Young Writers Society

7.
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
poetry, by which I lived?

-Galway Kinnell, The Bear

Oh, God. If you post poetry here as delicious as this and some of your recent ones, you may find me vaguely incoherent for some time. Doing wonders for my objectivity.

I'm *pretty* sure I'll be stalking this thread all of April.

april 1

desert

stone-ground flowers
caught in the new night
like the sockless creak of
cedar dawn floorboards—
the lyric bone of old hanging-trees,
white and moral with vulture,
and a shale of airborne insects,
drawing bats, hitched out
of the night like row skirts.

you walk horseless
through dry rivers, places of
specter water, old beds, and
a ballad of delineated canyon-stone—
layers tuned like ham radios
to faraway jurassics, mesozoics,
like hearing transatlantic french in your
own goddam living room.

you wonder what it would be like
to saw your arm off out here
with a little minnow of a penknife,
trapped in one of these canyons
pink-halled and split as trout, nerves
snapping and strung
like poppled whipmarks down a back—
to leave a part of yourself here
in an act of ownership,
pleasant-minded stupidity.

your blood sprawls
like seven years of plenty, a brethren
song for coyotes, who are bone-strict and
shambly as panned rivers.
harelip cactus bloom under the crammed
legend of stars and you finally reach
the highway longing between
cousin hills—

you carry yourself out
knowing how hard it is
to cup water like this,
or much blood.

--

Navita: topic61065.html

Good times, good times.

april 2

portrait of the artist, with beard

i could hear
grandfather's blood marbling
off of a cot of wristbones, skin
trustling and stillsweet
like months-dry alfalfa
and on his breath the
old currant wine of stories,
sensitivities.

beard of this
pasture patriarch, as if down
from a mountain, and tangling
white as freshet flumes. he is
mossy with prophecy, parting
through woods, through
aaronic idol calves of finchsong,
his beard rumbling down his chest
like the first horizontal signs
of stampede.

too old to return to homes
or even flowers—the old dominion
dissipated, he moves by streams,
letting them struggle similar
through stones, the way
summer strains through melons.
to name himself beside elm, barbed
wire; to sit before fires again
that snap like bagged rabbits,
hearts fat as canaan grapes,
tousled pulse; to be aware of
outer life like that again:
only in respect to himself.

he feels his own blood
in grand children, like spring
coming to an orchard, their
reunion laughter spilling like
blood-blamed berries from pails,
learning the same old damn sins behind barns,
unaware that the hotness
they feel is not from a closeness
to the sun, in fact.

a castor moon flushes through nearby ponds
like scent through a love-letter—
he stalls from going indoors,
waiting for the sprinklers and
the screen-door of a younger august,
for the good dog back
from fields, ransomed
with ticks.

april 3

dust in a jar

hot ash through wood,
nightjars kettled out of song
like honeysuckles slurped
of bee-proper sweetness—
self-scalping, mountain
like a bear-scored hive,
rutting and blooming across
two skies like blood in the bathroom
sink. helen baffled with sails,
smoke spilling as
effusiveness for plains-distant kin,
her red earth churning and rolling
like the first and freakish
signs of womanhood.

to wake up and find
ash in your coffee, the creek
spooling with it, darkened
like an outer-covenant union.
shoveling the loose carbon
of mule-deer and red-tailed hawk
off your front porch.

pyroclastic
flow off her shoulders
slow as a small-town murder—
aspens in orderly jonestown
repose, heat dancing
a moccasin mouth, the mountain
thumbed open like the jaw
of an adder for poison. there!
another umpqua history of salmon-rhythmed
obsidian, fresh arrowheads for a world
without caribou,
for a new pompeii using pumice
to smooth rough heels.

