AHARON SHABTAI ~

It takes a lot of muscle to get into Aharon Shabtai's poems, or maybe you won't think so.

One day I couldn't get a spark going as I read.

Months later it was all there, or I finally was.

This is the beauty given from poetry. Unlike today's new world, it isn't a flick of a switch.

This man writes beautifully and big about the biggest and smallest ideas, concerns, walk of the day. Peter Cole translations champion each poem with just the right verve, and the publisher, once again New Directions, gives it to us.

Aharon Shabtai was married to the scholar and activist Tanya Reinhart until her passing in 2007.

These are love poems to mother, lover, country.

2004


..........................for Tali Fahima

It was a bad year.

People got used to lies

as though to bread.

Toss them

for the umpteenth time

the same old fabrication

and they'll race to gobble it up

like a pack of ducks.

The stupid cruelty

[ats itself on the back,

and looks, smiling, into the camera.

At the nursery they're selling orchids,

while within a bark's distance

millions of people are caged like beasts.

A young woman from the country's poor,

a certain courageous swallow,

let the voice of sonscience be heard

within the kingdom of baseness,

but the fist of power

grabbed her, too, by the hair,

and threw her into jail.





2006


Many books,

many collections of poems,

were printed in 2006

and set out on tables

during National Book Week.

I leaf through a few,

and on every page,

from page 1

to page 30,

to page 80

and 308,

I see only

a single sentence:

Mothers and children

in Gaza are searching

for food in heaps of trash.





WIDOWER


I'm a widower

and will stay a widower,

because I'm a widower

and my wife has gone away



and my wife is gone,

gone



her table too

isn't her table

and her husband, well,

is not her husband





TANYA WAS GORGEOUS


"Tanya was gorgeous"

I tell Moishe



and he raises his head

over the bowl of bean soup



and just as he did ten years ago

he looks at me and says:



"Not everyone thinks so."





PLEASE


If our memory matters at all to you,

please, please, for the space

of a single year or more,

for ten years or twenty,

let it rest in a little oblivion

so that it might be draped

in the pure curtain of silence.

For fish in ponds as well

when it comes to water require freshness.

And you've pushed and pulled us

to the point of utter exhaustion.

Please, spare us at least for a little while

the hot air of your pronouncements.

Nationalist blather isn't

kindly received

at the threshold of heaven.

For heaven's gates are open

and generous to all mankind,

and neither rabbis nor officers

nor those in positions of power

hold any sway over us there.

So shut up and let us hear on high

the sorrows of the Bedouin too.

The Filipina worker's weeping,

what the hungry

Indian in Bolivia's saying,

what song it is they're singing

on the Euphrates' banks.

If you've learned a thing from looking

at the mounds of our eyeglasses,

please take into account

the eyes of a boy of nine,

instead of making your pilgrimage

to the barbed-wire fences

where we were sent for extermination.

Because — enclosures intended for people,

so experience teaches,

gives rise to infectious disease.



Aharon Shabtai
War & Love, Love & War
(New Directions 2010)

silviacattori.net

SILENCE ~


I was standing in a store today, minding my own business, waiting for Sweetheart taking care of some questions, when a clerk walked up and asked if he could help me.

I smiled and said everything was fine I was just waiting.

He looked a little perplexed as to what I could be waiting for and asked again if there was anything I wanted.

I didn't want to bother anyone, that's why I stood at the store entrance, near a candy bowl (filled to the brim), not near any merchandise and was looking over framed photographs / portraits of essentially 60s icons on the wall. Nicely done. Picasso, Joan Baez, Martin Luther King, John & Yoko. Some full poster size, others of regular fare.

There's Jackie Robinson sliding into home plate.

At a loss the clerk saw my study and pointed to one of the photographs and asked, "Do you know who that is? Most don't."

I looked where he pointed — which happened to be the most familiar photograph in all the room for me, and said — "They don't know Samuel Beckett?"

Talk about silence.

ONION SOUP


Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, after a night of drinking in Paris

in the 1960s, ended up at Les Halles at 4 a.m. for onion soup. Pinter

fell asleep at the table, exhausted and suffering from stomach cramps.

