Five Branch Tree
2025-04-02
2025-03-31
--Wallace Stevens
Tired of the old descriptions of the world,
The latest freed man rose at six and sat
On the edge of his bed. He said,
“I suppose there is
A doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just
Escaped from the truth, the morning is color and mist,
Which is enough: the moment’s rain and sea,
The moment’s sun (the strong man vaguely seen),
Overtaking the doctrine of this landscape. Of him
And of his works, I am sure. He bathes in the mist
Like a man without a doctrine. The light he gives—
It is how he gives his light. It is how he shines,
Rising upon the doctors in their beds
And on their beds… .”
And so the freed man said.
It was how the sun came shining into his room:
To be without a description of to be,
For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,
To have the ant of the self changed to an ox
With its organic boomings, to be changed
From a doctor into an ox, before standing up,
To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle
Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun,
Whether it comes directly or from the sun.
It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.
It was being without description, being an ox.
It was the importance of the trees outdoors,
The freshness of the oak-leaves, not so much
That they were oak-leaves, as the way they looked.
It was everything being more real, himself
At the centre of reality, seeing it.
It was everything bulging and blazing and big in itself,
The blue of the rug, the portrait of Vidal,
Qui fait fi des joliesses banales, the chairs.
2025-03-29
--Wallace Stevens
Through centuries he lived in poverty.
God only was his only elegance.
Then generation by generation he grew
Stronger and freer, a little better off.
He lived each life because, if it was bad,
He said a good life would be possible.
At last the good life came, good sleep, bright fruit,
And Lazarus betrayed him to the rest,
Who killed him, sticking feathers in his flesh
To mock him. They placed with him in his grave
Sour wine to warn him, an empty book to read;
And over it they set a jagged sign,
Epitaphium to his death, which read,
The Good Man Has No Shape, as if they knew.
2025-03-27
--Wallace Stevens
Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain
And bound by a sound which does not change,
Except that it begins and ends,
Begins again and ends again—
Rain without change within or from
Without. In this place and in this time
And in this sound, which do not change,
In which the rain is all one thing,
In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair
Is the clear-point of an edifice,
Forced up from nothing, evening’s chair,
Blue-strutted curule, true–unreal,
The centre of transformations that
Transform for transformation’s self,
In a glitter that is a life, a gold
That is a being, a will, a fate.
2025-03-25
2025-03-23
--James Richardson
Consider the palms. They are faces,
eyes closed, their five spread fingers
soft exclamations, sadness or surprise.
They have smile lines, sorrow lines, like faces.
Like faces, they are hard to read.
Somehow the palms, though they have held my life
piece by piece, seem young and pale.
So much has touched them, nothing has remained.
They are innocent, maybe, though they guess
they have a darker side that they cannot grasp.
The backs of my hands, indeed, are so different
that sometimes I think they are not mine,
shadowy from the sun, all bones and strain,
but time on my hands, blood on my hands—
for such things I have never blamed my hands.
One hand writes. Sometimes it writes a reminder
on the other hand, which knows it will never write,
though it has learned, in secret, how to type.
That is sad, perhaps, but the dominant hand is sadder,
with its fear that it will never, not really, be written on.
They are like an old couple at home. All day,
each knows exactly where the other is.
They must speak, though how is a mystery,
so rarely do they touch, so briefly come together,
now and then to wash, maybe in prayer.
I consider my hands, palms up. Empty, I say,
though it is exactly then that they are weighing
not a particular stone or loaf I have chosen
but everything, everything, the whole tall world,
finding it light, finding it light as air.
2025-03-22
2025-03-19
--James RichardsonSomeone breaks down. There is reasonafter reason after reason.Some patient is cured, and dies of the cure.Forms are submitted: natural causes.They rise through the purest officeslike scentless prayers We believe.Someone’s frustration sweeps his desk --papers fly out. In due course,they touch the floor, and alreadytroops move. From the bleeding frontfevers spread, and opportunists like fevers,as evolution says they must.Houses are emptied, farms strippedand Death, chainsmoking commandant,lights one child off another. Pardon: old story.What causes are not natural?Who can object to partly cloudy?Who disagrees with the news as usual?You're right, the world has no need for imagination.It makes sense, it makes so much sense.
2025-03-16
--Yu Xuanji (b 843 - executed 863)(trans. Peter Levitt & Rebecca Nie)A branch of bay laurelblends in elegance with dark mist,alongside rivers, ten thousand peach treesblossom red in the rain.For now, let’s get drunk with celebratory cups of wineand leave your sad gazing behind—from ancient times until now,sorrow and joy have been just the same.
2025-03-14
----Yu Xuanji (b 843 - executed 863)(trans. Leonard Ng)Morning after morning I say goodbye,crying into my gilded hairpin;the willow twigs have been plucked barein the spring breeze and mist.How I wish West mountaindidn’t have any trees.Then I’d be spared these tears,endlessly falling.
2025-03-12
--Yu Xuanji (b 843 - executed 863)(trans. Peter Levitt & Rebecca Nie)Flexible, without its own form,water settles into what holds it.Clouds arise from no-mind,but they are willing to return.Spring winds spread melancholyover the river as the sun descends—separated from her companions,a wild duck flies alone.
