voiles and tulles

A/N: It's about that time of year again. I'll be posting poetry here throughout the summer. Feel free to comment on one or all, at random or recent.

--

Swahili

In second grade we learned Swahili
a language of barely discernible toes, of animals carved
out of the land like the legend for moons or flood seasons, of rain that pooled in palms
heavy and implying god like inherited prayer beads. We were nine years old
and we were not learning Spanish to be able to understand the Chicano murals
rubbed down in our streets like joyful bathers, or the patriarchs
in the local bank branches with their hats between their knees—
nor the language of broken wine, shrouds, hills crackling with rabbits
and the cities, in turn, with fresh bread. In second grade, we learned
how to say elephant and friend in a language of royal, dozing lions
of months of rain in jungles where the blooms leaned cupped like beautiful faces
in mothers' hands, machetes, bullets long as bosun whistles.
We drew pictures for Cheetah and Goat,
Jambo Rafiki! Haribu! Nina kiu sana!
In the same year our class grew monarch butterflies in a terrarium,
the emerging insect wet and alien, colored for Mexico,
rearing spotted and plump as bible lands—jambo!
Monarchs are our friends, our rafikis, woven
out of grass and thatch, opening shallow and red
as a well dug in the clay.
The bus ride home is hot,
mother laminates the picture I drew depicting a Swahili Baboon.
All summer,
I dream of monarch butterflies
in the milkweed and the yellow land.

emergencies

our fruit is under a cloth of rot
shriveling to hard nodes like a coastal tale involving the sea as a woman and scorn.
i worry about vitamin c, cabin fever, the loss of teeth
like a dream without sex—everyone else loses their heads.
the poet says, “nothing is simple but that which we ignore”
and i question solitude, the love for a child, Tylenol murders
and i give up the mountains, their pine blazing
like the wildness of bodies clothed.

i have never been to a funeral or a wedding—i dread one of them.
the poet says, “as I get older, I fear death less” which is something
i don't believe. the poet is a liar. death roars clanging
through trees like the stallion of a fire engine,
dark sweat and work like a hot storm—
i watch a disaster movie on TV and i wonder
what the poets are doing, their meanwhiles
as cyclones touch down like bare feet on morning stairs
and the hero kills a woman, a death
i am forced to ignore.

i come home in the spring
lochs of plum blossoms, the worry about rain
migrating north and the sunflowers spooling like outfielders, loose
and always in the distance.
i research bees, which are disappearing because of cell phones and radio,
i consider a California without its groaning oranges and the old heart tomatoes
and the pollen traded by wind and sheep wool
like byzantine spice. i love them for their bobby-stings and hives
i open a peach and listen to the delinquent buzz
of the pit, bearing witness.

the poet says, “keep the fruit in a cool place”.
horses escape, are trapped west, the sky is green as rain
after fire that consumes a wind.

risen from the foam

i am the rose bull,
a bull of draped cloth, riparian
as a woman's nakedness. a bull of rustic notions;
of burial, courtship, the bottled isthmuses
and espionage of penmanship.

i am the uzbek bull, the brutal bull,
with horns weary and noble in Davidic posture
as returning fleets. i am under your tree,
where thistles grow through trousers of May.

i am always more beautiful
when i am looking back on myself
and is it my beauty i am reminiscing
or the beauty of bullfighting—namely
the ablution of the cape as it washes the wax song of a city,
his stockinged legs, his vest spangled
as a phalanx's war cry.
this is a co-mingling we both enjoy—it is not the blood i want
it is the feeling of every one of his bones
unfolding to the dark-meated length of condors, and please don't cry
but i do love the truffle of a grunt,
or a moan that could anoint
a king's feet like myrtle.

you will come back as me
you will twist around my leg from my ax.
you are the cold bull, the bull whose strong penis
i cut off, dry, and feed to dogs.
you are the awed bull whose hide
is used to make drums, painted and
threshing a desert.