He woke to find Beckett had scoured the town and come back with

bicarbonate of soda. "It was then I knew," Pinter wrote, "that this was

a man who understood everything about the human condition."

— from a most wonderful food lover's book of days
Life Is Meals (Knopf) by James and Kay Salter,
husband and wife team, amateur chefs, literary maestros.
Bad for them but good for me I found the book for 99 cents,
about brand new, fresh as bread.



( on with the show )

HWEOL ( WHEEL ) ~

I don't know about you, but what got to me the most watching the long haul excavation and rescue and triumph of the Chilean people at the San Jose de Copiapo Mine (opened in 1889 and shutdown in August 2010 when 33 miners were trapped) was the ingenious and proud method of using the wheel. See above. The New York Times website had a live feed we sat around for a few hours late into the night just watching that powerful and methodical cable, wheel and pulley design do its stuff. It took people down and it brought people up. Simple after all. An invention (the wheel) that has been with us since the mid 4th millennium BCE. Whether first seen in evidence from Mesopotamia, central Europe or the northern Caucasus, take your pick. The other night, and through the next day, it was the beauty of Chile.






Rodrigo Arangua/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

EARTH ~

Heather Christle

Acorn Duly Crushed



Dear stupid forest.

Dear totally brain-dead forest.

Dear beautiful ugly stupid forest

full of nightingales

why won't you shut up.

What do you want from me.

A train is too expensive.

A clerk will fall asleep.

Dear bitchy stupendous forest.

Trade seats with me.

Now it is your birthday.

Congrats!

Someone will probably slap you

about the face and ears.

Indulgent municipal forest.

Forest of scarves and of beards.

Dear rapid bloodless forest

you are talking all the time.

You are not pithy.

You are like 8,000 swans.

Dear nasty pregnant forest.

You are so hot!

You are environmentally significant.

Men love to hand themselves

from your standard old growth trees.

Don't look at me.

You are the one with

the ancient noble terror.

Bad forest. Forest wish

important gangs of leaves.

Dear naive forest,

what won't you be admitting!

Blunt international forest.

Forest of bees and of hair.

You should come back to my house.

We can bag drugs all night.

You can tell me

about your new windows.

How they are just now

beginning to sprout.

Heather Christle

from The Difficult Farm
Octopus Books / www.octopusbooks.net

RESCUE ME ~

Workers began to cover the first 96 meters of the evacuation tube with steel tubes for the 33 trapped miners who remained trapped since last 5 August, 2,300 feet below the ground at the San Jose mine, in Copiapo, north of Chile, 10 October 2010. According to the Chilean Mining Minister Laurence Golborne the beginning of the rescue is still planned for next Wednesday, 13 October, as well that to take out the 33 miners would take about 48 hours. EPA/Danny Alveal

www.monstersandcritics.com/news/america

ARCHIVE ~

This is an old announcement card for my book of train travels

American Train Letters (Coyote/SUNY Buffalo) ~

if you wish a copy, the book remains $10

Please add $3.95 shipping

Enjoy the ride!

or by Paypal (U.S. orders only; international ~ please inquire):

profshukor.blogspot.com

LIGHTNIN' (Afterword) ~

Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records

Bob,

You probably have this track, but I've always loved it. I grew up listening to the Arhoolie recordings of Lightnin'. My father actually picked him up hitchhiking on Highway 82 in Mississippi in the 60s. My father was heading home to Greenwood from college and saw a guy with a guitar walking along the road. He had no idea who the guy was, despite the guy assuring him he'd made records. They stopped at a little burger joint on the side of the road, but Lightnin' couldn't go in because of segregation laws, so my father bought him a burger and Lightnin' agreed to come to Greenwood and play a house party my father was throwing (his parents were out of town). A few months later a package arrived postmarked from Houston and it contained several of Lightnin's records with a note saying 'I told you I was famous.' Oh how I wish my father still had that.

whit

unknown, Long Gone Miles, Lightnin' Hopkins, Chris Strachwitz

Photo By Mack McCormick

Dear Whit,

Great great story about Lightnin' and your father. Someone had to pick up the hitchhiking musician! Glad it was your father.

