by
I take off my glasses
and the world softens;
the edges between me
and the grey walls blur.
I find it harder
to maintain myself,
to pull free of the flood
to swim cross-current;
it’s easier to stop
resisting, to fade fully
into the mist, to let
the water take me away—
my eyes are tired like stones
crumbling on the river’s edge.
by
along the way, so many rules:
each step precisely follows the last
as truncheons crack empty heads
near a garden gate, a cypress grows
as if it knows; as if it knows
what cost due diligence is owed
a word’s sound is not the word:
a lover’s last repeated cry
cracks open the infinite sky
(January 3, 2022)
by
for years anger raged
through me, then crow laughed
clearing the dust from the air
now I see—
in dappled sunlight
through the palace halls
her pale face sings
(January 2, 2022)
by
I toss out a line
in hopes it will pull something
from the dark waters.
A small pebble sinks slowly;
my poetry plumbs myself.
(January 1, 2022)
I head out on this path.
Our dog pulls at her leash
as if she knew where she was going.
Each leaf, each patch of grass
receives her full attention;
each tuft of her fur vibrates joy.
In division, the line cuts
the whole into tidy parts:
each equal to a degree.
After returning home,
I scratch down a line,
quickly, before I let go.
I’m often short of breath these days,
gasping after air like a dying fish.
(December 30, 2021)
by
2021 books
I have seen a couple of people post what they read this year. So, being the follower that I am, I decided to post my list. I read constantly, some books I have been reading for years, and have never finished, but am still reading off and on. Some books I stop reading for various reasons: I lose interest, I lose the book in the house somewhere, the book gets shelved, I get bored, I know where it is going, the writing is just too pathetic to continue. Here is the list of books I finished (from beginning to end) this year. I stress finished, because this is not a complete list of what I have been reading. The pictures are current book piles around the house I am reading from.
Fantasyland—Kurt Anderson
Bestiary—Guillaume Apollinaire
Educated—Tara Westover
The Historians (twice)—Eavan Boland
Poetry as Insurgent Art— Ferlinghetti
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
At the Existentialist Cafe—-Sarah Blakewell
An Indigenous People’s’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Under the Dome: walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive
Norma Jean Baker of Troy by Anne Carson
The selected poems of Wendell Berry
Living Nations, Living Words edited and selected by Joy Harjo
An Unnecessary Woman—Rabid alameddine
Selected Poems of Guiseppe Ungaretti
Jimmy’s Blues by James Baldwin (selected poems)
How to be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Stone Lyre, poems by Rene Char
An Oresteia (Aiskhylos, Sophocles, Euripides) translated by Anne Carson
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Finna by Nate Marshall (twice)
Debths by Susan Howe
Dark City by Charles Bernstein
The Essential Jim Harrison, by Jim Harrison
Four Hundred Souls by Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N Blain
The Big Seven by Jim Harrison
Goldenrod by Maggie Smith
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Glottal Stop by Paul Celan
Asylum by Jill Bialosky
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan
After Ikkyu by Jim Harrison
by
let me say it again, and then
again softly, so only
you can hear me,
a lover late at night
whispering her desires,
until you believe it’s true
this time—
because somewhere
you can’t remember,
you heard someone,
perhaps me,
say the very thing
that you hear now
but it coheres,
this time,
to what you’ve heard,
like spiders dropping
one soft strand to another,
so I whisper again
into your ear
through the dark
tonight
(December 26, 2021)
A few days past the winter solstice in the seemingly never ending worldwide pandemic, I am cleaning my house. In between running the vacuum across the rugs, and straightening the cluttered chaos of our everyday lives, I have been making tortilla soup, a tradition for the last ten or more years. Tonight, like last year, there will be no friends and extended relatives laughing over food and wine as we talk about politics, literature, art, and the lives of our kids. Tonight, only our grown children, their partners, and our two grandsons will arrive to celebrate Christmas, a religion I don’t believe anymore than the pagan symbols the Christians co-opted as a sign of hope for a better world to come: a hope, during the longest night of the year, that the sun will return again. I try not to fear for the future: the never-before-considered collapse of the U. S. as well as the fear caused by millions of people dying worldwide from this horrible virus. Instead I hope, a constant prayer, that we can overcome our pettiness and hate long enough to step from this darkness, and find enough joy in our lives, in our children, in each other, to pass back into the light. So, I clean my house and make tortilla soup, in hope that I will do so again. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Context: I’m stuck at a light on south 183. I’m tired from the end of the semester and grading final essays all afternoon. The car’s windows are down; I’m listening vaguely to Tom Verlaine’s rambling guitar on “Days.”
Situation: A man in his mid-twenties in the next car is yelling “Hey, Hey” out his side window at me. I look at him confused, thinking he is going to complain about the music’s volume.“Hey,” he continues to yell out his window, “You used to teach at Connally. I had you when I was a senior. You were great. You really knew your shit.” “Ah, thanks.” I said as the light changed and he drove off.Such are the weird rewards of teaching.
I cannot be anymore
than I am;
yet, I am
someone I can never be,
like winds bend through the black trees
without airs
to pretend
they are any more than air.
It is not sorrow that turns,
nor regret;
but old fears
which tighten their thin tendrils
until my voice is contained,
and defined
by others
unafraid of presumptions.
Brick by dry brick dead walls form
sealing in
the remains
of my childhood’s laughter.
I walk through this miasma,
this darkness,
each blue day—
discomfited in the rags
and cliches draped upon me,
like cold rain
which washes
all the burnt dust from the air.
(December 17, 2021)
by
Listen to your friends
as they laugh with you at lunch,
so sweet and so tart.
Every second passes
from nothing into nothing.
(December 17,2021)
Soft layers scribed over
erasures, poorly scraped;
a velum saved for use
as if it were a silence,
independent of any thought,
original, and never spoken;
emerging fully formed,
like Athena, into the world:
I am my own metaphor,
a translation stuttered
from a transparent other
which I will never know.
My words hover over words,
like mist over a graveyard.
(December 11, 2021)
subtext 