i am the last spanish fighting bull of Catalonia—
i have finally seen a meadow
the blue flies swarm with
clandestine friction, the mud-wasps are narrow as ladies, and my hooves
suck into the marsh and the milkweed.
i alive in an instant.

scripture

i excavate faith's rhythmic tomb where every tissue
is preserved, if not worse for the where
and i expect to find nautiluses scrolled up like a dead sea's literature
or a new translation for the word light or day in Aramaic,
Hebrew, reformed Egyptian, or a new name of god, gold-gilted
like the recipe for romantic medicine.
there is a big crowd. the panama hats droop with sunlight and the spirit
of archeology—a boy's dream of a notions shop of bones,
skeletons complete, arranged in the longitudinal echo of a body and smelling
of dry camelias, cut braids, promises over
what could be oceans.

i wade into papyrus
along the nile, silt around my belly golden
as the transient movement of a summer's shank-shelled insects,
the hard cider of a familiar humidity maple-taps
the literate grimness of ink from the tips of the farmer's fingers
wicking away into the soil off the stems of their tools, where it belongs
the eiffel ibises
in hot symmetry like stolen art, the grace of a feather's water
proof
the papyrus is in full thicket. there are no words written yet,
though you can hear them when there is a little wind,
rustling like embarrased sisters they know
what they carry.

fertile crescent
of a mother and her careful architecture around
tender, soft-bellied prophets, worn down
in the way of all elliptical, gladiatorial ampitheatres at her son's doubt,
and subsequent excavation—carefully panning
for mustard seeds in the freshets
of broke fish, luckless fishermen, caravelles stranded
like birds at dusk, how sturdy
is that water?

i flee from what i see,
torn at from behind as if by the house of Potiphar.
in my ears at night, there is the ambience
of blood and the broken jaw of a summer yet dedicated.
how will i face them
without metaphor
or the courage to speak plainly?

Well, I only read the first one, and I liked it very much. You had great flow and wording, and everything matched up. Also you had proper grammar, punctuation, and capitalization, the entire thing was well done. I can voice no complaints, good job. Keep Writing!

Looking forward to this.

Kylan wrote:A/N: It's about that time of year again. I'll be posting poetry here throughout the summer. Feel free to comment on one or all, at random or recent.

--

Swahili

In second grade we learned Swahili
a language of barely discernible toes, of animals carved
out of the land like the legend for moons or flood seasons, of rain that pooled in palms
heavy and implying god like inherited prayer beads. We were nine years old
and we were not learning Spanish to be able to understand the Chicano murals
rubbed down in our streets like joyful bathers, or the patriarchs
in the local bank branches with their hats between their knees—
nor the language of broken wine, shrouds, hills crackling with rabbits
and the cities, in turn, with fresh bread. In second grade, we learned
how to say elephant and friend in a language of royal, dozing lions
of months of rain in jungles where the blooms leaned cupped like beautiful faces
in mothers' hands, machetes, bullets long as bosun whistles.
We drew pictures for Cheetah and Goat,
Jambo Rafiki! Haribu! Nina kiu sana!
In the same year our class grew monarch butterflies in a terrarium,
the emerging insect wet and alien, colored for Mexico,
rearing spotted and plump as bible lands—jambo!
Monarchs are our friends, our rafikis, woven
out of grass and thatch, opening shallow and red
as a well dug in the clay.
The bus ride home is hot,
mother laminates the picture I drew depicting a Swahili Baboon.
All summer,
I dream of monarch butterflies
in the milkweed and the yellow land.

emergencies

our fruit is under a cloth of rot
shriveling to hard nodes like a coastal tale involving the sea as a woman and scorn.
i worry about vitamin c, cabin fever, the loss of teeth
like a dream without sex—everyone else loses their heads.
the poet says, “nothing is simple but that which we ignore”
and i question solitude, the love for a child, Tylenol murders
and i give up the mountains, their pine blazing
like the wildness of bodies clothed.

