What We’re Trying to Do is
Create a Community of Dreamers
--Lisa Olstein 

Horses, airplanes, red cars,
running. The Japanese sleep
less but do they dream less?
What do women in Stockholm
dream about in wintertime?
Show me every car dream.
Show me every car dream
in Moscow. Show me every
red car dream that involved
men living in Las Vegas.
Compare that to Tokyo or Paris.
Do famous people dream
differently? If you have
more money in the bank?
Can we run an algorithm
can we quantify, can we teach
that? The distance widens
and narrows, sometimes
a grapefruit, sometimes
a beach ball. Invisible data.
They say Einstein came up
with relativity in a dream.
What if you could go back
and find that dream?

[ Metamorphosis of Hitler's Face into a Moonlit

Landscape with Accompaniment ; Salvador Dali (1958) ]

Thread
--Dan Chiasson 

I lack the rigor of a lightning bolt,
the weight of an anchor. I am
frayed where it would be highly useful—
and this I feel perpetually—to make a point. 

I think if I can concentrate I might turn sharp.
Only, I don’t know how to concentrate—
I know only the look of someone concentrating,
indistinguishable from nearsightedness. 

It is hard for you to be near me,
my silly intensity shuffling
all the insignia of interiority.
Knowing me never made anyone a needle.

From, In Search of Distraction: the rewards of the tangential, the digressive, and the dreamy:

Distraction need not simply be another name for attention shifted (“I was looking at this, then I looked at that”). Attention is a form of “tension,” but the relaxation here — both that which creates the condition for the new perception and that which follows from it — is primarily conceived as passive (objects fall “upon the eye, are “carried to the heart”). The sense of one’s capacity of apprehension being “penetrated” is also strange; it’s as though, in a certain state of distractedness, our capacities are not our own. Yet this state isn’t conceived as deficit or disorder; although it arrives as Wordsworth has undertaken “final abandonment of hope,” it signals an advent. And even as he becomes distractedly absorbed by the bright star, the star itself is already luring him into a feeling for something other than itself, igniting “a sense of the Infinite.” The numinous turns nebulous. The unfocused seems to include — or to inspire — a new sense of freedom.

Whatever this freedom is, I would like a little of it. More than a little. I’m writing this sentence as a distraction from a book about poetry that I’m meant to be writing, but also with a hunch that the book may get written via the distraction, that something in the book needs to get worked out — or worked through — by my not attending to it. Or perhaps the book was really always a distraction, and wherever the non-book resides is the place I’m supposed to be. “I like to put things up around my bed all the time,” Diane Arbus once noted,

pictures of mine that I like and other things and I change it every 
month or so. There’s some funny subliminal thing that happens. It isn’t just looking at it. It’s looking at it when you’re not looking at it. It really begins to act on you in a funny way.

That’s a dream — or daydream — of the tangential as a route to the heedlessly thoughtful, which is a dream I want to have.

Everything Must Go
--Matthea Harvey 

Today’s class 3-Deifying:
Godgrass, godtrees, godroad. 

A sheet of geese bisects the rainstorm.
The water tower is ten storms full. 

We practice drawing cubes—
That’s the house squared away 

& the incubator with Baby.
The dead are in their grid. 

O the sleeping bag contains
the body but not the dreaming head. 

from “Ceiling Unlimited Series”
--Matthea Harvey 

(almost anything) 

Dear dust-ghost, the instructions don’t make
sense unless I sing them. If the bottom-most hem
is six feet from the ground, how do I get into this dress?
Bird ode: Dark triangle feet in a wind-field.
Fifth museum poem: O swim on through.
Handsome & Then Some: Hello. Please help.
Or if pretending isn’t the way, tell me that
the pony’s bones are still too soft to hold me
up & take away my paper lantern. Like most
cadenzas I need something to come back to.
I push the rubble out of the second-storey window.
I put the money in an envelope & it’s sucked up
a transparent tube. Only the rusted bits of roof
stand out against the sky. Yellow water
in the gutters—always the fault falls somewhere.

[ Free Go Lily ; Medeski Martin & Wood ]

b - Chris Wood

d - Billy Martin

k - John Medeski

From 'Exchanges of Light', Jacques Roubaud (trans. Eleni Sikelianos):

LEWIS DE B.

Let’s be serious. Why not try to prove that light is God, while you’re at it?

JOHN PH.

