In Patriarchy No One Can Hear You Scream: Rebecca Solnit on Jeffrey Epstein and the Silencing Machine
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
DUY DOAN ~
Rickshaw Boy
The man I pulled tonight
carried a load of books.
When I felt him watching
me uphill, I grimaced.
He gave me lunar
cakes the size
of two camel humps.
When I answered him,
I smiled to his face.
He wore the moonlight
in his specs. Pant
seams clean as the embroidery
work of his book covers.
One cannot grow rich
without a bit of cleverness.
Should I have shown
him the secret of my deft
touch? The Circling Moon,
the Graceful Swan? How East
Wind beats West Wind
if other two winds say so?
Snow falls on cedars.
____________________
Duy Doan
We Play A Game
Yale, 2018
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
EARTHLY SIGNS ~
[ On a second reading
and finding the cloth edition from Yale
I find this an even more powerful reading from Tsvetaeva
as well as a lively translation and revealing
portrait of the Russian poet by Jamey Gambrell ]
Monday, July 8, 2019
Sunday, July 7, 2019
MARIE PONSOT ~
1921-2019
Old Mama Saturday
BY MARIE PONSOT
“Saturday’s child must work for a living.”
“I’m moving from Grief Street.
Taxes are high here
though the mortgage’s cheap.
The house is well built.
With stuff to protect, that
mattered to me,
the security.
These things that I mind,
you know, aren’t mine.
I mind minding them.
They weigh on my mind.
I don’t mind them well.
I haven’t got the knack
of kindly minding.
I say Take them back
but you never do.
When I throw them out
it may frighten you
and maybe me too.
Maybe
it will empty me
too emptily
and keep me here
asleep, at sea
under the guilt quilt,
under the you tree.”
From Springing: New and Selected Poems by Marie Ponsot, copyright © 2002 by Marie Ponsot. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.
Saturday, July 6, 2019
THE YOUNG HOUSEWIFE ~
The Young Housewife
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
At ten A.M. the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband's house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
____________________
Long ago
in some school
— all girls
and let's not
get fussy —
I'd say all boys
if it wasn't
all girls
and winter
time
on my
way
to
class
I managed
to find a
leaf
often an oak
and brouht it
into the
classroom
and this went
on for 20
years the same
way asking
one of the
students to stand
on a chair
and hold the leaf
aloft as if her
arm was a
branch and when
I came to the WCW
line comparing
the housewife to
a fallen leaf
I would nod
and the student
would let the
leaf drop from
her hand and
every single
girl saw
what the poet
saw and I
loved that room
those girls
that moment
that leaf
that poet
that poem
and each
year a
different
leaf
[ BA ]
Friday, July 5, 2019
HUSBANDRY ~
Husbandry
Attention sways, can't fix
to anything.
Every morning he goes to his garden
barefoot, for the cold pleasure. Each day the beans
are taller, the wind
has flattened them against the wire
long enough for a tendril
to take hold
that the vine may climb
toward sunlight. All of it
as if by accident — as if untended: this row of lettuce,
this of beets,
a vagrant clump of weeds, a pile of cuttings. After all,
it's the ratty ends of things
he finds attractive. Little room
to cultivate a life
or a wife.
To accept one's lot may be
to become a pillar of sorrow,
he thinks, but to be alone
is salt itself.
_______________
Mark Weiss
As Luck Would Have It
Shearsman Books 2015
photo ~
patrons of husbandry
Thursday, July 4, 2019
SOUL FIRE (LEE SCRATCH PERRY) ~
Soul fire
I got soul fire
I got soul fire
And we ain't got no water
Soul a burnin'
Soul a burnin'
Soul a burnin'
Water comin'
Water comin'
Water comin'
Soul fire
Eh
La la
Burnin' in my soul
Burnin' burnin' burnin' in my soul
La la
Eh!
Soul fire
Soul fire
Soul fire
And we ain't got no water
We don't have no water
Soul a burnin'
Soul a burnin'
And we ain't got no water
we ain't got no water
La la
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
POET ~
Translated from the Italian
by Jamie McKendrick
There's a moment when the body
gathers itself in breathing
and thought stops and hesitates.
Likewise things
tugged by the moon
undergo the influence of
the tidal sigh, the malleable eclipse.
And the boats' planks
swell gently in water.
=
Summertime, like the cinemas, I shut up shop.
Thought flies off elsewhere and evaporates.
Billboards write white,
the air's warm,
the table weighted with fruit.
=
Often the page lies becalmed.
It's futile turning it to find
what quarter the wind
might blow from.
Nothing moves.
Thought wavers in that calm.
What navigation wrecked
is there, being
painfully repaired.
Fibonacci
I note the forehead's curvature
in its utter nakedness
and deduce the same number
that underwrites
how branches grow,
a church's poised facade,
the snail-shell spiral,
and the form of leaves.
=
I should like, one day,
to be turned to marble,
to be stripped of nerves,
glistening tendons, veins.
Just to be airy enamel,
slaked lime, the striped
tunic of a wind
ground to a halt.
=
On the beach, rotten wood, tires, bottles,
sodden stuff — all things wrecked
and putrified — I love them all:
what's washed up, spewed out, good-for-nothing,
what no one wants
to have or filch.
In April the air
takes on a hint of warmth.
Glows like a cheek.
=
This writing's being worn away,
its angles smoothed, the "r"s,
the "m"s, are turned
and sanded down and roll like stones
the currents shift from shore to shore.
Faces also,
faces waste away
from the pressure of being watched.
They turn into a landscape
full of ruins.
Games: Rebus
A world without time.
Without a breeze.
Everything is still
and exhaustingly full of meaning.
There's no end of meaning and sheer slog
in this worksite of sense.
Every word is a gravelly roadbed
of letters and figures.
Everything weighs a ton.
________________
Valerio Magrelli
Vanishing Point
Farrar Straus Giroux
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Monday, July 1, 2019
BUILDING (BOB ARNOLD) ~
— May '19Carson came out the other day with our little Strawberry Girls (who were given strawberries for breakfast out under the umbrella of the picnic table along with french toast, scrambled eggs, juices, many fruits, all Susan prepared). I sit there at the table and it dawns on me each time that the table is much older than me, was my parents, thousands of parties and meals and sit-downs at that table, and it is redwood. Carson and the girls then went along with us to look at all the new buildings, including the newest, which already has the front porch complete and not a window yet in the place, but I wanted a quickly finished front porch to sit there every day and enjoy the view over the pond, the yard, the views everywhere, it has a height.We then took them to the new fox den under the Faraway Cottage — a building I built with Carson 20 years ago, and now a family of many red fox glow under the building, doing what little harm. They have shelter. A photo below. I believe that is the male of the pups, fearless. Yawns at me like the buddha when I come over to have a look.Finally the sounds of summer have come here, and the look of the lighting. It’s taken a long time for winter to leave. We had eight months of one continuous fire in the Jotul woodstove.
__________________________
—1 July '19
___________________________
Lil' Fox
more to come. . .
Sunday, June 30, 2019
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