Tuesday, October 30, 2007

No patience

I belong to a Facebook group called Peace Corps: I'm being sent to Africa. Usually I enjoy seeing where people are being placed and when they are leaving. Today I read about 2 people who are going to West Africa in July 08. I'm leaving in May 08 and all I know is Africa. That's a pretty damn big continent to consider. There are alot of possibilities! Which country will be mine to explore? And i'm trying, really trying to stay patient. But I broke down today, emailing my Africa Placement Team lady. I'm pathetic, yes I am! It's all I can do to remain in my skin. Patience is my biggest struggle. I have none. I am in awe of people who seem to have it in abundance. Where to they get it? Is it sold at Wal-Mart? I bet it is, and they are taunting me with it b/c I don't shop there. Damn you, cursed Wal-Mart! I will not frequent your overly-bright aisles in search of patience, which I'm sure you charge a pretty penny for!

Winter is fast approaching this mad town. Once winter hits here, I get cagey. I hope I have a country soon!

Friday, October 26, 2007

Comfort

Father Ray Byrne quickly became
a star. He played sports, danced,
sang, told jokes. He was a man
of the people, and we loved him for that.
He came to our apartments
and brought us comfort.

He even came to a high school graduation
party one night. I was a little drunk.
Father Byrne came up to me and asked
"Are you thinking about it?" I panicked.
What did he mean? Sex? Booze? Basketball?
Could he read my mind? Then I realized
his tone wasn't accusatory, so I said,
"Yeah, I'm thinking about it," not having
any idea what he was talking about.

"That's great," he said, "I can always
tell when a young man is thinking
about it. Just let me know if I can be of any help."
Now I was positive he wasn't talking about
sex or money or any of the things I actually
did have on my mind. Father Byrne thought
I might have a vocation.

But I wasn't considering the priesthood.
I didn't even think professional basketball
was a possibility any more. God had walked
out the door about a year before,
when I was sixteen, and never looked back,
even though I begged him not
to leave me, alone and weeping
in this valley of tears.

Terence Winch

Friday, October 19, 2007

Mine

Pain trains an undisciplined mind.
I will end yours if you end mine.

Little feet, little feet
are playing Hopscotch among the landmines.

Hope has worked miracles before.
If yours didn't, how can mine?

I could have learned to welcome night,
If only you had been mine.

How dare you put words in God's mouth,
Shail? Why not. He put ashes in mine.

~Shail D. Patel

Monday, October 15, 2007

Some things to know

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. ~Confucius

The longer I live, the more beautiful it becomes. ~Frank Lloyd Wright

Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself. ~Herman Hesse

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Ars Metaphysica

Your head is a landscape revised by culm
and tire smoke, you stare through the window
as though words will appear, heraldic and from nowhere.

Light as a paper bag, you amble about town
waiting for the wind to take hold.
You profess the body is a cello, and the moon the eye by which you see.

You maintain your ancestors were barbarians,
that the tongue can out-leverage a crowbar.
You ascertain the weather with a fork
and an empty bottle of port.

Moths sleep under the mattresses of your eyelids.
You testify to wolves inhabiting your bones at night.
You claim the dead speak through you.

Crows circle your house like tiny hurricanes.
Saplings take root in your gutters.
Your own voice frightens you.
You're a liar, a thief. You're vain.

You believe you can extract silence from a stone.
You contend the friction between pen and paper
creates light. You believe the darkness
is larger than any space can hold.

~Bill Rasmovicz

Time & Place

Because I seem unable to get a handle
on either, I have been tempted lately to confuse
time and place. It starts like this: you call

wanting to come by tomorrow. Six o'clock
would be an empty parking lot in Flagstaff,
sundown everywhere, sky busted up, busted open

belly, red and white for miles. Nine would be
Holmdel Park in May: in my hometown,
you wouldn't have heard of it. Except

we'd be there, on the hill above the lake,
bower hidden by the land's rise and fall.
The problem, of course, is that these places

recall other times, and the present becomes
impossibly layered. Somewhere between six
and Holmdel comes (becomes) the fear

that I can't love you and that, all these years later
(measured as you'd expect in an accumulation
of place), I no longer have the fortitude

to leave anyone. What happens then?
On the phone, we agree seven-thirty. You will
"spend the night," which is a time

that involves a place, and a history: wakeful nights
next to men with whom there is
something unsaid. All those unspent nights.

Do you want to share a time and place
if it requires sharing a history? Recollections
of snoring bodies like a personal affront,

backs big and distant as drive-in movie screens,
and me tensed, blinking, wondering
what in that place could pass the time.

