Posts Tagged ‘ poem ’
春山淡治而如笑
夏山蒼翠而如滴
秋山明浄而如粧
冬山惨淡而如眠
Mountains in spring
— calm and smiling
Mountains in summer
— luxurious and dripping blue green blue
Mountains in autumn
— bright and clean, adorned in color
Mountains in winter
— somber, as if asleep
Guo Xi
There is loss it skins the world raw
Sloughs off tomorrow and tomorrow blots out the stars scrapes
snow-dust across snow-hives
Tears snow through snow a junco blown into last night’s window
Unfathomable loss no raven or angel eye can plumb it
I must forget how snow can peel back the skin
This is the loss snow-dust an illusion while it happens
Snow-dust that flies already gone
I long for raven wing on a fence-post mice who dream
snow-crust into existence packrat-cell beneath
floorboards double oval of deer prints in mud
while they are still here
I must forget the snow as it falls
There is loss indistinguishable from my death who stands
beside me wearing a late Paleozoic snow-cloak
When I go snow-blind there’s nothing left but voices on
the wind calling to themselves hunting their
former bodies
Look at how they ache and cry and skin the air
I must forget how all the cats in the world lift their open mouths
to catch the flying snow
This is the loss standing on the shoreline with my first child
watching snow fall into the sea
Whitecap-embrace of water with water thinking how many
times it will happen in the years to come and it has
not come again
Death’s hands are cold so cold but hold me so close
I have already forgotten the murder-cry in the magpie’s
blue feather
I spin with snow-dust become snow-dust for maybe the last time
To feel snow-dust blow through the heart into a cavern of masks
and stub-candles held by disembodied claws
Our hands and tongues and thighs become shadow-mutations
because of such loss
How can I forget the way snow collects on your hat your
cheeks eyelashes brightens your eyes
This is the loss words torn off roofs names without bodies
No I would become snow I would
I would sacrifice my body for the body of snow the slide of
a blue whale’s back against ocean ice the arctic hare’s
leap the snow leopard’s eye from behind snow-driven
stone No
I will not forget
Source: christien Gholson – Mudlark Flash 143 (2021) – Poetry
for Ya Haddy Sisi Saye aka
Khadija Saye, artistic photographer
(1992-2017)
When the smoke clears
there are lumps, charred clothing, human
meat and bones separating, melding to things
that once had other forms and other uses
or turned completely to ash,
where there should be people with faces,
slumbering between the alarm clock
or the newborn’s wail, the Bengali
argued in corridors, and under sheets
this time their color doesn’t divide the neighborhood
color that barely clads the curling flesh
Was the kitchen your only studio? The bathroom?
The wet, shiny photographs hanging on the lines
strung across the room like tongues
of sepia or monochrome, holy and native
the tub full of water with squeak toys and sponges
in the corners happening to fall in,
wanting to be part of the experience
the kitchen table overwhelmed
with pans of chemicals, with the chairs taking up the slack
and taping blankets or sheets to the windows
to urge artifice in the dark
on a sunny day, bringing pictures into being,
making magic with the camera
your mirror
I’ll bet your mum was patient, when she understood
Her cooking must’ve bathed the apartment
vied with the aromas of the pots downstairs
and next door, wiping the fumes clean with Gambia,
as if scrubbing the steps to your door, magic rising
like incense smoke from the cow horn
and the amulet medicine and muse.
Now every apartment has become an oven
that cooked the dreams from everyone’s sleep
while staying in place
stasis,
inertia,
torpor,
stillness
dwelling in their space they could not breathe
As she looked down from the 20th floor,
sometimes marveling in the view of her city,
she was not taken in by that mirage. She
and her mother were at Grenfell—that island—
by grace not god’s. Around them was £10 soap,
the suspicions of the coppers,
empty, crumbling houses worth more
off the market than roofing lives,
amid new modern slapdash
she and none of her neighbors could afford.
