River of Play

It's All About Knowing, Baby

A recent draft. I'm off to enjoy today's high of 22. Yesterday, we were in the 30s with lovely wind gusts also in the thirties. The first rule of not-freezing-yourself-to-death club is not freezing yourself to death. So enjoy this recent draft about epistemology.

The Occult

I feel my whole mountain body,
one family narrative.
My leg, my hands reach
for the sharp sunlight, the hills,
the creek rhythm.

I was young, wanted to work the hard bones.
My wife did not ask for piedmont cows,
hay and a thin creek line of sycamores.

What do I know of root?
I wasn’t much more than a boy when I moved.

Began. The world
barren without knowledge.

Like a root, the moving practice,
the sinking mind. Old men say
learn to turn, punch, kick.
I will grow back as a stronger vine.

We pushed off.
Atlanta began it all again.
Alone that time, root split.
In the mountains I found form
and I found bones.

Characters in Search of Names

I'm going to assume that I've gotten all the hits from friends I'm going to get today, so this counts as tomorrow's post. And look! It's a poem! Built from snippets from various science websites. Enjoy.

Questions of the Man with Small Pains

After dinner with friends he says
that he can’t look at the past
with its uncertain loves and sciences.
He says things like, “What were the uses
of water germander, the corpses of badgers
and thieves? What were the uses
of phylogenetic analysis, missed opportunities
of shot deer and mangled cousins?”

These questions fall onto the table
like ball bearings. The friend who laughs
knows that water germander
is good for inflammatory diseases,
helps men who can only piss
by drops. The friend who dated
the sister of another friend knows
that thief’s corpses were the only corpses
that could be dissected by Oxford dons,
but he forgets how many generations ago.

Everyone at the table agrees
on the uses of phylogenetic analysis.

The friend who is in the kitchen
cannot stop thinking about missed opportunities.
He could have patched a manatee skeleton
to a thief’s skeleton and made the skeleton
of a mermaid. He thinks
that if water germander weren’t rare
he could make from it a most singular cordial
that could comfort and make merry the heart.
He thinks he should have gotten that first deer.
He thinks he should never have called that girl back,
not after that whole month, and he should not
have asked where she’d been the day before.

By now, the candles are shuddering
like diseases and the speaker touches
the stones of olives. “I have a cousin,”
he says, “Who will not work again.
There is nothing to make him whole.”

Drafting

Here's a first draft I drafted sitting in the Coffeehouse yesterday. It amuses me a bit. As always, comments welcome. Some day soon, I should discuss why I do/don't talk about the politics of poetics. But for now, not that.

All fall I’ve wandered hallways.
All fall the juncos and cranes have drifted
flying above hallways tiled with linoleum
hearing a call mostly magnetic.
Grandmothers and grandfathers from Michigan
follow them in comfortable sedans
with little compasses velcroed to dashboards.
Music statics to talk statics to news statics to music.

No new grandchildren this year
most of them still in schools
with leaking pipes and broken linoleum floors.
Parents and teachers both nervous
about meetings between parents and teachers.
Turning up the heat and misting yourself
will not take you back to beach trips
when your parents were younger, tauter,
still able to catch the attention of other
young, taut parents going out for frothy, sweet drinks
after the kids are asleep and the birds
migrate down the shoreline
from the Michigan hometown
where you bought your tent and you dreamed
of sleeping near the ocean.

Night Vision

There's a little grey tabby cat who's established our backyard as part of its territory. It drives our cats crazy, which gives them something to obsess over. Most of their poetry is about this cat right now. While the cat's small, it's large enough to set off the movement sensor on the neighbor's front porch. If I'm working at night in the dining room, here's what I get so see from time to time:

Since we're talking about night, I thought I'd drop this tiny little poem on you:

in my dream a sliding bobsled run
cloudy tourmaline bricks

a woman with me
a teacher a lover

imagine going very fast
meeting a steep mound

a smooth crystal pile rose up
we died

haunted houses, bars, fields
laughed sibilant ghost laughs

earnestness we couldn’t believe
and it wasn’t funny anymore

Games and Nature

Here's a lil' poem that brings together--in one poem!--my interest in games and nature. Cheating. Nothing riles a primate like cheating. Really. Lots of research on this one. The poem amuses me, but D thinks it's sad. Have a go and tell me what you think.

Whose Name Did I Call Out?

I didn’t cheat.
The dice rolled to their natural rest.
I did not shave
or weight them with mercury or lead.
They clattered evenly on the tabletop.

The cards came clean
from the cellophane pack.
I did not crease or pock their surface.
I did not hide marks in the knots
of their patterned backs.

I did not know that woman.
I did not father those children.
They don’t look like me.
Their mother was an old friend.
I will explain the champagne.

My wife lies beside me
after we have spoken.
We should talk about the past.
We should talk about the present.
Silence cools like sweat.

Grocery Store Adventures

Way back in the day, before I was married to E, she and I nevertheless got into mischief. It was a wonderful time, really, and it feels good to say that we did these things in our youth. For example, we got our hands on some truly enlightening squares of paper and, after many hours, wound up in a grocery store. It's a formative moment. We had the sort of profound insight that accompanies experiences of this nature but, unlike many of these moments ("my apartment is floating through space!"), I think we were right. I've never been able to engage consumer culture without suspicion after that. I've been trying to write about it for years, but--for, I think, obvious reasons--the results were a bit. . . goofy. But I think I might have hit on something with this draft. Let me know what you think.