Do I want you to come over? Of course. But
perhaps in another place and time. I might say
I'm not in the right place for this, for us; and,

it's not you, just that the timing isn't right.
Except both would be lies, or at the very least,
conveniences. Imagine, in a black vacuum, no up,

no down, not even on the same plane: two men
(helmets, space suits) holding opposite ends
of a phone line. "Can I come over?" crackles

through static, in a context beyond "where" (no
common referent), outside "when" (some blather
about Einstein, and both of us implicated

in the speed of light). Then, lover, you'd hear
my answer clear through the ether: "Of course,
"then, "no," and "I want you; I want you; I want you."

~Benjamin Grossberg

Gratitude

Cultivate gratitude. Focus on what you have, not on what you don't have.

~Mary Elizabeth Williams

Incomplete Knowledge

I am of those whose knowledge will always be

incomplete, who know something about the world

but not a whole lot, who will forever confuse

steeplebush and meadowsweet

but know at least by the shape of the flower

that it has to be one or the other.


Don't ask me the difference between

a pitch pine and a red, or even a Jeffrey,

though I know it's a pine, not a spruce or tamarack

(a.k.a. hackmatack, but what's a larch?).

The difference between a sycamoreand a plane tree? It's beyond me.


I've never had a real grip on

Japanese painting—the different periods and styles.

I don't even know that much about Dutch—Vermeer of course, Rembrandt sure,

but could I distinguish a De Hooch from a Steen?

Do I even know how to pronounce their names?


I know next to nothing about what goes on

under the hood of a car, though I try to hide that fac

tin the presence of mechanics. Herakleitus

(am I spelling that right?) said something

about how we hide our ignorance,

but I can't remember exactly what it was.


Birds, music, fishing, history, it's appalling

how limited my knowledge is.

I'm not even going to begin to list

all the books I haven't read.

I'm the antithesis of a Renaissance man,

spread so thin I hardly exist.


I have a friend who knows what seems like

close to everything. Certainly everything in the woods.

He was explaining to me the difference

between steeplebush and meadowsweet

(which I understood at the time but didn't retain,

as if it were the theory of relativity),


when I looked up and saw a jet whose trail

of fine white cloud kept disappearing, reappearing,

and disappearing again, and I asked why,

and, holding the meadowsweet in one hand

and the steeplebush in the other, he explained it.

And he wasn't bullshitting, either—he knew.


I'm not sure I even understand what it means

to know that much. Does all that knowledge

add up to some encompassing wisdom,

something beyond the sum of the names

and data, vast and unknowable? Unknowable

at least to me: I will never be like my friend.


I misplace facts as easily as my glasses,

so the world seems blurred for a while—but then I find them, put them on, and go outside

to greet the ten thousand things (is that a Buddhistor Taoist expression?), no less amazed

for my not being able to keep them straight.

~ Jeffrey Harrison

Loss Loved Me

Loss loved me, and suddenly: loss loved me not.
I tried to be winsome, I tried following

my father's rule: be aloof if you want to allure!
I loaded my speech with emptiness.

I let him kneel at my feet with a flame.
I played goddess to his supplicant.

I smiled as he stalked me
but tilted my head in sadness, deceptively.

Still he left, and now what? It's spring—
and worse—there is no wind

and I am nothing without the wind
and I am even less in the too-bright sun.

I said goodbye to my white-haired love
who kissed me with his tongue.

I said, "Goodbye. Goodbye. The attention was fun.
"He said, "Not to worry, girl—it's only just begun."

~Kathryn Maris

letting your love shine

Tenderness and kindness are not signs
of weakness and despair, but manifestations
of strength and resolution.

~Kahlil Gibran

Out There

for Charles Levendosky

Wind like a razor
slides over the smooth
cheeks of the plains.

In my car I feel conspicuous.

I stop to walk
and turn to watch
the road laid like afrown of stone across
the endlessness of grass.
The idling car is fatally apparent.

No map I carry hints at this.

Later, driving on,
I wonder what it is
out there that notices
me as I pass,
what sensibility thrives
in all that terrible vigilance of grass.

~William Pitt Root

a poem

So long as swallows come flying back
I have a reason to live
So long as the sea
those swallows cross
has a southern shore
there's a reason for waiting for tomorrow
I have a reason for longing for you

~Ko Un

Description of a Pear on a Pewter Dish

But pears prove to be impossible to describe. —Czeslaw Milosz

See the blue there shadowed
beneath the yellow's gloss.
That blue is the sky
within the cut
is of the pear.
At night this sky grows dark
and unfolds a crust of distant stars.
It is these pale fires within its skin
that give the pear its taste of heaven.

