Verso, 2023
daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
75. The Warmest Place
If spring falls short, then be the spring yourself —
you hold abundant light inside, enough to give warmth
to whatever's within reach and even what's in view:
chair midriff, door slab, icicle knob, room.
Who cares if the Baltic is frozen — a Swedish arctic fox
has found a way across the page of ice to write
a runic greeting on the snow in yellow ink
below the lamppost. The coldest place at home
is the radiator's hip, the thermal plant having closed
long ago, and it's pointless to pin your hopes
on spring. Besides you hold within yourself,
enough fire to make the covers melt right off
and thaw the district to a mile radius,
plus a fair depth, and four more dimension besides.
Just for good measure. For starters. Be springtime,
the grass' green flame, its blood, be April, be sun.
92. Never
Never have I found you more beautiful than now.
Look — we're being hunted, yet still we walk around.
In front of us a road in the dust, a lively sea.
A life that turned out as I dreamed it would be.
_____________________
To the Letter
Tomasz Rozycki
translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
Archipelago Books, 2023
Jack Kerouac provided improvised narration. It features poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, musician David Amram, art dealer Richard Bellamy, Delphine Seyrig, dancer[3] Sally Gross, and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's son.
Wait til I pack my bag Death
my toothbrush soap after-shave and some clothes
Is the climate warm over there?
Do the seasons change in the eternal whiteness?
Or does the weather stay fixed in autumn or winter?
Will one book be enough to read in non-time?
Or should I take a library?
And what do they talk over there?
vernacular or classical?
__________________________
from MURAL
translated by John Berger & Rema Hammami
Verso, 2024
Mahmoud Darwish was the unofficial laureate of Palestine.
Darwish's poetry is an epic effort to transform the lyrics
of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return
EDWARD SAID
H A R L E M D E T E C T I V E S
Everyman's Library, 2024
(beautifully designed books —
paper, typeface, cloth feel, color)
Praise Is Traditional and Appropriate
I loved the wood because I found in it
Mushrooms, berries, beetles, birds and other words,
Hedgehogs, squirrels, memories, quarrels,
and the damp smell
Of dead leaves, and former lives.
I reached the first barn
— where wheat was stored—halfway up the slope
of the ravine
And saw her dancing, glancing twinkly eyes
Full of the hope and love which all thought mean,
And slate-green, slate-blue, blue or black like the sunrise
Skies, and in their variety and in their sheen
I thought that she was looking down at me
As if she understood past, present, and futurity.
______________________________________
The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz
edited by Ben Mazer
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2024
one of the posthumously published poems
A musician and audio engineer, he helped define the sound of alternative rock while becoming an outspoken critic of the music industry.
T H E B E S T T H I N G Y O U ' L L R E A D T O D A Y
A friend of Longhouse ~
goodbye David
I'll forever remember
the phone call
from New York City
where you spoke
lovingly — poetry
art, the countryside —
nonstop
for an hour
Kent Monkman, “Les Castors Du Roi,” 2011. Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Image via the artist. Here, Monkman, a Cree artist in Dish With One Spoon Territory (Toronto), depicts a fanciful hunting scene in New France, as it might have been painted in the time of Louis XV, who was known for his love of hunting. “The violence perpetrated against the beaver,” Monkman writes of this painting, “can be interpreted in various ways, considering the violence present in New France between French, English and the First Peoples. More than a beaver hunt, this scene alludes to the complex political, social and cultural histories of Turtle Island.”
The Interior
A winter night in desert light:
trucks carving out air-corridors
of headlights on the interstate
at intervals only a vigil
could keep. Constellations
so clean you can see
the possibilities denied.
Now, from the beginning
tell me everything.
Stars, Days, Words
We call days what nights leave behind.
My daughter points out the stars to me
(she is sitting on her father's shoulders)
as if I had not seen them before she came
and might have missed them except for her eyes.
You don't need to go far to see the world.
She has words and a sentence or two.
You tell me what's going fast as this.
Family
All I knew was that I would not let them die
alone, the images, the image of the father
with his daughter pulled into his shirt, her head
tucked into his armpit like a lamb
in a description of a shepherd in a novel
by Thomas Hardy, arms around each other
so they would not be separated
if they drowned, but then they drowned.
______________
Katie Peterson
Fog and Smoke
FSG, 2024