i have never been to a funeral or a wedding—i dread one of them.
the poet says, “as I get older, I fear death less” which is something
i don't believe. the poet is a liar. death roars clanging
through trees like the stallion of a fire engine,
dark sweat and work like a hot storm—
i watch a disaster movie on TV and i wonder
what the poets are doing, their meanwhiles
as cyclones touch down like bare feet on morning stairs
and the hero kills a woman, a death
i am forced to ignore.

i come home in the spring
lochs of plum blossoms, the worry about rain
migrating north and the sunflowers spooling like outfielders, loose
and always in the distance.
i research bees, which are disappearing because of cell phones and radio,
i consider a California without its groaning oranges and the old heart tomatoes
and the pollen traded by wind and sheep wool
like byzantine spice. i love them for their bobby-stings and hives
i open a peach and listen to the delinquent buzz
of the pit, bearing witness.

the poet says, “keep the fruit in a cool place”.
horses escape, are trapped west, the sky is green as rain
after fire that consumes a wind.

risen from the foam

i am the rose bull,
a bull of draped cloth, riparian
as a woman's nakedness. a bull of rustic notions;
of burial, courtship, the bottled isthmuses
and espionage of penmanship.

i am the uzbek bull, the brutal bull,
with horns weary and noble in Davidic posture
as returning fleets. i am under your tree,
where thistles grow through trousers of May.

i am always more beautiful
when i am looking back on myself
and is it my beauty i am reminiscing
or the beauty of bullfighting—namely
the ablution of the cape as it washes the wax song of a city,
his stockinged legs, his vest spangled
as a phalanx's war cry.
this is a co-mingling we both enjoy—it is not the blood i want
it is the feeling of every one of his bones
unfolding to the dark-meated length of condors, and please don't cry
but i do love the truffle of a grunt,
or a moan that could anoint
a king's feet like myrtle.

you will come back as me
you will twist around my leg from my ax.
you are the cold bull, the bull whose strong penis
i cut off, dry, and feed to dogs.
you are the awed bull whose hide
is used to make drums, painted and
threshing a desert.

i am the last spanish fighting bull of Catalonia—
i have finally seen a meadow
the blue flies swarm with
clandestine friction, the mud-wasps are narrow as ladies, and my hooves
suck into the marsh and the milkweed.
i alive in an instant.

scripture

i excavate faith's rhythmic tomb where every tissue
is preserved, if not worse for the where
and i expect to find nautiluses scrolled up like a dead sea's literature
or a new translation for the word light or day in Aramaic,
Hebrew, reformed Egyptian, or a new name of god, gold-gilted
like the recipe for romantic medicine.
there is a big crowd. the panama hats droop with sunlight and the spirit
of archeology—a boy's dream of a notions shop of bones,
skeletons complete, arranged in the longitudinal echo of a body and smelling
of dry camelias, cut braids, promises over
what could be oceans.

i wade into papyrus
along the nile, silt around my belly golden
as the transient movement of a summer's shank-shelled insects,
the hard cider of a familiar humidity maple-taps
the literate grimness of ink from the tips of the farmer's fingers
wicking away into the soil off the stems of their tools, where it belongs
the eiffel ibises
in hot symmetry like stolen art, the grace of a feather's water
proof
the papyrus is in full thicket. there are no words written yet,
though you can hear them when there is a little wind,
rustling like embarrased sisters they know
what they carry.

fertile crescent
of a mother and her careful architecture around
tender, soft-bellied prophets, worn down
in the way of all elliptical, gladiatorial ampitheatres at her son's doubt,
and subsequent excavation—carefully panning
for mustard seeds in the freshets
of broke fish, luckless fishermen, caravelles stranded
like birds at dusk, how sturdy
is that water?

i flee from what i see,
torn at from behind as if by the house of Potiphar.
in my ears at night, there is the ambience
of blood and the broken jaw of a summer yet dedicated.
how will i face them
without metaphor
or the courage to speak plainly?

Check this space later once I let you know.

That first poem was simply incredible.