~ Young Smith

A Shower of Rain

The good ideas that didn't work,
the spinster who taught maths and Greek,
the boarded-up, what was once a corner shop,
those passing through, those who make do,
the well-established, the little palace,
the family home, the them and us,
the completely refurbished, the new build,
the closed National school, the wind
down entries, the instant sunlight,
the sound of music, the endless traffic,
the steel grid on the parlour door,
the dark street of solitary trees,
the monkey puzzle, the bulging hedge,
the cemented-over, the minimalist look,
the climbing roses, the hanging drapes,
the dickey-dy-do's, the rickety bed,
the flaking paint, the box room,
the rustle of a newspaper, a noise next door,
the snaps of mother and father,
the wakeful, the troubled, the early riser,
the timber floors, the young one's car,
ferns in the backyard, the rapid skies,
the original fittings, a shower of rain.

~Gerald Dawe

Interior

want him here
want him lie down in dirt
want him dusk and drunk

blame the egg blame the fractured stones
at the bottom of the mind

blame his darkblue glare and craggy mug
the bulky king of trudge and beer stein

how I love a masculine in my parlor
his grizzly shout and weight one hundred drums

in this everywhere of blunt and soft sinking
I am the heavy hollow snared

the days are spring the days are summer
the days are nothing and not dead yet

I in my inhale my red and my coursing
I have no other life than this

~Deborah Landau

Dukedom

He folds me in his dukedom,
draping its commemorative hills and forests
round me, casting his dukedom wide
till he's down to his very last caprice.

He folds me in his septembers worked
in ivory silk, in his seascapes of living memory.
He wraps me in his dukedom
of windfall, goldfinch and peach.
He inflicts his dukedom on me like dew on a fountain,
like a year of consents,
like a lily merchant.

He brings me a list of colours ranked in order of sleep.

With a smile taken at random
from the world's stockpile, he unfurls
his meridians, temples and folios,
folds me in his coastline, refractive and just,
doubles round me
in a popular uprising of emerald and jade,
surprises me
with his momentous green democracy,
fields, pastures.

He demonstrates by storm the properties of his echoes,
by example the heaviness of his spiders.
He wraps me in his art du bonheur,
in his protocols and grammars,
his guilds of water, in the gallantry
of his mistakes, and in the diagrams of his purgation.

He shawls me in a déshabillé of orchards,
in the armour of his thoughts and bones,
encircles me
with his dukedom of doors, porches and portals,
its neighbourhoods of counterpoise, ellipse and hyperbola;

he flies about me
in circumnambient marvels,
wrinkles and smoothes his maps expectantly,
swathing me in views of bridges, sheepfolds, boundaries
and elevations:

he cloaks me in leisurely lakes shining from pillar to post,
in lunar versions of his dukedom,
then pulls me into the thistle
down of his physics,
his atoms pulsing.

He also makes known to me his Concept of the Round.

He lures me with his sugar factories,
tempts me with the silence of his herbarium,
its perfume-chimérique.
He wraps me in his protégé clouds,
in his skies dark as the mica sunk in granite.

He fastens his dukedom
round my throat,
the weighty balsams of its silver and gold
exciting respect, a collar of pertinence:
he plaits his dukedom into my hair,
anchorages of ruby, scruples of pearl,
adorning me with all his inferior and superior mirages.

He whispers a thousand dowries in my ear,
testing my arithmetic.
He floats his shipwreck museums up to me
from the depths.
He ravels me into his dukedom's conchology.
He brings me a list of colours ranked in order of aimance,

his dukedom minding its own business, he says...

draping its commemorative hills and forests
around me, casting his dukedom wide
till he's down to his very last caprice,
and must turn reclusive,
lie among his riches
no louder than his own lullaby,

his dukedom no bigger than a visiting card.

~Penelope Shuttle

Rembrandt's Raising of Lazarus, 1642

Of course he'd be coming
from the ground. Follow
Christ's eyebeam to find
the resurrected man,
somebody's brother,
somebody's lover, look
where Christ tells him
to come out.
And suddenly
he is with us again,
mostly just a face
is what we see, i.e.,
an identity.
This was Lazarus.
This man died
until he heard a voice
denying his understanding
up to now of his dark condition.
The voice said to do something,
come, come out
of where you think you are.
The face of Lazarus
peels off the ground.
Already he begins to tell
the story he'll be telling year after year
interpreting, maybe finally even
understanding the way he was,
the place he was, the thing
that happened to him and then
the thing that happened to that.
I was dead and then was not—who else can say that but me?
We're tired of hearing your story
but we love your face.

