JOANNA McCLURE ~

Permission




You left me to re-attach myself

Carefully and only partly to someone else



While you finished your fling

With fast cars, married women, cocaine,

      magic, and deception.



Now you begin a new life

With a young strong lady



To whom you give fidelity,

Honesty, and clean living.



                         Thanks.







Lust



I long to give this body —

Not to science, not to the fire,



I long to be given, whole

For the fish in the sea to nibble away.



I long to be buried, naked,

Under the earth, to be returned to the earth.



I want to be placed high,

On an altar made of sticks, for the birds,



For the birds of prey to feed on,

For the sun to whiten my bones.



I long, long to join myself

Back, back into all that life



From which I came.

I long, long to feed life directly.








A Chinese Painting



The stairs,

Up the mountain,

Are delicately, barely visible.



A chicken looks at

A butterfly looking at . . .



                          I think of Issa.








Images



Creeley

yields

Images



As satisfying

As pulling



Out potatoes.





—————————————

Joanna McClure
CATCHING LIGHT
Collected poems
North Atlantic Books
2013

LOVE ALCHEMY ~
( May Day after )

Lenore Kandel

Lenore Kandel's Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel is now out from North Atlantic Books, who have already shown their magnificent gift at releasing large, exquisite collections by Kenneth Irby, Gerrit Lansing, now Kandel, and in the works other poets in the San Francisco sphere.


Born in New York City in 1932, she passed away in San Francisco in 2009. Along with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Timothy Leary and others, Kandel was a participant at the Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park polo fields on January 14, 1967. The only woman to speak from the stage, Kandel defiantly read from The Love Book, her then notoriously banned short book of what she would call "holy erotica". It was her 35th birthday that day, and Michael McClure remembers, "The entire crowd of 20,000 or 30,000 people sang 'Happy Birthday' to her."


On May 10th in San Francisco, old friends, new friends, strangers and a family tribe will be singing to her again. If you're closeby, comeby ~

photo : isaac hernandez