Messing with Blogger

So, here I am, messing with Blogger to see if I can learn how to link things to things.

Ahem. For example, I spend a lot of time at this site because I'm an English Premier League junkie. My wife and I are West Ham fans.

This was one of our favorite pubs when we were in London last October. It's called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. We tried to steal a bar towel but there weren't enough around because other people had already stolen them.

Prop List, a newish poem

This is one I wrote this year at some point. I really need to start dating these things. It's not perfect or anything but I like the run-on sentence-ness of it.


Prop List

Have the strains of someone’s tenor sax and high-hat
tapping the air above us. Have the smell of onions
burnt in the toaster, have the ring of the register
and the warp of a humid afternoon, Hurricane Cindy’s
tantrums up from the south and the wet sizzle of tires
down the road. Have a girl in red boots. Have a guy
in headphones like a DJ reading Dostoevsky, a cool
breeze, a cappuccino, a coffee cake. Go on,
have a whole coffee cake. Have the leg
of the guy next to you bouncing as he thinks,
the leg saying Make something happen Make
something happen Make something.
Whatever it is it better be good because today
we’re all soggy, our shoes soaked through,
the bags on our shoulders sagging with ideas with
promise with the weight of what we’ve already.
Today it better be good because today, in spite of
everything, everything we touch turns to gold.



I don't know. It was just one of those days that seemed full of possibility even though it was a grey and nasty day.

One New, One Old

Here are a couple more poems. The first one I wrote this year. I woke up in the middle of the night with that first line in my head and had to write it down. That happens a lot, but rarely does anything come of it. (And rarer still are the moments I can actually read the line.) The second is from ten years ago and it's one of my all time favorites of my own poems. The first line came about when at a reading by Jamaica Kincaid when her mic wasn't working. Adam Sol--very talented poet--went up to help her out and while he was fidgeting with it she said that. The whole poem wrote itself from there. It's nice when that happens. (There are italics in the second one but I don't know how to make them here online... please imagine them where you see fit.)


Virgin’s Lament

All night, Kraken, my parents
hear your whine from the sewer.
She says to him, Well, go down there
and do something about it.
All night he hesitated,
limp with doubt. During the party the dog
stole a mouthful of cake. Mother wept.
At first I did not understand the need
for this candle but am
glad of it. I expect you are not
so homely as they say. I hear
the first drum. And another. I expect
we will become fast friends. I like
how my new gown
fills the room with stars.

(2007)


Eve's Lament
--one of many

I am beginning to feel I am married to Adam
and miss the blossoming mud
and those mornings I'd lie on my back
thinking up names. Orchid. Raccoon.
Here, a new music that I love and I
am trying to accept the fact of death.
He said to me once, "it takes character
to endure the rigors of indolence," as if
paradise were a burden, as if we were
better off, turning my mistake with fruit
into something good. My mistake.
We were treated like children and
for a moment, I wasn't thinking, forgot
the distinction between apple and pear.
Before that, I wanted to tell Adam serpent
was better than the word he'd come up with,
that it sang in the voice the thing it was.

I know he tries not to blame me, but
this isn’t fun anymore. I miss
how he used to look at me, just awake,
lips parted, one of my legs between his,
hoping for a day spent in repose.
But now a hundred Mondays planting wheat
and studying roots and techniques
for skinning rabbits, their little furs enough
to warm one thigh. Soup. Bread. Candles.
We've grown accustomed to not touching.
I can't remember the last afternoon we passed
sitting in a stream, singing, washing each other's
backs, but my hair was long then
and smelled of poppies. I draped it
across his chest, my long hair he combed
his fingers into like a loom, as if he could
weave another past, another future,
one not filled with walking alone down a path
picking raspberries, bleeding from my fingers,
sobbing, sobbing at the sight of a lark.

(approx. 1997)



After I wrote Virgin's Lament I was going to do a whole series of Laments, a couple dozen. The problem is that I didn't wake again with anyone's voice in my head.

Old Poems

Here are a couple of old poems from more than ten years ago. I spent a year studying in Vienna and spent the first eighteen years of my life in South Florida. I tried to mesh the two in "Fugue" and the Cafe Sperl was a place I spent many, many hours drinking coffee and writing in a journal. I can't remember what I was trying to say in either, but I think they hold up well.


Fugue

Here, there should be music.
There should be preludes and
fast-slow-fast. But any music
is all in my head.
I am in the Everglades.
Great white birds take flight overhead,
kites broken from their strings, while
I search for snook and redfish.
I cast into shallow mangroves
and beneath shadows of logs.
I hear the first allegro movement
of branches in the wind, this music.
My arm rises and falls, the scherzo
of fishing, keeps three-quarter time
with dragonflies, the way they
hover and bounce. This music
is all. There is the
splash of bait, occasional cry
of a heron, the sound of water
as it sways my boat, a clop of air
trapped under the hull.
All this music! The wind
and periodic thrashing of fins,
hum of the reel as line
squeals out, imitation and
counterpoint, difference solely
in the way I hook and land them.
Smell of minnows, hot sun, a lull.
My head. This music. The joy
in these hushed canals,
floating alone all day, fearing
it will end, releasing each iridescent fish,
feeling, somehow, it will never end.
The water-- like nothing but water--



Cafe Sperl

The cafes in Vienna are orchestrated by men
in tight vests and bow ties who order
the movements of waiters with the precision
of great conductors. Being directed to sit
feels like being asked to play fifth violin
and with the musical sense of Handel lingering,
a man sits at a small corner table.
He hums to himself as he waits to order
and watches two women out the sides of his eyes.

His hands lay folded in his lap and his coat
is rumpled. He has circles of sweat
under his arms and his balding head shines
with that about-to-perspire summer-day glisten.
In another booth, young men crowded together
laugh at each others' stories. Their laughter
sounds like horns.

His coffee arrives, he drops two sugars in
and doesn't know what to do with his left hand.
Clanking saucers and cups are percussion and
the maestro cuts short the telephone's ring.
The man lifts the cup to his lips,
blowing on the surface. He stares intently
into the coffee, searching the bottom. We know,
because of this, he is lonely, not just alone.

We know the man lives in a small apartment
because his shoulders look pinched as he hunches
in his seat, folding the sugar wrapper neatly,
unfolding it, rolling and folding it again.
He doesn't read a paper; that would only
emphasize the idea of absence.

He watches those coming in.
The cuff on his pants is a little too short.
We want the afternoon to reach an andante,
some sort of climactic grace in closure.
A scarved student joins the laughing others.
It is dark outside when the man leaves,
the streetlights still not warm. The two women
order pieces of cake, celebrating something.