~ Robert Kelly

Surrender

Sometimes the light, a horse,
gallops into the room
and demands you surrender.
It paws the floor, snorts—and so you rise out of the low-lying
cloud of the self, the half-dreaming
wakefulness we call love,
and into the cool air of the real.
It shakes its mane impatiently,
rears and kicks, its beautiful body
demanding your attention,
pushing its way in. Not
that you're afraid, not exactly.
But it shines straight into your eyes.
And though the heart is small
and cramped, barely large enough to suit
your own wants, you retreat into a corner,
make do with less. The only
possibility when the world lifts its head
and light pours from its back
in quantities enough to drown you.

~Sue Sinclair

Every Journey is a Pilgramage

"All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder. Travel stretches us so that out mental clothes don't fit anymore; it reminds us over and over that the anchoring assumptions of our youth lose their hold in the global sea. Travel to strange places can make us strangers to ourselves, but it can also introduce us to all the exhilarating possibilities of a new self in a new world."
-from Why We Travel by Pico Iyer

If you travel with reverance and wonder, with a lively sense of potential and preciousness of every moment and every encounter, then wherever you go, you walk the pilgram's path.
The real journey is the ongoing and ever-changing interaction of the inner life and the outer.
Every sojourn offers the chance to connect with a sacred secret: that we are all precious pieces of a vast and interconnected puzzle, and that every trip we take, every connection we make, helps complete that puzzle--and ourselves.
-Don George

Eating the Peach

Eating the peach, I feel like a murderer.
Time and darkness mean nothing to me,
moving forward and back with my white enameled teeth
and bloated tongue sating themselves on
moist, pulpy flesh. When I suck at the pit that resembles
a small mammal's skull, it erases all memory
of trouble and strife, of loneliness and the blindings
of erotic love, and of the blueprint of a world in which man, hater of reason, cannot make
things right again. Eating the peach, I feel the long
wandering, my human hand—once fin and paw—
reaching through and across the allegory of Eden,
mud, boredom, and disease, to bees, solitude,
and a thousand hairs of grass blowing by chill waters.

~Henri Cole

Suddenly in Grace

How in the bowl the collards steamed,
hiding gifts of meat and tomatoes.
How the chicken was cloaked
in its brown robe of singeing fat.
How the cornbread could have been supper alone, had been to others in starved times.

Again, look at the table.
How my mother plucked the greens
from her modest garden out back
and through the summer she chased
away creatures from the tomatoes,
righteously planting marigolds.
How she could have grown corn
so tall, she said, if only she had the land. How her hands did not wring this chicken's
neck but her mother's did another.

Again.
How she baptized the greens in gallons
of water, scrubbed the stiff, unforgiving leaves. How her back was turned to me
where she stood at the sink.
How she kept from speaking to my anger, lips tucked,
a bland face, head bowed suddenly in grace.
How she was determined to feed me.

Again.
How she plunged the greens over and over, watched the water run free of dirt
and tried to teach me this way back, though I had no interest then.
How she finally taught me, insistent. How a last meal must be clean.

~Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Sprig of Lilac

—for Haines Eason

in a week you could watch me crumble to smut: spent hues
spent perfumes. dust upon the lapel where a moment I rested

yes, the moths have visited and deposited their velvet egg mass
the gnats were here: they smelled the wilt and blight. they salivated

in the folds of my garments: you could practically taste the rot

look at the pluck you've made of my heart: it broke open in your hands
oddments of ravished leaves: blossom blast and dieback: petals drooping

we kissed briefly in the deathless spring. the koi pond hummed with flies

unbutton me now from your grasp. no, hold tighter, let me disappear
into your nostrils, into your skin, a powdery smudge against your rough cheek

D. A. Powell

Poem of Low Latitudes

Let's crumple calendars, smash watches.

Let's throw ropes around the Moon,
never stop swallowing its linens.

Let's recline the way the horizon does, every evening, yawning across Tropic lines.

Let's fill a hammock with limes.

Let's fall asleep on the reef,
stare up through clear water at trembling stars.

Let's climb a coconut tree & squeal like monkeys.

Let's ride a trade wind like paper airplanes.

Let's watch the sky wheel & wheel
from under straw hats.

Let's count a billion stars,
lose track at a billion minus one, then start over,
until we glitter with white sand.

Let's tumble together until the earth is flat.

Let me sail like Magellan into you,
unfold the maps of your roundness.

Let's hope for the volcano.

Let's reinvent the godless universe ballooning.

