Content
Sunday, October 1, 2023
The Wing
Saturday, September 30, 2023
The Pits
Free stone and cling stone, stone fruits
Of the drupes, the peach pit set
On the sill until it’s bone,
Sour cherries pitted for pies,
These are small parts of the worlds
You’ve known, elaborately
Detailed in their words and whorls,
Not always too trivial
(The burst of the just-plucked peach,
Or of cherries from the bowl
The neighbor brought from her trees,
The encounter with a bear
Gorging itself in those trees
To survive coming winter,
The tall, skinny cherry tree
Feral in the spruce and pine
Not far from the bear’s den,
The industries of peach trees,
Commercial cherries, pickers
Laboring all day for cheap,
Hoping their children can stay
In the country of their birth,
Get an education, not
End up as cherry pickers)
Strategies on strategies,
Fruit with pits to propagate,
Animals swallowing pits
Depositing them elsewhere,
Animals selecting trees
With the largest, sweetest fruit,
Cling stone, free stone, discarding
The pits in trash, dry on sills.
Friday, September 29, 2023
The Skeleton
This body is recalcitrant.
This body is not so involved.
There’s no fitness, no home cooking,
No physical accomplishments,
No handiness with mechanics,
No muscle memory of sex
Pulsing and humming in these lines.
It lives, after its own fashion,
For now, the structure underneath.
It has fingers and vertebrae.
It more or less supports its head.
It’s not just some brain in a vat.
It’s not just some lonesome AI
Confused by the shadows it scans
Of the worlds beyond its machine,
Or maybe it is. Here’s output,
Of a sort, from a string of thoughts
Circling atop a skeleton,
Caught in a skull caught in a world
That’s nothing but embodiment.
Still. These bones are recalcitrant.
Thursday, September 28, 2023
The Boulder
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
The Place
It doesn’t exist, except
As a compound memory,
Part Edward Hopper image,
Part Barth’s floating opera,
A room in an old hotel,
Sunlit, almost bare, wood floor,
Tall, wavery-paned window
Looking out at mostly blue sky,
An armchair in front of it.
It can’t possibly exist,
Since time doesn’t work in it,
Or doesn’t work right, at least.
Sometimes there’s night and moonlight,
Or night and a street lamp’s light,
But nothing really changes.
There’s a person in the room,
In the chair or on the bed
Or standing in the shadows,
One who never seems to eat,
Or change into other clothes,
Or pick up the phone, or age.
It’s a delirious place,
That room, something to visit,
Or turn slowly in the mind,
The stillness, the simple light,
The figure who’s always there,
Who’s the key you don’t dare turn.
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
The Moon of Books
Monday, September 25, 2023
The Oubliette
Forgotten. You knew the word
Once, young, but you’ve forgotten.
Olds claimed to be no abstract
Thinker, the better for her,
And you are not a body
Imager, the worse for you.
You live in the sunlit room.
You write in the idling car,
And you know there’s a trap door
In the floor, under the tiles,
And you know there’s a chamber
In the dirt, under asphalt,
And you know your words live there—
That is, you keep them trapped there,
Most of them foreign to you,
Few your inventions, carried
On the air and through the eyes,
Lodging in your skull’s donjon,
All of them captured after
You were born, then crammed down deep
In the dark to keep handy,
Some dragged out to work daily,
And some, some soft, fleshly ones,
Allowed to rot, forgotten.