Scribner
2018
Friday, September 28, 2018
Thursday, September 27, 2018
MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE ~
Tan Tien
As usual, the first gate was modest. It is dilapidated. She can’t tell
which bridge crossed the moat, which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps.
It’s a precise overlay of circles on squares, but she has trouble locating
the main avenue and retraces her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance,
which was intentionally blurred, the way a round arch can give onto a red wall,
far enough in back of the arch for sun to light.
If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is
the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension
in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard
or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you,
on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing.
And any stick or straight line you hold can be your spine,
like a map she is following in French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall
to each side of her like traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time,
an echo of what she says will multiply against the walls in balanced,
dizzying jumps like a gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone.
Later, she would remember herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board,
but she is her balancing stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length,
disordered once by an armored car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing.
The stick isn’t really the temple’s bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor.
This Tang Dynasty peach tree would be parallel levitation in the spine
the person recording it.
Slowly the hall looms up. The red stair’s outline gives way to its duration
as it extends and rises at a low angle.
In comparison to the family, the individual hardly counts, but they all
wait for her at a teahouse inside the wall.
First the gold knob, then blue tiers above the highest step,
the same color as the sky.
When one person came to gain confidence,
she imagines he felt symmetry as flight after his fast among seven meteorites
in the dark. He really felt like a globe revolving within a globe.
Even the most singular or indivisible particle or heavenly sphere will adjust
when the axis extending beyond itself is pushed, or the sphere it is within
is pushed. What she thought was her balance flattens into a stylized dragon
on the marble paving stones.
Yet she’s reluctant to leave the compound. Only the emperor
could walk its center line. Now, anyone can imagine how it felt
to bring heaven news. She is trying to remember this in Hong Kong
as the tram pulls suddenly above skyscrapers and the harbor
and she flattens against her seat, like a reversal occurring in the poles,
or what she meant by, no one can imagine how.
——————————————
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
I Love Artists
University of California Press
2006
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
JUDGE ~
"On Thursday, a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by two women, and who has been nominated for a position on the Supreme Court by a President accused of sexual misconduct by twenty women, will attempt to persuade eleven Republican men that he deserves that position—a position that would give him the authority to help decide, among other things, what options are available to women if they get pregnant after being sexually assaulted. What more damning demonstration of the solidification of male entitlement could we possibly get?"
—————————————————————
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker
A.R. AMMONS ~
Weathering
A day without rain is like
a day without sunshine
Success Story
I never got on good
relations with the world
first I had nothing
the world wanted
then the world had
nothing I wanted
Substantial Planes
It doesn't
matter
to me
if
poems mean
nothing:
there's no
floor
to the
universe
and yet
one
walks the
floor.
Small Song
The reeds give
way to the
wind and give
the wind away
Pebble's Story
Wearing away
wears
wearing
away away
The Scour
It was so windy
last night the snow
got down nowhere
except up against something.
Reading
It's nice
after dinner
to walk down to
the beach
and find
the biggest
thing on earth
relatively calm.
Camels
I like nonliterary,
uneducated people,
beach riffraff:
they are so aloof and
unengageable: you
can rope them with
no interest of your own.
Stills
I have nowhere
to go and
nowhere to go
when I get
back from there
—————————————
A. R. Ammons
The Really Short Poems
Norton 1990
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
MICHAEL HETTICH ~
Forgiveness
A person put together like a bundle of sticks, tied tight with twine and leaned in a corner because he or she looks beautiful there. A person swept up like sawdust on the shop floor after a day spent building sturdy furniture. Or a person imagined in the egg-filled nest abandoned in the live oak, a nest that will fall in the wind. I told you one morning a person is an empty train moving through the mountains at night and waking a woman who listens to the wind in the trees when the train has passed. She gets up and goes outside in her nightgown, walks across the chilly grass and steps into the creek that runs across her land. She stands there feeling the cold water and the stones, returns to her home and lies back down. Her skin is the color of a candle in the dark.
And you whom I've loved forever disagreed, asserting that a person is something else entirely, a subway car full of sweating strangers, rushing under the river at night while tugboats and tankers negotiate the currents and flounders look up from the mud. A person is the newspaper that falls to the floor, amongst all those aching subway feet, and a person is the woman who leans to pick it up, smoothes it gently and begins to read.
She will walk home soon through the balmy summer streets, to her husband who's cooking and singing as he waits for her. A person is the sidewalk that leads to her front stoop. A person is the music she hears in the distance, a song she remembers from church. She hums it, growing hungry as she walks. A person, I said then, is the glass of wine she savors, the bottle she shares with her husband. But another kind of person is the bike someone stole from the rack in front of the library, a bike which was given with love, for Christmas, that's being stripped now and spray-painted gold. On other days a person is more like the opossum with a baby in her pouch, who sniffs at the back door. We watch her push the garbage can around, trying to knock it over but afraid of hurting her baby if the can falls over on her, so she gives up and walks off across the weedy grass to look for papaya, broken open and rotting, or for mango and starfruit waiting in the bushes. A person is that appetite for sweetness in the dark.
