daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
HOW MANY HOMELANDS
play cards in the air
as the refugee passes through the mystery
How much sleeping music
in the wooded thicket
where the wind, all alone,
plays the midwife.
Lightning-split
the alphabet-spurgewood
sows
in devouring conception
God's first word.
Fate twitches
in the bloodcoursing meridians of a hand —
Everything is endless
and hung on the rays
of a distance.
_________________
Nelly Sachs
Flight and Metamorphosis
translated by Joshua Weiner
Farrar, 2022
We accept Paypal
Please use our email address of
longhousepoetry@gmail.com
Payable by check ~
Longhouse
PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303
No Longer Very Clear
It is true that I can no longer remember very well
the time when we first began to know each other.
However, I do remember very well
the first time we met. You walked in sunlight,
holding a daisy. You said, "Children made unreliable witnesses."
Now, so long after that time,
I keep the spirit of it throbbing still.
The ideas are still the same, and they expand
to fill vast, antique cubes.
My daughter was reading one just the other day.
She said, " How like pellucid statues, Daddy. Or like a. . .
an engine."
In this house of blues the cold creeps stealthily upon us.
I do not dare to do what I fantasize doing.
With time the blue congeals into roomlike purple
that takes the shape of alcoves, landings. . .
Everything is like something else.
I should have waited before I learned this.
_________________________
Something Close to Music
John Ashbery
David Zwirner Books
2022
___________________________________________
If you can't stand Ashbery's work
this is just the book for you —
impeccable poems (meaning: inventive,
crisp, word-saturated) diced with
square smart art criticism,
(there isn't a tired page)
and the price of this
handsome size book
is also ideal.
Take a bow
Jeffrey Lependorf.
(editor)
Yet one more edition of this tiny gem
(fiction and short essays)
from New Directions, this time as a
"New Directions Pearl" —
do ignore the typo on the
author's birth date on the back cover
1890, which it isn't, 1899 is more accurate —
Groucho Marx, Jean Rhys and H P Lovecraft were born in 1890.
First Voice
Went fetal as an ear on the bed and tried to feel
the dusty blue rhomboid of window being
in the vanguard of twilight every second,
hurtling, the word impressing itself
as no hurtling would on my mind
through space on the back of this
whale turning, turning, punctual
the other cheek to that star
_________________
Midwood
Norton, 2022
Newell Lyon learned the oral tradition from his elders in the Penobscot Nation in Maine and was widely considered to be a “raconteur among the Indians." The thirteen stories in this new volume were among those that Lyon recounted to anthropologist Frank Speck, who published them in 1918 as Penobscot Transformer Tales. Transcribed for the first time into current Penobscot orthography and with a new English translation, this instructive and entertaining story cycle focuses on the childhood and coming-of-age of Gluskabe, the tribe's culture hero. Learning from his grandmother Woodchuck, Gluskabe applies lessons that help shape the Wabanaki landscape and bring into balance all the forces affecting human life. These tales offer a window into the language and culture of the Penobscot people in the early twentieth century.
In “Still They Remember Me," stories are presented in the Penobscot language and English side-by-side, coupled with illustrations from members of the tribal community. For the first time, these stories are accessible to a young generation of Penobscot language learners and scholars of Native American literatures at all levels, from grade school to graduate school.
PHOTO OF BREECE D’J PANCAKE, ALBERT AND SHIRLEY SMALL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.
There is in Lopez's "Sliver of Sky" —
a tragic portrait of his early childhood years of
sexual predatory abuse by a family friend —
which may be his truest wildlife essay.
Random House, 2022
