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My Poetry and Commentary on Life

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Books 2021

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books, choice, gratitude, identity formation, Language and Literacy, life, literacy, literature, obsessions, poetry reading, reading, thinking, ways of knowing

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

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whispers

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chance, change, charm, communication, meditation, patience, poetry, process, relationships, ways of knowing

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)

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The Long Night

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belief, change, family, fear, hope, pandemic, politics, prayer

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.

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Teacher Appreciation

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life, teaching

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.

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Lost to Myself

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abstract, acceptance, aging, identity formation, meditation, poetry

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)

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Here and Now

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attention, friends, gratitude, life, meditation, poetry, ways of knowing

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)

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Palimpsest

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abstract, erasure, interrelationships, metaphor, poetics, poetry, sonnets, translation

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)

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Prompt

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ars poetica, education, poetry, process, students, teaching, writing

Write what you know.

Write what’s in front of you.

The obvious obviously:

Pay Attention!

The world is around you;

You are in the world.

(December 10, 2021)

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Poem

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creativity, difference, doubt, life, poetry, writing

I lie to myself most of all:

That I can write, or

I know who I am,

As if there were a difference.

(December 9, 2021)

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Only in Reflection

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abstract, acceptance, borders, change, life, liminal, meditation, poetry, ways of knowing, zen

You see a mirror;

you are not there.

Upon reflection you think,

as countless doors open.

Nothing’s behind you,

except a mirror.

You are alone as I;

another door closes.

You are a wall,

separating away.

You are the way

through nothing.

You are the door.

You are the mirror.

(December 5, 2021)

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Another Sunrise

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life, meditation, poetry, ways of knowing

The courage

to walk out the door

is too much

too often to flee

to the streets;

to leave the house,

this life, to wander

free, to live

without

this constant fear.

So, I stay put,

puttering about

my place

and await

my next breath.

(December 2, 2021)

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More Light Than Dark, But Still There is Dark

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abstract, breach, poetry, reading, writing

Often as I read or write

a poem, my mind wanders

unable to track the line

across the page, or leap

with a dancer’s grace, as

the line breaks a short hop

down the page. I drop, lost,

between the melted words

as if in an antarctic crevasse.

The whiteness widens, and

I fall through my thoughts

randomly cracking my head

on a word which spins me

along a tangental arc

deep into the uncharted dark.

(November 21, 2021)

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To Work After the Holiday

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acceptance, borders, dissatisfaction, life, poetry, tanka, transition, work

With a thick-cut slice

of buttered brown bread in hand,

I head out the door.

Traffic flows like a river

emptying to a dead sea.

(November 30, 2021)

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My Hands

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aging, family, fate, identity formation, meditation, patterns, poetry

These are my mother’s hands:

wracked with worry, the veins

thick below the skin, soft

like worms in loam.

These are my mother’s hands:

holding my face, stunned

that I am still alive

to walk through another day.

These are my mother’s hands:

kneading the bread dough

for another Thanksgiving,

one more meal together.

These are my mother’s hands,

empty like bones in the ground.

(November 28, 2021)

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Presence

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acceptance, aging, haiku, life, meditation, poetry, response, time, ways of knowing, zen

I breathe in this world.

A rose blooms in the backyard:

Today is today.

(November 26, 2021)

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