[ Yellow Irises ; Claude Monet (1917) ]

 

Iris of Life

--Zitkála-Šá

Like tiny drops of crystal rain,

       In every life the moments fall,

To wear away with silent beat,

       The shell of selfishness o’er all.

And every act, not one too small,

       That leaps from out the heart’s pure glow,

Like ray of gold sends forth a light,

       While moments into seasons flow.

Athwart the dome, Eternity,

       To Iris grown resplendent, fly

Bright gleams from every noble deed,

       Till colors with each other vie.

’Tis glimpses of this grand rainbow,

       Where moments with good deeds unite,

That gladden many weary hearts,

       Inspiring them to seek more Light.

 

…Dante’s Commedia, too, begins

not in hell but on earth: that famous dark wood,

not a garden of delights, not at all, but a kind

of garden nevertheless, and that

an arrival in Paradise might well take

the form, as in that remarkable final

shot of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, of

a return to Earth, a real Earth or

a reconstructed Earth, an imagined

garden or a painted garden, or simply

the garden where you were born. The leafy

globe, perhaps, that we see when the triptych

is closed. It is the earth that is ours,

and Dante’s cosmic love, though it moves

the stars that track their paths through the skies,

is a leafy thing, a fleshly thing,

a thing of the soil, a thing that demands

to be lived out on this surface, on the face

of this terrestrial sphere, this local

unheavenly orb, this, our planet,

our neighborhood, if, that is

to say, it is to be lived at all.”

--from “The Garden of Earthly Delights”; Troy Jollimore

 

 

Flowers for the Ear

--Blanca Varela (trans. by Carlos Lara)

flowers everywhere

                and just now I found them by listening

flowers for the ear

slow silent hastened

flowers

for the ear

walking toward the street

being jackhammered apart

I felt the horror of spring

of many flowers

                blooming in the air

and closing

with many echoes

                curly black petals

trailing

                to the edge of the seashore

                newly opened

I know that one of these days

                I will end in the mouth of some flower

 

To The Sea

--Anis Mojgani

Sometimes when you start to ramble

or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble

you will say Well, now I’m rambling

though I don’t think you ever are.

And if you ever are I don’t really care.

And not just because I and everyone really 

at times falls into our own unspooling

—which really I think is a beautiful softness

of being human, trying to show someone else

the color of all our threads, wanting another to know 

everything in us we are trying to to show them—

but in the specific, 

in the specific of you

here in this car that you are driving

and in which I am sitting beside you

with regards to you 

and your specific mouth

parting to give way

to the specific sweetness that is

the water of your voice 

tumbling forth—like I said 

I don’t ever really mind

how much more 

you might keep speaking

as it simply means 

I get to hear you 

speak for longer. 

What was a stream 

now a river.

 

 

[ Plum Trees and Birds ; Lin Fengmian ]

 

SPRING

No shadows here, only mud.

Praise the caked-up trowel, hand rake,

and grass scissor. I want to kiss each crumble

of sunbaked earth as my sons welcome iris

and drunk ants whirl-rush over each juicy peony bud.

After warm rains come the spring peepers shivering

out of the mud and sitting half in, half out of a puddle.

You must know the bees have come early

this year too: I see them visit aster, sweet Williams,

bleeding hearts, and azalea blossoms hardy enough

to not have crisped with the last late frost. Whatever light

bees give off after the last snow, I hold up to you now.

I cannot explain the click-step of beetles.

You are on your own for that. I grew up with patience

for soil and stars. Lace and pyrite. I believe

in an underworld littered with gems.

In another life, I have to. Sometimes I lose track

of all the bees and their singing.

You thought I said stinging.

— AN

Maybe you’re right: let us stop explaining.

I know those ants too — soon

they’ll slurp caves into the handful of apples

that come on the pipsqueak tree out back,

or scurry dizzy on the sugar

glazing the sweetest bean I’ve ever tasted,

the beans themselves tonguing

through the spent cherry bush.

Terrified as I am — and I am —

the bumblebees furrow the pursed

and purple lips of false indigo

for the dusty blush

and I want to go make a hallelujah

of my own simple body. Not to mention

the cup plants just coming up out back

can hold mouthfuls of wet

despite the months-long drought.

All is never lost.

Some of what remains

of my father swims amidst the breathing

roots of the plum tree. You could almost

see him look out from the leaves’ stomata

in spring, or his fingerprints pressed into

the delicate whorls of the young bark.

