Spring Haiku- 2013

still waiting to bloom,
a late spring understanding
last year’s winter

green grass above

the silent water 

of yesterday’s rain

protests outside the courthouse-

slowly the flood waters

continue a steady rise

hung from a taught pulley,
bound sacks of mortar mix
revolve in hard urban air

momma robin’s belly

cupped deep into her nest-

the world as a single eye

Cry of a Newborn-

Oh the Cruelty of April!

new grads, more art shows,
but one distantly played cello--
best that can be hoped for

Stepping off the porch,

a whiff of decay  

will carry over into June 

Sudden warm rain,

hard grip on a wheelbarrow--

more mud for the garden

new depth of sky
seen through the scent
of white blossoms

all these birds

in this wind

with the children

*FBT will be back up with regular posts in early June.

Everything
--Fanny Howe (2011) 

Infinite nesting
pushes all matter
towards emptiness:
child-nodes,
tree-droppings
with a root element of null.
None is always included
in every cluster
of children. 

Nothing in nothing
prepares us. 

Yet a fresh light was shed
on immortality
for me climbing the stairs
firm foot first. 

Everything was in the banister:
crows on branches, crickets,
architects, handsaws and democrats.
Red moon at 3 AM.

*Postings from 05/14 and 5/16 taken from Howe's 2003 collection 
  of literary essays, "The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life".

[A Blue Vase; Pablo Picasso, 1903]...............

...in some way the future and God invite thoughts of collapse, the end of the self. The end of words. The future has the look of a nameless expanse. The past is either trapped in the individuated body like water in a rag, or else both past and present are acts of shucking, removing, discarding the gravity of the world's givens as one enters a freer, lighter economy of space. One could think of the material world as something like an air that one runs through at high speed, in order to get past it. This thought would reverse the usual sense of being as being stuck in a body moving along with time. 

Just as music leaves itself behind, and words have to be spoken in order to effect their disappearance, one can catch a glimmer of a life itself being a glad renunciation of itself. 

--Fanny Howe

The taste and smell of an action, any action, comes from its objective. This is the strange thing about relationship. What you desire is what creates quality. You are not made by yourself, but by the thing that you want. It is that sense of a mutually seductive world that an itinerant life provides. Because you are always watching and entering, your interest in fixtures grows weary and your strongest tie is the the stuff off to the side traveling with you. 

--Fanny Howe

The serious reflection is composed

Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.

Wallace Stevens

In Good Time

There yet?  With a happy return of night
Sky over China? The rice paper lanterns

Will regard that end painting and some
May have been viewed at the bridge-rail.

But first its brushed about with yellow
Pollen of a warped and muddy spring,

As might late night showers curve over
Onto the following day.  Lacquering rains

That fall flat off each side of the garage
And tone grass verdant with houselights

On well past noon, mélange pekoe jasmine
as an avidity of compounded infusion

Espoused from the kitchen tap. But mild
Lethargy is in a porcelain less hectic

And so intoned beneath the glare away
From hubcap hubris. The indifferent

Flight of nesting birds oddly akin.
Their nature not to stay (eventually).

Blank look in the eyes (if necessary).
Nests woven from yesterday’s scrap

Somehow capable to brew honest  flight
And move on over to adult conversation,

As backed without ever knowing a thing.
A movie’s rerun, yesterday’s shortcut,

The finished utopia, games of jump rope
To hopscotch about school and work.

Rudeness to the manual then after secret
Knowledge of what its really all about.

Pockets full of quietly befumbled sand
And plumb wine from brief sun colors

That hallow sycamores. Those pictures
Are available and can repeal memorable

Ends of some the other passing days but
Still precede in singular light thereafter--

Down from standing moon, planet, star a
Bloom in reflective vapor, stone and fire.

[Trees Before a Bridge; Otto Mueller, 1874-1930]

On the foundational dark silence
...........of the forest
And without need
...........of worshipers
Temples grow with supple sculptures
...........of reaching branches,
With columns
...........of air and live sap decorated with living
Friezes, moving scenes in the lives
...........of leaves.

Therefore proclaim with the voice
...........of moss
An inviolable protectorate
...........of wrens
And another, other-continental,
...........of toucans.  

--from Manifesto Discovered Under a Fringed Gentian; Reginald Gibbons (2002)

[Cadmus & Harmonia; u/k artist, 17th Century].....

from Mortal Men
--Reginald Gibbons (2002)

Mythological Kadmos-- godlike
Warrior yet still a mortal man,
And himself a fantasy of those
.......Who told his story-- married
An immortal woman, Harmonia.
.......He said that to lie with her
Was a bliss on earth for which there were
No words. And  yet however chastely
Men might still wish their goddesses to act,
Doesn't describing their naked beauty already
.......Trouble sacred fantasies?
.......Something tumbles down.

......On some demolished but still gleaming
......Acropolis of thought,
Language is our Parthenon:
Always in ruins-- but unlike stone,
Always rebuilding itself already.
..............And not far from it
..............In spring light,
..............Delicate red
.......Poppies bloom at the unnamed foot
Of each gnarled growing gray-green column
And everywhere a poem can't reach.

Open ended conversations; from 7/14/2008-8/29/2011; from two hemispheres; reflections on male/male, female/female, male/female friendships; banking logarithms as a modern version of Plato’s cave; mass interest in arena sports as mass infatuation with numbers; “village explainer”; Freud and sexual taboos; naked versus erotic; mother tongue, technology, travel and realism found in a library; finished novels followed by the snark of critics; Art of Fugue; Quad Theater; 13th St.; Golden Age of American Poetry, 1950’s and 60’s; our new relation to food; ritualized tradition and ‘Giving Offense’; existential Man On Wire; political paradigms, historical dictators, apolitical ‘revolutions’ without politics; “tangled thoughts”; “make peace, not love”; two aging writers with too much spark remaining to become virulent curmudgeons.

