February 2012
7 posts
LEVIATHAN | George Oppen
Truth also is the pursuit of it: Like happiness, and it will not stand. Even the verse begins to eat away In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit; A wind moves a little, Moving in a circle, very cold. How shall we say? In ordinary discourse— We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words, The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights Daily with that...
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RECIPE FOR AMNESIA | Nin Andrews
Of every priest, guru, nun and rishi, of every therapist, lama, swami, and saint. Of every drug addict and several strangers on the street, I’ve asked for teachings on forgetfulness, transmissions, rituals for purification, drugs and whiskey, any form of magic for erasing your voice from my mind, your image from my days and nights, your scent of salt and lemons and warm summer rain like a...
4 tags
adara sánchez anguiano
adara sánchez anguiano, horses in the sky
January 2012
19 posts
ENDANGERED SPECIES | Bob Hicok
Very busy sensing there’s nothing down the train tracks except remembering there are only five remaining speakers of Mohave. There might be a loose and rusted spike, a smashed bottle of Bud is likely if I walk long enough into picturing a basketball team of old men and women in a gym in Oklahoma bouncing an orange ball against a team made up of how the rest of the world can’t...
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ANTILAMENTATION | Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t...
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THIS SLOW RISE | Monica Berlin
What does any of this matter on nights so hot we can’t sleep, somewhere else the rivers spilling banks, pouring in, and somewhere else still, drought spreading out the once rich land into a layer of silt. What does it matter these nights, our backyards of trains, our turning to dust, even as we’re more saturated than we’ve ever been? We’re tracing routes of the maps...
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SUDDENLY THIS DEFEAT | Jack Gilbert
Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray And the browns gone gray And yellow A terrible amber. In the cold streets Your warm body. In whatever room Your warm body. Among all the people Your absence The people who are always Not you.
I have been easy with trees Too long. Too familiar with mountains. Joy has been a habit. Now Suddenly This rain.
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THE ABANDONED VALLEY | Jack Gilbert
Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?
IT IS NOT SO MUCH THAT I MISS YOU | Dorothea...
It is not so much that I miss you
as the remembering
which I suppose is a form of missing
except more positive,
like the time of the blackout
when fear was my first response
followed by love of the dark.
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MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS | Robert Hass
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no...
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TO THE ANGELBEAST | Eduardo C. Corral
For Arthur Russell
All that glitters isn’t music.
Once, hidden in tall grass,
I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:
doe after doe of leaping.
You said it was nothing
but a trick of the light. Gold
curves. Gold scarves.
Am I not your animal?
You’d wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.
You said it was like lifting a cello
out of its black case.
December 2011
3 posts
TO THE HARBORMASTER | Frank O'Hara
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my...
A VALENTINE TO SHERWOOD ANDERSON | Gertrude Stein
I knew too that through them I knew too that he was through, I knew too that he threw them. I knew too that they were through, I knew too I knew too, I knew I knew them.
I knew to them.
If they tear a hunter through, if they tear through a hunter, if they tear through a hunt and a hunter, if they tear through different sizes of the six, the different sizes of the six which...
“Take time to stop and smell the flowers,” says an old homily. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD and lived to age 102, had a different approach. “Take the time to stop and be the flowers,” he said. That’s my advice to you. Don’t just set aside a few stolen moments to sniff the snapdragons, taste the rain, chase the wind, watch the ...
November 2011
25 posts
Beginning Martial Arts or A Mother's Advice on How...
Aim for the wound. Aim. The wrist, the guided movement: your body knows it by now. You give in. Instinct takes over. Time is a whore. There have been scores of them, and the more you have the more they seem to want you. Sad, isn’t it? You begin wishing they’d put up more of a fight. You get bored, get cruel. You push harder, bite her neck. Her eyes ask you to again. You oblige. You...
“All must be given away, given away every day, because to be human means:
1....”
– Dave Eggers
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STILL | AR Ammons
I said I will find what is lowly and put the roots of my identity down there: each day I’ll wake up and find the lowly nearby, a handy focus and reminder, a ready measure of my significance, the voice by which I would be heard, the wills, the kinds of selfishness I could freely adopt as my own: but though I have looked everywhere, I can find nothing to give myself to: everything is...
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from POWER & TIME | Mary Oliver
It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely....
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DETAILS OF THE WOODS | Richard Siken
I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do. A box made out of leaves. What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless. Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else. I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon. From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale. I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority. Everything...
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from SHY GREEN FIELDS | Hugh Steinberg
God is everywhere, cake is not,
which is why I like it, God says
and lifts his fork from the plate of
you. He makes it seem like charity.
I don’t care what he thinks. I think
about the richness. I too take
enormous bites, here and here.
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THE RACE | Saara Myrene Raapana
You’re a trigger finger dug into the starting gun,
the smack as it fires, the tense stroke of hooves
pressing into a fresh track. You’re the curiosity
of a flashbulb nibbling air, tricky camera lens
grabbing a mane as it quivers back. I’m a rising
overture of thighs. I’m dirt exploding midair
—sand fireworks. I’m the impulse to grab hold:
the jockey’s knees...
Dear Alisha, The admissions team at National College of Natural Medicine is pleased to inform you that we have received your application for Fall 2012 admissions. You will be notified shortly regarding the status of your application and any items we may still need to complete your file. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
Best Wishes, The NCNM Admissions...
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NO PLACE FOR A NINJA | Devin Gribbons
There are no want-ads for stealth assassins. No signs on windows that read Help Wanted: Bad Ass Mother Fuckers apply within. It used to be that my blade was the only résumé I needed and the only reference required was a death toll. Now employers don’t seem to care that I can make my sword sing in 5 languages, and men scream in 9 more, that I have severed heads
of state and scaled walls like...
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I SPILLED THE TALL BOTTLE OF RED WINE; YOU WANT ME...
; so I do; but after; you want me to know that it wasn’t enough; so I hang myself in your parlor next to the fine china; with twine I found in one of the kitchen drawers; but it’s still not enough; I invent new ways to die; I have the first brain attack; I talk my cells into splitting up but for good this time; every joke kills me; my death is so commonplace that the city has...
Stephanie Tillman: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephanietillman/3925542065/