Let's crawl into a conch shell
& bang on a bongo.

Let's build a bonfire
that boils away the atmosphere.

Let's sublimate, evaporate, condense.

Let's get drunk on the real stars—
helium engines strumming
our own cores to a glow.

Let me wear your warm skin.

Let's simplify: skin, nerve, synapse, nucleus, hydrogen, quark, the unpronounceable....

~Mike Dockins

Happiness is a birthright

Lessons from the Dalai Lama

"While translating the meaning of a dense text, he reminded us of some of the tenets of Buddhism that translate to any spiritual practice. In colloquial terms, no person is an island—the nature of being is dependence; events don't come into being without cause, and we can best understand things within the concept of relationships. Suffering is caused by our attachments, including grasping and craving. Although suffering occurs, the true nature of human beings is nonafflicted, or luminous." ~from Yoga Journal

The Five Remembrances
Version of the Buddha's Five Remembrances, offered by Thich Nhat Hanh in The Plum Village Chanting Book (Parallax Press, 1991).

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Never doubt...

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

~Margaret Mead

Spoon and Tree

What gladdens her is the spoon,
with its tiny saucer of remnants,
its slender shaft, scrubbed last—and now the kitchen's clean.
Clean are the knives and forks
all akimbo in their drying cage
at the window. The spoonleans alone toward light,
a backyard limb reflected
in its sunken belly, so a
liquid darkness tongues
its curves and bends
along its slender neck,
making the one tidying up blush
at this bed she's come upon—refractive, gleaming, the old
dream of coupling
here portioned out
in such a strange
supper.

When the light is gone,
the immaculate house hushed,
she puts down her book
and returns, barefooted,
waking the wood planks
to the kitchen. The cupboard,
too, sighs, its ascending note
sliding wind-clean. And even
before shaking whole grains
into her midnight bowl,
she has reached out,
across the ticking, low-watt
world, her warm mouth
clamping itself wetly
around the cooled,
hard truth
of the spoon.

~ Sarah London

Confusion

Confusion is a sign of growth...do not be sure of everything.
A planned life is a closed life, only endured but not lived.

From the movie The Inn of Sixth Happiness

Four Poems

[When you live under the mountain]

When you live under the mountain
you do not see the mountain.
What mountain, you ask, stirring your tea,
as your visitor falls silent
before the clouds.


Recruits: Fort Riley, Kansas

Every night they lose at poker to older
men, who know what to do with their faces.


In the Adirondack Chair

Looking the other way as
something flutters beside me in the wind,
I realize
I can't tell pages from wings.


Perfection

The chameleon on the window vanished
without seeming to move. So are we
looking through the chameleon now
as we gaze across the pasture?

~Lola Haskins

Travel Advisory

Do not endeavor
to snapshot the locals.

Do not trust anything
that could snap shut.

Try to pass quickly
through slipshod locales.

Do not give alms.
Make no eye contact.

Do not confuse
yourself with your reflection,

this span of ruins with a system,
this inn with a place to come back to.

Rein in the impulse to build
a new city from these scattered twigs.

Do not poke around in the abandoned
houses of the damaged village.

Do not get curious
about shiny metal in the grass.

Do not plant kisses
on the blind accordionist.

Leave the mermaid alone,
it is not meant to be.

You will cause offense.
You will not hear the knob turn.

You will wake to find stones in your mouth
and a lake in each eye.

Do not ring the concierge.
Do not search for the consulate.

Regard every centimeter
of ground as suspicious.

Trains are essentially useless.
The timetable lies.

Each day you are
bound to lose something.

Each day you are
bound to lose something.


Do not meander too far
from a given road's shoulder.

Owning a car does not give
you the clearance to drive.

~Michael Dumanis

Two poems

The Trouble with Openings

is they unclose you,
your body
become an invitation to pillage.
You let a man burgle your organs
then feed him before he flees
out the window, down the fire escape.
You say, Come back anytime, I'll be in.
I've been deflead, my shots are up to date.
Then he's gone and you're left
with only all your wide-open empties
which spread, and burrow through your walls,
and admit so much.


Invitation
for Sarah C. Harwell

The invitation that never came claimed, Come, this should be fun,
and being a sucker for events where I'm unwanted
I shrugged on my prettiest face and the shirt I wear

to be tastefully naked in public, I cultivated each eyelash.
By the time Sidekick honked outside I'd talked down
to my mirror for hours, and was ready to hole up at home,

but Sidekick insisted we circle the party in her car,
practicing the smoldering looks we'd bless the men with,
imagining the way each one would sit in shadow,

though some of them we bargained back down to boys
renamed Flimsy, Slipknot, Inflation. Eroded egos
shored up by the wailing radio, which advertised our options

as either: a) happily ever after, or b) a lifetime of wretchedness,
we entered the usual awkward: the host was large with light,
he had a love, everyone else was half of a pair.

