flashbulb

i woke up and
forgot where i was
the world hung suspended by its aether
spread warm over and of me
in the dark unconscious
spillway of half-decomposed thought
and everything that led
me heavy to this place
gone, forgotten
in a burst of purple cloud
heralding both the beginning and
end of this
journey
i remember stars
and a vast violet marsh
and the colors a sunset
vomits up after
a dark empty tearstained day
and being held
by the very sky
suspended by my aether
only one
only
only.
forgotten in twenty minutes
what thirty years pressed into
me.
i'll see you again
(this i'm
sure about)
when i
sleep

ad occidentem

A blur of concrete heat irradiates
The haze of Denver’s dusty morning sky
And though I try my best to meditate,
My pulse keeps quick’ning when I close my eyes…

The gentle creep of dawn that spread its glow
A thousand miles away now warms my skin;
I catch my breath in tatters, sharp and slow,
to think of what will be from what has been.

This memory—collapsed beneath the weight
Of three long, leaden weeks—now pulls me near,
And though my past tells me to hesitate,
I’ve long forgotten any taste of fear.

I’ll seek thy solace ere the day is done:
I’ll follow tender heart toward setting sun.

tinge

silence reigns oppressively when you are gone.

and yet, to silence this cannot compare.

i don't know silence--not at all--

my ears ring always with the sibilance that's 

          hanging in the air:

the sound of what i feel, and what i 

          know, and feel i know;

the sound of cicadas humming on a summer night

a muggy, sleepless sort of summer night

a cloudy summer night

devoid of stars

 

the poem that sold me the book

by Chandonnet, Ann. "Splitting Wood." Northward Journal: A Quarterly of Northern Arts, Alaskan Art & Writing, Number 21/22, August 1981, 55.

--

Splitting Wood

Anger's impossible
after splitting wood.
Bile flows out along the human trunk,
the arms, and ax handle
into the cleavages of birch and spruce,
into the neatly stacked cords
and the pleasing litter of chips
upon the snow.

The more lengths split,
the more I become whole:
joints cease their clatter;
rifts slide shut.

Lacking shoulders,
I turn scientific,
teasing the lengths
atop the block
until they come level.
Then my little force
runs straight down the grain.

The bore holes of twigs
are clean as laser burns.
Swelling branches spawn massive roils,
marbled end papers.
Force is balked by these conjunctions.
Wood splits just to them
and no further...
like roads deadending
at skewed headlands.

On the pile reclines a straight young arm;
beneath, a knotty fist of aged wood,
liver spots of decay staining its pale grain.
Some knotfree layers separate
clean as onion rings,
revealing breast-sleek silk.

Few things concentrate and empty the body so,
both engage and free.
Blows echo from the trees around;
a scrap of inner bark
glows pink as a conch.

ANN CHANDONNET

multo mane

vox Turturis audita est
et Solem et Testudinem
sensim experrectus sunt
autem hoc caelum
calidissimum
non mutat, et
non mutaverit

--

Early Morning

the voice of the Turtledove is heard
and both the Sun and the Tortoise
gently awaken
but this atmosphere
so incredibly
warm
does not move, and
will not move

Celsius

Boughs bend under the weight
of spring-time snow,
hanging wetly over the sidewalk
in my way.
By afternoon, the snow melts
into a contracted rain.
The trees unburden themselves.
As I walk, my heart
seethes with ambition;
my stomach churns impossibilities.
Hours move silent as the sky
and I,
in this white twilight,
observe the icy buds and blooms
in watery shades of pink, and green,
and try to think of a word
that means "Spring," but isn't,
and try to compose a self
verdant, vernal, viridescent:
born between seasons, between stories,
uniting barren Winter with fecund Spring
in branches, hanging over the sidewalk,
in my way,
heavy with blossoms
and snow.

keepsake

today i watched two
little crabs
no bigger than a grain of sand
scuttle white and camouflaged
across my palm
only their furtive sideways skittering
setting them apart
from fragments of coral and
silicon crumbs
(i only saw their tiny
legs once i had leaned in
close enough).
today i filled my hands
with little shells
black and white and brown and
seemingly the same
until
each resident creature gathered
up the courage to come out
exploring the strange new surface
of my skin
revealing snail or
hermit crab.
and then i told my dad that i
would write a poem about it.
that i would capture these
littoral microcosms
these days rolling beneath
emphatic surf--
seeking--seeming--seeing--
liquid earth flying into roiling sea
twilit walks up an overgrown hill
wind tugging at branches heavy
with chameleons
bright hibiscus blooms
color-classified
by bright nineteen-month-old.
i told him i would write
about the feeling
of salt in my hair
of the entire sea stretched out
beneath me
of summery sunny sweetness
distilled into a morning
bowl of fruit
of looking up at stars
spattered across improbable skies
even the shyest among them
bright enough to see.
i told him i would prove
(despite
fidgeting silences
hot miles crossed on blistered feet
staggering
sleep-drunk
mornings)
that i could write a poem
about two white crabs so small
i almost didn't see them.
i suppose
i always meant
to prove that
darkness isn't the only thing
i know how to write about.

