Published June 11, 2011
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?
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141,298 Literary Works • 674,338 Reviews
hosanna
no one blesses anymore—
it is difficult to find a person willing
to stretch forth their hand
as if to a surface they surmise to be hot
and pronounce words
of validation, robe, and canon as confidently
as they might clarify the spelling
of their own name—
to write poetry about the ineffable blue
of a passerine's gobbled eggshell,
a color that is the crackling smokiness
of a gunshot's echo between peaks.
to permit the hand of your daughter,
to love your son's man
to be weak-kneed at canyons,
vehement rivers,
the kyrie of lightning,
draining through branches
like the discovery of a bloodclot.
i cannot blaspheme
over my own grandson's head,
my fingers knotted up in his curls
like a blind jacob
stalled in goat's hair.
my petition is that of a patriarch,
a ruler of cataracts, a cowhand
of confluences. my birthright
that of a man who has loved two women,
fought a war, stormed the world
like a boy's flathead search
for radio's function.
i name it good
i make my sign
the galaxy cavorts
swirls around my touch
like cub games.
i may, god forbid, be the last man to bless ranges,
sun-leathered skin, lamp's piety,
womb's weather,
the lion's share,
all the hopeless, hideous notions.
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FREE HORSES
52 of them
to be cut down like mast lanterns
to be run into classroom paste
to have a hand placed on the base of their neck
as if seeking the tacklebox of tied pulse
between bone & lather
really, actually, to steady the creature
before it crumples under a sound it was never broke of—
thoroughbreds, jaws big as
the sound of their own coming,
the blazonry of their hearts,
their gentleman dead & the son
wanting nothing to do with them
will send them to sugarcreek
to be a gulley of bones
led to water, made to drink
caused to return to soil exhausted of blood
& be stirred up in some saga's dustbowl
by later west-urged herds.
it used to be difficult
to kill such a large animal who'd never
gored or shredded or stung anybody—
it used to be a thing
to make a man take a seat on a boulder
& bow his head over as if what was passing
was more than a barrel's terror
but a soul alien to stalls, guns, drunk weight; native
to the soft, pungent metal of hills.
they are not old, either, some in foal, some called
yearlings, as if the cherished beasts of a calendar.
there are 52 of them.
this is your chance to hold the neck of a blaze
to slip a bit in the mouth of a prairie
to ride sidesaddle if you must
these mounts once threading down from the orient
where the gunpowder
came from too.
mother tongue
spoken over the thick corn
of the day's tamales,
the tragicomedies
of family swoons, the names of south-certain cities
from the old country
that itinerant grandfather
would produce with relish like the huffed spice
of a cigar's craft from memory's desk-deep humidor.
it is the language that your father
would love you in—a tongue of horns and tines
a tongue to call dogs or urge out jersey #42,
rapidity to stun school friends like boat-side fish,
language for the impossible moments when the brain
rides only one monorail back to a time
when every charisma was astounding.
you keep it for returns, curses, encounters with God—
a dye, a slant, a tongue loosened
like the knot in coarse hair
to accommodate the day.
a charming,
light-footed illiteracy:
to clamber among some other home's words
unconcerned of their middle-centuries or consul prefixes,
like june-dark boys shrieking over the boulders
of many soundless, uninterpreted millennia—
these cedillas and strains
and ligatures;
the times when all re-routings
and translations upbraid you and you react only
with a pre-babel gesture or sob.
fight or flight
to be watched by deer
is to be warmed by velum rubbed from antlers.
i mirror stillness, and also streams
cleaving through rock
like lodes, claims. the doe
is soft as lead—i, too, could leap at any moment
snare into underbrush, bolted back
like a sour elixir.
all afternoon, i hunt bucks
to weed the forest of excess semen.
the does are like the gray capes
of fleeing maidens.
antlers prong, pry, there is a drizzle
of nodular shit—i am close.
i remember the venison yarns of whittling men,
and the gut action
to shape sticks into javelins, pikes, rupturing implements
with your leatherman or bowie
or swiss army.