The Bright Frog, the Grains and Milk

Grain comes from a prairie with an artist
and a woman in a store deciding
the toy surprise. See the immense truck shoulders
and the highway and the fatigue of us all.

The frog did not speak
what the company wanted me to hear.
It did not jump, swim or dance.
I saw the box and the frog on the box.

We share this hallucination: clouds
of attention reveal the world,
clouds that race toward and away.
Real things form, lean on my arm.

Too much comes from the box.
Too many frogs, too many people
hurtling toward other people.
There is paper and there is dirt,

fields deeper than boxes. Get nose down
in roots. Smell the bones of your face
fading into ground before the fire.

Time and Time Again

Here's a poem about a thing that I, as a grad student, have been forced to be obsessed with:

I wind clocks at the invitation of women.
Clocks wind down white rooms, dark shoes.

I have been befriended by clocks,
I have been chased by clocks.
Follow me everywhere. My joints
rust and my hair frosts.

Clocks cloaked leave traces, tracks.
Clocks blossom and melt with rust.

I wake mornings to my ragged passage
through scars, bells, my wife’s face.
Clocks open and close books,
track chemistry across the sky,
footprints, the exhale of decision.

Brass feet, plastic feet leave tracks
on bedside tables, desks, sideboards.
Track traces of breaking fights, olive
stained parties.

Clock maintenance is a bitter vocation.
I have failed women in their rooms.

Clocks are neither kind nor relentless.
They fail. Remove their limbs
and they will never be right again,
even twice a day.

Arms chart a future vortex,
but can be sucked into a tornado,
spun flat backward, needles flung deep.

Revisions A-Plenty

The Svalina who is not a weight-lifter dropped by today to talk about life, Pink Floyd, mint juleps, and poetry revisions. Below is a cage match between revisions of a poem I posted in draft form t'other day. Do vote. But keep in mind that I have a vampire cat. . .

From the Svalina:

A double-buttoned timepiece,
a stained ivory bishop
reaches the dark slaps of follow.
This is not about.

The woman drops her beer,
into November. Red pump
above a damp walk like a cavity.
Her man returns to tying flies,
with filaments & filaments.

Unmatched pieces game the mate.
Nothing fits the reflection
of the ceiling: plaster painted
gold, burgundy, alabaster.

A robin’s egg.
Her expensive hair.

And now mine:

Too Much Game for Mate

A double-buttoned timepiece,
a stained ivory bishop.
Another dark, another
move. A season about.

A woman drops her beer
into a barracuda November.
Her foot in its rain pump
pebbles above a damp walk.
Her man ties flies,
filament on filament.

Pieces unmatched.
No reflection of the ceiling: plaster
gold, burgundy, alabaster.

A robin’s egg. Expensive hair.

With a Title Like Asterisk

Here's a draft. Let me know what you think.

A double-buttoned timepiece,
two men at chess.
One reaches a stained ivory bishop,
punches the near button.
The other reaches the dark, moves, slaps his peg.
Back and forth, a season of choices.
Cheating doesn’t follow.
This is not about.

This woman drops her beer,
walks into a barracuda November.
Her foot in its pump pauses above a damp walk.
Rain pebbles around her like crystal.
Her man turns back to tying flies,
filaments wrapping filaments.

Too much game for mate,
the white and black marble.
These pieces unmatched. Nothing fits
the reflection of the ceiling: plaster painted
gold, burgundy, alabaster. A colored robin’s egg.

Her expensive hair will soon be soaked.
His hair stays short, is noncommittal.

Wake Up, Louisville

D and I are off with our friend Whit to attend a composition conference in Louisville, KY. I'll be a third of a presentation on collaboration in the composition classroom. So that'll be fun. Plus, a new city.

Here's a poem, a picture and a response to keep you busy. Color inside the lines. And no folding. When you're done, rest your head on your desk. And no taunting the undead.

Telling Alicia

It can’t be too hard to decide to visit a friend.
Yes, you haven’t seen each other in years
and since then you’ve both had your share of shifts:
she’s a mother now; you’re divorced and remarried.
Anyway, she moved away first, leaving you
and all your friends just a year or two into first marriages.
None of you live there now, so brew more tea.
Take the dog out for exercise. The decision
will be there for you, breathing softly, smelling odd,
smelling sour. How many times have you said no?
And imagined her looking at the message, imagined her
sighing, imagined her telling her husband
that this year the disappointment isn’t as sharp.

This poem began at the same time as the Man Sonnet below. Another meditation of how social groups work. Of course, beer featured prominently in the Man version. Here's our cat Jake (who may be a vampire--and you know what I said about undead) as a living inspiration for the Man Sonnet:

A familiar posture.

And now, a response to a Kat response: It occurs to me that your 8th grade inspiration for gas and electric PR is pretty much exactly what they still do. I'm not sure if I should give you full marks (you don't need to put your head down, dear, you go on to the chemistry room and experiment) or shake my head at industry. Or I could do both.