Paul Siebel
1937 ~ 2022
daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
"Light flickers on and off ruffled layers of leaves."
_________________
TODAY
WE REMEMBER
THE PASSING OF OUR FRIEND
CLIVE FAUST
PLEASE READ MORE ABOUT THIS FINE
Varda Poem
for Yanko
You who taught numbers to know the rainbow
Who opened every door in the celestial city
Who always made more when there was less
Who enchanted birds
Who loved all things except the mean
Should you be seen
Dancing in your golden ashes
About half a league off our port beam
As we go out the Gate
While the sun sets clear
Will you tell us one more time
How hard it is to be human
When it's so easy to be divine
_______________________
Shapeshifter
Alice Paalen Rahon
New York Review of Books
Translated by Mary Ann Caws
2021
screeching like baby birds
in a crowded nest ~
dumplings frying
on the fourth day
I named the fly
howard
my senile father
eats the fortune cookie
and the fortune
our beautiful old love
on such thin ice
we can't even shiver
a splinter
pulled from my thumb
spit into the fire
because of my old father
my old mother has learned
to make baby food
after the storm
an apology
of soft rain
going out the door
i pass a grape that had
rolled away from breakfast
a fence between
the cemetery and the road
leans toward the road
mountains disappear in fog
and i want to go right along
with them
_____________________________
selected from ~
Ronald Baatz
In A Clay Pig's Eye
Seastone Editions, 2005
Remembering Vaughan in New England
I saw reality the other night,
By New England moon-light.
All of my life, living has been
One or another kind of dream.
Now, nothing festooned itself between
Me, and the substance of moon-beam.
The land is honest, small and swept
Bare as a barn-yard floor
In winter. And no third thing crept
As it had, times before.
No feeling, its mist to intervene,
No inner thought to warp . . .
I stood: and behold, the trees were lean,
And lo ! the hills were sharp.
Moon's no ephemeral faint stuff
First seen, painted upon
Windows and walls . . . it is yellow as dawn,
After dream, it is marvelous rough,
Coarse as hoar-frost . . . texture no dream
Can invent.
Cut my vague dream away !
Moon in New England, O pure moon-beam,
Let it be day.
___________________________
Genevieve Taggard
Remembering Vaughn in New England
Arrow Editions, 1933
Village Landscape
There is silence in the meadows
of former battlefields
the bank of the bug river arranges
shells and bones
at times a wasp's ricochet
shoots from the burdocks
someone was buried here
or somewhere else
and there is no hole in heaven
as there is on earth
. . .
I was unable to save
a single life
I couldn't sleep
a single bullet
so I circle cemeteries
that aren't there
I search for words
that aren't there
I run
to the aid uncalled for
to the rescue delayed
I want to get there on time
even if it's already over
Kazakhstan, USSR
they let us out of the wagons
right here
And nothing anywhere
not a river
to drown in
or a tree
to hang oneself
____________________________
Jerzy Ficowski
Everything I Don't Know
Selected Poems
translated from the Polish by
Jennifer Grotz & Piotr Sommer
World Poetry Books, 2021
City Lights Books 2021
April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa
Today is your
birthday and I have tried
writing these things before,
but now
in the gathering madness, I want to
thank you
for telling me what to expect
for pulling
no punches, back there in that scrubbed Bronx parlor
thank you
for honestly weeping in time to
innumerable heartbreaking
italian operas for
pulling my hair when I
pulled the leaves off the trees so I'd
know how it feels, we are
involved in it now, revolution, up to our
knees and the tide is rising, I embrace
strangers on the street, filled with their love and
mine, the love you told us had to come or we
die, told them all in that Bronx park, me listening in
spring Bronx dusk, breathing stars, so glorious
to me your white hair, your height your fierce
blue eyes, rare among Italians, I stood
a ways off, looking up at you, my grandpa
people listened to, I stand
a ways off listening as I pour out soup
young men with light in their faces
at my table, talking love, talking revolution
which is love, spelled backwards, how
you would love us all, would thunder your anarchist wisdom
at us, would thunder Dante, and Giordano Bruno, orderly men
bent to your ends, well I want you to know
we do it for you, and your ilk, for Carlo Tresca,
for Sacco and Vanzetti, without knowing
it, or thinking about it, as we do it for Aubrey Beardsley
Oscar Wilde (all street lights
shall be purple), do it
for Trotsky and Shelley and big/dumb
Kropotkin
Eisenstein's Strike people, Jean Cocteau's ennui, we do it for
the stars over the Bronx
that they may look on earth
and not be ashamed.
_____________________
Diane Di Prima
Revolutionary Letters
50th Anniversary Edition
Pocket Poets No. 27
City Lights, 2021
Julio Jiménez drives short spikes into a large piece of stone in order to cut out a section from a quarry near Escolásticas.
Lullaby
What does the poet call
a loss of words?
She calls it widest pupil.
They call it skewered sight.
How precise the nerves
that bear the toll of language.
Once there were stories
I didn't want true about me,
but here I am, twisted
with appetite. My mother
said I was a curious child.
She meant it as a gift.
Pirate moon, the
rapture of deep sleep,
build me a fortress
for my mantle.
__________________________
Cruel Futures
City Lights 2018