as hot oil over medieval walls
so comes adrenaline.
how many bears could i clatter with
how many rivers could i ford—
the five point buck suffers from a lifetime
of tics, grinding like cyanide molars,
and wounds that could draw
a slatted tiger from neighbor continent.
every limb feels precious
i am an organism of glass and stud.
they call it hyperarousal—
i am pressed to replenish the earth
in a fugue of blood that i could leave a mile behind
or slip and stumble in
catching the buck from behind at the haunch
all of its bones collapsing
like a storybook closed, the children
already still and glowing
from love and milk and fabled woods.
worm fiddling
sixteen hearts
grunted for, like stile pearls—
i serenade with wooden stake
and iron rub, distract you
from the penitent blandness
of ossific churn, of toothsome ligament
and mineral conquest
a dirt chant pulling up through my blood as yours
taught by father's fathers
in their inscrutable bog witch charm and valley authority.
a way found up
intrepid of tunnels, roots, shelves
like a lover's shortcuts.
i fiddle for stocked lakes,
trout belly pouched
and talcum white as a queen's
second chin; you understand—
a son's first goring
the dumb wideness of the five inch bass
draped for a polaroid, lake water and bud light
boot-rubber cracked
like hermit voice, and at first
dawn's granite pools where mist has gathered
like shades summoned
by spilt blood.
i kneel and grunt, perhaps
this is how the first prayer for manna sounded
in a Florida forest, where my wife
gathers enough for this day and the sabbath
for when fishing season starts,
our rivers
full of dawdling tin Charons
having used their coin for a can of worms.
at night, i grunt along
her stakes and stumps,
knotted neath nodes, hook and gore
her eight-inch moans
feeding into deeps
what once ate at a king's bones,
and poor yorick's skull,
and a panhandle charmer of sixteen hearts
at a time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK-Oo7NwPiQ
Hey Kylyy.
Back from Mowing the Lawn yet?
Haha, my apologies for the delay.
So, let's get going.
I want it closer. "they all rot somewhat" gives the same image with less words and less distance, and still fits with the tone.
Okay, okay I thought I would have more to give you. The following stanzas are perfect. Clear in the image they want to evoke, clear in the directions, clearly brilliant in the way you evoke things like "post-bubble bath", the water still soapy, but flat, and then the steam in the air as you say "roman", "cow-leather sorrow" is soft, cracked, we know how soft and worn that sorrow is.
But, okay, what are we going to do with the last two stanzas?
Seven is almost fine. Seven is images and feelings less clear, more nebulous. Most of them still work. The ones I miss might work for others, but you could keep track if you'd like. I miss hex of razors, but the drop mixed with the three letter word ending in box makes me think box of razors and they clatter across the floor. Outer apple is funny because I remember when you said lower apple. Engorged dick is perfect, because you strike the right balance between elegance and well, you can't help what it is. Then I also kind of miss "mend your grandfather's hand", and the "spot-weld" almost slipped through, but if you could set up some kind of obstacle to make sure the reader lingers there, I think it would be effective to echo through the feeling of that spot weld.
And eight escapes me completely, which really upsets me, because the rest of the poem snuggles inside me perfectly, but I'm not able to grasp it completely. Maybe we can talk about it next time we pad together, but consider revealing a little more there.
Like I said, I'm in love with this one. At first you just think it's a bunch of images, but the VOICE, the speaker gives it a sense of evaluation. If the speaker tells us to do something, it's for a purpose, so as a reader we look deeper into these images for how they would affects us, rather than just passing them as pretty things. Smart choice.
<3
hotline
one. go to the korean market and lift a jackfruit. they will all be rotting somewhat, weeping to be carried, rolling and unappealing as guerrilla hills. the pacing man says, 'sushi, two for five' every forty-five seconds—in your head, it turns into a funny, tabulating tune for flayed sunfish, stoned tuna, real pliant crab.