And when the tree makes its first

fruit next year, or the next,

it won’t only be in dreams

he’s back. I think I too will be

so lucky some day. Some day,

I think, so too will you be.

— RG

--from Letters from Two Gardens, Ross Gay and Join Aimee 

 

Sorrow Is Not My Name

--Ross Gay

No matter the pull toward brink. No

matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.

There is a time for everything. Look,

just this morning a vulture

nodded his red, grizzled head at me,

and I looked at him, admiring

the sickle of his beak.

Then the wind kicked up, and,

after arranging that good suit of feathers

he up and took off.

Just like that. And to boot,

there are, on this planet alone, something like two

million naturally occurring sweet things,

some with names so generous as to kick

the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,

stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks

at the market. Think of that. The long night,

the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me

on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.

But look; my niece is running through a field

calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel

and at the end of my block is a basketball court.

I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

 

Opera Singer

--Ross Gay

Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief 

that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil 

dragging from my neck as I swim 

through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,

which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry 

snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion 

worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say: 

I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means. 

 

And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café, 

and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket 

as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No, 

I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness 

in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise 

when my self-absorption gets usurped 

by the sound of opera streaming from an open window, 

and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl, 

and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the 

delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue 

which means a language more beautiful than my own, 

and I don’t recognize the song 

though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s 

breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me 

two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch 

leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face, 

staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee 

and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention 

the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers, 

some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers 

and training wheels and nearly trampling me 

when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress 

blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting

.....the doorway 

and friends, it is not too much to say 

it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea 

and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles 

of love and every name of the unborn and dead 

from this abuelita only glancing at me 

before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby 

and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding 

makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here 

and tell you I said thank you.

[ Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass ; Vincent van Gogh ]

 

Almond Blossom

--Gerald Locklin

if you don’t look closely at

the rings of the branches,

it could be by anyone.

well, anyone who was among

the greatest painters of the

century: matisse, perhaps.

anyone who had studied

prints from the japanese.

anyone who loved light,

and living things.

anyone who believed in

the rebirth of nature,

the seasons of existence,

the blossoming of the creative.

anyone who had

absorbed the centuries,

had mastered his techniques

and from whose eyes

the scales had fallen.

Gerald Locklin: “I turn 60 in 2001, and most of my time is taken up teaching, writing, corresponding, swimming laps, or walking the dog. I think it’s probably a bad idea for poets to aspire to be interesting. Simplify, simplify!”

 

Toad Dies and Goes to Heaven

        In memory of Gerald Locklin (1941-2021)

--Clint Margrave

Nobody is more surprised than he is.

First of all, Toad doesn't believe in heaven,

and secondly, even if he did,

he never expected to visit.

In fact, he's minorly disappointed.

Has he failed to achieve the properly

debauched life he so often courted?

But the food tastes good.

And you can drink all the frothy beer you want

and never have to go the bathroom.

The salads are made just the way he likes them too,

with lots of crunchy iceberg lettuce

and a good Roquefort dressing.

(But who is he kidding?

Nobody eats salads here.)

At least there aren't any pearly gates,

or saints with haloes,

just a dive bar with a few pretty angels.

They even have a poetry night!

And though the audience is dead

and the open mic literally goes on forever,

this time it isn't annoying,

but filled with names like Dante and Homer

and Shakespeare and Szymborska...

"Hello Toad," says his old pal Bukowski,

who approaches the bar and pulls up a stool.

"Good to see you again, Hank," says Toad,

as they clink their glasses and take a drink,

not to their health, but ours.

 

 

Timing is Everything

--Gerald Locklin

the horoscope this morning

really put me on my guard,

sent the adrenalin coursing

through my veins,

as it predicted a crucial confrontation

that would require all the will and

ingenuity that i could muster …

until i remembered i was looking at

a week-old student newspaper.

[ It Happened Tomorrow ; Valerie Jaudon (2004) ]

 

The Triumph of Song

--Rowan Ricardo Phillips

I mean, the only zone I think I might

Know, and by ‘know’ I mean ‘this thing hasn’t

Quite killed me yet’ is the triumph of song.

All my poems mean that, I think, really —

This is the edge of my observable

Universe: I can’t see what does not sing,

Or what I have not coaxed notes from out of

Thin air. Like the first time I must have heard

Strawberry Fields Forever. I was twelve

And cupped the soft black sponges to my ears

While sitting cross-legged on a friend’s twin bed

As the janky copy of the cassette

Copied over my memory of where

I was, with whom I was, and even who

I was. All I remember is the song,

All that confident lack of confidence,

Which is what making art is really like.

