Category: poetry

The Darkling Thrush
BY THOMAS HARDY
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Life powers consciousness and unmakes it.

Here I am, sleeping again, but I don’t know that. An entire world crawls into my skull and spectates, and somehow that world is me. Unconscious for whatever registers dreams, I sleep with a heaviness that obliterates care and hangs a sheet over an ugly view. The drowned city dreamscapes of my childhood have given way to a glacial blue crevasse into which I fall each night; Del Toro and such? – these terrors cannot find me.

My griefs and wounds depart. I waken in a world where my eyes are so dry I’m momentarily disoriented, then I enact Warren Zevon’s plan and start to cry. My griefs and wounds settle back in my flesh. Break time is over.

How does it happen? To travel galaxies in flight and perspective, and never move; to be snoring for most of it.

The cat is sleeping on the couch. Ears flick, paws twitch. Someone’s in there, dreaming.

Here I am, on the phone with my mother. She is sad with the normal sets of woes plus the indignity of current ‘lurgy. My job is to cheer her up without making her laugh. She’s coughing as a new career. Laughter turns into a long stretch of wheezing irritated pain and a claim that this has gone on for too long. To maintain this conversation I am picturing my mother in her den, surrounded by books and papers; I am leaning my mind against hers through our voices. I was a dream she once had. She built a programmatic nest for me, with twigs from Pa, and now I am talking to the woman who taught me how to be conscious.

‘these cogitations still amaze’

Fresh grief bleeds. We wait for the scab
with dullness and anger.
Our losses don’t bear solemn thought
until they’re all we can think about.

This is a pre-grief warm-up.

The liminal glitch
of dark matter
pulls my mind upward

the glitter of stars is a lie

The photons that reach us
are old – no one asks them,
‘Are you tired?’
when they finally get here
and die to bring my nerves
something new

In the subtitles

do sirens do anything but wail
I’d love it if one time
maybe I’d have to be really high
but it would be great if the screen read
‘(sirens yelling)’
since kids these days sound just like sirens

Let’s hear it for ‘(eerie crunching sounds)’;
‘(bones splintering)’ let’s pare down English
into eyesized chunks
and glue it on a soundscape

Pentimento & palimpsest

Need alters how I see things
To smother dullness under the hot metal
of discovery
To give it an edge! Ken this
and the hard slap of wave and sail –
the pause before the engagement

I am the old woman who sings
flushed but calm enough

To force the flatness of a bygone age
up and up in brilliant knotted folds
an origami statue, now
perhaps an ornithopter or an owl

The lines reform

The poem is a queue

It is a brief piece of logic tilted against
the pressing and persistent is of essence

The red of the horse harness
the gold of the headdress
all will be re-sown, re-shown, cut
carefully and edited, my ancestors’ bones
are reclaimed
tamped back into the ground

to grow fruit trees and grandchildren

Seas die and flint is born

Flint is knapped and trees are felled

Islands die and people take to boats

Boats sink and brave souls raid the wreck

It all is written over in the end
Earth, sky and water queue for the last word

You are a little seed. There are millions like you.
You were made to sprout in a mind
unthinking being sprouted; that’s
For other minds to bend. Upwards where upwards
Is defined by gravity, that mundane unknown.

I can hear people laughing in my basement.

I want that to be in the scrapings of trace nutrients
I give you, that you are so loved, and all around me
Are ancestors who can still laugh, and will never cease
Weeping this river of love. Salt water kills plants they say
But there are those that grow in brackish water.
There’s no guarantee
That you will be one of those, little seed.
I too was once a little seed, and I commit you to this world.

I am angry at you, Waffle
I flense your mother
I plunge my hand into the chest of your father
I cause rocks to be dropped on your siblings by rocs
I dismember your shop tools as if they were your children and eat them
Well know that I am displeased, Waffle

For your dictionary is foul, and your sloth is benthic

How is it, Waffle? that your dictionary looks like this
Ordinary words
Little, ordinary words in English
Escape your notice
‘Yep’ is not allowed.
‘Zoot’, as in zoot suit, is not allowed
I can understand that words with ‘s’ and ‘er’ and ‘ed’
Might be passed by, but then YOU ARE NOT CONSISTENT
About how the rules are applied
And I hate you
With that festering hatred that consumes cognition like oxygen
With a scary pH
Like a tailing pond, and I boil you in my mind in that very pond.

I refer to this game.

This poem is dedicated to my Onty Mary.

Yes;
I was wanting to talk to you about the sad enterprise
of writing poetry.

How downcast one is, seeing all the parts for it
enlimpened by advertising
et all the new Malaprops. one toes English
hoping it staggers to its feet once more
as with the pugilists of old, one drunken wager from renown
one butterfly from glory
one stolen kiss in a library doorway closer
to a skald’s dearest wish

A bard gets tired, in a world eating new words
faster than it can understand the effects
of the old ones
neogollyism newspikke and an endless
scrolling déluge of porn, puppies and punditry
it only seems so bad because there’s so much of it
but indeed, it is bad, because there is so much of it

I do not need to search for topics. The particular
presents itself, most insistently sometimes
‘RESPECTFULLY, I AM BEAUTIFUL.”
disrespectfully, I have the attention span of a house fly
and a variable crock of enthusiasms and illnesses
I LOOKED AT YOU AND YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL
But I ain’t writin’ a poem about that.

I am scraping blueberry pie filling from the counter
and that’s quite enough
i do prefer love over sinks
and the enthralment of learning and insight and connection
over the technic that gets us all here
whoosh
in the company of our peers
being the being that watches our species crash into an asteroid

I am saying this way is an old way, and it works for me
those beings who relent and strike the rock that is my forehead
then hoot with laughter as i bleed and swear
they are old beings and they do not have names
they don’t care about pretty moments
sing for your people, they yell, they babble and yell
trying to make themselves heard above my tinnitus

another field of verse – this body will lose this form
i remember holding you and thinking that these bones
inside these bones will be gone some day
you didn’t feel like a skeleton
no poem could contain my situation
and I was forced by my own breath into song

Other pens hover over those long bouts
of helpless, isolated weeping. it’s grim
and effortful and being uncomforted
is the whole point of it

I write poems about death because my friend died
there’s nothing complicated about that
it would be uncanny if I didn’t
poems are not edifices
they are tattoos
I’ve left a space here (pats chest)
for you, for when the word comes back
No.