____
two. sit in a warm, post-bubble bath, fresh as a roman, with the toaster next to you, if you so choose. focus on the warp of your toe-tips. embrace raisin-hood like the old, aided at the toilet by daughters. don't you feel hungrier now that you've been in the water?
____
three. laugh at a tongue stained with local berries. with less effort, watch someone laugh at a tongue stained with local berries, fruitlets picked off of the old highway route west, sun-small, you barely have to chew or swallow, they could drip through veins, drop through eyes, draw a shark's olfactory merely from shape, hue.
____
four. wash your hands in a white basin. dry your hands on a clean towel. they used to make soap from lye and animal lipids and a little crushed lilac. now it comes from aloe, wheat, coconut, stroked spaces, stones stormed for listening.
____
five. realize that everything in the world is speaking to you. the car's buckeye horn outside at the goddamn dog in the street is a cipher for you; allow it to be overhead and decoded. build altars. descend from mountains, break stones at their bases in rage. build an addition to your dining room which is a tile closet with a drain for vomiting, used to clear the stomach between grand, featherless repasts.
____
six. go to war. hold your voice over your head like a musket while crossing a river. feel genuine, cow-leather sorrow for crippled horses that you have to shoot. their skulls break like cool, larder carafes. your blood is a landlocked knot. it is not your father's, your mother's, your susceptible lover's.
____
seven. diffuse constructively. drop the hex of razors. wrap the sallow rope around your elbow, put the stool away. mend your grandfather's hand, wash your wife's foot. follow, come, be in her hymn me, be in the plum that bends like a corduroy's button, be in the traveler's burlap, the outer apple, the engorged dick, the cyclopes' cave, the spot-weld of eye contact.
____
eight. above all, you are a being of fear. there is everything to fear. how else could you not have loved? how else could you have stolen everything single-handedly with this one, villainous thought?
firefighter
the dark is a barn-raising—
horses scatter brightly
like early thermal weapons, careening toward hay thatch.
flame burls, burgles through windows
moon drags off of trees,
hits the canopy floor with a harvest, gather thud.
the smoke is an imported saga,
you can hear two children screaming
under a quilt on the second story—
their mother is a caper in that nightgown,
blasting like a commanded sea
around her shins.
i cut in to dance,
oxygen slinks away like a dull boy.
your hand has fallen from a nest
shedding adolescence for adulthood's knobs and rafters
smoky with the boggy experience of linen
oak beds, fluttering, topmost children.
i run into you, hatchet-bearing
you laugh, all lip
your tongues snagging
like wound-feigning birds.
the night is rubbed of its velvet
like the extinction of bellboys and elevator operators.
you gape through walls,
lean hot against me until my wedding band warms
like a mood ring, your breath timber-lush,
woozy with wicker. when i find them,
the children mewl like milk-rims.
i could have had you
against the hood of a studebaker after high school,
skirt riding up, your leg between my two,
stomach soft and warm as bread pulled out too soon,
lips the red of a ramming speed.
dearest, you're absolutely
two left feet.
i lay the children on the lawn, almost
i lay beside them.
the summer is a conclave of hydrants.
behind me, you consume a roof.
on thursday, i see you at the supermarket
in the beer and ice cream isle
hair in a kerchief, sucking an unlit cigarette
your legs a sextant
for distance, horizons, homes.
"posture" is my favorite from you in a long while.
I have to echo blackbird in that I think you're starting to stretch out from the rut you found yourself in. Your work is starting to reach a sort of balance between catharsis and rigidity, especially in the poems that are a bit more sparse, especially in the ones where you indulged in a couple more full-stops than you normally do. It's almost like doing that allows your mind a breath to step back and reign imagery in, albeit most likely subconsciously.
There are still some parts where your rhythm could use some work-- it's a bit clunky, especially in "posture" which I loved in all other aspects. Maybe play with your linebreaks, maybe structure. Just a thought.
