Art and shiny things…
Lovely followers, I’m so excited to say that Linebreak, one of my very favorite poetry publications, picked up one of my poems, “Kitchen Ode”! Please read below and share on Facebook/Twitter if so inclined! (There are handy links at the bottom of the page)
Read or listen to “Kitchen Ode” on Linebreak
She beats the driftwood against her thigh during a break in the squall, with branches and burls culled from debris and dark conversation of wind, water and wood about her feet.
She shakes out sand and rubs the wood on her jeans to shine up the wet pores looking for a face, and finds it, fumbling with a worn-out burl, her snowy cheeks turned scarlet like twin fires on the beach of the morning.
She has discovered a fable to create for her children.
I look, see nothing, and I shall not forget that when she left me that morning the ducks and gulls and the sea turned from tone and sonority to rattle and racket, the caesura and pause of the sand transformed to an endless taut drum by the pounding of the surf.
I shall not forget how I could taste the cold metal my tongue had become without her melting syllables, how wet and warm from the rain at the river’s mouth I stood shoes hung about my shoulders, impoverished of myth, looking at the torment of the sky, the storm in my mouth gone quiet and dry.
-Jeff Burt, Treehouse
Really rather blown away by the below poem by Eric Raanan Fischman (an MFA candidate at Naropa University)
Hostage
for Jennifer Faylor
By the time you read this, the air
will turn white. The Sun will wake up
like a winter bloom, harvesting
its own light, and the barren clouds will break
like mirrors in a house of mourning.
There will be no more storms, no bombs,
no more seeds of ice. Only the stark feel
of white paper, and the blue sound of my voice.
This is not the first letter I’ve written you,
but all the others were composed
on the backs of sealed, stamped envelopes.
A woman in Boise, Idaho believes
that I cannot live without her. A man
in Tennessee keeps my soul on his bed-stand.
A Nicaraguan coffee farmer is the sole proprietor
of warm, passionate, August nights.
Here inside the mailbox, it is always
and envelopes make love like fireflies.
Magazines peek from beneath their covers.
And I fashion this letter, on a Cosmo’s table
of contents, on a Chinese take-out menu,
on my arms, my lips, and the steam of my breath,
hoping that it will reach you.
-Eric Raanan Fischman, published in Sixers Review
Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because —
because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you’ll have gone so far
I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
-Pablo Neruda
The above painting has been a favorite since I first laid eyes on it as a kid – an incredibly tender portrait of a young married couple on their honeymoon, done by Sir Frederick Lord Leighton, an English pre-Raphaelite painter in the 19th century. The details are more vivid in a larger version, but I’m always struck but how delicately he holds her hand, and the attitude of complete trust with which she leans on him, every flow and line of her body and dress falling in to that movement.
I also always associated it with a favorite romantic poem – “The Last Ride Together” by Robert Browning. The old Victorian poets are still the masters of romance – this epic, delicate poem charged with love and longing is a childhood favorite – and it wasn’t until recently that I realized how appropriate it was that I’d always associated the intense tenderness of these two works (the painting and the poem) together, because there is in fact a connection – Leighton was commissioned by Robert Browning to design Elizabeth Browning’s gravestone.
In “The Last Ride Together,” two lovers ride together before being parted.
I said–Then, dearest, since ’tis so,
Since now at length my fate I know,
Since nothing all my love avails,
Since all, my life seem’d meant for, fails,
Since this was written and needs must be–
My whole heart rises up to bless
Your name in pride and thankfulness!
Take back the hope you gave,–I claim
Only a memory of the same,
–And this beside, if you will not blame;
Your leave for one more last ride with me.
Early on, I noticed that you always say it
to each of your children
as you are getting off the phone with them
just as you never fail to say it
to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.
It’s all new to this only child
I never heard my parents say it,
at least not on such a regular basis,
nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.
To say I love you pretty much every day
would have seemed strangely obvious,
like saying I’m looking at you
when you are standing there looking at someone.
If my parents had started saying it
a lot, I would have started to worry about them.
O course, I always like hearing it from you.
That is never a cause for concern,
The problem is I now find myself saying it back
if only because just saying good-bye
then hanging up would make me seem discourteous.
But like Bartleby, I would prefer not to
say it so often, would prefer instead to save it
for special occasions, like shouting it out as I leaped
into the red mouth of the volcano
with you standing helplessly on the smoking rim,
or while we are desperately clasping hands
before our plane plunges in the Gulf of Mexico,
which are only two of the examples I had in mind,
But enough, as it turns out, to make me
want to say it to you right now.
and what better place than in the final couplet
of a poem where, as every student know, it really counts.
-Billy Collins
Yes to the wooden giraffe airmailed from Arizona
with a note from your mother-in-law saying no more
excuses to sleep unprotected by your spirit animal,
but no to a new kind of insomnia. Yes to most -philias
not in the dictionary, like car washes in the rain
and bakeries on fire, but no no no to looking at old photos
with a bottle of Maker’s. Yes to your wife drinking
beer in the shower, but don’t hop in and join her,
let her have this moment beautifully wet and alone,
you’re here in the kitchen sautéing spinach and garlic
if she needs you. No to speed limit signs graffitied
but yes to climbing the overpass at night to tell the world
exactly the year that you loved her
This poem by Justin Bigos rocked my world and will rock yours.
