old untitleds, resurfacing

awyn inkwash 2013

you wake up only when
the dream you're having
can no longer come true

you wake up only when
it's the same old you again
and not that dream person

you wake up in suspense
at what will happen next in
the dream that just ended

              ~~  Bill Knott

"Out of these gawky flitterings . . . emptiness"

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

He is not here, the old sun,

As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.

Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks

Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.

They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.

Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.

The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,

Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,

The savagest hollow of winter sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach

The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.

Bright is the malice in his eye ...

One joins him there for company,

But at a distance, in another tree.

-- Wallace Stevens

us, them, I, we: Becoming the Other

we all wake as each other
 

we all wake as each other
i, particularly
pick you up when you die in air and auto crashes: in a dream
i am you, and then
all memory is gone, nothing but a sensation of relief at living on
i felt the flame
touch my skin
i have been a rainbow coloured woman in a sinking bus, i have been a
passenger on many
ferries, i have swum
down, to a door, white metal in blackness, gone through,
and drowned
sleep apnea be damned
i am you and you are me and we are all
reflections of the larger eye that we
are building

~ ~ Peter Greene



©Peter A. Greene 2014

[Thanks, Peter, for permission to share your poem here.]

Poetry for the Tomatoes

Imagine Something Other

Ursula K. Le Guin

(1923-2018)

"I think that hard times are coming, when we will be wanting to hear the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.

We will need writers who can remember freedom; poets; visionaries; the realists of a larger reality.

Right now I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art."

                                             [Excerpted from an event, November 19, 2014.]

Le Guin's words challenge and inspire us to be more mindful of the way we practice our art--and its potential role in suggesting the possibility of something more, something better than the reality one is presented with.  John Lennon is an example of a voice that asked us to imagine a world without war.  (He also asked us to imagine a world without religion, borders, or greed.  Then, as now, however, not everyone wants to change, or to be one with the "Other" in today's or tomorrow's reality.)

Still, I like her conviction that writers, poets and artists offering creative alternatives to the status quo need to have their voices heard.  Writers can create stories that transcend the reality we're given, to imagine a different, better one.  Poets could give us words that profoundly resonate, leading to life-changing insights.  And artists can make us see, instantly, what words often struggle to say, and can't. 

In all this, it seems to me, it's less important whose voice is doing the voicing than the meaning of the message conveyed. That messages can be misinterpreted (or go unheard) does not mean that some aren't or that their impact is unfelt.  Grounds for hope.

Thank you, Ursula Le Guin, for your words and the reflections that resulted. R.I.P.

______________________________

Click here for Ursula K. Le Guin website.

Window Woodhawk

awynfoto

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye . . .

He joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.

         ~~ Wallace Stevens 

What struck me about this Wallace Stevens poem is the way certain words leap out as
metaphors for the new now, in this age of excessive lack, "here, in this bad" , where an emperor's utterings erupt as hollow savageness inspiring horror, or "gawky flitterings" intoning emptiness. 

Like silent sentinels we watch, and wait, for the light to shine again.         

Poetry for a Cold Winter Day

It's -13 F today and our house and street are surrounded by snow.
So quiet it's as if the world has stopped.
Rearranging a  lower bookshelf, a thin volume slid out, which
got opened to a random page.
These are the words that leapt out:

 

December sun seeps into the woods
orange yolk over bare limbs
drips into a grove
where woodpeckers
tap tiny solos
                           a net cast
                           in the wake of the day

Chinese monarch King Wen
tells us the wanderer can progress in little things
when the source of light is farthest from the earth
and bends the prism
like a bow
                           and he finds himself
                           surrounded by woodpeckers
                           tapping out their eternal question

how to hold
interwoven rhythms
in a net of changing light

                          ~ ~ Paul Pines

Excerpt from Book Two: The Absent One
in Divine Madness (Marsh Hawk Press, 2012).