Regardless, happy to see more work from you again, especially as it's getting so good.
posture
i slouch
like the night
you can't quite quit cold turkey.
my spine humbugs
i am fetal
as a summer-floored ditch
a frond's self-pity
an inch's lynch, the gravitas
of a riversack of kittens.
the world's seven princes
reclined like unset traps
stapled with fur, nibble grapes
from nubile fingers,
grace weighs heavy on you and i
it is hard to stand straight
when you are plumbed with honey
like an ursine nap
and the world's bitrate
whirrs in your lap.
my mother presses me
against the wall, calls on me
to roll my shoulders back
oarlock my shoulders
into the skirmish of my clavicles
“you stand like your father
you'll be three inches shorter by forty”—
i mimic jugs, gallons, desert marble pitchers
curves are plundered
by couches, menisci
cling like hope's calories.
god presses down like a howl
i let my heart closer to the ground
like a carried pup.
i am angled
like a day of fishing, every ounce
on dusk's os sacrum
i articulate the atlanto-occipital joint carefully
but it snaps all the same
and i end up holding my head in my hands
like rivers of legend and trade
until all screams to be
stretched or uplifted or ruled.
all day day light
at Christmas we lathe oranges
the creche's angel breaks like a spell of sleep
simmering bells are flagons of sound
decantered wantonness—
i have not been saved,
i have not even wandered.
it turns out you didn't know me
this jesus is not mine either
i will die and take everything you do not know
along with me, like the other half
of that drawered novel.
i have seen myself in the future
in a similar lane church
robe's mesmerism, metal's flourish in hostile cygnet
quarter-tide of candles, the kissed medallions of relatives
turkey split and rubbled with garnish, chickpeas
you, tugging on ropes of brandy
as if they might lead to bells.
your legs thrown over my lap
are too easy. i pray anyway. i have seen
every end like the hallways to a small hour's
drink of water. i would be terrified
if i wasn't so sure.
you spill cinnamon oil
burns like a turkish curse
you bristle to bear skin at night
i could trim and clean each heart beat that snowshoes
beneath young, wren pine and hang it
in houses of smoke.
yes, i have hidden everything.
i am the haze of a saint's smile.
we bounce as zany and silver-sucked as a horse's bells
our tintinnabulation is the jealousy
of the congregation. your breaths on my neck
are a prophet's whiskers
i must flee to egypt
i must i must
you cannot watch.
I don't know that I've ever had the pleasure of reading a poem that flowed with such clarity and precision before. T'was very concise, and I really appreciated that. Your writing is simply magnificent!
abdicated
full moon big, full moon young
lunations, fluctuating like the new color planned
for the family room—york harbor yellow,
raisin torte, old pickup blue.
the apogee of a school day
laughter tidal as refugee dynamic
the first winter lacerates, garrotte hoarfrost,
stunned cord of wood, kneeling mitten horse
nothing could be warmer than her cheek against mine
or the chummy velum of the second christmas
when she was more interested in the boxes
or the morning appendix of chortling wrapping paper
the vascular arcs and tucks
of metallic bows.
bones in the grass
like an abandoned incantation
i fold my arms on the porch,
its wind-chimes dangling are legs on a bridge
the water the same, an old rival against wood
the cold is comfortable,
like the prospect of a blanket or an indoor loved one
i couldn't bear her gravity,
the moon's insistent tug on the sleeve
bright as a grocery of sounds, noses.
when the hospital inked the culled instep of her footprint
it was massive, suspect,
weighed on me like a dangling son.
there was no viciousness in the kitchen
to speak of, potatoes boiled meekly.
i thought:
maybe someday, I'll try again, or maybe
i'll have my ovaries rooted out
like swine-hunted truffles, my uterus sealed,
so that only pleasure may enter
when i care for it.
for not even lesbos could love me
the islands are wrapped
like new faces. the fissures in the sunset
recombine and close, fontanelles
where the clouds break—
i search for medea's constellation,
or some born resemblance
but see nothing other than overturned chairs,
barbaric hunters, and dogs.
Kylan, I was doing a review in a document and then wondered, "what would he like more?"