Someone else has a similar story about picking up Townes Van Zandt in Texas. Again, just trampin', picked up, said he was known had records etc., and later he either sent the driver some records or else pulled them out of his pack after or during the drive.

Speaking of drive, I collect Arhoolie Records. One time we were in Taos after spending some days in Wisconsin with Cid and Niedecker events/readings. We had a train ticket west to Milwaukee and made it further (at about the same price) since someone, quite kind, paid our way out and so we made the itinerary to Denver. After Wisconsin and friends (including Ted) we went westward and ended up spending some days traveling around New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas...where I plugged into some Arhoolie finds for my collection back home. There was a fellow opening a used LP store, and it looked momentary, in Taos, and he had just picked up at the town dump a scarf of Arhoolie. He said he wasn't sure what he really had but he priced them at $3-5 because he needed the money for the first month's rent. I bought them all. Some more Lightnin' included. The next day I mailed my clothes home and wouldn't part with my LP treasures, or trust the mail. I lugged them through Denver, Chicago, Albany, Springfield, Brattleboro. Companions.

24 degrees this morning. Hard frost.

all's well, Bob

Here's more on Whit, his terrific new book of poems, and the UK wonder
Skysill Press

http://skysillpress.blogspot.com/2010/07/just-published.html

LIGHTNIN' TECHNIQUE ~






Lightnin' usually tuned his guitar in the key of E, though not necessarily to

a concert pitch. He utilized what ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons has called

"that turnaround....It's a signature lick....He'd come down from the B chord and

roll across the top three strings in the last two bars. He'd pull off those strings to

get a staccato effect, first hitting the little open E string then the 3rd fret on the

B string and the 4th fret of the G string. He would then resolve on the V chord

after doing his roll. It's a way to immediately identify a Lightnin' Hopkins tune."





Lightnin' was tremendously appealing for aspiring blues guitarists to

emulate because his signature turnaround was relatively easy to learn,

but it was extremely hard to replicate his sound because of his distinctive

held notes, pauses, string bending, and shortened and lengthened measures.

Sometimes, as bluesman Michael "Hawkeye" Herman points out, Lightnin'





"played it in triplets, sometimes as a quarter note, sometimes as an eighth

note....He knew how to play the same lick/riff forward, backward, from the

middle to the front, from the middle to the back, from the back to the front...

each effort creating a completely huge guitar vocabulary." Ultimately, it didn't

matter what kind of guitar he was playing, acoustic or electric. "He just had

this feel," guitarist and luthier Sam Swank maintains, echoing the sentiments

of so many Lightnin' devotees. "There aren't that many blues guitar players

in the world that when you drop the needle on the record, anybody who's

anybody knows who that is. Lightnin' Hopkins is one of those guitar players."

Alan Govenar
Lightnin' Hopkins, His Life and Blues
(Chicago Review Press 2010)

NOVICA TADIĆ ~

ARMFUL OF TWIGS, DREAM


Armful of dry twigs

I carry to the fire

through busy streets.



I can't see the stake,

don't know who is being

burnt alive or why.



Flames rise in the glow

beyond the ecstatic crowd

singing, shouting and firing guns.



(This dream, I am not

bound to forget.)



Don't sway like that, O my curtain.




STEPMOTHER


Hard freeze, and the stepmother

kicks me out of the house.

In the barn the cows were steaming.

It was warm to be with them.



I didn't curse anyone,

nor did I think about my fate.



When I started the village path,

I had my father's old shirt on

which I wore like a dress.



On the first big crossroad,

(all crossroads are big)

a man asked me where I was going

and I told him I am going far

beyond the hills

to seek Father and Holy Mother.



I wandered everywhere

like a God's fool.

whatever I acquired — I lost.

What I gave to life — died.



My stepmother died too.

Now I've no one left in the world.

Only her countless sons

and her wicked daughters.