Pain

Today I learned two things:
that Dr. Jack Kevorkian died early this morning in Michigan
and that there are bison in my state—
a blue creature I thought reserved for the funnel plains
and dove-wood ghost-towns of Wyoming.
They are an animal of great, panning shots over kiln-hot landscapes,
hills rolling like a ship's delivered commands—
sterner and nobler than cows, a creature in turn of hand-made whistles
and the filthiness of feet at the close of the longest day of the year.
I learned that we have bison on a television advertisement for bison meat.
It was like learning that we have an opera house,
or that our state is one of two that allows physician assisted suicide,
which is not glamorous, but infiltrated by the odor of urine
and the frustration from hands that will not cease shaking.
Bison are alive, but this means nothing now that Kevorkian is dead
and there is no more glamor in taking your life because of pain or shame
as old age creeps in like lead from a grand empire of pipes
and aqueducts and water from Sunday basins.
It is not so bad; squeeze my hand if you must.
What you are feeling is the consequence of love.
Do not blame death, although certain authors from Central America
would argue that they are the same. Your blood on sewing errand.
Your bones impossibly long, like a railway's labor across a landscape of bison.
Consider ponderous, endangered species,
story-telling and red as an era of pottery before you consider yourself.
You pick pills from the doctor's scalp, suck them from your dexterous, wonderful digits.
The days are full of the dutch hips of tulips,
the dim morning opened and tinny with song,
like the most expensive card at the pharmacy.
The nights are nurses with accents like mule-beaten towpaths, disappearing into grass and canals.
You have never seen a goddamned bison and you hope to that god
that a bison and a buffalo are different things,
because bison are evidently packaged to meat
while buffalo carry the nickel blood of indians,
and stand on railroad tracks that run through sierras, tableaus, mesas, panoramas,
arresting trains, and like-minded juggernauts.
There is desolation in the knowledge that Dr. Kevorkian died in a hospital bed,
like the rest of us, but, as usual,
there was no harm hoping that true love (etc.) would save us again.

a view from the porch

i am out of the west.
this is my third porch,
made from wood dragged up from the horse creek,
scrubbed to back-hand resins,
dark boar wood that keeps
nails from another decade's carpenter
like wartime habits, sore knees.
i talk with men in the coordinate language
of lumber as women talk
together about infant age in months instead of years
and their fractions.

i am from a grandfather
who described the gulch country beyond his land
by its typical mortal animal.
from this porch, i hated laws—this natural ante-room
where i would watch the half-way homes
of summer storms split-level,
and count miles from strike zones
like the three denials of Christ.
those are short miles.
they are not miles of dust and mended axles,
kilometers, clicks, knots where people are buried
and known by stones
and menace crosses.

i have watched a woman leave from this porch.
i have seven chivalric wounds as I have never been hurt
for anything less than love in some form. it is a marvelous porch
that causes me often to re-consider having a son
so that he could return to it
and see his father propped up
on peach crates and barley
tired from the good moted stalls
of an terse-watered year.

there is an oak copse
beneath my feet and i stand like solomon.
i am the art of pruning,
of bones held back
like sons from the ocean.
i am fooling them all
with the grow-box of flowers
kept well out front as if by the love of a life
who is barefoot in the morning
and whose laugh is healthy
as pitched reap straw.

I liked the first poem, it actually sent shivers down my spine.

The only thing I had a problem with was this line,

as old age creeps in like lead from a grand empire of pipes

only because I was pronouncing lead as if it were lead, like leading something. I was like leading? what? But now I figured it out that it was lead, as in the heavy substance.

Buuut, I did not like the first poem as much as I liked, "Pain".
I really, really liked how you kept the repetition of the bison constant throughout the entire poem, and didn't just drop it off at the beginning. I like how you're able to relate to so many things and have them fit in and make sense. When I read this poem I'm able to think of many stories and things I've learned, such as Michigan where my grandmother lives, and the connection of buffalo to the Indians. There's a feeling to this poem that goes full circle and seems to wrap around everything and keep it contained within the lines of the poem.