Would you like a review of selected pieces now? OR would you like a complete review at some point later in the future?
thee, thine (an ode to Uzzah's faith)
i reach out a hand to steady the ark
thus touching the doted ochre of unprotected sex
the possum slouch of a joint
the cheek of a father, the silvery county of a church.
the ark falls despite my efforts, i step out of its weight
and instead of a jar of manna and mulberry burnt tablets
meters of loose scripture spill out
fluttering like the balneotherapeutic gayness
between two bathing cousins.
i have seen God five times, not including
running the oblong ebony of a comb through
the chore-dark hair of an older sister, or hitting a deer
at fifty-five miles an hour, a four-point rack
spraying into my eyes like the debut unpeeling of an orange.
i, of course, did not know it was God at the time
and i think five is a good number for a lifetime
the number of houses
love affairs
famous poems, or children planned
or perfectly timed entrances, so that an entire room cheers to see you.
it is not wise to know to not know
regardless of what is said; there are one too many infinitives, infinities—
a pasture's aureole, naturally occurring fractals,
the indignant dour plum in blossom,
petals like a coldwater baptism, my father's wedding band
and the corresponding theory as to why the fourth finger
from the end is the ring finger, that maybe
the most prominent vein to the heart is there
and blood is washed with gold and love
like a face in snow.
the bread in the communion tray
is torn like a bill i cannot pay.
the prayer of a basketball into a netless hoop
is earnest as is the prayer to knot
a cherry stem with the stridency of a tongue.
i chase pages of scripture across ditches, plattes and sweetwaters
a storm like a fragrance,
an incensed god, clouds on the horizon shaping
like the art of iron for horses and phalanxes
or a kiss from a mother
on sorrowing lips.
Many thanks Blackbird -- you might find these in the same vein.
--
sacred
steel thuds in your brain
like a competition to lay rail
i feel the brace
of your jaw, the upturn and downturn
of your pulse there
attached like a child's red mittens
against the loss of snow.
pool throat
a wrench of blood
winched rinse—
a sanguine cliff
i have seen before coastally
spilling like a trout's angle
or hair tossed in a pause.
upended, gable guts
i draw a knife from breast bone
to anus, a twain latitude,
each of your stomachs
boat out. you are hoisted
to a clattering Calvary.
and for hours i'll watch you eat
the rotary chaw,
the neck bell like an aunt's sternness
lower than thistles,
your milk bludgeoned
with wild onion.
to dream of you at night
as ignorant softness, as a throat
before the drain, as a calf
before a molten heresy, before
i cut this covenant
and take you with a bolt.
gamecock
eight hind-feathers
black spill like a manila thrill
turning to the palace flu
of a green crest
nearer the breast, then the kicked war copper
of the head and neck.
in speckled legshow,
the head cleared of loose blood-plugs—
you could split corn
or a family fortune on the ankle talon
curving like a sultan yawn.
rooster, you night stooge
a name that is hutched rest, a clutched dowel
so female a form that yolkless eggs
were once believed to be male laid
and once hatched, a den of basilisks
then the warmth on the stoop of a statue
could be from the sun or a stare.
cocked like a rain-brimmed hat
your scream is an off-cue morning,
there are no hens,
you are surly
as burned rope.
wings snap, blood gullied and well-run
as the course of a stampede.
the arena could be used for boxing
or the bony plunge of gymnastics.
the cocks flap like capes in exit,
ground blooms, dull coin
the coup de grâce does not come
from a spur but a beak
with a turn of the thumb
or a bone hook—
a laying male that would have moved from my path
in the yard
and shuffled for grain
and the emblems of offered bread.