. . .

Sidekick and I gnawed at stale bread crusts like the prisoners we were.
We took down a book and read some dead men aloud
to stave off despair, which worked for ten or eleven minutes.

Then I exiled myself to the porch to phone people
scattered across other hours, my real friends, and confess
Some of us here will be utter failures and I am not immune,

but when I couldn't reach anyone in my same state
of intoxication, I tottered home on my stilts
along the park where girls wearing pheromones like mine

are violated or disappeared,
and called my sleeping father, and spoke into his answering machine
as fast as I forgot what I needed to say,

messages he would hear
a year from now, a thousand miles away, yesterday.

~Courtney Queeney

The Field

There was a dirt field I'd walk to as a girl,
past the convenience store and the train tracks
where the day laborers congregated with six-packs,
where the two-lane road turned to one lane with yellow stripes
and the vacant field loomed like a desiccated fallen sky.

That's where I'd go to sit on an oblong rock
until prairie dogs sprouted from tunnels underground
and the ground became a fabric
stitched by fluid lines of ants.
And though barely perceptible,

if I waited long enough,
the world would begin its shallow breathing,
the soundless wind's only duty in that field
to rearrange a few grains of sand
while the smell of hot dust grew sharp in the nose.

I waited. I don't know for what.
Sometimes I'd sit so long the sun would sink,
a fiery stare blinking shut beneath the horizon,
and the drooping electric wires would borrow the dark
until the dark seeped back into the sky. And when stars

surfaced like needles piercing through velvet,
I'd hold myself back just a moment more.
What made me feel watched in the naked field?
I was paying close attention and could discern only
a begging to be cloaked and a begging to be released.

~Jennifer Grotz

Azaleas

It was a town so quiet, the mailman was empty-handed.
Why then nostrils of bloom, breathing so pinkly?

Even the town crier had taken a vow of silence.
Why at the house's edge, beneath a wide-eyed window?

A pink so dense it begged hiding.
Unsiblinged, unmated,the moon might find one rocking in a hedge of pink.

It was a town clothed from head to toe: skirts draped
its ankles, sleeves were buttoned tight at its wrists.

So why a shimmered curtain, less a curtain than a sheer
view of two figures on a bed, eyes affixed to a blue flickering?

Blooms pink as baby mice, soft as tiny hands, cluttering the bush as if in celebration.
Why a town that never smiled?

A figure lifted an arm to the nightstand, drank long a glass of amber.
Blue light flickered to the metronome of drama.

Nobody touched nobody. Invisible figures mowed lawns soundlessly.
The halls, everywhere, blue and institutional.

Where cars never drove with their windows rolled down.
A town where anything might happen, except for me.

The flowers, only the flowers had hearts.
Even birds pretended, their beating of wings mechanized by meanness.

Except for the petals that touched my fingers, except
for the little oceans I viewed their pinks through,

except the tongue that was my nose, the whiskers
I wore as I crawled on my knees through yards,

beneath the fresh fingers of azalea blooms, beneath
a window that flickered blue, to where my smile grew.

~Cate Marvin

Redoubt

If only because in another country you are free
to renegotiate yourself or what you thought you were,

I found myself this night approached by a man
in a suit. When he asked me what I was drinking I didn't demur.

French was a lingua franca. He showed me a worn photo,
wife and children smiling at us from some Polish city.

We'd already exchanged names, whatever they were. So what
did I do? I told him I was a writer, not well-known.

Me? I'm a salesman, he said, I travel in fountain pens.
He represented all the big companies like Mont Blanc.

It was the coming back-to-the-future thing in the East,
though back where I come from, he said, they'd never gone away.

But what they desired now was 'Western exclusivity'.
And what sort of thing do you write, would you like to try mine?

Even before he proffered it I knew it was a fake.
He'd filled it with fancy ink. De l'encre violette.

So I wrote that I was a writer of fiction and poems,
and if you're about to ask me what they're about, I said,

that's for the reader to say, whose guess is as good as mine.
He smiled. And how did it all end up? I said, picturing

the scene, bottles with strange labels glinting in the background,
the bartender pretending to polish a glass, and you

looking the Mont Blanc man in the eye. I imagined snow
outside, the footsteps that brought you there already erased

as were his that crossed yours at the threshold if not before,
as you were a stranger to me once when we first met.