The dark blood zoning forward and backward

In the brain, the heart like grass in a bowl,

And the burning horizon’s sharp swagger

All of it part physics, part faith, part void.

 

Mirror for the Mirror

--Rowan Ricardo Phillips

This night sky won’t always have a meaning,

Won’t always mean something it’s meant before,

For if it did it would always be but

Merest meaning, and how then would I know

Myself from any other self, my self

Beached at the sea of my soul, as it turns

To sing back to this star-seized evening that’s

Unreeling and unreals like Paradise?

 

The Beatitudes of Malibu

--Rowan Ricardo Phillips

i

Walking across the PCH, we looked

Up and saw, big as the butt of a pen,

Jupiter, fat with light and unheighted.

I looked back at the waiting traffic stalled

At the seaside road’s salt-rimmed traffic lights

As they swayed to the Pacific’s not-quite-

Anapestic song of sea and air — 

The raw and sudden crick of crickets — 

The cars, suddenly silent as cows — 

And blue Malibu blackening like a bee.

ii

A poem is a view of the Pacific

And the Pacific, and the Pacific

Taking in its view of the Pacific,

And the Pacific as the Pacific

(Just like that: as though there’s no Pacific)

Ends. A poem is the palm of the ocean,

Closing. It or she or he is merely,

Which means it or she or he is a mar.

But a mar made up of  temperament and

Tempo — the red weather in the heart.

iii

I’m about to get this all wrong, I know:

Santa Monica behind me, the ocean

To my left, Jupiter high above me,

And Malibu somewhere in my mind, flecked

With mist and dusk and Dylan and strange grays

In the sunsets that stripe the seaside hills

Like the tricolor of a country made

Of  beauty, the dream of beauty, and smog.

Sadly, in my mind it’s always snowing;

Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here.

iv

Along the thin pedestrian passage

Beside the PCH, just off Sunset,

Mel Gibson chants of beginnings and ends

And lies and facts — Jews and Blacks being

Both the lies and facts. His face is ruddy

Like bruschetta. He storms at the police

Because fuck them. He’s wearing his T-shirt

Like a toga. He schools them his toga

Wisdom from toga times. He offers them

His toga. They offer him a ride — .

v

Arun’s car carried us like metaphor

In a poem or painting; moving meaning;

Moving the current; being the current;

The terse tug of tides: still the great glamour;

Still, even as we speed on the 110,

The music in my head, the Jupiter

Of the mind’s unstemmed Pacific Ocean

As it unfurls in the vapor trail of

Malibu, fragrant in far-off fluorescents,

Like a nocturnal flower calling you.

vi

Then, Downtown LA and LA Live surged

Up, like marginalia on a newly

Turned page, spangled with bland suggestions,

Fiery accusations of its own

Brilliance that descend into indifference.

We speed nearer and it grows. We veer and

It grows. We park and it grows. Close your eyes.

Now look. And it has grown. Yo la quiero.

But I should know better, if just because

You can smell the injustice in the air.

vii

The Pacific encircles me. Slowly.

As though it doesn’t trust me. Or, better

Said, I only understand it this way:

By feeling like a stranger at its blue

Door. The poet with the sea stuck in his

Enjambments can’t call out to some Cathay

As though some Cathay exists and be glad.

No, the differences we have should be felt

And made, through that feeling, an eclipsed lack;

A power to take in what you can’t take back.

viii

The old hocus of this ocean’s focus

On pulling its waves over the soft surf

Like a skin pulled down tight over the top

Of a drum was, to her, a new hocus.

We stared out with her, out toward Hokusai’s

Tiny boats and rising lace-fringed sea swells

No chunk of haiku could think to charter.

It was like the eighth day of creation

In the eighth line of a poem — she sang,

She didn’t sing, the sea sang, then stopped.