I think with this latest poem, you are now beginning to liberate yourself from the creative struggles you were having earlier with trying to cover new ground, illuminate unseen facets in your usual subjects in poetry. The uneven enjambment suits the tone and imagery quite nicely; the almost severely brief lines are a refreshing shift from your usually long, languid lines that can sometimes lead a reader's attention to drift away. But here, attention is sustained thoroughly, and I myself was quite rapt throughout. There's a new energy in this poem, a dark and jagged energy, yet entirely you, for while it is at times almost jaded in its perspective, which is a departure, the imagery and setting is your signature vintage and rural, but sharpened and rarefied in the evocation of this particular subject matter; death is not gentle. Looking forward to seeing more. Glad to see you've broken free of the rut you may have been in earlier.
hard
passing through
the shoulder a bullet
into barn wood
where it lodges a complaint
about wrists, finely
tamping bones—barometric skewer
here where there might be dances
and stored hay crackling
loveyellow a cholera panic.
wagon blood
a kicked horse
four different kind of day moth
fluttering over hoop and
jimson weed like bank notes
poorly stuffed in
the powder-snuffed
red-haired getaway.
up past gold hill
two dead boys
could you hear their
skulls on rocks?
the river is cool, clement,
cow-licked further south
names called bankside
worn past any ligament of meaning
as knees on robe-blushed church stone.
a cop almost killed
at the valley of the rogue,
someone i know
pried open his clavicle
like a christmas bell.
the fences are broken wives
who can't keep out knotweed
or wailing canines.
the men are different
we lose so many at borders
or lines drawn in the dust
that you must overstep
and be declared.
there are ten summers
and as many fires in the first.
weren't we all missing
and smiling
then? i never got
my mug on a milk carton
or on a heart as good as a girl.
Thank you, Kamas!
mouth to mouth
for jared
the day attempts to pronounce a killdeer
with a pebble for every degree
under its tongue—i tend the lawn
with ringlets of gasoline, engine two-stroke as a safe murder.
flowers of differing color and urgency
like the sounds of French, American, or Russian ambulances,
perhaps tonally altered antebellum, but all originating from the same moan
which is mother in the backyard
with dad's head in her lap as he suffers over a rototiller
and each breath slangs, drops a modifier or dangles a mortal participle
hooking in the throat like fox-tail, red-tailed
as the lofty circumference over sifted rabbit
lungs unflapping in clipped daylight.
i have forgotten the last time i kissed my father.
i embrace him now with zest
out of duty and fear, mustache soft as the weather-tell
of a caterpillar, his body melting under mine
each bone worrisome, low-pressure, his organs gadget
like a father's Christmas
the operator on the phone urging me on silkily
telling me where to put my hands or mouth.
it wouldn't be like this if maybe
i had kept kissing him,
the albuterol of a son.
or was it always on the forehead, like the blessing of a birthright?
in a left-footed filial tango,
the breath between his teeth is a Spanish rose
in a country where fathers love
through the heat from a cord of wood
or the bust of a turkey on a mother's platter.
a gurney unfolds like the birth of a horse
the day snaps of latex, i wipe my mouth as i pull away,
perhaps a faux-pas; my apologies—
but there must be a term for this,
a word for the bile that is not mine.
that must be his.
Kylan,
this is going to take a while to read (for me, not you) -- but since you know exactly what you're doing I'll keep each one to a brief opinion and pointers on each piece.
pain
Ah, Doctor Death. If you wrote this on the 3rd, I'd giggle. I like this, because you've taken this story on in a clever manner. But at the same time, you have this difficulty in separating yourself from this southern imagery. I feel that perhaps the buffalo is a bit of stretch from each side at the beginning. It feels too separate. You close it off something and nicely, but at the beginning it suffers from the lack of connection between the two. It feels like two different threads of thought that braid into each other at the end. I mean, Kevorkian is an interesting guy don't tear me off to think about buffalo.
a view from the porch
Same old same old. Your theme is hard to follow because of your long love affair with words (I'm sure I'd get it as soon as you told me, but as your dumb and not quite as well read reader - give me something to work with). It was difficult to force myself to thoroughly read it because it's come to sound the same. It's strong, of course as usual, but I'm bored Kylan. Oh so very bored. It's like taking someone to the same spot over and over and over but having different experiences there. The spot is forever engraved in my mind even if I went fishing yesterday and today I'm observing x and y and I need a change in scenery.
degenerative disc disease
Nice construction of imagery and theme, it's nice to know what you're talking about and follow along. But this is really the same thing - I swear to god, if I didn't know better I'd think you were a cowboy/cattle rancher - this western kind of look that makes me think of the south and farms and bad farmer's tan and wheat fields and cattle. And this aging farmer in worn out jeans and a button down shirt cracking his neck and groaning quietly at back pain.
