I see it with no starlight.
And your skin, a map of mushroom
shade crumbling
in the crisis fur. I can read
it even in this blackforest
where the water is thick enough to hold me
without another chance.
Where nurse shark tremble in the nighthole,
with the blindness we had, too.
Four Poems
Malinda Markham
TO UNDERSTAND FLIGHT
Wet hands work quickly, cartilage shines into light.
Do not turn to what you once knew and yes
I would stitch this house this person to the ground
If I could. One day, Grass said to the Rain, Do not leave.
Do not dry between the fingers and leave powder
Behind. Outside this house of memory and bricks,
I plucked a wing fine to see the mechanics of flight.
How could anyone move with skin exposed like this
And waiting? Memories collect at the feet and trellis
Over the knees. Don’t imagine the pull didn’t hurt
Or the sound. I fear the ground is watching, the sky ready
To answer in rain. To loose feathers, first close the lids
to spare them. That day, gray light spilled into crevices,
covered the hands in down. I was warm.
GIVE ME CLOSED DOOR
Give me bright cloth to cover stains on the wood.
Give me animal body in the arms,
cold wall and skin
to withstand it. Strong surfaces, they say,
will not list in wind.
This jacket smells of salt and brick. Where did
the warm gloves
go? Divide all words among seven
people. Let them speak as one. Divide
their hands into leaves that bend
at a touch. People are trees and will not
remember the wind. Give me salt-filled cup
until I sicken. Give me
cool hand on forehead or apple
to touch to the lips. Circle the names
to be saved in red ink, circle everything you want
to remember but can’t. I was a sailor once
and woke to a throat quickly closing. I was an instrument too
and measured direction
of sound. Sing now
until you cannot
sleep. Sing until I wake and kneel at the door.
The plants are dusty, can you hold them
till they’re clean? Can you
love the hard chair as it loves you
deeply? Give me another’s hand to the mouth
until I recall what the thin mouth
is for. Animals eat
with flexible jaws, sleep like injury
and glass. This table is stained
with irregular flags. Seven people speak pale
like light. Here is a face,
and only a coin could carve the lips
rounder. Give me
closed door and a mouth
to open
on cue. This is a gift. There is skin
that will save you and skin
that will give you away.
CHASE SCENE
Acorns are fortunate, are collected like pills
children find after their mother
is dead. How many questions
can one clock
hold? They find the secret places
and take
everything they can. (Look at this picture
snapped in the rain. Find the figure
made of paper and twig.) Oh the shame
of old stories—is that how
the song goes? In the car,
they sang out sounds
for the words
they didn’t know. The mother passed
coffee-flavored candies
around. (The tea has turned
lukewarm
and dull. Do not drink it
or eat the little cakes
unless you must.) In this verse,
the sweets are soft inside
and good. They make the teeth ache,
don’t crack the shell
at once. (Sugar hardens on the saucer.
Leave that for the cat.)
Across the yard, a boy buries quarters
in mud. The girls chase a ball
into a cropping of rock. (If the trees crumble
to ash. If birds break into bits
that cling
to people’s clothes
as they run—) Good children cut bread
into strips. They avoid power lines
in thunder and empty
their pockets at night. Who saves
that acorn now loses it
in spring.
The boy’s quarters were seeds, his sisters
sprang from each husk.
One will meet fire, one metal,
and one unmineralled soil. Which memory
did you think
you would find? To run right
is to know the rules
completely. (If the animals uncover
their teeth, if the soldiers find you
at home as you are—)
AFTER AESOP
An animal must live under the water. Hear children calling
out the window like glass.
Water in the hand roars like the sea and orders itself into pleats.
I am thirsty, thinks the bird. Who
could possibly resist?
Whatever moves draws objects nearby into its shape. Come with me once, and I will make you into
whatever you please.
This is a cage, a desert, a fear.
They string the balcony green with nets to keep the pigeons out. The garbage to keep out the crows.
There are two ways to devise this world. In one,
I nail nets to the posts; in the other, I watch a net like a painting keep me
from food. This is a plum, a bone, an excuse.
Or from beneath a net to see if anyone tries
to take me despite.
This world is noisy in squares.
I am thirsty, said the painting on the wall. Water is time
pulled like lament between two blue hills and the museum
always is closing. Wings bruise against the glass. A bird already has swallowed
The paint and its master.
“Come again,” the sign says.
Don’t speak. Push bills through the slot in the door.
Where is the cage now, when animals swim without moving? Bring the mouth to water—
What memory to you touch?
