Poetbabble

Revision in My Wife's Powder Room

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:37:00 -0500

- It has been said that James Audubon once slaughtered a mangrove of birds in order to find the right specimen for a painting.

I’ll need more salt than this. A loose feather
sticks pink to the edge of the bathtub
and slides down to my fist. Her mouth
music boxes shut: its wish against human knowledge.
Inside her stomach—stones and sand and concept.
I can’t ask questions in that language. What if
my strings of English reveal the man I want to be?
My tongue waters at every lagoon, every disjointed
flamingo: the mistakes of God. There are
thousands of them and I will need thousands of them.
When the bird steps forward, her legs bow back,
behind her, toward the man she doesn’t know
will fit her to this canvas. Bend her to the
face of God. Grace I’ll need more strength than this.

- Lauren Berry

Proximity / Randall Mann

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:06:20 -0500

Out of the fog comes a little white bus.
It ferries us south to the technical mouth
of the bay. This is biopharma, Double Helix Way.

In the gleaming canteen, mugs have been
dutifully stacked for our dismantling,
a form of punishment.

Executives take the same elevator as I.
This one’s chatty, that one’s gravely engrossed
in his cloud. Proximity measures shame.

I manage in an office, but an office
that faces a hallway, not the bay. One day
I hope to see the bay that way. It all began

in the open, a cubicle—there’s movement.
My door is always open, even when I shut it.
I sit seven boxes below the CEO

on the org chart. It’s an art, the value-add,
the compound noun. Calendar is a verb.
To your point, the kindest prepositional phrase.

Leafy trees grow a short walk from Building 5.
Take a walk. It might be nice to lie and watch the smoky
marrow rise and fall, and rise. Don’t shut your eyes

I’ve been absent lately. But I’ve been working on...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 13:02:06 -0500

I’ve been absent lately.

But I’ve been working on THIS!

Digital Graffiti at Alys Beach.

Artists from all over the world are selected to install/project their work on the walls of the town. It’s stunningbeautiful.

Variation on a Theme / W.S. Merwin

Thu, 30 May 2013 12:49:04 -0500

Thank you my life long afternoon
late in this spring that has no age
my window above the river
for the woman you led me to
when it was time at last the words
coming to me out of mid-air
that carried me through the clear day
and come even now to find me
for old friends and echoes of them
those mistakes only I could make
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it
thank you good body hand and eye
and the places and moments known
only to me revisiting
once more complete just as they are
and the morning stars I have seen
and the dogs who are guiding me

"After you learn every story your mother told you about prom caught hard in the back of her..."

Mon, 27 May 2013 19:55:58 -0500

“

After you learn every story your mother told you about
prom caught hard in the back of her throat.

After your sister finally tells you what happened the night
you didn’t pick up the phone.

After that party your freshman year of college, when you
drank all the vodka and then threw yourself at that boy
who was so not into you.

After the picture frames, the wine glass, and your vows
lay broken on the floor.

After you remember every racist thing you said as a small
town white teenager. After you realize that no amount of
present day enlightenment will make those words unsaid.

After you accept there are things you will never know
about your father or the man you love. After you accept
that each reminds you of the other. After the night they
met and shook guitar-calloused hands, staring each other
down with matching blue eyes.

After he asks you to marry him, and you say “Not yet.”

After you find your underwear in the dark curves of a
stranger’s sheets and leave before sunrise. After you,
sobbing, confess what you’ve done, and he does not
forgive you.

There is shame. There is fear. And there is this dizzying
freedom.

”

- The Brief Two Seconds After You Ruin Everything, Clementine von Radics (via clementinevonradics)

|| The National || Slipped || Trouble Will Find Me (2013) ||...

Mon, 27 May 2013 19:43:05 -0500

|| The National || Slipped || Trouble Will Find Me (2013) || Indie Rock ||

"This year will take from me / the hardened person / who I longed to be. / I am healing by mistake. /..."

Mon, 27 May 2013 19:37:10 -0500

“This year will take from me / the hardened person / who I longed to be. / I am healing by mistake. / Rome is also built on ruins.”

- Eliza Griswold’s “Ruins” (via themapleleaves)

"Today I receive a postcard of a blue guitar. Here snow falls with wings, tumbling in its feathered..."

Mon, 27 May 2013 19:35:43 -0500

“Today I receive a postcard of
a blue guitar. Here snow falls with wings,
tumbling in its feathered body, melting
on the window glass. How each evening becomes
another beautiful woman holding
the color of expensive sapphires
against her throat, I’ll never know.
It is an ordinary clarity.

So then was it music?
Something like love or
words, a sentimental moment once
years ago, that blue sky?

How soon the sky and I have grown apart.
On the postcard, an old man hangs
half-dead, strung over his instrument, and what
I have imagined is half-dead, too. Our bones
end hollow, sky blue; the flute comes untuned.”

- Erin Belieu, from “All Distance” (via weissewiese)

"When you show yourself to the woman you love, you don’t know your fear is not fear, itself. You have..."

