Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of reading with Lee Ann Brown, Johnny Stanton, and Anne Waldman at Bowery Poetry. The poems I read and a recording of my reading follow. I am working on a Vimeo of the whole reading, which will soon follow. Until then, enjoy.
for John Keats
I think that I’m a candle
whose flame stays round the wick
whether set in one place or carried
never wavering an inch
from where I’ve always been.
I hold out my hand like you did.
When I’m happy and look at it
it’s not the same I see sadly
desiring or when I’m tired.
It changes with my feelings
which usually I don’t notice
like light and shadow pass over the day
revealing as the morning sun
obscured by clouds or tears.
When you vanished, did all vanish?
With a change of heart I change the world.
on seeing a wasp in a mountain stream
Come, look with me
a small thing spins
with delicate legs and delicate wings
soon not to be intact
among the rapids and the rocks.
Who will kneel to pick it out?
If it stings it must
unlike us.
uncle
I’ve an uncle who builds houses
and he tells me I don’t write poems
that what I write is vile and useless
not good for anyone.
There was a time I believed him
his words allowed crippling all mine
until I saw a word’s a board
each nail succeeding nail.
Something comes even if quite small
and finds shelter there.
Lou
He was so fucked up he stumbled
and fell down then someone
helped him to the microphone.
He didn’t sing, he spoke
rhymed, indiscriminate.
He didn’t care what I thought.
The same beat he repeat
like waves of sea
make us cease the struggle
giving up our bubbles
flow in the push pull
toss and tumble of its surf.
Mindless, forgotten
as the just begotten
I’m the rhythm of him.
the grass
Out of the skin of a rabbit
unbending shoots in eye sockets
cover the valley and mountain’s
impenetrable darkness
as I write upon them
crushing, cushioned by them.
They rise again soon as I leave.
the water snake
In the South Mountain along a road
that goes from an ocean to a great lake
not far from my parents’ home
I walked up to a water snake
whose lower end a car had crushed
revealing in blood its smooth intestines
where a cluster of flies flew up and remained
filling themselves.
It hissed a delicate transparent blood
flayed and reached out trying to leave itself
still, now moving tip of its nose
along the road, mouth so silent, open
I thought it was dead till it twisted
closed unclosing constant agitation without rest.
I thought, “You are a poem,”
and crushed its head with a warm flat stone.
From Fucking
And I was like a dog tied to its little house
going no further than my chain allowed
tearing at the grass
making the earth bare with my chain’s scraping.
O Love, forever come,
don’t fly up to some branch I can’t reach
but take the chain off of my neck
to fling it in that sea
where there is a shark
a slish slash on the wrist
when the razor’s nearer to me than my flesh
and oh this gnawing that’s the smell of roses
that comes after pruning all that’s dead
before the peeping little leaves
can unfurl quietly like flames
to whisper in the wind, “I am,”
with all the buds unfolding
bloomed red then truly dying is the rose
as on your face when looking
my flesh pretended stone;
now as the detumescent petals float
out of the bower
bald birds peck hatching gaping
eyeless gaping mouths
in the soft drift of approach of dark
of the twilight hour
within the thorny limbs young hunger peeps,
“we need, we need.”
Of course we need.
The trouble is a mouth can’t say this wordless thing
that’s understood and said so easily between eyes.
Even in the eyes of children throwing a ball at play
or in the eyes of your grandmother dying full of cancer
more vast than the Roman Empire inside her.
As you bend down to kiss her, she’s too weak to hug you
yet you know she still knows you:
right there in her eyes she is
shining among all that withering
Grandma who groans then her eyes close
and I’m kissing a stone I’ve picked out of a stream
pressing my lips tasting incredibly clear water
smack dab against the unenterable hard cold shock of it:
what knew me doesn’t, what I know isn’t
now all is useless emptiness, pointless in grief I weep
when out of Grandma’s cunt a hand comes
without flesh, no rottenness, just bone
like an ice cube that smokes so cold
I would have stayed stuck to it, but
when it took my hand to shake and gripped
Grandma’s womb warm dripped
squeezed out between our palms
and intertwined fingers a separation yet
kept from each other midst a slippery salvation
I slipped out of drips slick as drooled spit
on the lips of a tiger shaking a gazelle by the neck
while out of its paws unzipping its claws to rip:
“Hello,” Death said, “I’m glad we’ve finally met.
I am the truth. Come closer and I’ll whisper it.”
Now I, gnawed always by a secret,
was scared shitless, but listened hearing nothing:
Death wasn’t there, only silence and my tears
though I know Death will one day appear to me again
as quickly as an accident or something I forget
and I admit it, I am curious, I wait for death
like factory workers wait for their trains
that took them to work to take them home again.
I’ve waited with them on a subway bench
among lunch buckets, newspapers, cigarettes
thinking how this world of ours, its bombs and locks
without stop goes passing by on a conveyor belt
and I thought we are what we’re touching
and I didn’t think very much of them
the no good factory fodder, raked leaves for the fire:
it wasn’t good-bye but their smoke made me cry
soldiers for sons and very loose daughters
who get knocked up, quick grow old
but keep the thing going.
Up against the wall the working class stood
leaning back or standing in flocks
staring down at the tracks that now begin to tremble
like you’re just about ready to stick in the needle.
Way down in the tunnel I hear the train’s coming
for them here now standing waiting doing nothing
which is what I think of them nothing
gazing dispassionate from face to face
on sleepy looks emotionless; not one I think’s awake
until I see around one eye a line of red
and knew that eye had cried laughing so hard
the tears had to come or crying over a sentiment
that meant something to that eye alone
or crying perhaps because it’s a fact
this world holds more sadness than you can shake a stick at:
we humans get to shed more tears than oceans can put back.
Then I looked until that eye saw me
and I saw that eye trembled because it was seen;
what’s seen you know, what you know you can hold
what you hold you can destroy as quickly as a thin tea cup
or any delicate joy like the wing of a butterfly
like this eye that was a soul
a thing that felt, a thing that knows
one thing that’s understood and there it was.
on painting
“Painting isn’t filling in the spaces
made by penciled lines premeditated
but’s existing as I touch
on the canvas with my brush
the woman there below
hanging out bedsheets that blow
among geraniums’ red explosions
about her hips.
In a moment do we see?
Life’s happening so quickly
I think I remember it
but push, smear color till I show
right there hung up on the wall
what is finished yet will change
each time you look.”
While you talk I take off my beads
to closely examine the delicate seeds
blue and amazing strung on a string
I bought today from an Indian.
You put down your brush
touch at them too.
Your fingers touch me
my fingers touch you.
the gift
I cursed my luck.
Sometimes one passed, a jungle truck
ignoring my thumb stuck out
in the hot and wicked air.
Only lizards from the dust
lifting their heads glanced back, if once
before they fled into the underbrush.
When from four stilts a bamboo hut
rose from the hacked green land
out of it a woman came with a bowl of boiled beans
in her brown hands for me to eat beneath a tree
where white hens were scratching all around me
kept from the cruel sun, hid away in the kind shade
while up from the river her children run
watching till I’m done to thrust at me
a gourd full of water I drink, wash
with what’s left over the bowl I take
when I go to pay something to the woman
who shakes her head and says, “De nada,”
getting from me empty what she’d given full
I wanted at least to thank her and was about to
my lips puckered, tongue still on my mouth’s floor
not used too much if I can detect at all
in the beginning sound of pronunciation of the word.
“Muchas gracias,” I said. What I saw
was a breathing keeping watching in us all.
Oh!
Peg screams to see
a mole peek
from the sharp and gentle
jaws of the cat
she’s lifted for a kiss
beneath the apple tree.
Snow white pink edged
falling blossoms spin.
Some end in the black fur
or clinging to her curls.
Tiresias remembers
I was on my way to Corinth
in the process of pushing
a bough of pomegranate from my path
when there she was, Athena
covering her breasts and running
out of the pool.
As for what’s come
this gift in my eye’s stead
that lets me see what isn’t yet
it’s like Arachne’s thread about my neck
when she falls and is still living
not yet that eight legged thing weaving
on the daisies in the evening.
So delicate and golden this thread is
it might have been touched by Midas
that thinly yet holds me completely
as an oar slave to the bench.
To the most awful thing I find I’m wed.
In it I see no end, only smoke and a sailing.
A smoke not perfumed as Delphi’s risen
but a smoke from a pyre full of mourning
that drifts along a shoreline
where dead fish and fish lie gasping
lifted and forsaken by the slow storm
left upon the sand and foam unsinking
and the wormwood, wood and bodies severed
among the dune grass and the violets are rank
all rotting and the sailing is a sailing
where the Furies fly impaling.
Indeed there was no choosing
and though they’d think me mad
with dung and my dread I covered my head
before them prophesying.
“My brothers,” I said. “We are already dead
and the wall of Thebes stands shaking.”
O Pretty Self
A snake curled in the sun
feels my shadow come and goes
ripples over stones.
The stream falls down
and oozes out of moss
and mud where a deer’s stepped.
No, I won’t pick this violet.
Let it clutch the cracking rock
blue out of yellow from a black dot.
When I leave these woods to work
and stammer or say two words at once
I’ll think of it and stop.
Spring Sonnets
in the middle of the winter
don yorty !
bravo,
Donna Fleischer