"Poetry" by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
*****Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
*****it, after all, a place for the genuine.
***********Hands that can grasp, eyes
***********that can dilate, hair that can rise
*****************if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
*****useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible
*****the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
***********do not admire what
***********we cannot understand: the bat
*****************holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
*****a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea
*******************************************************the base-
*****ball fan, the statistician—
***********nor is it valid
*****************to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a
*******************************************distinction
*****however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not
*************************************************poetry,
*****nor till the poets among us can be
***********"literalists of
***********the imagination"—above
*****************insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have
*****it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
*****the raw material of poetry in
***********all its rawness and
***********that which is on the other hand
*****************genuine, you are interested in poetry.

********************************************—Marianne Moore

Like Garden Snails United Against Gravity

One day in the car
7-year-old Maria Lourdes confided
that she’s had one dream come true.

She had dreamed that she and a classmate
would play together,

and sure enough in school the following day
she and her classmate did play together.

Then she told me that another time,
she had dreamt that she would turn into a building
while her brother, Alex, became a kitchen sink.

Alex chimed in, eyes wide in wonder, saying
he’s had this same exact dream,
only in his, he said, he turned into a giraffe.

‘What’s your favorite animal?’
Alex inquired.

I considered this for a long time before saying,
‘It’s a toss up between
Phaenicophaeus cumingi—
The Scale-feathered Malkoha

and Hypothymis coelestis—
The Celestial Monarch.’

An echoing hollowness.
The two stared ahead,
eyes blinking asynchronously.

Then, because it helps people,
Maria Lourdes whispered that her favorite animal
was Sasquatch.

‘Big Foot?’ I yelped.
Smiling, she nodded.

Seven years old, wide open as the weather,
she said that the time her dream came true was like a miracle.

I told her it was.

idea for book cover

image from ffffound.

Tentative titles:
1. The Armageddon Tastes Better with Bacon (maybe not...)
2. I Need You So Much Closer
3. A Pretty Good Thing Going
4. One Day I Will Make It Up To You
5. The Last Stand of Good Folks
6. Say Yes to Ruckus
7. Help Would Only Confuse Me
8. The Beast We Ride
9. The Last Stand of Folks Who Regret Nothing

bye bye scratch, trying to recapture silliness

hard to believe scratch is gone. cats are wonderful to do silly things with because they're so serious most of the time.

bye bye scratch

Scratch died yesterday, June 23, 2009, 10am. Scratch loved to wake us up every morning by putting his paws on our cheeks and gently pushing and meowing. Scratch once killed a hamster accidentally, and scratched the face of a photographer's daughter (not so accidentally). We both survived an earthquake. Scratch was there when I had no work and watched cable shows all day. Scratch had blue eyes and bad breath caused by bad teeth (like mine). Scratch loved to drink water from deep containers like pails and the toilet bowl. He liked to see water sloshing and loved to lie on his back and have his tummy rubbed. He was very trusting of people (I believe Scratch was never hurt by people) and distrusted other cats (with good reason). Scratch was devoted to Lu-Ann, who raised him and fed him a can of tuna a day when he was a kitten back when they were living in a street called Hope. Scratch joins Spoon, Cuervo, and Ms Melba Suzuki.

dexter

The Gate of Horn

by L.S. Asekoff

Forgive me if I seem a bit at sea
but you woke me from a dream of words
I was setting to music I’ll want you
to transcribe for me—a quatrain Shakespeare wrote
when he was eleven, “The uncertain glory
of an April day.” At my age, what is life
but a recitativo oscuro, with its shadowy intimations,
musical aphorisms, librettos in a sigh.
Caught between willful tempestuousness
& bewildering geometries, we dread & long for
those moments of cruel lucidity that fix us as we are—Mallarmé’s
swan
frozen in ice . . .

Last night I sat here alone in the dark
listening to the overture of the coming storm—distant rumbling
like sheet metal rolling off a giant press, then the true
cacophony, a delirium of lightning bolts, thunderclaps,
whiff of ozone in charged air—as though nature’s wunderkind—
“a lion flayed alive”—drove a lyric electric concert grand
hurtling over Niagara Falls. As my kinsman,
that half-caste past master of the hyper-climactic
molto grandioso crescendo, Beethoven,
reminds us, “The world is king,” & we but paupers,
doing its bidding. Staring out the window in the rain
I could feel time passing like a wall of moving mirrors,
a river in which is reflected the wing of evening
speckled with stars, & thought, Night sky, whose mind are you?
The stars, the stars are inside our heads. & now
out of the silence the dead rising: ghosts of Buffalo soldiers
& Ogalala Sioux—winged messengers—like great blue herons
arrowing over the lake where the black spring lambs gambol,
late for the sacrifice . . .

After the storm,
I followed the tone rows & tentative tap tap tap
of drainpipe off metal roof—a blind man’s cane, wandering
Oedipus—sensations uprooted to atmospheric effects,
the many weathers of this moment, this place—
its windy gusts, fleeting moods, scherzo of cloud shadow
racing over rockface—& wondered, at the risk of forgetfulness,
where do we go, venturing forth beyond our murky
origins? Recapture against failing light
memories of a rusted harrow leaning upon
a dusky barn door, a swaybacked horse the color of “bricks
wrapped in silk,” thunder of boots on a hardwood floor,
& smell once more that starched white linen apron
we buried our eyes in. I hate farewells, don’t you?
& the terror of coming back to what is at once new
& familiar, a reunion of two times chimed exactly
that leaves us estranged from ourselves, staring at shadows
trembling in the shade. What will save us? Who appear
at the head of our bed announcing, “Cast off your shackles
& chains!” & place in our hands the sacred instruments,
show us the great tablets scriven in the sky,
prophesying, “These are road signs to Heaven
& gateways to the Pearly Everlasting!” & looking up
we shall see on high the letters & the numbers, the figures
of the creatures of the Lord, all carved in the frozen music
of stone—the Lion lying down with the Lamb, the Oriole
serenading the lowly Mule at dawn, the Dove fanning
the Night Nurse’s brow, the three Angels washing the feet
of the weary Day Laborer, & His Son come down in a cloud at last
to lift the veil . . .

Do raise the shade—& fill that glass.
Ah, whiskey is a great river . . . Is that a sunspot or a swan? . . .
What do I miss most at my age? . . .
Seeing the stars.

dutch in september heat

double dutch