PANIC

Bola of the mind,

bola of the body,

o to drive a pile

in the chronology

still the roots climb

up to the limbs

of the banyan;

the armored seed

drops on the bog

& the eaters

in the silt.

It’s a tale of water

& sand, what goes on

in & around these walls.

Stuck fast,

make a wish

on your own bone,

or knit the clavicles

of the genii.

I guess that’s it:

escaping

the house on fire,

the tumbling train,

now that fetching

carbuncle will have

to wait

until the knife

is loosed

from the vertebra.

September 26, 1182

Like Jesus Christ in the garden, the Church

is in anguish, stumbling, deflowered:

the moors strip her from the south 

and a savage bear claws her from the north.

            By cruel hands her sons are snatched from port,

while winds blow all of the heresy 

and vice and sin the world creates

as rats begin to devour the dead.

            God halts all with lightning from his left hand,

observe the wounds of his sacred Son,

from which flow four fonts of paradise,

which can still replenish the world:

from on high He sees

Saint Francis born in the city of Assisi.

Barcelona, May 29^th 1895.

Jacint Verdaguer, from Sant Fransech: Poema

AT SAINT BONAVENTURE

 

To write well of the angel embodied

would need another angel;

oh You in whom Francis seems revived,

            return & in my self dwell.

Once again, please, beat your heart

            once again strike your lyre

and light the angelic spark, 

Assisian sun, that inspires your songs

and I’ll lift my winged love to fly.

 

fron Sant Francesch: Poema by Jacint Verdaguer

THEY SAY

Quills on

the pronominal orchid—

what has not been said

of I? Phenomena

beget Them, all around,

in their hovels, eating

their food.  What once

was We scoured & sewn

with shards, Your boon,

the colors running off

the synthetic oriflamme

into sticky pools, enamel

clawed off the sun-painted

moon—work all of the day

& into the night, to know

its secret, Us, held low

in the dirt.  I am going there,

anyway, to do what You

should have done, We

can never recover, can

never go back to the sleeping

little streets or the corner

store totems, a standard

of flypaper to which I

am adhered & held above

like a snake head.

STRANGER IN MY ARMS

No good comes from a vanilla

flash, the frying skies; don’t

look above where the wheel

in the sky spins a lathe. All

through the night until the brown

sun dawns.  Stanger, stranger,

make a brooch of your falling

teeth, the beaks of doves;

who can sex the bare skull?

A mandala of chrome rings

& the rain stings, what creature

sings when a house falls?

Everyone into the street

like a party, the wily styles

of the plastic bags,

face-huggers, concealing our last

nakedness, all I see

can’t be true to life.  The last

movie was us, the camera

high above, a roman candle

spits chromium sparks

through the seaweed-

green.  No identity: my body

is a pixel.  Not even data.

We were dancing.

Wailing came, a rook

out of the shower-

drain, our pipes far below

the buckling ground.

They erupt like bones

& spew blabbering

the black water.  It will wash

you away.  A splat of black

feathers is punctuation,

full stop the needle

pops & clicks & pops

& clicks in the groove.

HANG ON SLOOPY

 

In the empire of the greys

disappearing by degrees

snow in your face, please

I must get in to see

What your daddy did,

the other two

fingers, what I can remember

a washboard of blood

Siren’s song played

backwards as I forget

the spokes of the saw-

mill, the tongues of bland

cards & their cancerous lines

of fire ants

blat blat blat of a rubber

bulb horn, as long

as I can remember, in nested

circles in the twilight

hood, the town’s bad parts

exposed for pleasure

The stiff weeds that are a line

down the rickety

street like a torso, talking,

limbless in there where

cymbals bleat go ahead

make my angel

food cake for the host

of lost days, a grey metal

table & cloth that rips

like God, everything

I can remember, exposed

out on the floor

a red stair, a rubber

mallet, a sinister form

I can’t

fill out.

Wassily Kandinsky: Far Away

Blood moon,
       reflected in dark water,
skeleton of an
       alien algae
blooms on the dun shore.
       Steel horizon line
hulls
       the heavy
night.

Franz Mare: "The Dreaming Horses"

 

A grey ray from the east

      the dream is a

blue sheen       does not 

      interact with planes

but an orb is 

       the penumbra

regards the mate

       standing beside

eyes closed awake

       under Eden

feeling the side heave

       listening to lungs'

ocean crash

 

Moccassin

This plane
never leaves;

walk on the ground,
human,

brothers & sisters
will look up

to you, Kirlian-
prints on the ceiling,

something
to hold

onto,
you,

kept from drifting
away,

gravity is
the love

of the dead
from the rocks,

silt, veins
below ground,

harder stuff
still

at the still
center, to

which we are
all implored,

held fast, to the flaming
core, perhaps the furnace--

heaven what's
above,

clashing strata,
the heaving planks

of home, we are
chucked

like funeral dirt
by its shrugs.

Walk on
the ground, human,

burier,
holding true

to your roots,
or to the roots

of sturdy trees,
stay close

to your bitter name,
feel it

convince the spine
of its last

home, the long stint
below,

in the hard garden
that shouldn't exist

at all.

NaPoWriMo

It's that time of year again, National Poetry Month, variously beloved and maligned by poets themselves.  I will be participating in the NaPoWriMo festivities, as usual, by posting a poem a day.  Some of these will be for my ongoing Northern Soul project, writing glosses on songs associated with that cultural moment in the U.K. in the late 70's - early 80's; I will also post some of the translations of Sant Fransesch: Poema by the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer that I have been working on, as well as miscellaneous ekphrastic things as I write them.

I've done some housecleaning on this blog, as you can see.  Since Facebook has all but replaced Blogger as a social networking platform, I've eliminated the links that served that purpose from the blog, and devoted this one entirely to my own work.  I'll be blogging on my other blog, Ashes Ghosts Rubies as a more traditional "blog," and will include some links to poetry-content sites that I read frequently, as well as some links to commercial presses.