WOODEN SHJIPS ~

summer 2019

CY TWOMBLY ~

R E A D      M E

JOZEF CZAPSKI ~

R E A D      M E




New York Review of Books
2018

AARON SISKIND ~

M O R E !






Little, Brown
1982

BERT MEYERS ~

Rainy Day




Outside, nothing moves: only the rain

nailing the house up like a coffin.



Remember, in childhood, when it rained?

Then, the whole world sailed down the alley:

leaves, paper, old shoes, the buildings,

everything like a circus going to sea.



Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys

is closing all the doors. . .



and I think we're all dead. See how the sky

sits like a tombstone on the roofs.






Evening on the Farm




Time for a jacket now,

and to put my hands away.



I must learn from the stars

how a field should look.



But one by one, bright children,

the stars rush downstairs



to meet my horses and hay

with their astonished eyes.







Apprentice




Because

I love you

I've learned to be

this hammer that runs

all day like a horse

with its hoof in its head.



In the afternoon

my hands

lie down together

for a minute.







Twilight at the Shop



A whole day at the saw —

when they come for the rubbish,

I throw myself

out with the dust.



We smile and smoke and praise

what's left of the sun.

Dark trees have bottled its light.

They glow like many beers.






______________________

Bert Meyers
Sunlight on the Wall
Kayak
1976

THE BALFA BROTHERS~

RADUAN NASSAR ~

R E A D      M E

BOB ARNOLD (ARCHIVE) ~

ANN PETRY ~

R E A D      M E

Library of America

2019

OLGA CABRAL ~

Night-Letter



Nightly I write you letters

but morning is always a cancelled gray envelope

stamped ADDRESS UNKNOWN.

I've been wanting to tell you

how things are since you have gone:

the cherry trees still looks into your window

and offers its arms full of small birds

of your last Spring.



I've packed your luggage —

that worn leather suitcase with the labels of epochs

and sent it on freedom rides

to Mississippi jails.

Your clothes closet, once gay

as a carnival of bears

with your checkered shirts and poet's neckties

holds the odor of dead flowers

and more sinister than shadows

motes of dust in faded sunbeams

swing suspended from bare wire hangers.

Your rough jackets have gone

with their bearings —

they have given me their last embraces

to link arms with new companions

and your shoes are out walking again

on new picket lines.



But the grief of your old eyeglasses

that you patched with Scotch tape

is more than I can bear.

Lying in the lamplight before an open book

they watch me from a void

of vacant lenses

as I go from room to room on perilous journeys

groping with my fingers to construct your face,

seeking the answer of your lips

upon the sundered air

the way it was the last time I kissed you

under the wings of the Angel

of Death.



___________________

Olga Cabral
The Evaporated Man
Olivant, 1968




Olga was a very early friend to Longhouse
— we miss her.

THE LEFT BANKE ~

BEATRIZ BRACHER ~

R E A D      M E

THOMAS BERNHARD (PROSE) ~

R E A D      M E

Seagull Books

2018

ALDEN VAN BUSKIRK ~

St. Louis Poems





God runs a gas station in

    East St. Louis, wears

big blue dungarees.



    What angels in the gold rest rooms,

what music of the organ pumps tonight? O



    Croak not Black Angel, the

truck pulls out to

flame the streets at zero.

        _______________


Gene showed essentially a square attitude

    toward the new myth of mud skinned angels, and when

confronted with the knife in a most

serious "dance of the syllables,"

subtly cooled from exclamation

mark to dash

         __________________


No Splibbins, No Smacks, No Straights.

         __________________


When yr supply is

        depleted, turn

    on w / a stick of garbage

or shoot gold dust from the sun.








After the desertion (a)




Streets empty in gray absence of light

their prints swept away by alto winds

the gods have deserted the city

their shoes hang in Good Will Stores

or writhe in incinerators

Lami's silver shoes among them — faster than

new sneakers for a

flight of thieves —

flame blue at last.

Lami was Joe Angel, Johnny the Fag,

Rimbaud, the Road Runner, myself.

The idea of the image is murdered,

debris wins at last.

Mind is free of imagination at last &

shits gaily in the streets, floods

paper buildings &

shines fresh in the garbage sun.

Citizens' bodies turn, bloat

in eddies, &

flow back to sea.





After the desertion (b)



Gray absence of light.

newspapers blow loosely in the streets like

Spanish galleys crumpling against lamp posts or

curb in tiny convulsions; no tragedy — they

billow off in the next breeze.



The gods have deserted.



Their prints erased by alto winds the

gods have deserted the city.

Their shoes hang in Good Will Stores or

writhe in incineraters — one last dance before



debris wins at last.



Mind has conquested imagination &

shits gaily in the streets,

streams from paper buildings, slime

in the ashen sun.



Bodies putrefy in doorways, only the eyes

flicker short-circuited by the

senses, their eyes convict me,

No they cannot see, they have

abstracted the sun & are lost

in me the dreamer,

only I am not dead for I dream,

my spirit-candle electrifying the

world forever.




_____________________

Alden Van Buskirk
Lami
THE LAST POEMS OF A POET
WHO DIED IN 1961 IN HIS EARLY 20s
collected from his writings by David Rattray
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALLEN GINSBERG
The Auerhahn Society,
San Francisco, 1965

MUSIC BURNS ~

THE UNIVERSAL STUDIOS 2008 FIRE

BACK TO THE LAND ~

R E A D    M E

ARCHIVE (BOB ARNOLD) ~

from Cache, Bob Arnold

Mad River Press

(Richmond, MA)

RAINER MARIA RILKE ~

R E A D      M E

DIRTY OLD TOWN ~

STEVE CASTRO ~

Polar Opposites
                                      __________________________





I just rose from the dead.



"Do you feel tired?" I asked.



A little. I'm also hungry.



Then she hugged me.



"Are you hugging me because I'm about to take your place in the afterlife?"



Maybe? I could also be hugging you because I like you.



"I've never dated anyone who was previously dead before."



I've never dated anyone who's about to die.



"How long do I have?"



Still embracing me, she looked into my eyes and then I knew that we

would kiss. Kiss we did. Her mouth tasted of flowers that had been

placed inside a coffin. I started crying.



"I can taste death in you."



She started crying as well. I wiped the tears from her eyes.



"I wish I didn't have to die," I told her.



Your wish is my command, she said.



Then we lived happily ever after.




__________________

Steve Castro
Blue Whale Phenomena
Otis Books
Otis College of Art and Design
2019