I stared at my face for an age in the en suite mirror.
Then I must have crawled into bed before my mind went blank.

~Ciaran Carson

The Easel of Mantegna

Empty-armed, like a soldier
waiting for the deposition
still to happen, watching

as the rough skin is stretched
across the squat square ribs
and stapled, scraped with a palette-

knife before the morbid under-
taking of the gesso and the paint;
or say instead you always were

inclined to play an active role
in this, our cruellest fiction:
empty-angled and pristine save

where you were brushed
with the death and cleansed
with the dizzy stench of spirit.

You are the awkward ladder,
the hallowed steps, the endless
air forever drifting through

the thin rafters of an unroofed
steeple—on or in or out of
whom the wide sound of resurrection

still remains for us a thing
we listen for in silence:
untolled, unrunged.

~Kelly Grovier

We Are Not Dead

For Kadhim Kaitan

To no avail the doves cooing—
Our delights are cellars
And our time is ash.
We go, every sunset, to the river
Carrying the coffins of our days'
Polishing our teardrops
And shrouding our fears.

We are not dead.
We still have the tearful embrace
Of sacrifice.
We compose our features,
Bandage our calendars,
Our disappointments,
And,
Under a spider's tent,
We still have the right
To conquer the city with kisses.

We return to our hospitals
Lighting lamps of regret
And reciting our elegies.
Our lifetimes are paper boats
Pushed to the waves by the hand of a trifling child
Where, fold after fold,
The sea takes our dreams
And wraps them in weeping.
Our lifetimes are withered leaves
That launched an attack on the sun
And fell in flames.
The fire now licks at our names,
Sewn together with splinters.

~Munthir Abdul-Hur

Haiku

The Problem with Haiku

Of all the things I
Wish would be, the one that most
Occurs to me is

~Michael S. Glaser

Admiralty Bay

Bequia. The Grenadines

The man on the mast swings in his red cloth chair,
working to fix a snag in the mainsail rigging:
the labor of others is more compelling
than our own. The man in the chair raises and lowers
himself as a water taxi skims past in bright
Caribbean colors, with "African Pride" painted
below the gunwales, red on a yellow background,
like a national flag of dispossession.
Despair is the fruit of disparity, and where
it ripens it never falls far from the free.
The sailboat will cruise away leaving money
in its wake. The motorboat circles the harbor,
catching fares and chasing fairness in the guise
of freedom. No nation is an island, says
Geo-Politics; no island is a nation,
says Multinational Markets. To develop
importance, you import development
but you outsource sovereignty. The man in the chair
knows the precariousness of in between
but his yacht attests to wealth that's grounded in
securities. "African Pride" cuts his engine
and glides to the dock, smooth and practiced,
professional. The yachties are set to sail:
the auxiliary engines billow diesel
fumes on the water as the boat finds a way through
the harbor out of the bay to the open sea.
Naked children, blond and bronzed, with orange floats
on their arms, splash among the waves on the beach.

~Paul Kane

Two Things

Challenges

Any fact facing us is not as important
as our attitude toward it,
for that determines our success or failure

~Norman Vincent Peale

Truth

Do not believe the truth. The truth is tiny compared to what you have to do.

~Leonard Cohen

The Fog

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

~Carl Sandberg

Wallpaper

~Adrienne Rich

1
A room papered with clippings:
newsprint in bulging patches
none of them mention our names
gone from that history then O red

kite snarled in a cloud
small plane melted in fog: no matter:
I worked to keep it current
and meaningful: a job of living I thought

history as wallpaper
urgently selected clipped and pasted
but the room itself nowhere

gone the address the house
golden-oak banisters zigzagging
upward, stained glass on the landings
streaked porcelain in the bathrooms

loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried
up to secrete the rash imagination
of a time to come

What we said then, our breath remains
otherwhere: in me in you

2
Sonata for Unaccompanied Minor
Fugitive Variations
discs we played over and over

on the one-armed phonograph
Childish we were in our adoration
of the dead composer

who'd ignored the weather signs
trying to cross the Andes
stupidly I'd say now

and you'd agree seasoned
as we are working stretched
weeks eating food bought

with ordinary grudging wages
keeping up with rent, utilities

a job of living as I said

3
Clocks are set back quick dark
snow filters past my lashes
this is the common ground

white-crusted sidewalks windshield wipers
licking, creaking
to and fro to and fro

If the word gets out if the word
escapes if the word
flies if it dies
it has its way of coming back