BIG MUD



Hey, little marsh, weed, cattail and water lily.

flies flies the gray crow.

among swamp plants, a tufted diver.

a small white heron hunts a frog, swallows the frog.

high in the tree the bird nests sway gently.

here, there, there's no one in the rotted boat.

no one rides the school of fish.

only gentlemen cormorants, only hungry white spoonbill.

let's praise everything we see.

let's set out for the open waters.

let's turn and lie on our backs forever.


translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic




from Dark Things (BOA Editions)

photo: kraljevo.com

JEAN VALENTINE ~

Jean Valentine has been writing for a long, long time — many books, and quietly, starting as a winner with Yale Series of Younger Poets, large and small press publishers for almost fifty years — and one of the strongest gifts of her writing life has been a steady draw of remaining fresh as well as unpredictable and holding to a stunning touch and craftsmanship. Her work has only improved book by book. Royally taking off since her collected poems Door in the Mountain and her two most recent books Little Boat and Break the Glass. The poem I've chosen below is the opening poem to the new book, her eleventh collection. I reached the end of the poem, and while I kept on reading, I haven't really left that page.

In Prison



In prison
without being accused


or reach your family
or have a family............You have


conscience
heart trouble


asthma
manic-depressive


(we lost the baby)
no meds


no one
no window


black water
nail-scratched walls


your pure face turned away
embarrassed


you
who the earth was for.




Jean Valentine Break the Glass
(Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

author photo: Star Black

WOODCUTTER ~

NIGHT TABLE



Here is part of you

While you sleep —




The small shine

Of silver earrings







DOGS IN SNOW



I bring them out water

They drink around the ice

Chains rap on the bucket




Shivering I wait

Looking up into the stars

What I see in their eyes




Plowing back to the house

After shaking their coats goodnight

Strength in my hands







THE PLEASURES OF LOVE



The last of my noon hour

Black tin lunch pail

Sitting on a sap soaked maple stump

Woodchips nettled on my woolen socks

Finding the fruit cup she made for me

Clear cold glass in my oiled hand

Neat slices of strawberry and pear

DECEMBER



She’s supposed to be land clearing

Heaping brush to burn in first snow

But the pale yellow ghost of tall

Summer grasses she sweeps down

Is instead caught in her hand

And placed that way in a kitchen vase

Showing a warmth to last us through winter







WORK GLOVES



On the garden gate

Left here with me —

Shape of her hands

I HAVE BEEN TOLD



Down on the river

There is a small place

Where there is no sound

Nothing, and I know it well

And I have been told

And since found

That when climbing back

Loaded with water

At the top of the rise

If you half turn your head

The river will tilt into your ear

HORSE & FARMHAND



Here is the slowness

Of afternoon and sun

A farmhand bending to lift

A sleeve of ice

From a trough

In the pasture

The horse that stands still

The snow we’ve been waiting for








WINTER DAY



I swore if you laid

Your cheek, wind

Blown red as any

Soft maple leaf

Onto the pond,

And looked down through

The half-foot of

Ice, the rest was

Water flowing clear

Way back up to you —

The scales of depth

Catching your breath

MANY TIMES



There is the absolute way

Of doing it, and we have done it

Many times and again —

How I will come to you

How you will meet me

The early morning sun

Perfect on the bed, and

Stripes in the Mexican blanket

Like blood, the sea, yellow iris petals —

And it is a silly lovers ritual of ours,

I hug you and you hug me and step onto

My boots, and I walk you and me around the

Sunlit room, the sway of patchouli in your hair,

And your face smooth against my lips

Like the inside of your hands

THE SKIN OF HER NECK



Tonight, because her hand is in pain, the small finger

Swollen, yes, I’ll stir the

Batter, although she is better

And first taught me how

Something is done right.

And I came from behind

And smelled the skin of

Her neck, the long blonde

Hairs alive and the blouse

White and rough, tucked into

A thin summer skirt.

Winter, near Christmas,

3 feet of snow and her

Body moves across the

Cabin room with summer,

A clay bowl with

Colored stripes in her

Arms, the fresh heat

Of the flat iron stove.