I wouldn’t say that. But why reject a metaphysic of light? Several divine traits are applicable to it; thus: light begetting and the splendor begot come together and illuminate each other; something divinity also accomplishes by itself.

M. GOODMAN

But isn’t that what light is? There is light and lights; lights are objects, light is an arrow. The first change; the second, not.

WILLIAM H.

In the air
...........light
......................pulls out
...........from earth...........into dark
and spits
...........in the air
......the night..........rough to the edges
......of trees
......................in the ground

DENNIS PS.

Whatever you say. It’s clear that each light tears itself out from night, but it is also clear that in each shining thing, light in its essence and substance is more shining still than its visible glimmer, which is only the black and shadow of all its shininess.

These trees, this grass, these hills, like us, visible in the dying light, aren’t they all as impenetrable as the inaccessible light, of which lights are but a shadow?

Your Kingdom
--Eleni Sikelianos

if you like let the body feel
all its own evolution
inside, opening flagella
& feathers & fingers
door by door, a ragged

neuron dangling like
a participle to
hear a bare sound

on the path, find
a red-eye-hole rabbit, fat
of the bulbous stalk pecked out
to the core so you can

bore back to the salamander you
once were straggling under the skin
grope toward the protozoa
snagging on the rise toward placental knowing

who developed eyes for you agape in open waters

the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in
directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your
hagfish spine who

will bury your bones
investigate a redwood rain or tap
the garnet of your heartwood, bark, put
your flat needles on dry ice to inquire
after your tree family, father or mother in the fairy-ring
next to you, find you
are most closely related to grass
your hexaploid breathing pores gently closing at night, when
did you begin your coexistence with flowering
plants from which arose the bee before the
African honey badger but after the dark
protoplanetary disk of dust grains
surrounding the sun become
the earth you
had no nouns, did you

Not Verb, but Vertigo
--Eleni Sikelianos 

.........................—after Alejandra Pizarnik 

A yellow scraping across my skin when
I write the word “sky”

Not sky but scything :
……to let day be scraped out
…………by night

I scratched down the word “flower” & felt
…the parts draw away from the tongue.
……Not gnomon, grown*man, but ghost :
………to gnaw on the crisp
……………skin once it’s been stripped
……………down from the meat

the neat meat

hiding under the table
of the skin’s
tablatures

right at the juncture where day/night meet
you can see it indicated by the perforated lines

what parts of us that don’t cast a shadow

Fragments for Subduing the Silence
--Alejandra Pizarnik (trans. Yvette Siegert)

I.

    The powers of language are the solitary ladies who sing, desolate, with this voice of mine that I hear from a distance. And far away, in the black sand, lies a girl heavy with ancestral music. Where is death itself? I have wanted clarity in light of my lack of light. Branches die in the memory. The girl lying in the sand nestles into me with her wolf mask. The one she couldn’t stand anymore and that begged for flames and that we set on fire.

II.

    When the roof tiles blow away from the house of language, and words no longer keep—that is when I speak.

    The ladies in red have lost themselves in their masks. Though they will return to sob among the flowers.

    Death is no mute. I hear the song of the mourners sealing the clefts of silence. I listen and the sweetness of your crying brings life to my grey silence.

III.

    Death has restored to silence its own bewitching charm. And I will not say my poem and I will say it. Even if (here, now) the poem has no feeling, no future.

[ Translation ; Agnes Lawrence Pelton ]........

The Sap is Mounting Back
--Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. J B Leishman) 

The sap is mounting back from that unseeness
darkly renewing in the common deep.
back to the light, and feeding the pure greeness
hiding in rinds round which the winds still weep. 

The inner side of Nature is reviving.
another sursum corda will resound;
invisibly, a whole year's youth is striving
to climb those trees that look so iron-bound. 

Preserving still that grey and cool expression,
the ancient walnut's filling with event;
while the young brush-wood trembles with repression
under the perching bird's presentiment. 

No. 3, from The Sonnets to Orpheus
--Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Robert Hunter) 

Gods are able. Tell how a man, though,
could possibly thread the lyre's narrow modes?
Vacillating at the heart's dark crossroads,
he beholds no temple of Apollo. 

Song, you teach us, is beyond achievable desire,
it is rather the sheer reality of immanent being:
simplicity itself for deity,
but how may we partake? When will you inspire 

our being, bestowing earth and stars by turn?
This has no relation, youth, to your enamored care:
mouth forced wide by the thrust of your voice - learn 

to set aside impassioned music. It will end.
True singing breaths a different air.
Air without object. A gust within God. A wind.