What water. Originally, the character for grief was drawn partly with mind,
partly with upturned foot. In the dictionary (entry #1871)
Found between to tempt and to melt.
Just look this time.
The hotel is open, if anyone wants to rest. Money in the basin and weather
in the palm. This is not sky, not water.
To drink.
With a tearing of wings, the bird threw itself into the frame.
Nets opened and closed, looking
Remarkably like hands. Comfort lives in the eyes nor the mouth,
anyway. A passer-by
Will arrive to abbreviate the scene.
#307. A pigeon, driven by thirst, saw a basin [krater] of water in a painting and believed it to be real. So, with a great flapping of wings, the bird hurtled itself against the the picture rashly and broke the tips of its wings. Falling to the ground, the pigeon was caught by a stranger who happened to be there (Aesop 223).
Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
What did the work demand?
What did the work demand?
The knot.
That the question he asked.
Simply to go inside the fierce exactions of syntax and be answerable.
Shadows fall in every extension.
And detail. Time’s rocks in space.
Ecliptic flaneuses.
The work exigent: “thought taking time.”
Knot of string and rope and thread and leaves, all scales juncted unravelable.
“… wanting the tones and even the effect of its silences …”
The affect of its silences.
Tried to take soundings. No half measures. But the truth was—
The imagination of the ordinary is unimaginable.
The work gets woven from and knotted into its own shadow.
The work lies wrapt in its own shadow, cast back.
How did this work work?
So now what, now exactly what?
By knotted soundings. It said it all again.
There could be gestures; gets hard to avoid them.
Although what’s done is done.
Insistence is a kind of elegy; the plumb a commonplace.
Wanted also social justice.
Does the elegiac sap, or motivate?
Nothing is inside the work, but everything is. The stillness of things not still.
To say is, is, is again and again, is very simple, very painful.
Absolute toll.
Every word teeming and bereft.
What are the tasks of the work?
Is time soluable inside (these) things?
The word means ergon—work, on the geo—land.
Work, despite insomnias of rage.
As a genre, the land of poetry.
Material time is linked to our softness, we fold over ourselves.
“I painted this cut branch by mixing ink in mist.”
The exacerbation of the precious.
I sat in a room made of stone. Between the two, a third.
Such small stakes within the endless.
I wanted “a kind of mutedness” in words, silence without silencing.
Don’t misunderstand if it is engraved in stone there on the “path of time.”
The clots on the paper came from mixing ink with ash.
Could not decide between “it” and “is.” So I left two midsized pebbles.
Cotto chipped at the lintel. Forget you’d ever said “center.”
Untranslatable blots or shapes whose very blankness testified.
When did you finally know you would enter time by writing?
Around the razor wire ringlets wound plastic flags of ripped bags waving.
Saw thru, thought then.
Saw of, might have been if.
Is it Lyra in Vega or Vega in Lyra?
The clouds were curdled milk. My heart leap’d up at that.
How did you set to work?
Has any work gotten done?
I went roaring to the end of the runway.
Affirmation doesn’t enter the absolute space.
Turned observation to observance.
Shared a self with the revenants.
Set out utensils: freshwater jar, and brushwater dip in the form of a furled leaf.
Way wide brown grey muddy.
Dreamed I set up darkroom in my mother’s deep closet.
The monument was a chute.
Wanted social reverie, and then change. A fantasy.
“It” on the right side “is” on the left. A-moving, all a-moving.
Answering questions set by the dot, sited and forceful.
Chickadee, nuthatch, cardinal, junco, titmouse, house finch, and big mild doves.
What about any rock? OK, Rock.
Was the name Rilke, Rothko, Roethke?
In the work as rock can sometimes see roads of the world.
Was the phrase secret bliss, secret place, secret police?
Sometimes not.
Take it all as a loss.
And mis-typed “throught.”
Systole, diastole, evisceration, copia.
How did the work begin?
Was there a certain moment of identification?
Began 30 years late ago to set my own bees flying.
Salutations, teenage flowering pears, dark cypress, silvery olive, and squirrel-clipped tulips.
“I have a long history of starting.”
Histories of startling.
The scratched crystal blurred the numbers. Perhaps it was right I lost my watch.
Salutations. The work is the horror of poetry as such.
Our names were missing from the title page of the book. Our work as if invisible, us shadowy, anonymous, unnamed. This was an irony only at the time.
Background of cancellations into which floats up the fad for acetate jackets, chartreuse, fuschia. Or a name: Vivien.
A good little girl. DP. Post-war.