Wonderful job. : )
Of course, I think most of your poetry is wonderful, but you probably get that from a lot of people. ^^

degenerative disc disease

motes of hay seed and loose crown
settling through light
like oriental old age.
he lifts a bale of hay and later passes out
against the wire grate of the fire place in the house
from lumbar pain, waking up curled
like the build-up to the supersonics
of a bull-whip.

it is irrigation season again
the sprinkler heads break and guzzle
like drowning turkeys—he ducks beneath
the flowering plum, dark and cupped
as the inner silk of a hat,
and three discs grind on no pad at all
but bone and he walks into twenty years
feet pointing outward a little
hunched so his belly gathers above his belt
and his pants sag.

i realize how little muscle he has on his biceps
and thus the cast of apples from trees.
his hair is the color of pleaded seas
his occupation into the oarlock of cochleas
and the warbeat of the inner ear against cotton
will bring him no poetry
or saltpeter salutes.

but it is a smallness i have recognized
too late to be bitter or justified
i stare at him from across the table
his good face i will carry
his smile in knowing we come from farm blood
and the exquisite pestle
visited upon us as we bend under trees
or lift bales of hay
as if they were broken horses trapping a leg
in a canyon of floods
with no son or daughter nearby.

You are an amazing writer.

pussy-willow

mr. smith's choir class was at the end of the day
our child voices like a chandelier's tragedy across a marble floor
the bosom-tucked facets bending the light
of disparate kitchens, parlors, play rooms, gin cabinets, singing songs like
the cat came back
the peanut vendor—a busty pregón
cleaving the curvatures of ship-ripe fruit like a weighty tropical arachnid—
chicken noodle soup with rice
the 50 states song (O-Hi-O!, and Oregon, the cream of them all)
don't worry, be happy, when half of us could not whistle, or worse, roll our tongues
our rib-slid ditch-jug diaphragms, the smell of spit on skin,
the capillary action of otter-pops,
the embouchure of alfalfa fields behind the school where
a bear was sighted once, rambling like a ruminant's tract,
dark muscled as the noxious tide of blackberries—
fields tongued under the reed of bird flight sporting boulders slouched like bathed fathers
on which you could climb, above the knee-whistling tallgrass
and view your best friend's plot
to raise pigs and sell them for double what he got.
mr. smith with a lisping baton and a vase of ludicrous pussy-willow
and the falsetto voice he would follow us in
like a broken-leathered oldsmobile
the bone-spurred pussy-willow
cotton-tipped as a shameful history
and he loved to say it, or sing it,
and maybe only one or two of us really knew the meaning
of the word fag tagged outside his room
by a pair of twelve year olds—a fag of pussy-willow twigs
bundled up like a January steamed by rice-bottomed soup
or the lyrics, which we snickered at (“peanuts calling to you from a little bag/
big jumbo ones not tiny ones”), of that song
from the carnations of a street of iron trellises,
and women in gowns loose
as colonial tobacco, their eyes high
as a nameless note reached beside the boy who smells
like an older brother, an unwashed dog, the white lactate
of snapped dandelions in a summer without song.

An Innocent Misinterpretation of Young Virgin Being Sodomized By Her Own Chastity, 1954

at the balcony in nothing but a pair of heels—
“spring is an floral pornographic, after all;
a seasonal lifting of the skirts,
if you will”
and i do
she bends one knee forward
the muscles on the thigh ripple
as if the catfish of every man's matrimony
was being thrown back, for sport or size
and the thighs are what draw me
to throw myself around one like a column of a conclave I cannot enter
they are undimpled, with an entreaty of routes
like the neck of a horse—
trunks upon which the fox-holed hip bone rests and glides
and warps with age on the fall down the stairs of nudity.
they are red heels
boosting ses jambes,
emphasizing flesh, cord, harp
the wind sucking at her hair like a snake bite—
she cannot bleed or be beaten
because you cannot see her face, perhaps because she was painted after a lover,
she gazes toward harbors and piers,
eases into her own warmth and smell of bath-salts, publicity, feline mint
like the calm before an honorable suicide.
her thighs multiply, digress
dirigible and rudderless.

