Just Look Up

"the slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull and if my stomach would..."

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:12:12 -0500

“

the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation

I would not remember you

or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these

and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops

a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight

”

- April 18th, Sylvia Plath.

Tonight I Can Write- Pablo Neruda

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 23:26:58 -0500

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

A Dog Has Died- Pablo Neruda

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:35:50 -0400

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I’ll join him right there,
but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he’d keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea’s movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean’s spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don’t now and never did lie to each other.

So now he’s gone and I buried him,
and that’s all there is to it.

bookshelfporn: Reading a book and spending the day outside with...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:23:42 -0400

bookshelfporn:

Reading a book and spending the day outside with someone you love are the rules for a perfect Analog Sunday.

Piccola Commedia by Richard Wilbur

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:05:17 -0500

Working on a poetry paper for tomorrow, I decided to do some background work on Richard Wilbur. Turns out, he was a pretty interesting guy: he train-hopped across the states twice and this poem, was created from that experience.

He is no one I really know,
The sun-charred, gaunt young man
By the highway’s edge in Kansas
Thirty-odd years ago.

On a tourist-cabin verandah
Two middle-aged women sat;
One, in a white dress, fat,
With a rattling glass in her hand,

Called “Son, don’t you feel the heat?
Get up here into the shade.”
Like a good boy, I obeyed,
And was given a crate for a seat

And an Orange Crush and gin.
“This state,” she said, “is hell.”
Her thin friend crackled, “Well, dear,
You’ve gotta fight sin with sin.”

“No harm in a drink; my stars!”
Said the fat one, jerking her head.
“And I’ll take no lip from Ed,
Him with his damn cigars.”

Laughter. A combine whined
On past, and dry grass bent
In the backwash; liquor went
Like an ice-pick in my mind.

Beneath her skirt I spied
Two sea sea-cows on a floe.
“Go talk to Mary Jo, son,
She’s reading a book inside.”

As I gangled in at the door
A pink girl, curled in a chair,
Looked up with an ingenue stare.
Screenland lay on the floor.

Amazed by her starlet’s pout
And the way her eyebrows arched,
I felt both drowned and parched.
Desire leapt up like a trout.

“Hello,” she said, and her gum
Gave a calculating crack.
At once from the lightless back
Of the room came the grumble

Of someone heaving from bed,
A Zippo’s click and flare,
Then, more and more apparent,
The shuffling form of ED,

Who neither looked nor spoke
But moved in profile by,
Blinking one gelid eye
In his elected smoke.

This is something I’ve never told,
And some of it I forget.
But the heat! I can feel it yet,
And that conniving cold.

the genius of poetry 225

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:34:04 -0500

the genius of poetry 225

montrealpoets: Robyn reading F.J. Bergmann’s Gender...

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:36:50 -0500

montrealpoets:

Robyn reading F.J. Bergmann’s Gender Characteristics.

This is the second part of my Poetry Term Assignment.

"All She Needs She floats over mountains stolen from other planets. Beyond lies an aperture into..."

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:13:44 -0400

“

All She Needs

She floats over mountains stolen from
other planets. Beyond lies an aperture
into the golden sky, where they build
their own castles from blocks of flame.
She still lives in the darkening silver
spoon she was born in, wears a dress
of tears. Her heart is growing
its own jungle. She covers the face
she does not have with hands
that cannot feel. The pulsing flowers
that beat instead of wings lift only
her caracoles of hair. Without eyes
she looks away from the light
into everything else that glows.

”

- F.J. Bergmann

"‎”I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the..."

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:02:38 -0400

“‎”I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of
people and then me, on the outside. Because how do
you meet a new person? I was stunned by this for many
years. And then I realized, you just say, ‘Hi.’
They may ignore you. Or you may marry
them. And that possibility is worth that one word.””