It's wonderful in the way you can paint that picture and give it meaning and give it purpose, but again, I'm bored. Feeding me the same meal on end is going to get irritating.
pussy-willow
I found all the dashed words entertaining. I reiterate the above. This one is a little more quirky then the rest, with things like:
It's summery and lighter then most but still bathes us in the same tone of voice, and approach to the descriptive imagery. I won't go on really.
An Innocent Misinterpretation of Young Virgin Being Sodomized By Her Own Chastity, 1954
Hmmm, for my own reference:
Spoiler
I love Dalí and I did much enjoy this take, naive and ironic in the interpretation of the poem. I find it funny really, how well it matches up with the mood of the painting itself and yet, it was sold to the Playboy Mansion a while back. And when you take Figure at the Window and match it up with this one it's all very fun, analyzing poetry alongside a painting.
phased out
You and Looney Tunes eh?
I think this falls between interesting and lack lustre. It's got this interesting spin on your voice and your approach but it feels too hesitant to really go anywhere with so it wakes me up but doesn't carry be far enough for me to notice a change in the scenery. It's more modern, which I can appreciate, getting pulled back into the present. But for now it sits kind of uncertain and doesn't hold enough punch to drive in that fresh breath you put into the poem.
boy scouts
I love the first three lines. I don't know too much about Boy Scouts/Girl Guides, it's a very North American thing I'm not too familiar with as I never did it nor did my brother. The first lines are rather powerful but then the rest slows down as I progress and loses that original flare. It returns to dabbling into your same, but without anything to retain my interest.
Carnivorous vulgaris
Some light nearing the end of this long review. This is awesome. It blows all the other poems in this thread out of the water and gently pats them on the head before sending them to dry off. Thank you Wile E. Coyote. It's passionate, and I can feel a real dislike for Road Runner that's extremely humourous, but at the same time so well described and said in a manner powerful enough to have my imagination kick into those crazy plots Wile E. would pull. This one is a keeper and one to set as an example, it's new, it has punch and it's entertaining to read.
(And dude, I agree. The beeping of Road Runner was always annoying.)
roadkill
There's this gray squirrel that loves to come to our door and scratch at it until he gets bread. I named him Scruff. This is an awful poem to read shortly after. :c Again, more punch then most of the poems here because it's got more spice, more awake kind of voice. Not the typical sleepy, sunbathing-observing Kylan. It's got movement to it.
naming the storm
Takes me elsewhere, but falls short of reaching the finish line. It's over-dependant on imagery that's feeding us pictures but not carrying us far enough.
I'm tired, and that was long xD
That's all folks.
Hello, I really liked the first poem. I found it very interesting and I liked the use of language. I don't really have anything negative to say, it just captured me. Nice work
Wile E Coyote somehow did it. Congratulations.
naming the storm
she clips nautical miles like the wings of domestic birds
and their oval tithe.
curling into the red noose of a false gypsy under the meteorologist's
godly superimposition, who lists the names of her mild-eyed ancestors
like a necrology of dead kings. her news a doused lioness in the streets,
her preference for the dark, pink-soled signals of Mesopotamia
relocated into her warm core routes
by colonial tobacco, stands of sugar like the jostling of pikemen,
shook cotton from burlap and an annexed song
for a sorry crouch. how they throw their hands up on rooftops
and die of thirst until the helicopters come
like a horizon of locusts and honey.