Love, please don’t lift me up to anywhere
Now that I think about it. I don’t lift
Up easily. I’m not “handle with care.”
I like ground, grass and gravity, a gift
Hallmark should hustle. Who is it who’s flying
Where the eagles cry (Do eagles cry?); and who
Wants Joe Cocker if they don’t plan on tying
One on, hot-boxed, until all birds look blue?
To be together is so overrated—
That’s not my style. Fragile is fine enough
To fracture, like an old, disintegrated
Leaf pulled from a worn notebook, perforated
To separate. The eagle’s wing is fluff.
The sky’s not high. Nothing’s exaggerated.
-Erica Dawson, Birmingham Poetry Review
They fall into exhaustion rather than into gentle sleep,
each limb heavy with the ash of its bonfires burned completely down,
not curled but sprawled, claiming all the space of their bed,
two bodies that attempted fusion, both straining to push into
what is impenetrable in the other, wanting the only way they know
to try, to perhaps break through the inherent loneliness of skin.
Now, very late, leg over leg, arm across chest, they breathe deep as newborns,
as if drawing from the stuffy air replenishment after their struggle. No dreams
tonight. Instead, only thick flesh, cooling back into their separate selves.
What will they say when they stir back into the world,
conscious, suddenly, of their edges as morning sun floods their sheets?
What will their first words be upon waking?
They each will arrive in the new day alone, surprised, as they were at their own births,
and at death, and as after each sleep, utterly bound in the locked rooms
of their bodies. Will they recognize their loneliness? Will they speak of it?
For this is the most fragile moment, with mussed hair and sour breath,
when wild abandon has dispersed and the habitual seeing returns
in the glaring light of every day. Who can they tell?
If love resides anywhere, it is here: in the waking face, the tender hand that reaches
to touch that face. It is in the gestures they choose to give, and in their decision,
whether or not they will speak, one to the other, of their true need.
-Joanne Esser, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review
It was 1979. There were a few orange tree orchards left
in Orange County. John Lennon lived. I was careful
like the mole digging up the front yard. I emerged
from the dark hallway, barefoot, it was Sunday.
I turned on the TV and was careful to mute the sound.
And I believe you have never seen Bo Derek in a silent, empty
living room grow bright from a warming cathode
running along a Mexican beach, her one-piece flesh
colored swimsuit against oiled, sun-marked skin.
And I was careful, I was alone, and I checked behind
me, looking for light from under a door, listening
for the squeal of a hinge. Then a motorist lit
up the front windows and drove on. I hit the off switch
tingling like static from the television discharge. I never learned
how others do it, but I learned to look at women privately
and in private, my eyes coming through a dark tunnel
to a throbbing kind of light, as out of a hole. The old
throbbing of analogue beauty unscrambling
in front of me, a terrifying pose. It was so strange how
afraid I was of getting caught: of getting caught looking
at slow motion Bo Derek, at lounge chair Bo Derek,
piña colada Bo Derek emerging from the water. Afraid
of those beaded Mexican braids, staccato on her shoulders,
white sand at her feet, the salty swell of the gulf pulsing
on the sombrero end of the world. I was afraid for a long
time, a child of some in-between, and years would go by
before I could make any sense out of that sexual fear
that came from just looking and the thrill of just looking.
And years would go by before I watched Blake Edwards’ 10
again, watched Bo Derek in bed with Dudley Moore
while they played Ravel’s Bolero, what Ravel mockingly called
“an orchestra without music,” a piece that when first performed
had women falling from chairs while crying Stop, stop I’m going mad!
It was the indecency of the rhythm, the impropriety
of the tease, the long and overreaching crescendo, the lack
of a satisfactory tonal resolution that may explain
the great success of Bolero and the even greater success
of sex in the 1970s, it might even explain Dudley Moore’s
nickname, “The Sex Thimble,” or explain how I had searched
for something as frenetic and unattainable in my girlfriends
for so long, forcing each of them to run along the beach
in perverted judgment, wanting something that was incapable
of satisfying even the Sex Thimble in me. An orchestra
without music is sex without love, but how the orchestra
still plays whatever notes they’re given, and they need to play
to finally understand what music is when and if it finds them.
And I can’t help but see how all this made Bo Derek a sex icon,
and her perfect breasts would go on to be smothered in honey
and licked clean by young Arab men in later films. So
it happened when I was in bed with my wife for the first time
and she turned her back to me at the moment she removed
her blouse and bra, pulled my hands to her chest and said
that her breasts were small, and she would understand
if I didn’t want to keep going. Because it never occurred
to me that sex could be such an act of courage, raising
a baton until the figure of brown hair pouring upon me
became the syncopated overture to the rest of my life.
And these were the greatest breasts I had ever seen. I asked
if she wanted to hear some music, I had just the thing.
-Timothy David Welch, Rattle
Coffee and Irony 