Good For Nothin

I will start to post again starting now

I am trying to be plain with you.
I want to explain a moment that was
usual but important. By which I
mean, this custom was brought to
me and is therefore significant.
Which is to say, it was shown to me
and held energy and force. We were
a fort and we ravished. I’ve got dirt
under my fingernails and dried
blood on my hands, still. I’m
telling the truth. And without
ligation we were the same.

When I came home from the country side
I found a flower the size of my body
lying on the bed. And orange bright cosmo.
That’s how beautiful it was. It was. And
I turned to see a different large flower
on each piece of furniture. Laying with
peace. In my house. My home, the place
where I live is delicate. And I grow.
I dig my feet down into the hardwood
floor, which is now soil. Are you in
the soil with me, that sings?

As if we were not humans, as if we
were horses walking around laying on
our sides in the grass. Talking with
our stature. I was brown, you were a
paint. What a pleasure to leave
language, it was spacious. The space
immense and soft, but felt. Imagine.
We were horses and we ran at
comfortable speeds off the ledge
and into the green water.

Hot meat and flatware. Peril. Peril.
Sitting in the chairs, we eat and feast.
For the first fifteen seconds--
laughter.
For the first fifteen seconds--
(body standing like a cross)
laughter.
With? Which is to say: blithe.
At? Which is to say: ugly.

Who still seem sober, we rush them to
water. Our clothes are torn.

The day was today. Again. Again.
I hop in my truck and head south,
to stop by my old home. The ride
rode light, being as a child
baggage was balloon, thought of
flight. I light a cigarette and
pick up the old friend. He left
his home dropped control and made
the confession. Then we head for
water. My sister there already and
her husband with her. We all knew
the ___ of the ___ (inescapable moment
of turning). The verse was right on
our heels. One felt. He felt. She
thought this might be important.
It had been planned. We gather,
more come, and spoke of beauty.
And I, like a bird, lost the sun
over the cliff and flew down into
the water. The wind soft. The
water fluid.

something i am still thinking about (recalling one of my very first posts on this blog)

Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

a stanza from Friedrich Rückert

used in Mahler's Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

Into the Nada

"its in nothing that you have so much to give,
and its in nowhere that you've found your place to live..."

Derek Walcott's OMEROS

Book 1: Chapter 1 - Section 1

"This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes."
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. "Once wind bring the news

to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes.

Wind lift the ferns. They sound like the sea that feed us
fisherman all our life, and the ferns nodded 'Yes,
the trees have to die.' So, fists jam into our jacket,

cause the heights was cold and our breath making feathers
like the mist, we pass the rum. When it came back, it
give is the spirit to turn into murderers.

I lift up the axe and pray for strength in my hands
to wound the first cedar. Dew was filling my eyes,
but I fire one more white rum. The we advance."

For some extra sliver, under a sea-almond,
he shows them a scar made by a rusted anchor,
rolling one trouser-leg up with the rising moan

of a conch. It has puckered like the corolla
of a sea-urchin. He does not explain its cure.
"It have some things"--he smiles--"worth more than a dollar."

He has left it to a garrulous waterfall
to pour out his secret down La Sorciere, since
the tall laurels fell, for the ground-dove's mating call

to pass on its note to the blue, tacit mountains
whose talkative brooks, carrying it to the sea,
turn into idle pools where the clear minnows shoot

and an egret stalks the reeds with one rusted cry
as it stabs and stabs the mud with one lifting foot.
Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly

as eels sign their names along the clear bottom-sand,
when the sunrise brightens the river's memory
and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound.

Although smoke forgets the earth from which it ascends
and nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed,
an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lense

over its lost name, when the hunched island was called
"Iounalao," "Where the iguana is found."
But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale

the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,
its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail
moving with the island. The split pods of its eyes

ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries,
that rose with the Aruacas' smoke till a new race
unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.

These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before.
the first god was a gommier. The generator

began with a whine, and a shark, with a sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackerel over water
into trembling weeds. Now they cut off the saw,

still hot and shaking, to examine the wound it
had made. They scraped off its gangrenous moss, then ripped
the wound clear of the net of vines that still bound it

to this earth, and nodded. The generator whipped
back to its work, and the chips flew much faster as
the shark's teeth gnawed evenly. They covered their eyes

from the splintering nest. Now, over the pastures
of bananas, the island lifted its horns. Sunrise
trickled down its valleys, blood splashed on the cedars,

and the grove flooded with the light of sacrifice.
A gommier was cracking. Its leaves an enormous
traupaulin with the ridgepole gone. The craking sound

made the fishermen leap back as the angling mast
leant slowly towards the troughs of ferns; the the ground
shuddered under the feet in waves, the the waves passed.

Watch Out

in a room
a window stands

light chased on
plants like a TV show

a light inside
pointed at me

a person sitting in
a room like a TV show

a horror show a comedy
and i rejoice

in the shroud
that was given to me

Bill Callahan

Check him out.


Photo by Joanna Newsom

a poem by WCW

These

are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.

The year plunges into night
and the heart plunges
lower than night

to an empty, windswept place
without sun, stars or moon
but a peculiar light as of thought

that spins a dark fire--
whirling upon itself until,
in the cold, it kindles

to make a man aware of nothing
that he knows, not loneliness
itself--Not a ghost but

would be embraced--emptiness,
despair--(They
whine and whislte) among


the flashes and brooms of war;
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,


the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused--


Hide it away somewhere
out of the mind, let it get roots
and gorw, unrelated to jealous


ears and eyes--for itself.
In this mine they come to dig--all.
Is this the counterfoil to sweetest


music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped


that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing--that is now stone.

i met a genius by Charles Bukowski

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.

it was the first time I'd
realized
that.

Few and Far Between

If only we could forgive ourselves, and didn’t
have to have somebody else forgive us—

Where I came from everybody could see anyone coming,
Even storms: and out there the etiquette

was not to say right off what you came for when you did
or ask anybody why, if they come where you wer

in all space, and time; it made for a kind
of trust, or—well, it was like trust.

I remember some of those storms, how the dust
would kick up before them in the wild wind, and behind it

the blueblack cloud piled high white on top
with lighting flaring inside, and maybe only a few miles
wide,

coming over the desert sort of slow and grand:
you could got out of the way if you wanted to

but nobody did; as I said, seldom enough is welcome.
Didn’t I say that? One night when mother was away

my dad and I followed a storm clear down
to Needles in the state car, His job

Was to take care of the highway, so it was work, sort of,
for us to ride along behind that cloud we see by its
own light

through the wild fragrance the desert has after a rain
in the lone car on the road that night, to keep track

of the damage it did. He showed me a place near Essex
where a flash flodd had ripped out three hundred feet of
roadbed

two years before, where it hadn’t rained
in fifty years before that. The foreman said so,

Billy Nielson, and he’d been out there fifty years
without seeing the ground wet .
My dad and I stopped on the grade below Goffs
and watched the storm go on out of his territory

across the river into Arizona
where the sky was getting gray,

and turned for home as the sun rose behind us
back across the clean desert in slant light

that lit the smoke trees in washes that were churned
smooth
where the water went, and sharpened along the edges
through Essex and Cadiz Summit, great tamarisked
Chambless
Ludlow for breakfast with the humorous Chinaman, Lee,

Newberry Springs, Daggett and Elephant Butte, Nebo
Hidden by wire,
On home over the hill to Barstow on the good road.



somebody gave me a copy of this amazing poem, but i do not know who the author is. if you know, please tell me--if not, im glad you got to read it.