Senryuu

Bits of old brown paper crack
Under my fingers--memories splintered
On a blue fitted sheet

drift

and i was picking pieces of myself
off the sidewalk
because there was no one there
to do it for me or to watch,
or to listen to the gulls screaming
carrion cries fighting over what bits of me i
missed:
a thumbnail here, or a
knucklebone bleached white
since morning, or a
hair, a tooth, a stone.
as the day frothed its last
against the shore, beating itself red
against the stalwart waves,
the impotent assemblage
groaned and cracked
and took up her place,
breathed a sodden, brackish breath:
asking where had the time gone,
and could we get it back,
and would it ever be possible
to sleep
without falling apart
in the meantime?

and who shall follow after?

there's a place for the women like us
somewhere by the red rocks and the sea
where the breeze tangs of iron and salt
and the waves move more slowly in
the mornings.

there's a place set aside for the people like us
forged half from truth and half from fiction,
braced against the cliff where the seabirds nest
in great exposed stone catacombs ripe with
lichen and ossifying urea.

i stand with my toes hanging off the edge
where solid ground gives way to pure horizon,
waiting for what i know only in the unknown:
fathom only in the faceless forms of mythic artifact.

i will hear my calling once i have moved
beyond befores and afters, beyond the sweet
and terrifying certainty of now, or of then, or then.
when i am myself subsumed into the uncouth wind,
stripped of physic consciousness, borne upon
the biting, crafty wind,

only when i reach this formidable Beyond,
our febrile Eden will begin to grow
within what's left of me.
our ferocious, indeterminate Eden--
glutted on blood and lymph and
lachrymal distillations--
will reach Before every before,
and After each and every after,
and rescue us from ourselves
and from each other.

i stand with my toes hanging off the edge
of a cliff ever dropping clean and quick
into the sea. i take each step back, and i realize
that i am content to wait
for inspiration. i realize
that i am content to lay myself
before the reddening sun, the composite moon.

someday i will sing your song
to the stones and the waves.
today i am content to listen
as you sing to me.

sui, sibi, se, se

sometimes i wonder what happened to her.
she always seemed so small
the corners of her mouth drawn down
brows forward, furrowed,
eyes ever wet with the myriad tears
she would never learn to shed.
i remember how she used to take two
corners of the sky, pull down and spin and
wrap it around herself like a blanket,
a shawl of moon and stars to breathe
and hide in.
i remember how
she used to be part of everything, and
everything used to be a part of her.
and when she folded in on herself
she disappeared, collapsed
into a singularity
of darkness and light,
of music and silence,
of crippling faceless fear and
ferocious unstoppable hope and--
her gaze, her smile, was the event horizon
beyond which no soul could ever hope
to escape.
i remember when i found myself in her orbit:
a speck of dust tumbling headlong
around the body of a star--
but then she smiled, and looked down
at the ground, and in the darkness
all I could see
was the fitful glow of a firefly
clinging to the palm of my hand.
sometimes i wonder if the wind finally
tore her apart, scattered the pieces
like ashes from the burnt-out aftermath
of arson--or if the sea finally
came, sought her where she slept,
swallowed her wholly and quietly and
brought her back to the deepest place
where the water crushed down comfortingly
against her poor, wounded skin,
always full to bursting
with images and ideas and insight and
everything she couldn't contain
and everything that couldn't contain her.
i wonder if she is buried in the earth somewhere
or if she still wanders between the trees
of some forgotten forest,
her fingers understanding the texture
of each tree, each flower, each sunbeam,
each thought.
i wonder if it is even possible for her to die
and if so, what that might look like
and if the world itself would still exist
once she had departed from it.
mostly i wonder where she might have gone
and if she might consider
coming back
to be with me again.

