WORKS ON PAPER I
(an Ashbery Erasure Poem)
Japan is famous with chairs,
Tall brew around a contradiction.
Now his bus takes him where the perplexed doomed
Get hangovers. Afternoon souvenir, an arrangement,
Old sea where passengers hang flummoxed.
Ill with looking, an empire is dying.
Between the benign outskirts,
Everyone reasonably free to fall,
The naked are coaxed out with tea,
The shivering trees own the bookstore.
Blow September
Go sing
Before the red dogs are ash.
11.30.2006
11.26.2006
Two Prose Poems by Wendy Barker
The First Time Ever
Sometimes we lay together afterward for a long time.
He would stroke my back, we just stayed wrapped. He
always folded his clothes on the chair beforehand. Even his
shoes, parallel, with the socks inside. The first time I’d come
to him, when we stood up to move to his bedroom—I was
leaning on him so closely, so enmeshed in him I could barely
walk—when we finally stood by his bed, I couldn’t make my
fingers move fast enough, unbuttoning, unsnapping. But he
helped. And when he stood there facing me, I looked at him,
looked, before I slowly began to touch, before I lifted my whole
self onto him. Long after, in the beam of the bedside light,
reading his body. So close we’d read the same page of the paper
at the same time. When we’d finished a section, he’d fold it in
half, in half again, and place it at a right angle on the table.
All the layers of the news, contained.
Heterogenous Math
Roberta Gibson’s blackboard was never all erased,
covered with equations and formulas. She could draw a
circle with a chalk and a length of string in any size, radius,
perfect, and work through theorems at a pace so steady
even fat Thomas Johnson in the back row could follow.
Triangles, parallellograms, hypotenuses. She’d done it long
enough she could keep going all through the day, and not long
enough she was tired of it. Sometimes at lunch she’d open
up, gossip about the other teachers. She laughed out loud
when she talked about Ty. He’s a menace, she said,
shaking her tidy head from side to side. Put her soup spoon
down. You know what he did? she asked. Two years ago,
he’d always be walking by her class room with his tennis
racquet swinging, making himself a big old nuisance, and
once he came on in to her classroom with the kids right
there working at their desks and he slammed—Robbie’s
voice got higher—I mean to say slammed, a tennis ball
against my board. Messed up one of my angles. But you
gotta like him. I mean, he’s sweet, you know? That time
Ruth’s house was hit—and that grouchy old husband was
Back East somewhere—Ty took Ruth to the police, and
then he got a couple of the kids onto it, and they got most
of her stuff back. But girl, that man could mess you up
bad and you not even be looking.
11.22.2006
Stuff
It's sunny out, a day to travel weatherwise, so of
course there are crowds. John Gallaher posted books
he likes recently. Everytime I think I know what
I like by definition everything changes. It's because
I can't go at it that way, backwards, with criteria
first. I like Rick Lyon's Bell 8. I like Kenneth Koch's
"You Were Wearing": "I said, 'Let's go outside
a while.' Then we went onto the porch and sat on the
Abraham Lincoln swing./You sat on the eyes, mouth,
and beard part, and I sat on the knees./ In the yard
across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage
can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king
George the Third." Everyone go out and buy and read
Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It is pure. It is oddly
uplifting. It's the beginning of the world, and it's nothing
like what we think about when we ponder books or films
about the end/beginning of the world. Yes, there is
a cooked baby, some small horrors tucked into the
corners of this slender nightmare. That's not what
you remember though. I read it in a few hours,
the best novel I've read since Housekeeping and in odd
ways the books are similar. They are both about Nature
in essential ways. I'm teaching an advanced poetry class
in the Spring and I'm using individual books for it,
but once again I feel frustrated for lack of an anthology
that is any good at all (contemporary poetry anthology).