 

[ Spring Love ; Beatriz Milhazes ]

 

Typography

--Ardengo Soffici

Poetry shining summit of the universe

Even your mortal attire is charming

Ancient things of flesh and sinew

Living beings with their earthly fate

Shadows now nailed down with a clear and fixed sign

Typefaces transubstantiation of infinite mysteries

Alphabets letters dentelles batistes bows

Ornaments of the naked idea

Je m’abîme dans ce fouillis de tiédeurs charnelles

I breathe the rich odors of your secrets

I kiss your golden scarves that are but a small part of your great body

Old cosmopolitan satyr of future mythologies

Voilà I possess you completely

 

Mysteries mysteries on sale cheap

Paid for with 24 hours of youth per day

Atelier ateliers

Compass roses

Joy beauty miseries

Dissolved in the depths of harmonies

In the cubic vat minute by minute

Just open the crystal vials and magic spells will smother you

Pull aside the curtain

Facing the street that rises and falls

The twilight that festers in the white basin

Smokestacks towers chimneys stars

Cities of Europe deep in the night

And trains speeding through lit up like theaters trains laden with nostalgia

All the earth comes to rest

Halcyon bird tired of flying

Unfurled like a flag over our hearts

--from Atelier, Ardengo Soffici

Rainbow

--Ardengo Soffici (trans. by Olivia E. Sears)

Dip 7 brushes into your heart that was 36 years old yesterday April 7th

And touch up that face worn down by the passing seasons

You’ve ridden life like a nickel-plated carousel mermaid

Whirling

From city to city from philosophy to frenzy

From love to passion from royalty to poverty

There isn’t a church movie theater newsroom or bar that you don’t know

You’ve slept in every family’s bed

There should be a carnival

Of all the sorrows

Forgotten along with umbrellas in the cafés of Europe

Gone in a cloud of smoke with handkerchiefs in the sleeping cars of express trains

heading north or south

Countries hours

There are voices that follow you everywhere like the moon or a dog

But also the whistle of a smokestack

That mixes up the colors of the morning

And of dreams

No, you won’t forget the fragrance of certain nights drowned in armpits of topaz

These cold narcissus that I keep on the table by the inkwell

Were painted on the walls of Room 19 of the Hôtel des Anglais in Rouen

A train was rambling along the quay late at night

Beneath our window

Beheading the reflections of multicolored lanterns

Among casks of Sicilian wine

And the Seine was a garden of blazing flags

There is no more time

Space

Is a twilight worm coiled in a drop of phosphorus

Everything is present

Just as in 1902 you’re in a garret in Paris

Sheltered by 35 square centimeters of sky

Melting across the glass of the skylight

La Ville offers you again each morning

The flowering bouquet of Square de Cluny

From Boulevard Saint-Germain bursting with trams and buses

The evening arrives with the hoarse cry of the paperboy

On Rue de la Harpe

Pari-cûrses             L’Intransigeant              La Presse

The shoe store Chaussures Raoul still rivals the stars

And I rub my hands stained with the liquors of sunset

Like that time I thought about suicide near Rigoletto’s house

Yes my friend

The fortunate man knows how to live with uncertainty like the flowers

Look at that gentleman strolling past

As he lights his cigar proud of his manly vigor

Restored by the page-four spreads in the daily papers

Or that cavalryman galloping through the indigo darkness of his barracks

A sprig of lilac between his teeth

Eternity shines in the flight of a housefly

Place the colors of your eyes side by side

And draw your own arc

History is as fleeting as a nod at the train station

And the tricolor automobile of the sun keeps breaking its own record pointlessly amid the used machinery of the cosmos

You remember along with a kiss planted in darkness

The window of a German bookshop in Avenue de l’Opéra

And the goat grazing on yellow broom

Among the ruined stairs of the palace of Darius at Persepolis

You need only look around

And write as you dream

To revive the face of our joy

I remember all the climates that caressed my skin like a lover

All the countries and cultures

Shining on my desire

Snows

Yellow seas

Gongs

Caravans

Carmine of Bombay burnt gold of Iran

Whose hieroglyph I carry on this black wing

Sunflower soul the phenomenon converges here in the center of this dance

But the most beautiful song is still that of the naked senses

Silence music of the south

Here and in the world circular poetry

Today marries always

In the crown of the rising rainbow

I sit at my table and I smoke and stare

A young leaf is trilling in the garden before me

White doves flutter through the air like love letters thrown from the window

I know the symbol the code the electrical

Connection

The attraction of faraway things

But we’ll need fruit and lights and crowds

To festoon this Easter with miracles

The day sinks into the scarlet basin of summer

And there are no more words

For that bridge of fire and jewels

Youth you’ll pass like the end of every play

Tant pis           Never mind        I’ll make myself a magnificent suit out of old posters

[ My Room Has Two Doors; Kay Sage (1939) ]

 

My Soul

--Stevie Smith

In the flame of the flickering fire   

The sins of my soul are few

And the thoughts in my head are the thoughts of a bed   

With a solitary view.