- Augusten Burroughs

I Feel Horrible. She Doesn't - Richard Brautigan

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:38:14 -0400

I feel horrible. She doesn’t love me and I wander around the house like a sewing machine that’s just finished sewing a turd to a garbage can lid.

e.e. cummings "since feeling is first"

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:29:04 -0400

montrealpoets:

since feeling is first 
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things 
will never wholly kiss you; 

wholly to be a fool 

while Spring is in the world 

my blood approves, 

and kisses are a better fate 

than wisdom 

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry 

the best gesture of my brain is less than 

your eyelids' flutter which says 

we are for each other: then 
laugh, leaning back in my arms 
for life's not a paragraph 

And death i think is no parenthesis

Denim Blues by Rita Wong

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:25:44 -0400

denim blues

there are denim mountains in my closet:
well-worn cutoffs, raggedy jeans,
adolescent skintight pants, baggy prairie overalls,
years of tacky stampede outfits

nothing comes between me &
the labour of the garment workers
their fifty cents a day sweat
hugs me tight every morning

my auntie’s fingers nimble
with the demands of piecework
how she churns dozens of jeans by dim lamplight
one more casualty for casual wear

cotton picked by hungry workers
beaten into fabric & submission in far-off factories
dissembled into department store offerings

black denim with amputated
fingers waving bloody threads from pockets
knotting in my chest as i look in the closet
find nothing to wear

nothing, that is, but
thin faded gauze ripping open,
spilling labour into consumer vision,
ragged with guilt, ignorance, fear
but still rippling, a necessary banner
in the wind for change

ahahahahhaha.

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:00:29 -0400

ahahahahhaha.

I Want to be Your Shoebox- by Catherine Bowman

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:58:00 -0400

I Want to Be Your Shoebox

Memphis Minnie’s classic blues line “I want to be your chauffer” was miscopied in an early Folkways recording song transcription as “I want to be your shoebox.”

I want to be your shoebox

I want to be your Fort Knox

I want to be your equinox

I want to be your paradox

I want to be your pair of socks

I want to be your paradise

I want to be your pack of lies

I want to be your snake eyes

I want to be your Mac with fries

I want to be your moonlit estuary

I want to be your day missing in February

I want to be your floating dock dairy

I want to be your pocket handkerchief

I want to be your mischief

I want to be your slow pitch

I want to be your fable without a moral

Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel

Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l’oeil

I want to be your biscuits

I want to be your business

I want to be your beeswax

I want to be your milk money

I want to be your Texas Apiary honey

I want to be your Texas. Honey

I want to be your cheap hotel

I want to be your lipstick by Chanel

I want to be your secret passage

All written in Braille. I want to be

All the words you can’t spell

I want to be your International

House of Pancakes. I want to be your reel after reel

Of rough takes. I want to be your Ouija board

I want to be your slum-lord. Hell

I want to be your made-to-order smorgasbord

I want to be your autobahn

I want to be your Audubon

I want to be your Chinese bug radical

I want to be your brand new set of radials

I want to be your old-time radio

I want to be your pro and your con

I want to be your Sunday morning ritual

(Demons be gone!) Your constitutional

Your habitual—

I want to be your Tinkertoy

Man, I want to be your best boy

I want to be your chauffeur

I want to be your chauf-

feur, your shofar, I want to be your go for

Your go far, your offer, your counter-offer

your two-by-four

I want to be your out and in door

I want to be your song: daily, nocturnal—

I want to be your nightingale

I want to be your dog’s tail

"You guys just wait and see. We’ll stand taller than these mountains. We’ll bare open our hearts for..."

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:15:57 -0400

“You guys just wait and see. We’ll stand taller than these mountains. We’ll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We’ll see lights where there was dimness. We’ll testify together to what we have seen and felt. Life will go on—all of us—crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly.”

- Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland (via thechocolatebrigade)

Date A Girl Who Reads

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:28:08 -0400

28 minutes
- Date a Girl Who Reads by Rosemarie Urquico
  
  Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
  
  Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.
  
  She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
  
  Buy her another cup of coffee.
  
  Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
  
  It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by God, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
  
  She has to give it a shot somehow.
  
  Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
  
  Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
  
  Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
  
  If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
  
  You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
  
  You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
  
  Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
  
  Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

The Fiddlehead

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:04:00 -0400

The Fiddlehead

Soliloquies (submit your poetry!)

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:02:41 -0400

Soliloquies (submit your poetry!)