Dali is a dream. And so is that poem.

phased out

could josephine baker
dance this new lightbulb, too
in whipped limbs that horrified the "drys"?
—this swig of trapeze glass
could be arms into shoulder blades, or grope worn into a waist,
like oak into wire, curling a summer plait.
dad buys a reckoning's stock
of incandescent light-bulbs in protest,
pale and unstartled as the brains of wolves.
he won't buy fluorescents because they are dimmer
and the government has banned
their void-wired predecessors
and he doesn't like the tone besides and if
he was the sort of man to love a gun
and the burn of saltpeter
in the gulch of thumb and forefinger
and the ingot forensic mash
of a bullet after the rhubarb of an artery
he would buy another, used and unregistered
so that when the fascists take over, he could say with his undestined palms up
there are no guns here, officer.
and so the old cartoon manifestation of revelation
will become antiquated—
when Elmer Fudd
raises a finger to the vision of the consummate rabbit trap
tachycardic with springs,
twinging like peachdown
above his head will appear the Green coil
of a florescent bulb, shining
as a city upon a hill
doffed of its bushel
_____or was that a candle
so that it might give light unto all
who are in the house?

Spoiler

dicot

back when transport was arranged
in the congestion of ram wool,
or in the blood-smug coat of the wild dogs rutting among camel-wet blossoms,
worried by rain into a history of color and crepe.
when a man would brush through the low-hanging otter
of apple flowers, gentle and tactile as the command of a woman
infusing his hair with a toilette of gametes
particular as the smell of a household
in touch with a tradition of recipes, tobaccos, holiness.
back before bees were magnets,
and when plotted combs of their honey were sold at market
sucking like southbound mouths
and flowers waddled with pollen
and the bees let forth great drifts of it when they tucked in,
like the sleeves of a queen when she points west to dispatch navy.
the bees disappear, we adopt Mendel's perverted
facilitation of innocuous sex
with cue-tips. like children,
this summer, the impatiens have no smell,
apples cut breadth-wise have seeds arranged in the shape of an astral omen
we chop down the cottonwood tree due
to its desperate airborne boles.
i pocket seeds and drop them in troughs like depth charges
to search out roots.
i have a particular heel-toe jive to tamp them in,
a satchel cool with livelihoods, which require only soil and water
before they burst into adulthood like messiahs on temple steps
unfurl saplings like stage whispers,
and the eventual blossoms cut for a table
speak the universal language, which is not mathematics or money or music,
but the desire to see one's children fall as far from you as possible
by way of dog, herbivore, or wing.

boy scouts

squaw lake rises a few feet this year,
thus bluer and more prone
to host drownings.
the coldness seizes my chest like a gory premonition
and we make jokes about genitals tightening
like the aim of a slingstone—
i am the only one who notices the heron
slatted in light, and if there is any motion
it is the motion of kingdoms
ascending to domains. i tread water
the other boys do cannonballs
from the oxidized bridge—i try to recall
how many inches to raise the legs
of victims in shock, their heads having been bashed against lake rocks
like the clatter of alp rams.

crawdad collateral,
glo bait—
an eighth badge earned
now he can weave a basket with reeds
supple as an indian name for Great Blue Heron out of Scotia.
they are awarded their names finally,
not as different as their fathers might have been
when they didn't care about the shape of the hook
or the weight of the lead.
marshmallows in bloom
like a quarantine radius, roasted on cottonwood
after knife-throwing practice into the ark hearts
of pine, cedar, practice for a summer of love.

the favored pastime
is to topple dead trees—for four or five boys to push
at the ant-rotted trunk like a juiceless Buick,
rocking back and forth
until the boy is a cycle of his own,
arid, tributary, eroding
loosening the earth like the rubbed shoulders of a boxer
before it careens on its own
without him, or his family, varying only by a few feet
of pine-blue water
by this year, or the next.