I've been enjoying Oliver de la Paz's Names Above
Houses, the way the small stories seem adrift on water,
each landscape (with people) caught in a ball of slow
dazzling light, the way the ground and the sky are felt
in every "frame." And I do want to say frame. Sometimes
students bring light to life because an authenticity opens
up in the relationship art makes possible, and this has
happened with Talia Reed, whose complexity as a person
and a poet seems bottomless. Also, Vince Bauters, who
is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery thing
in poetry. (He's reading Tony Hoagland and Christine Hume,
and loving both, not knowing quite yet you're supposed
to go for one or the other.) Mix poetry and people and you
get involved in a conversation that runs deep. Not the worst way
to begin to understand the world and its myriad paradoxes
(some politicians should write some poems, and I mean
some Flarf or some long image driven narratives, or at least
read in Seidel's new book the poem "Dick and Fred" and try
to imagine why a man might write that poem in this moment
in time). I didn't get an NEA, again. I'm reading in February at
The Box Factory in St. Joseph, Michigan. Dana Roeser is
reading in February at IUSB. Louise Mathias is speaking
soon to Sarah Maclay's class at Loyola. Joyelle McSweeney
now lives in South Bend and I need to meet her, possibly at
Lulu's sometime. Walter Lab is painting his heart out
in California. Greg Cleary is plotting birds in Michigan.
Bret Favre is still playing football and won't retire. Please
retire! But as Greg says "All he's got to do at home is blow
up beaver dams and mow the lawn."
It's sunny out, a day to travel weatherwise, so of
course there are crowds. John Gallaher posted books
he likes recently. Everytime I think I know what
I like by definition everything changes. It's because
I can't go at it that way, backwards, with criteria
first. I like Rick Lyon's Bell 8. I like Kenneth Koch's
"You Were Wearing": "I said, 'Let's go outside
a while.' Then we went onto the porch and sat on the
Abraham Lincoln swing./You sat on the eyes, mouth,
and beard part, and I sat on the knees./ In the yard
across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage
can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king
George the Third." Everyone go out and buy and read
Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It is pure. It is oddly
uplifting. It's the beginning of the world, and it's nothing
like what we think about when we ponder books or films
about the end/beginning of the world. Yes, there is
a cooked baby, some small horrors tucked into the
corners of this slender nightmare. That's not what
you remember though. I read it in a few hours,
the best novel I've read since Housekeeping and in odd
ways the books are similar. They are both about Nature
in essential ways. I'm teaching an advanced poetry class
in the Spring and I'm using individual books for it,
but once again I feel frustrated for lack of an anthology
that is any good at all (contemporary poetry anthology).
I've been enjoying Oliver de la Paz's Names Above
Houses, the way the small stories seem adrift on water,
each landscape (with people) caught in a ball of slow
dazzling light, the way the ground and the sky are felt
in every "frame." And I do want to say frame. Sometimes
students bring light to life because an authenticity opens
up in the relationship art makes possible, and this has
happened with Talia Reed, whose complexity as a person
and a poet seems bottomless. Also, Vince Bauters, who
is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery thing
in poetry. (He's reading Tony Hoagland and Christine Hume,
and loving both, not knowing quite yet you're supposed
to go for one or the other.) Mix poetry and people and you
get involved in a conversation that runs deep. Not the worst way
to begin to understand the world and its myriad paradoxes
(some politicians should write some poems, and I mean
some Flarf or some long image driven narratives, or at least
read in Seidel's new book the poem "Dick and Fred" and try
to imagine why a man might write that poem in this moment
in time). I didn't get an NEA, again. I'm reading in February at
The Box Factory in St. Joseph, Michigan. Dana Roeser is
reading in February at IUSB. Louise Mathias is speaking
soon to Sarah Maclay's class at Loyola. Joyelle McSweeney
now lives in South Bend and I need to meet her, possibly at
Lulu's sometime. Walter Lab is painting his heart out
in California. Greg Cleary is plotting birds in Michigan.
Bret Favre is still playing football and won't retire. Please
retire! But as Greg says "All he's got to do at home is blow
up beaver dams and mow the lawn."
11.20.2006
SIN BIRD
(an Ashbery Erasure Poem)
The perfume climbs red words
most amply.
Phony people try to hear it
to get away.
Horses through hell,
it's normal.
That summer we rent.
Bugs came and people have cars
to carry them.
And man sets his pet up, artificial,
a photograph,
a car in mist.
Pardon the land or lock us out.
(an Ashbery Erasure Poem)
The perfume climbs red words
most amply.
Phony people try to hear it
to get away.
Horses through hell,
it's normal.
That summer we rent.
Bugs came and people have cars
to carry them.
And man sets his pet up, artificial,
a photograph,
a car in mist.
Pardon the land or lock us out.
11.17.2006
REAL KISSING
The light is getting Novemberish.
Mid-morning. Some scratching on the roof.
Day like a hangover, followed by the boil-
Ing down. It is the cornfield he watches,
Way out there, good for drowning in. Thunder-
Storm like boiled flowers rising,
Scars in the bay of a crooked paternity.