Haiku or smth idk

世界の名
意識入り箇所
この眉間

Sekai no na
Ishiki iri kasho
Kono miken

The name of the world
Acquires its consciousness
Right between these eyes

Nineteen Sixty Five

Blushing light settles like gauze upon
the worn-smooth floor...
hangs suspended, condensed,
in the soft and foreign air:
many-winged insects
stretched across a raftered sky.
Here sings everything with nothing to lose:
here sings nothing, floorboards and shoes and
learning how to float is never easy
rounded calves picking up
sharp heels,
light caught, felt, held ransom
in necklaces and
rhinestones and
fingernail polish and
striking green eyes.
Youth is no object.
Time savored here is free--
feral--feckless--fresh--
fierce in the lingering twilight
pure and cynical and absolutely
Breathless.
This world belongs to her.
And whether these weary walls
realize it or not,
whether these intricately carved and courted people
realize it or not,
the fight has already been won.
The Swan spreads her wings.

Excerpt from a Letter to Nan, July 2011

It feels like time just slips away so quickly. All of a sudden it's time to sleep again, and I've hardly done anything. I feel like I live and move in an impossibly viscous liquid, while the rest of the world breezes through air. Time to breathe. But what am I breathing?

exculcerated swell

for fourteen days the snow lies cold
where it fell
the air sinks and spreads its chill and
I am not afraid
of the voices that keep escaping from this
porous sediment:
testaments and resolutions, too-late
prophecies and
promises of restitutions: and I am both
cold and not-cold,
skin flushed, sweating, pulse erratic
fears abstracted
mind limping, racing into the lingering pall
of broken oaths
arrears and gall and fortis, fortis, fortioris,
eyes down, mind
drawn like a curtain, conscious only of my skin,
hot and prickling,
pinned to my muscles with thin needles, lancets
subdivided scalpels
sore and strained white-hot and autoclaved
and if I watch
more closely, listen to the clear and frosted
wind, I hope to
quickly notice when the world will cease this fatalistic
spin but really I
am holding myself together with cold reason and
cold hunger.
so it is, and as it is my day goes on a little longer.

inertia

the morning passes slowly, like a
kidney stone.
i sit on my bed, drinking tea,
loathe to give up what left-
over warmth clings to this bed,
which isn't a bed so much as
a haphazard pile
of blankets
on the floor.
the sun has, in her in-
scrutable wisdom, chosen not
to come out when she was sup-
posed to--loitering, rather,
demure and thought-
less, wanton, wayward,
lost behind a deep and
haggard cloud.
and i know somewhere in-
side myself: eyelids heavy, muscles
heavy, belly heavy with hot
tea--i know indistinct-
ively that i
was never meant
for mornings.
it is far better for you to call
on me in the after-
noon.
if you are looking for
me then, you will find
me lying in bed or
standing in the backyard or
hunched over some-
thing small: something precise and
unusual: something detailed and
curious and
small

dolor

half-finished
heavy
poured out upon this
thankless ground
the air itself punctured
precisely, in
carefully measured intervals
by shards of silver
stagnant
silence
when, again,
the world zooms out
tips on its side--feints--faints--falls--
the way it used to when
back when
and then
again
the sickening silent lurch
and turn into a wild
skid, air cracking like windows
bursting into clingfilm-covered coarse
quartz sand
the very ephemeral air, the one and only air,
solid as a jewel and
twice as sharp.

forge

down comes the hammer in the center of the town
escape the beat of concrete feet
come tearing up the ground
steel yourself for twenty tons
press into eighty-four
hear your blood escape itself
and fathom sixty more
surrounded by a thousand lights
all piercing bright and clean
close your eyes control your fears
plug into the machine

up comes the signal in the middle of the street
conceal your heart and take apart
each future that you meet
avail yourself of ninety pints
yet drown in thirty-six
feel your own soul devour yourself
belt down the galling mix
filled as you are with guillotine
and wine and tears and bread
close your eyes forget to smile
you cant escape your head

preach

the sky is a damp and
mealy gray.
the engine of the bus roars,
inescapable and
deafening and
i can barely see out
of the rain-flecked windows.
the city is dark and
slick with almost-ice:
fat white heavy raindrops
congealing in the gutters,
in muddy holes dug by great
groaning yellow-black
anonymous machines,
in droplets on my glasses and
my waterproof.
I know my own mind, my own
soul, and
it is heavy like this
rain. it is cold like this
rain. and
i do not limit myself,
but i am limited
nonetheless.

Mariana II

it's useless, trying:
every hour slips by cold as a fish
slippery as a hagfish
burrowing into the belly
of a whale.
let it be known that i have only
resisted this darkness
insofar as darkness has resisted
me.
except it isn't only darkness.
it is the deep pressure of the sea floor
it is the crush of a thousand atmospheres
it is the silent, unyielding flow of brine
and picked-clean bones settling in silt
and numbers falling forward
across the face
of a clock.