The handwritings on the walls
are vast and coded

the music blizzards past

The Waters in Benin

This is a journal entry from a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin

It Smells Like Fish

09.24.2007 — Everyone around me said it was coming. Every four or five years, it happens, and this is the fourth of fifth year since the last occurrence. I kept saying that I hoped I would be here to see it, but today I saw enough to understand, and choose to no longer particularly want to see the real event. Since the previous entry, the rain hasn't really ceased. Every couple of days there is a break with sunlight, but soon enough the rain returns. All this rain on a river plain brings a flood, for sure and certain. Today, during a faux-break when there was no rain but the air was still wet enough to make my friends' hair look hoary, I fled the house on my bike, eventually stopping at the river. I had to brake earlier than usual as the bank had deteriorated and become dangerous. I was silenced. Water filled the ten-foot descent to the usual pirogue landing, which I thought looked calm but deceiving, knowing that the water was not only tearing away the bank, but was also on the brink of wreaking destruction. Straddling my bike on the crumbling bank of a swollen river in the twilight that evening was the most dream-like jungle moment I have experienced so close to home. I have had other jungle-like moments, but not so close to where I live. The river had reclaimed the Togo-side Palm Nut trees, and all the nooks and crannies along the way. The continual moisture had allowed for the toads, frogs, and crickets to become a constant background noise. The sunlight that remained and broke through the clouds made the air seem darker somehow as I watched the water. I took a couple steps back as I heard a crash and slide up-river; a few moments later, part of Benin floated by. That was when I decided that I didn't need to see more water. I am not in Kansas, and people do not have insurance. Fields have been invaded and crops risk to be ruined. People are harvesting while waste deep in water, some by pirogue, and some not at all because the crop is already gone. This morning I toured the wettest areas. The next crossing down river is underwater, except for a small island where the pirogues embark. I parked my bike with the displaced zemidjans, pulled up my pagne, and walked the submerged road to cross the ankle-deep water. Here, the usual descent to the boats is 12-15 feet deep, and today was beyond filled. Women were washing laundry and some men were washing their motorcycle or vehicle. People were still crossing in boats to Togo except the loading area was where the zemidjan hang-out usually should be, and the people who pushed the boat had to be careful for the now-hidden descent. Those of us standing on the island heard a big splash on the Togo side as barrels were pushed into the river. Men jumped in after and pushed the barrels across while swimming. As I stood there, about 20 men swam across, five at a time, and a stack of 20 or more barrels were still lined up in Togo. One man swam three-fourths of the way and became too tired. A man who had mostly crossed left his barrel and swam back into the current for the tired man's barrel while two boats, one from Togo and one from Benin, took off after the man, while yet another swimmer rescued the second barrel. It was an intense moment, but barrels, swimmers, and boatmen all returned safely to Benin. The barrels are full of Palm Nut tree oil, locally called red oil, which is a big source of trade. I biked on toward another village about five kilometers from the opposite side of town, but not even half a kilometer into the trip, a woman told me to not even try crossing. She had been up to her knees in water, assuring that the river is already passed its banks on that side. I returned home. The river has an emergency route very close to my home, so my house is the second to be engulfed, the first being the mayor's home. Mud homes that do risk to be in water are built up, and can resist most of a flood, but not all. I am told that it depends on the depth and the force of the water. In the evening I walked out to the market to stock up on foods. The ditches around my home where already full, and every 30 minutes later were more full. I had been considering the flood a natural disaster. I have never really been in the midst of one, which was kind of obvious in the end because I felt I was being dramatic in calling the flood a disaster. I am possibly the only person over the age of five in this town that has never seen the river flood. Mathurin told me that he likes watching the river flood, and that as a child he would sit on my house's porch railing to fish. Silly me, I was thinking of all those fields being ruined. He says he likes to see what happens, and to eat all the fresh fish, snails, and other animals chased out of the brush. So, I guess a flood is a flood; next year will be different. In the mean time, I have my camera ready for fleeing animals. I guess I still have a chance of seeing a hippopotamus in my front yard before leaving. P.S. As I type this out the night of the day I wrote this entry, the water has claimed my front yard and is still climbing, and it's still raining. P.P.S. As I edit this entry, I will add that the water only keeps rising, and I take a pirogue to leave my home. It rains about once a day. My dogs, who are shorter than my knees, must swim to leave and enter the house, so they don't too often. In fact, I try to avoid coming and going as well.

Today

I may not have gone where I intended to go
but I think I ended up where I invented to be

~Douglas Adams

What if...

"What if love wasn't the
act of finding what you were missing
but the give-and-take that made
you both match?"

from The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult