Sporadic, Aimless

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Beside The Barn-Evening Glow-Catskill Mountains (forcedcollaboration #2)


Beside The Barn-Evening Glow-Catskill Mountains
Originally uploaded by
bovinacowboy.

In this evening glow, the sun
Warming the grayed pine, that bone-
Weathered antiquity, can seem
Like a benevolence settling
Thickly over an entire
Country—or something that resides
Within it, more ambiguous and
Accompanied by a less
Ceremonial music.

The photographer notes the
“Offset window” confusing enough
To knock witches from their brooms.
A fact which, he explains, pins
The barn to the 19th
Century, a lonelier
America, one more comfortable
With lines that bend from warping.
One less comfortable with you
Or me, who might hum, alone
Walking a pine needled path into
Midnight to sit at the base
Of the Kaaterskill falls, if only
To hear something like our own voice
Rippling up from the foaming mouth.

The barn’s red door swings open
And the cows might amble to pasture
Or the tractor might carry
Into the barn its few bails
Of hay and one pitchfork, motor
Sputtering and a dark exhaust
Climbing into the air, which is to say,
This sunlight is that romance
Of the future for its hollow pasts.




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fly away all sorrows (forcedcollaboration #1)


fly away all sorrows
Originally uploaded by
*davidsαngle

In sunlight, the seeds become angels,
and the angels meet the earth and turn again to seed.

In the photo, the hand is my own childhood.
The sidewalk is one I'd forgotten, and there is laughter behind me.

I’ve been warned that there is a danger in nostalgia.
I’m sincerely wondering, what are the dangers in nostalgia?

I'm naïve. Mountains loom behind me and I am glad
for them—for their shadows and the way they mix clouds.

In my home town there was a story of a witch who
had lived through the town fire of 1912. A fire that burned

Everything but the clock tower. The story was
that the witch had set the fire. That she still burned.

The photograph does not catch the witch because
she is hiding behind the blur of the background.

After I blew the seeds from the dandelion, I was left
with the wilting green stalk. I reached out for her.




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Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Nightmare Songs: A Remainder

These are the ones I decided didn't jive with the narrative of the other six, even though I wrote them in a similar mode. I'm posting them because it's the only daylight they'll ever see, and I'm a bit sweet on them.


7.

An ornate teapot in the perfect disorder of celestial dust.
Let’s take it down, polish it with old rags
until the reflection is bluer than a static sky—a departure
from the deadlier atmospheres.
At what heights do we stop breathing?
Or have I asked the wrong question?
Do we? No,
but there are better words in the earth.
Deep veins of granite thick with words
and sometimes the molten violence
of a collision
will name us to a moment like a thick syrup.
The natural sugars are also
light into which we are spilled or poured
like the volatile liquids of industry.


8.

Into the heavy bowl, she wept oranges
and was delighted to be in harvest, and so brightly!

The fields were a bleak stretch of heavenless—
there were sprites or devils in our periphery.

Shooting them was out of the question, seriously.
We had signed contracts against murder. When murder is all that is left

then you resort to prayer. And so Samuel the murderer
kneeling at the railing—his wristwatch, canceling his heart—ticks.

Could he become lackluster machinery?
We do not condemn for sin the machines of harvest or production.

Our creations become blameless and we enter,
through them, an eternity of contrariness.

A chaos of leaves that spins into a brief eddy of color.
I’m watching this from the porch, in the safety of my own breath.


9.

Cold. Man’s a new broken song.
The corners of his neighborhood are a hungry tempo.
They are empty of pedestrian traffic like roofs,
these dim bodies in cloud—dull weather.
Or are they ships of a broken Armada?
The wind blows them in one direction
for three days straight and this is called lucky.
Never again would the youngest rejoice at so much monotony—
a future without absence, without the long horizons of loneliness.
Sun over tall pines is a game of velocity
and beneath that I sometimes also become that game—
oh, my consequences are surrounding me with blunt weapons.
Can I say ‘bludgeoned’ here without being obvious?
Forget it—this story wants to insult your expectations.
Burn this poem without its holes.


10.

In an old room the piano grew a tail.
Something grew less golden in the tallest corners.
When he looked hard it went shadowed.
There was a lineage of chins:
the chin’s newborn son and its ties to ancient Norwegian royalty,
the chin as a stone survivor of imperialism.
Oh, the uprising was bloody—nobody survived
save for a small boy, having fallen into the deep well
where he did not suffocate, though he did relieve himself.
If people were horrified, they weren’t talking
about it in the streets or under the calcium lights
where circled a myriad of black flies.
The hordes are their own reckless determinants
and we have become them without allegiance.


11.