Straps, chromosomes, and a timepiece
For fucking. Dust is in every raindrop.
Light all over her mind. Little sections
Of falling go into it, not sleeping,
And they add a small room, plan to live there,
Get out the cans of yellow paint. Late
Water-music slides sideways, like
Escher having a nightmare, moonlight on the
Bed turned the color of skin, square as
A radiator, followed by the two of them,
Naked, at pasture. A dog trots dragging a
Metal chain that bangs between stumps
Along a ditch bed and acres of corn left standing.
It approaches the front of the towering house.
As the sun goes down, the windows light up.
The light is getting Novemberish.
Mid-morning. Some scratching on the roof.
Day like a hangover, followed by the boil-
Ing down. It is the cornfield he watches,
Way out there, good for drowning in. Thunder-
Storm like boiled flowers rising,
Scars in the bay of a crooked paternity.
Straps, chromosomes, and a timepiece
For fucking. Dust is in every raindrop.
Light all over her mind. Little sections
Of falling go into it, not sleeping,
And they add a small room, plan to live there,
Get out the cans of yellow paint. Late
Water-music slides sideways, like
Escher having a nightmare, moonlight on the
Bed turned the color of skin, square as
A radiator, followed by the two of them,
Naked, at pasture. A dog trots dragging a
Metal chain that bangs between stumps
Along a ditch bed and acres of corn left standing.
It approaches the front of the towering house.
As the sun goes down, the windows light up.
11.16.2006
THAT YEAR IN BLACK AND WHITE
(Merrill Street, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1997)
A man is found hung on the edge of the ghetto,
his eyes bleeding from the pressure,
the cold moss like water
where the stones have been rolled away
& replaced over the man’s keys
& empty wallet.
A couple of bank receipts blow in a circle under his shoes.
Police lights warble, red & blue.
*
Abort Christ, it says on the toilet stall
door in the Catholic hospital,
& somebody drew
a fetus hung by its own umbilical cord.
The urinals epoxied to the wall
look like something from Easter Island.
They stare silently into the long mirrors,
bored stupid by years.
*
The snow flakes here are made of dust and metal.
They taste like nothing, like a pile of new envelopes.
A squadron of planes purrs invisibly over the house and then when it’s quiet
you see a single mosquito casting a shadow on the kitchen wall.
Is it really 3 a.m.?
Yes, but it hasn’t snowed for five months.
When you turn on the television a burning crucifix fills the screen
And for twenty minutes it just stays there.
(Merrill Street, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1997)
A man is found hung on the edge of the ghetto,
his eyes bleeding from the pressure,
the cold moss like water
where the stones have been rolled away
& replaced over the man’s keys
& empty wallet.
A couple of bank receipts blow in a circle under his shoes.
Police lights warble, red & blue.
*
Abort Christ, it says on the toilet stall
door in the Catholic hospital,
& somebody drew
a fetus hung by its own umbilical cord.
The urinals epoxied to the wall
look like something from Easter Island.
They stare silently into the long mirrors,
bored stupid by years.
*
The snow flakes here are made of dust and metal.
They taste like nothing, like a pile of new envelopes.
A squadron of planes purrs invisibly over the house and then when it’s quiet
you see a single mosquito casting a shadow on the kitchen wall.
Is it really 3 a.m.?
Yes, but it hasn’t snowed for five months.
When you turn on the television a burning crucifix fills the screen
And for twenty minutes it just stays there.
Deer & Salt Block
(poem from the new Laurel Review)
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
One boy is a liar & says there's a block of salt under
his bed to draw the deer in from the orchard. One boy
says the wall will open if you say an untold anagram of
his name. One boy is already dressed when he wakes
up for the wedding. One boy hides a turtle from his
brothers in the birdcage. One boy says he's itching
from the hurricane rash. One boy took a long time in the
bathtub reading the comics. One boy loops a tractor
chain to the ceiling fan & tears the whole roof down.
One boy speaks through the keyhole to the others about
a baseball player's surgery. One boy can't stand the scent
of corned beef. One boy has a different spelling for his name
each week at school. One boy stole his teacher's shoe. One
boy listens to the radio under his pillow. One boy drinks
coffee alone in the tool shed. One boy casts a purple stone to
the bottom of the pond & follows it down with all of his
church clothes on.