REDTAIL



By the river I found her —

Long and short feathers matted by weeks of rain,

A soft spotted down on her chest,

The whole body twisted in the crotch of an ironwood

This hawk hung and not a right way to die.

Nudged out with my axe handle it fell with no life,

Eyes gone and the rotting smell of blood and grease.

I cut the claws for the first time, others I’ve left —

One talon broken off and the muscular flex of skin

No different than a man’s, except for the ruggedness,

The pale yellow of it, but a companion to my own.

And the tail feathers — still a beautiful tan — pinned

Open for flight on rough pine boards inside our cabin,

I only buried some of her.

THE WOODCUTTER TALKS



I’ve got to go pretty soon

So I’ll take my boots off

And shake out the snow,

Sit close to the fire you

Have built, then left for me.

I’m in no hurry until the sun comes up.

My snowshoes need new leather straps

But for now they’ll have to do,

Carry me to the woods where I work

Thinning out the half bowl of a hillside —

That’s what it looks like — and sometimes

I rest and watch it for what it is, with my

Wet gloves off, the clearness above me.



© Bob Arnold
from Where Rivers Meet
(Mad River Press)






photos © bob arnold

WATER WALK ~

As referred to in The New Yorker Oct. 4, 2010 page 59.

DESK SET ~
(1957)

A jazzy screwball comedy released in May 1957 with the
unbeatable pair Hepburn/Tracy, who once again challenge one
another's wits — this time Tracy marketing a computer (then called
an "electronic brain") against Hepburn heading up a reference
library crew of workers for a network (think NBC, the exterior shots
are all Rockefeller Plaza) proud of their book skills and learning.
It raises all sorts of dilemmas and ideas that still reach into today
re communication and the value of a human touch.

Written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron who would go on to raise four
daughters, and all writers, one called Nora.

Speaking of writers — we lost a fine one with Michael Gizzi. A shock to
learn of his passing on Wednesday morning.

Michael did all sorts of things in the life of a poet — teacher, editor, man
about town, tree surgeon, publisher, an attractive raconteur. Jazzy. Years ago
we walked about a few towns together just talking things out...faraway
from the poetry reading scene and just inspecting the neighborhood.

When Ted Enslin and I read one winter at Melville's Arrowhead in the Berkshire hills,
Michael didn't have to, but he took it upon himself to set up a table of our
books where he took care of selling things. Years later I ran into him bumming
around with a literary famous one, bookshop haunting, and both were perfect
snobs. You could never tell. But I always trusted Michael could flip back and
forth.

He loved books and rummaging in poetry and he wrote some fine books of his
own — somehow not quite getting the recognition I thought he deserved. Maybe in
another lifetime.

OLYMPIAN ~

William S. Burroughs

Today we took a day off. In a northern town, sunny all throughout, books and hikes around the neighborhood

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.”—Nathaniel Hawthorne



and we even get a peek into a William Burroughs tiny exhibit where we held two copies of Naked Lunch: the Olympia Press first edition

and the first edition Grove Press.




Sweetheart had to put her pocketbook and satchel into a locker before the books were permitted near her. She gave her driver's license to the authorities. I simply sat there waiting for the books, unarmed. Here came the softcover French edition and the familiar to us cloth edition. Both signed by Burroughs on the full title pages with a ball point pen. When we were done we took the books over to the authorities. They smiled. Two women. One gave back Sweetheart's property, the other asked to see the books. She seemed to be handling and peering into both volumes as if for the first time in her life. A book approximately a half century old. Still dangerous.

WB

blog.shankbone.org
www.tribe.net

MY SWEETEST FRIEND ~

POEMS TO A SISTER

HONOR


let me tell you one thing about suicide



if a loved one has the guts or the heartbreak

to pull this off, you better have the same to

say this is how it all ended



even if you argue with her or him in your mind

every day as you bake bread

rake leaves

drive to work

return library books

tie your shoes

walk a cross walk

mail a letter

split wood

and try to sing in the shower again

48 pages
hand-sewn wraps
three color text with photographs
limited signed edition $20

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