title and author if I was struck for some reason during my quick evaluation. One of the books I found on the shelves was Nelly Sachs’ Glowing Enigma. I added it to my list of books I wanted to read, then pulled another book off the shelf. The following Christmas, Lisa gave me most of the books on the list that I made in Chicago.
A few days ago, while cleaning off my book shelves, I found Glowing Enigma again. This time I read the whole poem. It is a beautiful book, strange and enigmatic (surprise! from the title). Sachs was a friend of Paul Celan, the Romanian poet who survived Auschwitz and wrote hermitic poems that are difficult to glean meaning from (at least for me), but are always worth the effort. Sachs is similar to Celan in that aspect. I am glad I found Glowing Enigma again. It was a beautiful book, filled with strangely lovely poems (or sections of a longer poem, what would you call those?) Here is one example:
How many blinking of eyelashes
when horror came
no eyelid to be lowered
and a heap of time put together
painted over the air’s humility
this can be put on paper only
with one eye ripped out—
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Like the party game two truths and a lie,
I shape my story as I start to speak.
I hold the lie much closer to the truth
than I do the truth, which is more suspect
in its simplicity. Fear is my truth:
it trembles like a slowly failing heart,
or a delicate lace stained with red wine.
That I lie to myself is another—
But who doesn’t? Everyone is a hero
in their own comic tragedy, no doubt
a story shaped like epic destiny:
to rise from nothing, to slip past the guards
who watch the one unbending truth of life—
to be ignored as I walk to the dark.
(July 19, 2024)
subtext 