————————
Michael Hettich
Bluer and More Vast
Hysterical Books, 2018
Monday, September 24, 2018
PORCH-HUT ~
 |
Bob Arnold on the new hut job summer 2018 — the stone hut ( 33 years old ) is right over his shoulder |
Bob spent this past June and July clearing ground, setting sills into granite (bolted) and building this new Porch-Hut. One day it will get a name. Bob may write a small book about its construction. For now here are some photographs I took while Bob was at-work. Spruce framing with many native tamarack, hemlock and pine logs cut from trees on our land and peeled on site and set in. The floors are hand-stenciled by Bob and you can see the bookcases are ceiling to floor and permanent.
All a continuation after a many months reading on the Birdhouse of Bob's book Stone Hut (Longhouse).
Tiny one room in the woods of books to come —
and there is another room above this one
Narrow stairway built of hemlock logs and thick pine slab
Bob hand stenciled all our house interior
but this new hut floor is a favorite
Roof purlins on!
Take five
Done!
Stone, Timber, Woods
& Star
By a pond
All photographs by Susan Arnold
June ~ July 2018
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Saturday, September 22, 2018
BRENDA HILLMAN ~
Street Corner
There was an angle
where I went for
centuries not as a
self or feature but
exhaled as a knowing
brick tradesmen engineered for
blunt or close recall;
soundly there, meanings grew
past a second terror
finding their way as
evenings, hearing the peppermint
noise of sparrows landing
like spare dreams of
citizens where abstraction and
the real could merge.
We had crossed the
red forest; we had
recognized a weird lodge.
We could have said
song outlasts poetry, words
are breath bricks to
support the guards singing
project. We could have
meant song outlasts poetry.
——————————————
Brenda Hillman
Pieces of Air in the Epic
Wesleyan 2005
Friday, September 21, 2018
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
THE POSTAL CONFESSIONS ~
Fedoras
They come out of the 1940s
to be your parents. Their faces
swim and settle into clarity.
The crook of an arm. The fount
of a breast. They come from
the time before your life,
before the things that fill
your life. Before water
sprang from the faucet. Before
television loomed in the corner
and even the house cats gathered
to watch. They come from after
the war, when all the movies
were jubilant, even the sad ones
bloodless. It's as if you
were handed down to them,
as if you were a pearl
they would polish into life.
From time of great difficulty
they come, though speaking
with a deep nostalgia,
lowering the language to you
like a ladder, rung by rung.
Before you existed, they are,
which is like something
out of the Bible. Out of
their own childhoods they come
to be stricken with this,
to be stricken with time,
of which you are the immediate
symptom. Bringing their jewelry
and shaving brushes, wearing
their fedoras and hairdos,
they come to be your parents.
You have your father's eyes
someone says. But no, you
hav you mother's face and eyes
is the more common opinion.
They send you wobbling out
like a top in front of them.
The wind could almost bowl
you over. You turn back
and hey are dressed
like characters in a movie
or a dream. You turn back
and this is love. Your own name
sinks in and separates you.
An Oral History of
the English Language
Sometimes I wake up with my hillbilly voice.
I don't know why. Maybe a dream took me back.
The catalpas wilting in the heat.
The dust-devils walking the dry field.
Maybe the river was trying to shine
through the silt and accumulated years.
But when my head cleared and sleep ended,
there was only the twang of home left over,
like stubble in a milo field.
Sometimes I wake with the voice of my mother,
every syllable stretched like sorghum
or cold honey. The vowels washing over
the consonants without mercy. Every word
elongated, drenched in diliberation.
The name of my sister for instance, Pam,
becomes Pay-yum ; takes two syllables,
one to release the word, the other
to call her back again.
Or sometimes I wake with my schooled tongue.
The tongue that moved away. All the i's and y's
precisely spoken, buttoned in their uniforms,
the cap brims set at the proper angles
of ambition. A voice clipped
and regulated, rising and falling
like the boots of a mercenary, drawn
deeper and deeper into the provinces,
hunting the stragglers of childhood down.
A Little Baptist Harmony, Please
Here it's pronounced the same
as hominy, which according to the natives,
served with butter and salt, can provide a man
a hundred years of life,
if he is careful. If he is not,
it still functions as ballast
for the body. For wherever hominy
enters, it remains.
Harmony, on the other hand,
is all about leaving the body.
It takes at least two, willing
to make the trip.
For if the spirit comes down
it must be lured by music.
By separate voices wound
into a braid, then looped
into a kind of snare, which,
with eyes wide open, and for reasons
of its own, the spirit steps into,
every single time.
———————————
MAX GARLAND
The Postal Confessions
University of Massachusetts Press
1995
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