But the eye of eternal consciousness   

Must blink as a bat blinks bright

Or ever the thoughts in my head be stilled

On the brink of eternal night.

Oh feed to the golden fish his egg

Where he floats in his captive bowl,

To the cat his kind from the womb born blind,   

And to the Lord my soul.

 

 

Conviction (II)

--Stevie Smith

I walked abroad in Easter Park,

I heard the wild dog's distant bark,

I knew my Lord was risen again, -

Wild dog, wild dog, you bark in vain.

 

The Airy Christ

--Stevie Smith

After reading Dr Rieu’s translation of St Mark’s Gospel.

Who is this that comes in splendour, coming from the blazing East?

This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ.

Airy, in an airy manner in an airy parkland walking,   

Others take him by the hand, lead him, do the talking.

But the Form, the airy One, frowns an airy frown,

What they say he knows must be, but he looks aloofly down,

Looks aloofly at his feet, looks aloofly at his hands,

Knows they must, as prophets say, nailèd be to wooden bands.

As he knows the words he sings, that he sings so happily   

Must be changed to working laws, yet sings he ceaselessly.

Those who truly hear the voice, the words, the happy song,   

Never shall need working laws to keep from doing wrong.

Deaf men will pretend sometimes they hear the song, the words,   

And make excuse to sin extremely; this will be absurd.

Heed it not. Whatever foolish men may do the song is cried   

For those who hear, and the sweet singer does not care that he was crucified.

For he does not wish that men should love him more than anything

Because he died; he only wishes they would hear him sing.

 [ Variables with Color ; Robert Goodnough ]0

 

Common Flowers

--Michael Joseph Walsh

You can grow some things,

whether you want them or not.

The air that surrounds us here we call music,

the force of which is old, and full of life.

It imagines us here, and finds pleasure in the shape of our wound.

The door is open, and above and about

the common flowers the adventure of prolonging

other logics spreads weakly in two directions.

To this I give myself, and it heals me,

reinfects me with the shape of this place.

I sleep, I form opinions. When it rises to the surface of the mind,

........I greet the sun.

How otherwise should I have devised this dance of omission?

To falter before the building,

to fall over every inch of it.

And thus the music lives

the ghosts wind up the spirit;

shortcuts to pleasure, wounded springs.

But what happens tomorrow will change all that,

like a diamond left out in the cold.

And yet I would, if you wished,

tear a hole in this fabric we've made,

and so distend the earth,

and grow drunk on our non-continuance. The cipher burns

slowly the thing it pleases,

and this is knowing, but like the heart not knowing quite how.

The waves breathe long, and the smell of earth

in the half-shade points to a sex that would be myriad,

and shimmer, and derive from touch

what in stillness will come to pass—

here where the wind blows, and a body lives,

and where the grasses that are not dead

will tell the story of what that means.

 

Little Shields, In Starlight

--Carl Phillips

Maybe there’s no need for us to go anywhere more far than here,

said the dogwood leaves, mistaking speech

for song, to the catalpa leaves, imitating silence. It was like

sex when, push the tenderness to either side of it, it’s

just sex; hardly sex at all . . . Hardly worth mentioning,

except forgetting seems so much a shame, lately, and why

shouldn’t there be records, however small, of our having

felt something without for once having to name it, I know

what my dirt is, as if that were enough, might well

even have to be, to have moved mostly with the best

intentions, at least, before we stopped, that’s

all that happens, I think; we stop moving forever.

 

from Giant Night

--Anne Waldman

Awake in a giant night

is where I am

                   There is a river where my soul,   

hungry as a horse drinks beside me

An hour of immense possibility flies by   

and I do nothing but sit in the present   

which keeps changing moment to moment

How can I tell you my mind is a blanket?

It is an amazing story you won’t believe   

and a beautiful land

where something is always doing in the barns   

especially in autumn

                         Sliding down the hayrick!

By March the sun is lingering and the land turns wet

Brooks grow loud

The eddies fill with green scum   

Crocuses lift their heads to say hello

Soon it is good to be planting

By then the woods are overflowing

with dogwood, redbud, hickory, red and white oaks,   

hazelnut bushes, violets, jacks-in-the-pulpit,   

skunk cabbages, pawpaws and May apples

whose names thrill you because you can name them!

There are quail and rabbits too—but I go on too long

Like the animal, I must stop by the water’s edge   

to have a drink and think things over

 

 

[ The Spring Sun ; Abraham Manievich (1913) ]..