Mon, 27 May 2013 19:25:35 -0500

“When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’t know your fear

is not fear, itself. You have never been good,
but now you are so good,

who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,

or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?

This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind

that doesn’t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,

the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.
”

- Brenda Shaughnessy, excerpt from “Card 19: The Sun”

(via pleasebebrave)

"It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness...."

Sun, 26 May 2013 16:56:03 -0500

“It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it.”

- Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (via larmoyante)

No Great Illusion: On Oceans

Sun, 26 May 2013 15:02:15 -0500

No Great Illusion: On Oceans:

nogreatillusion:

Over the phone I am told that they found something on her spine. This child with a back barely larger than my palm has grown an unexpected lump. The doctors are surprised. My sister does not return my calls. I speak into her voicemail, my voice collapsing into an accidental cry.

In Brooklyn, I…

In the middle of a profoundly-sad, seemingly-unbearable and unthinkable possibility, her writing is transcendent.

9:40am: Early morning beach walk. Coffee in hand. Eggs in a roiling boil atop the stove. Plump...

Sun, 26 May 2013 09:40:49 -0500

9:40am: Early morning beach walk. Coffee in hand. Eggs in a roiling boil atop the stove. Plump cardinal on a stump outside. And then, wind and wings rearranges them, a bright red breeze through the pine trees. Two quotes come to mind that I’ve seen recently… Klosterman who said “art and love are the same thing…the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you”, and then, of course, of Borges: “To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god”. Both seem cardinal somehow in their truth; how we worship at that perfectly flawed altar. Art and love and art and love and art and love.

Writing Contest for Comic Book Lovers, Superman Fans, and Avid Retroblasters

Sun, 26 May 2013 09:13:00 -0500

Friends of mine own Retroblasting.com, and they are holding a Man O’ Steel Essay Contest. The winners of the 250-word essay contest get:

1st Place: Superman Comics #1-#131
2nd Place: Man of Tomorrow - The Entire Run

They just sent me the info, and I think the deadline is looming, but you smartypants can whip out 250 words before your heads leave the pillow this morning. Link for the specifics!

1:15pm: Flowers from the ditch where my grandmother was drowned.

Sat, 25 May 2013 21:53:33 -0500

1:15pm: Flowers from the ditch where my grandmother was drowned.

10:23am Sealife. Emerald, yes. But more even. Green is the...

Sat, 25 May 2013 13:23:00 -0500

10:23am Sealife.

Emerald, yes. But more even.

Green is the hardest. Both deeprich and translucent.

Electric cyan jade. Kelly hunter teal. African honeydew and midnight pine. Spring and sapphire. Paris summer green.

kalathedebaser: Today I met a Comcast technician named Ricardo....

Sat, 25 May 2013 10:26:00 -0500

kalathedebaser:

Today I met a Comcast technician named Ricardo. As he worked he spoke a while about the difficulty of divorce, his daughter’s poetry and the uselessness of embarrassment. I was also instructed to go to Spain before anywhere else, cause “that’s where it’s at”. I asked him what “it” was and he said I’d find out. We talked music for a while—Chavela Vargas especially. When he finished wiring everything up he wrote this list of artists to check out, shook my hand, and bid me adios before he walked out the door.

I met a Dell technician this year who had just returned from Canada after being a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He talked about the deep bone shame that a culture of patriotism and its narrow definitions of masculinity had forced upon him for so long, how choosing to be true to one’s convictions is worth every minute of uncertainty and hopelessness about how the world makes you feel. I invited him to take my copy of O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried. He invited me to his Unitarian church because “we all worship something” and also to one of his gigs playing in an “old-time rock and roll band”. These types of moments are probably amongst my favorite.

Plus, “the uselessness of embarrassment.” Amen.

"The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive."

Sat, 25 May 2013 09:30:05 -0500

“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”

- Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson in his timeless Kenyon College commencement address, May 20, 1990.

"It is necessary to fall in love, if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are..."

Sat, 25 May 2013 08:19:36 -0500

“It is necessary to fall in love, if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.”

- Albert Camus (via marigriffin)

[Writing the essay “Love, Hotel Style”] taught - or rather reminded - me about the...

Fri, 24 May 2013 22:48:00 -0500

[Writing the essay “Love, Hotel Style”] taught - or rather reminded - me about the importance of ceremony, which is another way of saying “story,” which is at the heart of the word romance.

- Thomas Beller

Hotels and motels have always struck me as incredible arenas of possibility. This has been true,...

Fri, 24 May 2013 22:44:00 -0500

Hotels and motels have always struck me as incredible arenas of possibility. This has been true, even if I was checking in to one alone. I like the feeling (or the illusion) that I am completely off the grid, anonymous and unfindable, like a fugitive. For a long time the most important quality in a hotel room was, for me, that it was a hotel room…. What every hotel room has in common is the erotics of a blank slate.

- Thomas Beller, from “Love, Hotel Style”