There aren’t blues enough for cheap whiskey
except in the cold oven—gas.
But a good breeze from an open window
is enough to sweeten our tongues through scalding.
Is there an escape without damage? Oh, rarely
have we been refunded our full deposits—
charges reversed in a convention of trade.
Magistrates at the dismissal are a plenty of hands
and their bouffants wave niceties
as if they were ever more than a fashion
that we purchased for the price of a loaf of bread at market.
But about our produce we know nothing
save that it comes from the earth, about which
we know even less of origins.
This is an interrogation—tell me everything you’ve seen.


12.

A harvest of obscene squash littered the lawn.
Against a rusted dawning
we climb the oak and become breathing phantoms.
Our visible breath gallops away from us on hooves
soundlessly across a deep field of ice.
The old limbs of oak are giving us the finger.
Let’s choose not to be offended—they are only trees.
And after all, they will dance if the wind suggests.
They are a quiet and deliberate tribe
hunting for the starkest provisions in a populace of game.
I came across a shallow spring
and did not drink my fill of it.
There in the cooling shade of the willows
the clouds shifted dangerously overhead.

Nightmare Songs: 6


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6.

They offered me soup—I shook them off. And their grins!
The wooden floors of these old buildings smell with snow-water.
The entryway’s lined with travelers’ worn shoes,
their smocks and heavy cloaks.
My grandparents belonged to their mutual antiquities.
This, the soft ache that reminds us
of our toes among limbs, that wakes us in the night
to rub this out by touching.
And we reach across for another cosmos to wreath our brows.
We are not, after all, giants in our beds.
Clouds do not pass through our ears
as easily as our own voices over rocks.
There went even the music of orbit into our cold glasses
and we found ourselves standing neatly
in the green shadow of a building.

Nightmare Songs: 5


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5.

Softly, the baby’s just asleep in the next room.
Could we our felonies into a leaking pocket . . .
could we forget the darker crimsons of dawn.
There weren’t any visitors then, we were lonely.
So we invented a tongueless vocabulary of our own brief bodies.
In the cold just beyond the fire—we enter savagery like winter.
The air in our throats bites at our teeth.
So we know the warmth of our guts
and the way that we ascribe everything, even air,
by breaking it, by altering it
like anything else true enough to be spoken.
The archaisms of politics circle in a drain.
We have seldom answered the challenge of a quiet morning,
and even then with our safest whispered kindnesses.

Nightmare Songs: 4


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4.

History loves its impossible martyrs,
their willingness to be aberrant and remembered
leads them onto crippled stairs without shoes
where they—blinded—must navigate the extant
grammar of vulnerability.
Some prisoners were executed by pike—
the other soldiers, unbloodied, were being prepared by this.
Morning coffee in the barracks—these became afternoons.
Hemingway imagining the terrorists as they enter the forsythia night
could never have foreseen their smaller victories:
the fishing trophy at five years old, the carved napkin ring.
These forgettable collections that become us
even as we throw them away or hand them down.
Our siblings and our children become reiterations
of design, of voice. What polyphony in this—
there are specters in the spaces between our digits.

Nightmare Songs: 3


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3.

The chords don’t behave. We have obliterated the fresh snow.
In this regimented fall there are leaves piled into burial mounds.
Can we forget the seeping carcasses?
Our water draws from one well—through earth
we gather nutrients and expel less than gold. These courageous returns,
our medallions in a land-locked expedition: the river we forged
against the first snowfall, the boots that froze
and thawed in the night fire and froze again the next day
for a month. He lost his smallest left toe.
There are accidents even to our feet in this world,
and all injury is undeniable against good health.
The collapse of the dependable—our hearts
will keep some secrets from us forever.
Can we forgive ecstasy its denials?

Nightmare Songs: 2


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2.

The heavy spice breaking over breakfast.
No smoke here, much less chimneys.
We are an echo of the ocean returning to ourselves,
unless we are muffled footsteps in a hallway.
Should we count these like our breaths? Our hours?
A heavy chain going out over the edge of the boat,
at its end the anchor that will stay us in the drift.
Bright rain in the afternoon, like sand,
is a contradiction of weather—
it suggests that gravity might be temporary.
It could validate the stories of those who took flight,
however momentarily, from earth and perched
at the peaks of their roofs.
We crowed up at them mockingly
and our voices came back again false.

Nightmare Songs: 1


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1.

Where we killed him there was a wooden fence.
Snow had drifted across the field.
We uncovered a deep hole of frozen apples,
still green, somehow immaculate in that earth.

These are not the tall grasses of Ohio
and we have never ventured beyond the familiar bars.
We are lightless in our mugs.
A grim face is drinking in our glasses
and we have not even offered him welcome.
If we are offended, we could blame our manners.

Did you enter the room like a bankroll?
Were people milling around your knees?
Any party, after I’ve left, is held in my honor.