always in logarithms, the curve of a barley harvest,
an uppercut from a female boxer, dancing
from the sesame apex of her open hips, head tucked into her shoulder and eyes
for the coast, like the rough half a heart left on a beach
after a captainless storm.
carve out the islands first, burn into them
like the process of shaping a canoe from the fell of a tree
they were your mother's pearls, her evening ransom that turned green in the humidity
and were not the licked, printless fingertips of her children.
i realized that there was something wrong when we named her
a beautiful name like the sound of silver intercepting silver,
or colored rages of glass on beachfronts
and then she blew through our cabinets and stripped the trees of our fruit
and the fish washed up were studied by children
for the old wealth
of their blue edges.
she began in Nassau, and tossed her beads over her shoulder, rolled her chest forward
and knew what category of wind she came from, her elliptic caste
and the blood on the doorway
which she would ignore.
roadkill
the ceased sine of two gray squirrels,
ducklings soft as kisses on a Kodachrome, flung in a line by the creek lip
the tabby cat at four in the morning which hesitated when i did not
as i peeled an orange in front of a house unstreaked
with blood, the moon like the stare of a nude
and the pressure on the back of my head where i must have hit
the roaring spine freshet from this first warm night—
i look back to see it hooping on pavement
like a knocked fish, god, it cannot feel it
as an insect mustn’t in its simple panic of reception,
or lack thereof.
it is enough to cause me to search
in the wall's nightwatch of ivy, or among shot archdukes
of precipitous poppies for my own copper-whiskered mouser,
bored belly among the humoresque of day-moths,
nodal eyes spotted with the steps of age like decrepit stars,
every summer on the milk of her chin
and the twinge of a floorboard, or the flour of a ratless pantry—
so did the man who overturned his white truck when it wasn't enough
also go home and search for his own children?
frantic for their eight types of blue
and the long, unhushed rabble of tibia, femur
he feels them through their skin, touches the blasting cap of their chest cavities
the futile girlishness of their hair, because he knows
how all driveways run into the road like cats,
how all summers take to the streets, and how queer it is
that there is blood in every grout but the tread of his tires.
i do not swerve, or put on the breaks,
there is a ripple of home, eerie with eyes.
i lose all taste for oranges, borrowed skateboards on a grade to a truck,
or the warped volts of an insect twitching
when we all know
it is already dead.
Carnivorous vulgaris
The physics are all wrong, of course—the anvil trajectories, dead stops,
tonnage and miracle of careening newton meters.
The rocket-powered shoes skating like the pinched heads of cottonmouths
that sent him into the mountainside would have snapped his spine,
broken the canine skull into heat-shorn fragments
curling up like the residue of reptile emergence.
The nasal diesel of the shelved bird,
certainly not as blue, named out of a desert spooky with road.
There have been no tribes here,
nor salt mines, nor cacti with lupine hearts and a special pollinating moth,
gray and wholly dependent
as the spousal evening of a golden anniversary.
There is only dull wit and a starving scavenger,
with a cry tussled up into the loom of the moon,
and a legend of an ancestor’s trickster gods,
or gods of love and stone, but there is no moon either.
The length of the day is impossible to divine, like a song of Hebrew bondage.
I want to see the roadrunner seized,
split open, robbed of insouciant bones—until I know the velocity of blood,
toy-horn shape of the larynx,
the heart dry-docked, and then slid into like a +g maneuver, or a record across salt flats—
the ennui for the stupidity of fowl, and Darwin's vicious beagle.
I want to see a coyote in the shade,
with sagging belly and teat,
the evening matter-of-fact as a re-dressing nude, and then a night of singing,
lunar genuflection,
and a desert that is never quite as dark
or as strong as we think.
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.
phased out
dicot
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
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.
Dali is a dream. And so is that poem.
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.
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.
You are an amazing writer.
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.
I liked the first poem, it actually sent shivers down my spine.
The only thing I had a problem with was this line,
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. ^^
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.
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.
That first poem was simply incredible.
Check this space later once I let you know.
Looking forward to this.
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!