Consecratalstones That Lack Foundation

EVICTION PROCESS

Wreckball all the highrises:
then use the cornerstones of those
leveled towers to create my castle:
composed solely of foundationstones,
each one of which was blessed
with a ceremony, a literal
groundbreaking and therefore whole;
each block unique,
inscribed with ritual aggrandisements;
each planted solemnly:
each underpin-laid as the bedrock
its lesser brothers would rest on:
use only these rootstones to raise
the walls of my eyrie house hideaway
whose forbidding frame will have
no real infrastructure, whose form
will be a spiritual suspension
(cradle crux kernel hub core)
wherein each establishing stone
must cohere solid with the weight
of its having once been named
in salutation as such--but surely
when these maidenstones these
consecratalstones are placed
together to make home my dream
my ideal occupancy, then surely
due to the baseless act
of imagining this acme of architecture
I will never be allowed to live here.

~ ~  Bill Knott

From: Beta: Poems About Things that Begin with the Letter B,
self-published by Bill Knott in 2013.

The poem above is one of three poems in this 82-page book that fall under his category of "buildings" (between "barbershops" and "bullets").

Imagine us all, he said

awynart

        ...    ...    ...    ...

If we do not see each other again
in this life or any other, let’s agree
to each take the time,
whenever we can,
to imagine us all standing at the rail
confused but delighted at the endless,
deathless sea before us
with no need to speak of desperation
for once.  Imagine us all
in sunset, in sunrise, under a laughing moon.
Imagine a shared moment
where it didn’t need to make sense
that there was no sense to the voyage.

~~ Excerpt from "This Ship", by Tony Brown.

________________
*  Thanks to permission from Tony Brown, who several years ago told me I could share any of his poems, and will do so again in an upcoming issue of too-long dormant Salamander Cove in July/August.

Guests at the door today

Excerpts:

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

         
~ ~ Czeslaw Milosz


Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ ~ Rumi


(translated by Coleman Barks) 

Birthdays of our Departeds

Today is my mother's birthday.  Had she lived she would have been 94.    On this day every year my sisters and I remind each other it's her birthday and we speak not just of her but to her.  Happy birthday, Mom!

Coincidentally the first email I received today was from another person celebrating the birthday of a departed one today--poet Robert Peake, whose poems continue to speak of and to his deceased son, James, who would have been eight years old today.

I first met Robert online, when I stumbled on his website and found a poem I really loved and asked permission to share it.  Four years ago I was gathering poems to post in a then-upcoming issue of Salamander Cove, which is not usually theme-based, but I'd decided to try something a bit different that time.  I wasn't sure how readers would react.  The theme was loss of a child, through miscarriage, stillbirth, illness, suicide,  accident or war, where these particular beings' not being there anymore--their strongly felt absence--profoundly affected these particular eight poets.  Six of them wrote about their own loss, two on the loss of others' children.

 The poems held a special meaning for me as well.  I hesitated, wondering if it might seem. . .  well, too depressing to group together this collective grief and lay them out, one by one. I went ahead anyway.  The poems were just so compelling.  The poets themselves were supportive of the idea.  Occasionally I'd find that a reader had shared the "Loss" posting with a grief support group, that some readers found comfort in the company of these poet-parents and could relate to their experiences.  Thank you again, Chris Agee, Anna Ross, Dave Jarecki, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Jim Murdock, Robert Peake, Charles Bernstein and Jamie Dedes, for allowing me to share your poems back then 

I'd like to put a plug in here today for Robert's chapbook published last year titled The Silence Teacher.   I knew the background, as it were, and some of the poems were already familiar to me, but what stunned me was the continuity of the sheer Poetry of his poems.  There is poetry and there is Poetry.  It was not just the retelling of a deeply personal journey, it was a realization of  the craft and elegance and care with which each word was chosen..

Don't just believe me - here are some other reviews.

 Birthday dates remind us that our beloved departeds are not here anymore.  And yet they still are.

And so to my mother, Happy Birthday!  I will keep celebrating you. 
And to young, little James Valentine Peake, Happy Birthday as well.