2025-03-10
2025-03-02
2025-02-28
Another Snow ManAll the frozen molecules collectingupon absence are winter wordsand those without much comfortstill contain their solace, presenceslowly abounding as snowflakesdropping in settlement, thoughtupon branches while the moon,where it can, highlights empiricalsufferance within each element,what is right here while carrying onwith a rather particular enduranceof ice, just when it comes to this.
2025-02-26
2025-02-24
2025-02-22
--Bret Shepard
The mood of the oven—
plastic is more than plastic
when it burns. Did we design this
room to smell of plastic? The open
floor-plan circles us into each other.
And who cares.
And who suffocates. Fields suffocate
as snowfall pulls our bodies outside.
It shouldn't be shameful to breathe.
Wheat stubble crunches as feet
sink into snow. The ground pulls us.
For as long as I can remember,
the ground has been pulling us,
as if iron laced our bones, promising
last breaths, a few
last clear breaths.
2025-02-20
--Bret Shepard
Some caribou take place with late hunger. If death is the mind
out of season, you hunt the sound of what it was
in the melt-filled space outside. You hear it beneath the lowest
tempo of need. You find it in your nature. Lost
on the trails of others, lost in reflection
most nights—memories like the melt that was once ice. What is
lost outside moves without you. The sound is one track playing
hours of your inside voice.
2025-02-18
2025-02-16
--Cornelius Eady
My friends,
As it has been proven in the laboratory,
An empty pair of dance shoes
Will sit on the floor like a wart
Until it is given a reason to move.
Those of us who study inertia
(Those of us covered with wild hair and sleep)
Can state this without fear:
The energy in a pair of shoes at rest
Is about the same as that of a clown
Knocked flat by a sandbag.
This you can tell your friends with certainty:
A clown, flat on his back,
Is a lot like an empty pair of
dancing shoes.
An empty pair of dancing shoes
Is also a lot like a leaf
Pressed in a book.
And now you know a simple truth:
A leaf pressed in, say, The Colossus
by Sylvia Plath,
Is no different from an empty pair of dance shoes
Even if those shoes are in the middle of the Stardust Ballroom
With all the lights on, and hot music shakes the windows
up and down the block.
This is the secret of inertia:
The shoes run on their own sense of the world.
They are in sympathy with the rock the kid skips
over the lake
After it settles to the mud.
Not with the ripples,
But with the rock.
A practical and personal application of inertia
Can be found in the question:
Whose Turn Is It
To Take Out The Garbage?
An empty pair of dance shoes
Is a lot like the answer to this question,
As well as book-length poems
Set in the Midwest.
To sum up:
An empty pair of dance shoes
Is a lot like the sand the 98-pound weakling
brushes from his cheeks
As the bully tows away his girlfriend.
Later,
When he spies the coupon at the back of the comic book,
He is about to act upon a different set of scientific principles.
He is ready to dance.
2025-02-14
--Cornelius EadyNew York growsSlimmerIn his absence.I supposeYou could also title this pictureOf Miles, his leatherySquint, the graceIn his fingers a sliver of the stuffYou can’t get anymore,As the rest of us wonder:What was the nameOf the driverOf that truck? And the restOf us sigh:Death is one hellOf a pickpocket.
2025-02-12
--Cornelius EadyYour body, hard vowelsIn a soft dress, is still.What you can't knowis that after you diedAll the black poetsIn New York CityTook a deep breath,And breathed you out;Dark corners of small clubs,The silence you left twitchingOn the floors of the gigsYou turned your back on,The balled-up fists of notesFlung, angry from a keyboard.You won't be able to hear usTry to etch what roseOff your eyes, from your throat.Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,Through our dark fingertips.We drum restWe drum thank youWe drum stay.
2025-02-10
2025-02-08
--Maggie SmithAll we ever talk of is light—let there be light, there was light then,good light—but what I considerdawn is darker than all that.So many hours between the dayreceding and what we recognizeas morning, the sun crestinglike a wave that won’t breakover us—as if light were protective,as if no hearts were flayed,no bodies broken on a daylike today. In any film,the sunrise tells us everythingwill be all right. Danger wouldn’tdare show up now, draggingits shadow across the screen.We talk so much of light, pleaselet me speak on behalfof the good dark. Let ustalk more of how darkthe beginning of a day is.
2025-02-06
--Maggie Smith
In what I think is a dream,
I look at some manifestation of the past
& say, I know you’re not real. Someone has to.
As most dream-things do, the past
shapeshifts, reconstitutes itself with new
eyes & a new haircut—the past
made over—& then I forget its name.
I forget what I’m doing with the past.
What is that joke about the river?
It’s not really a joke, no more than the past
is really past—the one about water never
being the same water. As it flows past,
the river’s current—now that’s a joke—
is always flowing now, now, now. Past
seven, when I wake from what I think
is a dream—a dream where I tell the past
the truth about itself—it is the present
as it always is. There is no past.
2025-02-04
--Maggie Smith
my daughter says. Unless the car could float.
Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean
turned to ice and promised not to crack.
Unless Greenland floated over here,
having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row
our country there. Our whole continent
would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless
we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw
could we use for that? What kind of oars
could deliver one country to another?
She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland
if it’s not green? Why is Iceland called
Iceland if it’s greener than Greenland?
Unless it’s a trick, a lie: the name Greenland
is an ad for Greenland. Who would go
promised nothing but ice? Who would cut
her home to pieces and row away for that?
2025-02-02
2025-01-31
2025-01-29
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