Song: “Orpheus with his lute made trees”
--William Shakespeare 

(from Henry VIII) 

Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.
Every thing that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads, and then lay by.
In sweet music is such art,
Killing care and grief of heart
Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

[ Esa Riippa（Finnish, b.1947） Rullakartiini 2006]............

[via the wood between]

Haiku- Winter 2017/18

sitting so low,

sun in a cold as wide

as everyday blue

coffee break,

my head murmuring

silent snowfall

snowflake-

I should be so

accepting

half moon

rabbit tos and fros 

with its shadow

winter solstice,

hours on the highway

sloped with sunset

holiday marangue

but black coffee has its own

vocubulary

new years snowfall-

the white space between

what's remembered

back in the office,

my glasses slowly falling

asleep down my nose

full moon

the grand entry

of silence


snow day
this nuthatch at the feeder
all to himself

ice fishermen

patiently holding out

for a bite of life

february thaw-

brown paper bag

mired with last autumn

A Hole in a Cloud
--George Scarbrough 

Heretofore in my life, Old Man,
I lived in twenty-three apartments
Of one sort or another,
Never content, moving from street
To street, house to house, room to room.
Somewhere, I was convinced, there
Was a place I could truly call my own.
But my conviction has faded.
I no longer dream and am no more
Than a tramp along the highway.
Here on Exile Mountain I’ve built
A nest in a hole in a cloud,
Being that kind of bird
And no longer a fledgling. 

[from the Han-Shan sequence]

Coma
--Carol Quinn 

Bodies of ice and dust move through space. 

They sleep like seeds in the dark. They bloom
like matches at the edge of what we think 

we know. You don't always see it coming. 

Beyond a point, a priori worlds
break down. One December night, perhaps 

you'll keep moving even when you can
no longer feel that you are moving. 

Zuangzhi awakened. He didn't know if he
had only dreamt he was a butterfly 

or was a butterfly that dreamt it was a man. 

                             • 

After the lecture on Taoism, a motor-
cycle carried me towards home. I was 

a tuning fork pitched to the combustion.
I was an iron finial ensconced in cloud. 

In dreams I've braced for impact as
the pavement came like static at the end 

of a film. I've purled like a goldfinch
and I've flown. I've been a child pearling in 

the mollusk dark. I've been a stone.

[via poetry daily]

[ Max Clarenbach (1880 - 1952) ]........

[via the lifting of the veil]

Freedom
--William Stafford 

Freedom is not following a river.
Freedom is following a river,
................though, if you want to. 

It is deciding now by what happens now.
It is knowing that luck makes a difference.
No leader is free; no follower is free -
................the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy, and habit-forming
................to be worth arguing about by reason. 

If you are oppressed, wake up about
four in the morning: most places,
you can usually be free some of the time
................if you wake up before other people.

[via whiskey river]

Demand It Courageously
--Julia Hartwig 

....Make some room for yourself, human animal.
....Even a dog jostles about on his master’s lap to
improve his position. And when he needs space he
runs forward, without paying attention to commands
or calls.
....If you didn’t manage to receive freedom as a gift,
demand it as courageously as bread and meat.
....Make some room for yourself, human pride and
dignity.
....The Czech writer Hrabal said:
....I have as much freedom as I take.

[via read a little poetry]

The stars have been getting too large lately,
big white loose splotches in a liquid sky.
Can I handle this jigsaw puzzle
of the universe? I'll need a thousand
dog teams and very long ropes.
There'll be no seating for the audience
they musts stand in the nation's backyards.
Earth will be at peace again through dog power.
The International Dog Church will be founded.
The moon will be called Holy Dog Moon,
the sun called Sun Dog.
The gods are now called dogs and are much happier.
Marching is permanently banished in favor of trotting. 

--from 'Moon Suite'; Jim Harrison

I recently watched the Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown episode where he visits Jim Harrison at his home in Montana (Season 7- #4), which would have been filmed shortly before his death. Well worth the time to hear Harrison's poetry in his own voice, even for this vegetarian. 