Sometimes I wonder if there's anything you can't write about.

april 4

farm (i am not a farmer)

paint the trunks white
in the isosceles light of afternoon
and find out why the new peach
tree, shaky and skinny as the
first rape, has leaves that curl
and bubble like bike wounds
cleaned with peroxide. maybe
the co-op can tell what disease,
nevertheless the three good peaches
soft and low as cow-sorrow
and weighing the branches down
to a socked posture.
_____we killed the first rabbit
yesterday grandpa broke its neck like
opening a cold soda, as it kicked
a troublesome engine, and we
felt the small and earnest ghosts
of its last leaky pulses, long body
skinnier now than ever before—
we examined the skull, jaw
delicate as shyness
between year-apart brothers.

or the summer that
every single chicken died, but
we weren't hearbroken until
we found the bazaar bodies
of the chicks in the hutches
and it was silly to be so sad
because they couldn't even
open the screen-door so quietly
and sneak in the back.

the rain snaps across
the heat-green pastures, reset
like a bone, the old barn with
goddam windows where i'm
pretty sure that cows
were once born in, sliding all limbs
like kids down oak-parent banisters,
to lamp-light in the earliest morning
to hands that knew death
just last afternoon at a level stump
at the woodpile sleepy
with an apple-smoked slouch.

Your word choice is just golden. I like everything here. Your lines just have a lot of personality.


Will leave something before the end of the month in the form of a review or something.

Edit: Also, I see your Shins lyrics. yeeeeaahhhhh.

Kylan, I love this:

we killed the first rabbit
yesterday grandpa broke its neck like
opening a cold soda

I want this to be all the poem is about, though. Haha. Though I do love the ax fall at the end.

and this:

the mountain
thumbed open like the jaw
of an adder for poison.

Was just really effective for the tone and the image and everything. I couldn't understand that poem the first three times I read it, but I just did, and now I love it.

Last one you have there is fantastic.

#4 reminds of Seamus Heaney.

april 5

carthage jail

nettled june in carthage,
heat knotting and drowsing
like a lesson in flyfishing
and a sisterhood of birch trees
chapping whitely and sidesaddle
in afternoon, branches
tugged at by finch
like tea gloves.

two brothers, a tenor, and a pharmacist
in jail at the county seat. a poor wayfaring
man of grief sung until their hearts deviate
path-grass-wise like deer-prints, past the
walls and into the knot hills: a hymn
from the tenor until all that was left
of the afternoon was their
pulses against wood, funny in
their non-origin and everyday use
as idioms.

to stand by the window
after your brother is shot his
sloppy head blurred like a rain-warped
poppy, his chest gummed with
a tusk of lead, how
all the life seems to linger at
the cheekbones, dustless and chipping
as windowsills to wait at.
to fire a pepper-box pistol
at the shutters knowing full well
of the rifles bristling up
a br'er base, rosy
with smoke as a porch memory.

birches bending cold, thawed in light
as a sweetwater crossing—
a hymn on his lips,
like geese on the rim of a winter;
he falls into the summery twine of
o lord my god—

there is no fun
in the cider of
fallen bodies, so they
move into birches, away.

april 6

of lebanon

sinai wood,
and cleft upward fungi that cup
like peacepipes also
the quiet xylem of
pushed water.

dandelions that drowse
like trebuchets, the swell of lumber
hot inside as the heat of hay in a dark barn. these
were the great draft tibia
of solomon's house, felled
buttresses, balustrades rearing up
like swallowed gods.

the silence here
in the stall of seeded clouds, the
torn blue of meadow clearings, small cooped-
up colds of spring violets, fireweed
snarling over brush like a chained dog.
they rock on their roots,
squatting and tribe-boned,
looking westward
like a canvas family.

down the coast of oregon, california, not
cedars, surely, but the hot
summer of redwoods. i place
my palm on a trunk where
rhythm grows warm, used, and we lean
close like a kindred unit
around the evening radio
for eastern, prophet voices.

I liked your comment 'you may ignore this one', purely because it's so improbable. You may attach that tag to my entire thread haha, but then, I think I approach this month more cavalier than most. The second and fourth stanzas, above, have something more to them than the others; work with it.

Keep it up.