Back at it: April's fool

After Seeing Gerhard Richter Painting

Paintings are mortal enemies, says Richter

quoting Adorno, and poems too will kill you

if they roam unsupervised, untethered,

flying off along yon ecliptic with all they know,

know about you. Truth! Gad!

Maybe

it’s better to stop all this you mutter once

in a while, April nights when the thought squeezes

like a rat through a sliver in the baseboards

in the house built of words, always only words

so circumscribed, bound to 24 marks and

one antipodal Hippocratic oath: first, do harm –

that’s how you know it’s a word, a real word.

Another thing Richter says at movie’s end,

a line the director knew to save for last,

to remind us why we’d paid and offer

permission (the world loves to

hate its artists): It’s fun.

Justice Barbie

(27 late)

Justice Barbie!

Like tequila, one sip leads to if
I bump into old Malcolm X in the morning
when I’m supposed to be making a poem for Robin
and Charlie I’m all it’s the ballot or the bullet
for the rest of the day and meaning it, meaning
justice in a way that wouldn’t bother to say the word
though I might look up Chomsky on education
send a snippet to Evan and Eamon but no justice
probably trademarked by some honky designer
of disposable plastic manufactured in China.

There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.

My pal John goes to China to make plastic gewgaws
and has to bring his own food and water.
Says it stinks real bad. Is that a related issue
and should it be explained in a poem.

“Justice Fine Cutlery in Primrose Pink”

If you and I were Americans there’d be no problem
my country ‘tis not of me, though as grandmother
pointed out when I began bringing home
this particular vintage, this is my America since
I can be mad as Malcolm X to which I explained
that’s because we’re crackers, gran, and surely none
of this politics has any place in poetry, maybe old
Tom Jefferson, he takes a seat in real poems
who read architecture books he'd ordered from Boston
so he could let more light and space in a house

oh Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself.

Notions of self-evidence sadly hamstrung
for any gal who sipped postmodernism in the 80s or
even these ironic days when Bruce needs poetry,
or just light and space, at least truth spreading
easy like a lamp, easy like the April rainfall
which cannot help but corrode cars, graveyards, storm
of justice infinite like Greek's chaos and I think
We aren’t Americans yet and damn,
how will I ever make a poem.

11: It's Christopher Smart's Birthday

from Jubilate Agno, Fragment B

[For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]

....For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

7 came (too) easy via a prompt

Getting at the Really True Number

No water-drinker ever wrote a poem that lasted. –Horace


Our wearisome calculations have
ended the blue ( ) results may
only be farmed by nuns and water-
drinkers ( ) tolerant
in the long dream.
You cultivate indoor plants
we laugh, deathless. Until
the translation, meaning
molested. Hark!
Seventy!



(I used a prompt suggested by Robin at Kelli Russell Agodon's very cool Book of Kells.)

A Break from Our Sponsor

That is, this is a break from me. I want to honor another who is writing a poem a day for this month, only his poem-a-day consists of one (lonely, ebullient, zen) word. Barwin, Gary, whose work I totally dig. I guess I'll eventually add his Serif of Nottingblog to the blog roll, though it doesn't seem fair because is he really working as hard as Robin, Charlie and Ada and those nice grad students at Rutgers?

All's fair in love, war, and art.

Today, his word is ... hmmm, actually, you'll have to check it out.

Thanatology in April

Thanatology

Speaking personally I ask simply that I be sped
to the county morgue in an old gold convertible
Caddy propped against a guitar—the one
I can’t play. Speaking personally I request
that I be donated to arts, not science. Speaking
I ask to be wheeled to the crematorium in a red wagon
yanked by neighborhood tots who haven’t learned
to fear deadness here. I demand the Marseillaise be
sung immediately upon my demise, my tongue snipped
and buried far back in a spot that is no garden, hardly
in nature, my brown body painted blue, my gray dyed,
nails vamp, hands holding a manifesto. Any manifesto.
Except the futurists'! Crazy bastards! Personally I
ask to be firmly lassoed to the Vermont mountainside
and left for wolves’ delectation. Unless they want cake.
But first (first!) get me to the city hospital to be plumped
fat with air, plugged into heart and lung machines so
I'm back just a minute to call my Katie, tell her what
happened and how they all are, there on the other side,
and who I shared a cigarette with, thinking it over, saying
little, little, less, tired of it, tired but finally able.