The laws and rules of nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, viz. through the universal laws of nature. 

--from Part III of Ethics; Baruch Spinoza (1677)

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined 

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come. 

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together 

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body. 

--from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction; Wallace Stevens (1947)

...............[Pair of Lovers; Otto Mueller, 1919]

It seems men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown.  Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.... 

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love....  

Then consider the effect of sex- how between man and woman it hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here’s a valley, there’s a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all’s as flat as my hand. Even the exact words get the wrong accent on them. But something is always impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery...   

–from Jacob’s Room; Virginia Woolf (1922)

Susanna and the Elders
--Adelaide Crapsey (1915) 

"Why do
You thus devise
Evil against her?" "For that
She is beautiful, delicate;
Therefore."

(Crapsey's cinquain form)

[Three Figures: Pink and Grey; James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1868]

The Source
--Adelaide Crapsey (1915) 

Thou hast
Drawn laughter from
A well of secret tears
And thence so elvish it rings,—mocking
And sweet:

At times you want to keep
the boredom. Have it back
with an empty seat out on
the porch; plastic buckets
and a wire fence. An anytime
of day as nothing to do
with yourself but everything
going on with life's departure
in a deeper weather of breath.
While not at all thinking much
about that. Only to unfold
through the halations mute
with direct sound and image.

He was a wise man who invented beer. ~Plato..................

[Breakfast Stout; Founders Brewing, Grand Rapids MI]................

To see what you have always dreamed of seeing. But what have you always dreamed of seeing? The Great Pyramids? The portrait of Melancthon by Cranach? Marx's grave? Freud's grave? Bokhara and Samarkand? The hat worn by Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett?  

Or else, rather, to discover what you've never seen, what you didn't expect, what you didn't imagine. But how to give examples? Not what, over time, has come to be listed among the various wonders and surprises of the world; neither the grandiose nor the impressive; nor even the foreign necessarily. But rather the reverse, the familiar rediscovered, a fraternal space... 

What can we know of the world? What quantity of space can our eyes hope to take in between our birth and our death? How many square centimeters of Planet Earth will the soles of our shoes have touched? 

To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square meters of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory.... 

--from Species of Spaces and Other Pieces; Georges Perec (1974)

I identify with the meaning given to "nostalgia" by Tarkovsky, which in one Russian sense means a longing for one's home so sweet and sharp one might almost leave home in order to feel it..... I've never understood this bittersweet narcissism within myself. I love to wander lonely streets in unknown cities. To find a cafe and order a coffee and think to myself -- here I am, known to no one, drinking my coffee and reading my paper. To sit somewhere just barely out of the rain, and declare that my fortress. I think of myself in the third person: Who is he? What is his mystery? I have explained before how I'm attracted to anonymous formica restaurants where I can read my book and look forward to rice pudding for desert. To leave that warm place and enter the dark city is a strange pleasure. Nostalgia perhaps. 

--Roger Ebert; from All the Lonely People 

(thanks to Quiet Bubble)

Archie Shepp - Blue Ballads
Archie Shepp-soprano saxophone
John Hicks-piano
George Mraz-bass
Billy Drummond-drums
Recorded at the Clinton Recording Studio "A",
New York City on November 24 & 25,1995

Kit for Civilization
-- Dana Goodyear (2013) 

Want hearts. Make a religion of sex.
Separate the sick. Teach the smart ones
greed. Decide small pieces are important,
and divide them (two for you, one for him).
Tell your story on a bowl.
Paint skulls and weapons; give them eyes
and smiles. Learn to deal.
Soften, grow more pompous. Exult
in the love between this and that,
or you and your god. Abstract. Talk peace.
When the enemy comes, eat this.

9. Ghost Heart 

The scientist keeps
a mouse heart in a glass
bulb, a wet white blob,
like cotton soaked in alcohol. 

She washes it with soap
to break the old cells down,
and makes a scaffold for new
ones to cleave to.  It starts
to twitch; it starts to act
like it's a heart. 

In the lab, someone in a white coat
shouts, "Doris, it's healing." 

--from 'The Singing Bowl'; Dana Goodyear (2013)

New Yorker staff writer and poet, Dana Goodyear, has released a second collection, The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard.  While operating in lyrical form and style, absurd and slightly apocalyptic tones hold the reader to the at-hand assembly of her images and away from complete comprehension. Seems an appropriate response when living in Los Angeles. From 'Freeway': 

........................... but the pool is full

of flames, and the trees are ash shadows,

and the sky's so dark night-blooming whites

release themselves to moths
too singed to reach them. The yellow vine
presses its wax ear against the warping glass,

and the deck chairs, pale and worked
as skeletons, somehow hold their ground.

And from the LA Times:

"There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness," Goodyear says.....  “For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader......" 

Where Goodyear's narrative style takes time to unroll, her poems are terse and framed with a sharp immediacy. Most of the poems are brief, distilled to the core. 

"The poems are very much engaged with dealing with a new landscape, apprehending a new environment, getting my bearings," Goodyear says........ set against "this sort of deteriorating beautiful, quasi-natural, quasi-artificial landscape that is modern contemporary Los Angeles."

Yet the landscape is more stage than point of contemplation.

Ultimately, Goodyear says, she tries in her poems to "come to terms with some of the basic forces of nature that all human beings try to come to terms with. Poems about decay and regeneration, and birth and death — a lot of the paired opposites that people write poems about."