Herring
--Jim Harrison 

I’m sitting at the window earing pickled herring
and watching the existence of earth.
A small brown bird flies in from the left,
a fellow creature. We are each other
though he’s more closely related
to dinosaurs. Lucky for us
this existence doesn’t include
the future, which at this point is questionable.
Israel and Iran bomb each other at the same
split second. Thousands
of small brown birds will die in what
the media call conflagration, temporarily the world’s
biggest double bonfire. I won’t attend the party.
It’s far too small for God to see
in a universe with ninety billion galaxies
small brown birds and herring.

The 25 Principles of Adult Behavior, as written by John Perry Barlow (1947-2018) at age 30:

1.  Be patient. No matter what.

2.  Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of
     another you wouldn’t say to him.

3.  Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than
     yours are to you.

4.  Expand your sense of the possible.

5.  Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.

6.  Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.

7.  Tolerate ambiguity.

8.  Laugh at yourself frequently.

9.  Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.

10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.

11. Give up blood sports.

12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk
      it frivolously.

13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are
      sometimes exempt.)

14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.

15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission
      and pursue that.

16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.

17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.

18. Admit your errors freely and soon.

19. Become less suspicious of joy.

20. Understand humility.

21. Remember that love forgives everything.

22. Foster dignity.

23. Live memorably.

24. Love yourself.

25. Endure.

"I don’t expect the perfect attainment of these principles. However, I post them as a standard for my conduct as an adult. Should any of my friends or colleagues catch me violating one of them, bust me.' [via kottke]

[ (snow scape) ; Bill Lynch b. 1960 ].......

[via lilith's place]

.

Wight
--Stanley Plumly 

In the dark we disappear, pure being.
Our mirror images, impure being. 

Being and becoming (Heidegger), being and
nothingness (Sartre)—which is purer being? 

Being alone is no way to be: thus
loneliness is the test of pure being. 

Nights in love I fell too far or not quite
far enough—one pure, one impure being. 

Clouds, snow, mist, the dragon's breath on water,
smoke from fire—a metaphor's pure being. 

Stillness and more stillness and the light locked
deep inside—both pure and impure being. 

Is is the verb of being, I the noun—
or pronoun for the purists of being. 

I was, I am, I looked within and saw
nothing very clearly: purest being.

harbor (the conversation)
--Nick Flynn 

If this bowl is always empty 

If it breathes if it’s lung 

If a horse can rise from the ashes

Saul was a sailor on the boat to Damascus 

He did not know what he was 

Paul turned to a voice it rose up from the waves 

It chained his boat to the darkness

A man finds ash & he makes it a man 

A horse finds ash in a horse 

It lifts us it holds us it breaks us again 

Scatter him into the harbor

Animated video for the last verse available at The Washington Post.

Cartoon Physics, part 1
--Nick Flynn 

Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding, 
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies  

swallowed by galaxies, whole  

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning  

the rules of cartoon animation,  

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it. 
Anyone else who tries  

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks, 
ships going down—earthbound, tangible  

disasters, arenas  

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships  

have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump  

you will be saved. A child  

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus, 
& drives across a city of sand. She knows  

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn  

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall  

until he notices his mistake.

[ Shiny Stockings ; Avishai Cohen ]

b- Ben Street
d- Johnathan Blake
t- Avishai Cohen

Original by Frank Foster.

Dog Music
--Paul Zimmer 

Amongst dogs are listeners and singers.
My big dog sang with me so purely,
puckering her ruffled lips into an O,
beginning with small, swallowing sounds
like Coltrane musing, then rising to power
and resonance, gulping air to continue—
her passion and sense of flawless form—
singing not with me, but for the art of dogs.
We joined in many fine songs—"Stardust,"
"Naima," "The Trout," "My Rosary," "Perdido."
She was a great master and died young,
leaving me with unrelieved grief,
her talents known to only a few. 

Now I have a small dog who does not sing,
but listens with discernment, requiring
skill and spirit in my falsetto voice.
I sing her name and words of love
andante, con brio, vivace, adagio.
Sometimes she is so moved she turns
to place a paw across her snout,
closes her eyes, sighing like a girl
I held and danced with years ago. 

But I am a pretender to dog music.
The true strains rise only from
the rich, red chambers of a canine heart,
these melodies best when the moon is up,
listeners and singers together or
apart, beyond friendship and anger,
far from any human imposter—
ballads of long nights lifting
to starlight, songs of bones, turds,
conquests, hunts, smells, rankings,
things settled long before our birth.