Yes, cruelest

I'm in.

30.

First, the picture is of my father's maternal grandfather, a tenant farmer of Pownal, Vermont, and father of nine. He was a big fellow, but he was crushed to death by a bull he let out of the pen so it could get a little air.

Second, this has been harder and more fun than ever. I am glad it's over.

Third, what came today:

What Came Today

It's hard to think in this green and black
breeze, though thinking never helped. How
it's always you and me and that which cannot
be got round. If yesterday was exciting, why.
Sitting at the edge of the bath, bathing at the edge,
sins washed clean, secret sins amassing like dust
in the far corners of the closets, all these sins
of the puppy. This is high church, puppy church,
the climbing, the pawing, the gnawing,
when all you longed for was interaction.
Or the main thing. (Even puppies refuse absolutes.)
As the Greeks said, or the Chinese, or maybe Will,
Conscience can make slaves of nobles of long lineage.
What I mean is Look up now. Come.

29.

Greetings from the Girl-King of Crazy

Consider St. Monica, the nag who did not cause
the conversion of Augustine but bickered
for it, lowing always, leaving post-its.

Keep your shirt on! I was a victim
of my unconscious, a lithe boomerang
with a hell of a sharp edge. I couldn't
know what I was grumbling for, rumbling,
purple waiting (misunderstanding that, too)
for the strepitus to snap us all out of it.

And once in a while, you followed along.

17 on the 18th.

The beginning is a popular movie, the one from last year. The color is dinner party. The philosopher is (also) homeless. The title is cumin. The art is orange. The sorrow is a streetlight on the northwest corner. The handwriting is architecture. The rules are corrosive acid. The church is packed. The rules are actually salt. The salt is Irish. The music is sentimental. The middle (also) is sentimental. The sentiment is rage, and no one sits to the left or the right of it. The calendar is gold, but not like the metal. The arc of time is flat and small. The ending is the village, but no one told you. I'm telling you.

13 April, 13th NaPoWriMo

I wish I believed in the soul

I wish I believed in the soul
so that I could talk about it
like a real poet. I would
focus on yours, of course,

since I know yours, oh I do know
that soul-ish thing in you
and I love it, too,
though it is omnivorous

like a dog. Like my dog
Arthur Rimbaud, who will
eat anything from cigarette butts,
apt for the French poet in him,

to pine cones to styrofoam
peanuts, apt for nothing and
surely invented by someone else who
doesn't believe in the soul. Above all

he loves to eat every ketchup and
snot-slicked napkin crumpled and
dropped to be stomped on the streets
of New York. He leaps to their gray

with spritely joy and a private furtive
glance he can never share
with me because he already senses
though he's only a puppy

that I do not understand.

How I am: always

How I am: always
the three a.m. call: the big news
that I love you so terribly, the fact
that I hate you so truly. I am
the digital ping of the phone that wakes
your dog, I am the dream broken, the one
where you are sawing off your leg
before an uninterested husband. Too: I am
wholly given up on the caller, have deep-sixed
the bright cotton candy stickiness
of our shared jail time, have let go
the blood hostility like pompoms shaken
in the headlights of oncoming traffic
on the old farm to market road, oh I am all
Buddhist detached oh oh I am the ickle
bit of hope for the caller
tucked in the top drawer behind the socks,
rolled loose like a sock,
the interruption long awaited.

I am the moment beneath the 3 a.m. call,
not the first kiss but the gray afternoon
and the invitation across the fence,
I am the energy of the hop over that fence
and the lope toward the scrotum-tightening sea
and the letter you wrote about it later
and the argument in which it came up
and the future heaped on the door stoop
like your best jacket worn for the date
bleached by salty sand.

Or I am the moment before that moment, the breeze
called spring with dirt and shit and the crocuses
probably, sure, though I wouldn't know a crocus
if it knocked me on the head. Who's there.

I am the reason you think the call is made
and the reason I think the call is made
and the dark cut by halogen, helpful,
because anyway it's 8 a.m. somewhere else
and 5 p.m. in still another town,
and I am the other reason, the one always here,
silent, spinning us round, drunk.