Success was coming towards her
its matchless fingers primed for embrace,
but she hadn’t made it yet, a living for herself
and her mum, there was no one and nothing to whom
she felt superior, she gloried in the next achievement,
and the next, and the next. It was still illumination
lighting every pore
That perfection is what she had created,
and where she had finished;
she was humble before acclaim, overawed even,
laughing and smiling like the round child
she still was. Her art was not an idol
that she worshipped, apart and speechless
she spoke her brilliance from within
Wrongfully arrested, the police kept her cell phone
though exonerated; they took away her voice to call out
to call for rescue. Gone may be the negatives,
the dead ends, the false fronts,
the revelations, gone may be the crowns
and the Eid
yet that fire remains
that fire
– Gabrielle Daniels
Eustace Nash (1886-1969), “Poole Quay from Hamworthy, Dorset”
Source: First Known When Lost: Elections
The Facts At Dog Tank Spring
Three broke-down gnarled cottonwoods at Dog Tank Spring
they’re older than anything at Dog Tank Spring
The cloudy iced water the high desert
two or three inches fresh rabbit track snow
Blaze orange and cobalt tents at Dog Tank Spring
The crackling juniper fire at Dog Tank Spring
The night stars wheeling close and mythically overhead
you could reach up & touch the sharp edges of
constellations at Dog Tank Spring
Half human petroglyphs haunt the dream at Dog Tank Spring
but who talks about Aeschylus at Dog Tank?
Orange sparks sift into the night
a coyote cries off in the sage at Dog Tank
Wonder where the dead go at Dog Tank Spring
Dog Tank Spring turkey buzzards go where?
Dog Tank hiking comrades shout over wine at the night sky
At Dog Tank Spring your cell phone won’t work
the news went stale a thousand years past
night drops to 12 degrees
the water jug freezes at Dog Tank Spring
Plans hopes aspirations irresistable ideas at Dog Tank Spring
but human designs at daybreak seem the raving of idiots
dawn is for coffee at Dog Tank Spring
At Dog Tank Spring the bow saw the axe the work gloves the matches
the Cedar Mesa map at Dog Tank Spring
spires hoodoos pinnacles of polished red sandstone
cream colored stone shelves at Dog Tank Spring
The trail guide says anticline & unwrap at Dog Tank Spring
Greasewood rattlesnakes blue wavering laccoliths
the tiny oil painting tacked to a pinyon
by someone last month at Dog Tank Spring
A hundred years are what at Dog Tank Spring
Dog Tank past and future lead nowhere
What are spilloffs chockstones scorpions the dugway the sidereal
what’s a rowel at Dog Tank Spring?
The faraway ranch-house the constellations the rabbitbrush
the anvil-headed clouds over Navajo
Let’s talk about the old ones at Dog Tank Spring
Tobacco Canyon Bullet Canyon Kane Gulch the turkey pen ruins
want to meet here in late March?
Embers whiten and fade they’re fleeting books or old loves
a wool blanket over the cold sleeping bag.
These things are facts
at Dog Tank Spring.
18-20 December 2019
for Mike Gordon
________________________________
Andrew Schelling
The Facts at Dog Tank Spring
Dos Madres, 2020
Source: A Longhouse Birdhouse: THE FACTS AT DOG TANK SPRING ~
Waking Who Knows
the great open
doors of the tall
buildings and the grid
of the streets the seed
is a place the stone
is a place mind
will burn the world down alone
and transparent
will burn the world down tho the starlight is
part of ourselves
_______________________
Primitive
George Oppen
Black Sparrow Press, 1978
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
This poem of mine recently appeared in Muddy River Review.
The baby and I practice
hissing like a snake
howling like a lobo
hooting like an owl
all these creatures
might appear
at the perimeter of the ranch
out in the basin land
some things remain silent
the moon rising over the sandstone cliffs
the look on a face
that turns away
but that is for later.
[For some years now, Rochelle Owens has been a regular contributor to Poems and Poetics & before that a key part of the poetry world which many of us have shared with her. Of the power of her work, Marjorie Perloff has written: “… brilliantly inventive, immensely learned, sophisticated, and witty in its conceits. She is, in many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities, and dense and clashing verbal surfaces. Hers is a universe of stark gesture, lightning flash, and judgment, a poetic microstructure in its superb modulations of rhythms and internal rhymes, its ironies and paradoxes. … Owens’s lyric voice is unique among contemporary poets. An astonishing body of work.” For all of its ongoing changes (the symmetry of her strophes in the present instance), that assessment, I think, still holds true. (J.R.)]
Source: Poems and Poetics: PATTERNS OF ANIMUS: A New Poem by Rochelle Owens
word pond 