Tell loss. Telos. L is for Tally bone.
Tiniest skipper salamander. First person pile.
How does the work proceed?
What are the impulses for new work?
I make “choráls out of random input.”
I make thin perambulations of loss.
Washed thru downsluice in gold and pink shine, I remain shadow.
A day inexplicably white with one goldfinch. The tongue of the bell.
Hearing the collusive chortle of collegial laughter.
Sent it snail mail, a response that rhymed.
Could experiment with a fan-shaped format. To toast your three-quarters skid and flashy slats of loss.
Eventail.
To time! L’chayim!
To Memory: “the thing I forget with.”
But then I wanted to sing in Erse, an unknown-to-me northerly language, sing and sing in Erse.
Hey ho silly sheep.
Those old moon-gegenschein songs.
Tinted hallucinated cloth.
A set of poems, ancient Chinese, selected and translated from “the Nineteen Old Poems.”
Whereas I feel the same way.
Yet when there is development, it seems banal; when there is aphorism, it seems incomplete. When there is tone, half-tones seem excluded.
Did it want gaps? Guesses only.
Make the whole work an Etruscan votive hearth—lustrous toy objects for serious placation.
Make a David Smith’s “The Home of the Welder”—imbedding shards and symbols onto one plane, four walls. Little bronze house.
OK agree each work is the carcass of a cicada, green and silver-white oddity, a lost shell.
OK agree each work is a valise packed tight with allusions, a traveling kit.
Just a patch of volume there.
Claim nothing, then move on.
The underspeech is always diasporic.
What are the details?
How do you choose, or do you?
Swinging the bong of a bell inside memory makes a sound no one knew was hanging there, and which, when you listen for it, was the hallucination of poetry.
Parlons, parlong, parlone, parole.
Sweet flakes of time, amber insistence, and dropped daily, are called manna.
Letters scatter over the roads of earth.
Little gold dot on the glass that shines, is where everything is.
Cannot see for the deep dark, but the heaving shadows, bush and bliss.
Every letter is the inching of history, seen from so many miles, it is just what implacably happened and closer up, grief after grief, error after error, profit after profit, scarification and burning, the knife swung above the body. Initiation into what?
Wrestled all night. Gave way. No blessing.
Were there other bearings on the work?
And what other transfigurations of letters?
Holocause. And effect.
Doubles in unspeakable shadow.
Writing goes recto to verso, memory the other way. Poetry the wobbling pivot.
To orphanhood! Given these enormities, this has got to be our central tenet.
Sound. Hinge.
Wing of air.
Waves.
Assize.
Slowly the particulars scatter to the wind, starting with that shirt the color she used to say was “toy koise.”
Do you still believe in the theory of the shard?
The word Unto.
Backbeat, hey ho.
“I make things because I want to.”
Surface and beyond in one fold.
“They became little museums of the commonplace.”
Coated with dilemma, bereft of story.
So resist “that ancient injustice toward the transitory.”
So jump, mote, into the dancing whirl, despite powerlessness.
And work until it tolls.
And work until it tolls.
Two Poems
Nathaniel Tarn
RECOLLECTIONS OF BEING
Cloud around tree outside window, in
which, at sudden motion of the mind,
all is contained again. Not to be here—
but there, in cloud, and to be there
as being here of which, in other wise,
there’s no conception. Birds, joyed at
feeder, raven within my satiation,
each one his one and only mask, and yet
also all others’ being and my own. Tree’s
self at home in cloud, cloud in high sky,
to furthest worlds, all single dwelling
of this unity. Forgotten now forgetting, no
more the absent-minded in full preoccupation
with the ten thousand things, each separate,
each needing its own space and unique memory.
Years seem to have gone by in this forgetting.
Do thousand lives have to be wasted now
to sharpen this one life? But all the lives
return again into the picture as sun wills me
to wither down to a last flare of love. Day
darkens. The oldsome window overglows my birds.
SHELL
Da svidanya, drug moyi, da svidanya …
— Yesenin
Winter star in the skylight
where once a satellite
crossed the small space
on a wide journey,
not again to cross,
never, the selfsame space.
A shell, lying within the shell
of this dead room, this blackout.
The shell should have contained
a universe, a flourishing
and fertile score of generation:
not tree stump, not new branch,
to start a fire or feed one.
Not seedling anywhere in sight,
idea of fruit unborn, of flower
still undelineated.
Shell should have burned
half century ago:
glass cage with wings, narrow,
tighter than custom suit
with visibility
impaired in all directions,