Watermark

Hard Winter

It's the last day of 02005, and it seems I should take Watermark out with a winter poem, but I don't have a new one; so, here is an old one:

 

Spike bit Maxine on the hand last week.
As blood came up in tiny beads, he rubbed

against her legs and purred. Plows excavate
narrow, high-walled tunnels along our streets.

Yesterday, the schoolhouse roof collapsed
under layers of snow. I am learning

to french-braid my hair. Each morning, I gather
and plait these graying strands; each evening

I untwist them. Birch trees hold white ruffs
in their pale arms. While the house of my body

decays, I remodel the other. The kitchen is down
to dust and studs. Avalanche danger is high.

I woke this morning from a dream, thinking:
if no one knows I am lost, how will they ever find me?

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Critter Resolutions

A Crazy Cat Lady action figure! Except for the fact that my hair is still mostly dark, and I'm not skinny, and I have only two cats -- that could be me. And since I am getting an iPod Nano for Christmas (!!!), of course I want this totally frivolous and useless [useless since I plan to wear mine around my neck] item:

Yep, that's an iPod case. Clearly, one of my resolutions should be to be less covetous -- but, later for that. In the meantime, since they are disinclined to make their own New Year's resolutions, I have decided to make them for the critters who share my space. We begin with:

The Irresistible Beauty of All Things

From Harpers Magazine, September 2004:

Poetry is like faith -- it isn't meant to be understood but to be received in a state of grace. No one should say "this is clear," because poetry is obscure. And no one should say "this is obscure," because poetry is clear. What we must do is search out poetry energetically and virtuously so that it will surrender to us. But we need to have forgotten poetry completely before it can fall naked into our arms. What poetry cannot bear is indifference. Indifference is the devil's armchair. Bu it is indifference we hear babbling in the streets, dressed grotesquely in self-satisfaction and culture.

. . .

Visible reality, the facts of the world and of the human body, are much more full of subtle nuances, and are much more poetic than what imagination discovers. One notices this often in the struggle between scientific reality and imaginative myth, in which -- thank God -- science wins. For science is a thousand times more lyrical than any theogony.

The human imagination invented giants in order to attribute to them the construction of great grottoes or enchanted cities. Later, reality taught us that those great caves are made by the drop of water. The pure, patient, eternal drop of water. In this case, as in many others, reality wins. After all, it is much more beautiful that a cave be a mysterious caprice of water -- chained and ordered by eternal laws -- than the whim of giants who have no other meaning than that of an explanation.

. . .

The mission of the poet is just that -- to give life (animar), in the exact sense of the word: to give soul . . .  The light of any poet is contradiction . . . Poetry doesn't need skilled practitioners, she needs lovers, and she lays down brambles and shards of glass for the hands that search for her with love.

Frederico Garcia Lorca

Interesting Photos

[Where are they? They're gone.]

Shelley and qB have both posted Flickr's picks for their top photos, according to the mysterious interestingness formula. Here are mine:

Duck Soup

Didi asked that I post an audio of this very odd poem. This was written in response to one of her challenges: write a poem using all of the following impossible phrases ...  I've done this before, with some success. This one, I think, is less successful -- but still, here it is:

MP3 File

I'm making duck soup, as the year
falls toward the dark. We shall eat it
as we watch the light come up in

the morning. We are contemplating
the confinement of song birds. Can
canaries and Java sparrows live kindly

together in the same cage? Green
onions, root ginger, winter melon. He
looked so calm, so not beaten down,

in his Chicago Overcoat, there in the
Fleet Street Family Mortuary. I had known
he was a lunger, but not so near. . . He

told me he was behind the eight ball.
Chicken stock. Arrow root. All those
orphan papers posted on the board.

Who will bother with them now? He had
to have the bees. Five hives in the middle
of town. Peel and chop the ginger. Slice

the winter melon. He had the oddest quirks
with words, especially words for women: long,
long getaway sticks; great nippers; man, she

snaps my cap, but I can't carry the vigorish.
They're ringers, all of them, he'd say, wanting
to ring my bell; wanting my mazuma. He loved

duck soup, loved the way the duck came last,
after the chopping and peeling; after the salt,
the monosodium glutamate; after the shao hsing

wine or dry sherry. The clearness of it. The hot
and soft, the sweet and salt and dryness of it.
The rich and stringy empty body of the duck.

UPDATED to add title and my name, as requested; and also an MP3 file. The middle of an insomniac night is no time to do things like this.