(poem from the new Laurel Review)
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
One boy is a liar & says there's a block of salt under
his bed to draw the deer in from the orchard. One boy
says the wall will open if you say an untold anagram of
his name. One boy is already dressed when he wakes
up for the wedding. One boy hides a turtle from his
brothers in the birdcage. One boy says he's itching
from the hurricane rash. One boy took a long time in the
bathtub reading the comics. One boy loops a tractor
chain to the ceiling fan & tears the whole roof down.
One boy speaks through the keyhole to the others about
a baseball player's surgery. One boy can't stand the scent
of corned beef. One boy has a different spelling for his name
each week at school. One boy stole his teacher's shoe. One
boy listens to the radio under his pillow. One boy drinks
coffee alone in the tool shed. One boy casts a purple stone to
the bottom of the pond & follows it down with all of his
church clothes on.
11.14.2006
The Story
One thing I've noticed is that not only does a person
navigating the medical maze called health care in this
country have to learn not to obsess on the illness at hand,
but that telling people about bad medical care invites lectures
on how bad the medical system indeed is, only the lecture is
directed at the sick, or possibly sick, person
who suddenly is trying to decide how to be rational
while feeling terrified. If some doctor schedules you for
some test two weeks hence you get YOU'RE NOT GOING
TO TAKE THAT CRAP ARE YOU? You get advice not to
research your possible illness. Anyway, believe me, the sick
person knows, not via news reports either, how awful the health
care system is. You're left with great choices--speed versus
quality. I love that we study how to buy a car for months but
if cancer is suspected we go to whatever doctor
we are sent to, forget that he treats you like a babbling
lunatic and has exactly three months of experience
doing biopsies. Forget that I wouldn't share a coconut
with him on a desert island if he were the only other person
marooned there with me. But fuck all that, it's rough figuring out
the correct PR for illness. On the one hand you
have a legitimate reason to give yourself a break as to
your normally barely doable responsibilities (and you deserve
to be able to say why), but on the other hand you become
the illness you have. You're not you anymore. Obviously
there is no "correct" way to act going in either direction, as
someone who is sick, as someone who knows someone who is sick.
I've had some very bad experiences with the "health care system"
this month in that I have found not a single soul who is willing to
have a dialogue about the cancer it appears likely
I have. (I've been lied to, and I've been treated like an old
senile person, as if my poor brain can't process the implications of
the possible outcomes I'm facing.) This has prompted me to
consider postponing quick testing in order that I find someone I can
trust. Shouldn't I bag the first specialist I visited. I don't know when I'll
know what I need to know--mid December? I have another
consultation in less than two weeks. I grew up surrounded by
attention seeking sick people unfortunately. Life was--and still is--
all about being sick. So of course I grew up simply refusing to believe
I'd ever get sick since my disgust with such behavior leaves me at
a loss as to how to even be sick (quietly, I'm thinking, allowed to
not answer my cell phone any longer if I don't want to).
Of course I'm emotionally a wreck. That goes without saying,
and I will be for a while. One day I'm wracked with symptoms,
the next I'm close to normal. I've been hyper and wired my entire
life and you can bet I'm hyper and wired right now. Sleep,
what is that? Anyway, some people know about this but I've
been busy simply going through it. So I am saying here, I guess, if I
seem other than usual (vanished) it's because I am preoccupied.
It's very strange. I feel this odd need to apologize for all this.
And then, immediately after I feel THAT, I just feel pissed off.
Long long walks help with this immensely, possibly, if you're like
me, while listening to pop bands like The Shoes.
One thing I've noticed is that not only does a person
navigating the medical maze called health care in this
country have to learn not to obsess on the illness at hand,
but that telling people about bad medical care invites lectures
on how bad the medical system indeed is, only the lecture is
directed at the sick, or possibly sick, person
who suddenly is trying to decide how to be rational
while feeling terrified. If some doctor schedules you for
some test two weeks hence you get YOU'RE NOT GOING
TO TAKE THAT CRAP ARE YOU? You get advice not to
research your possible illness. Anyway, believe me, the sick
person knows, not via news reports either, how awful the health
care system is. You're left with great choices--speed versus
quality. I love that we study how to buy a car for months but
if cancer is suspected we go to whatever doctor
we are sent to, forget that he treats you like a babbling
lunatic and has exactly three months of experience
doing biopsies. Forget that I wouldn't share a coconut
with him on a desert island if he were the only other person
marooned there with me. But fuck all that, it's rough figuring out
the correct PR for illness. On the one hand you
have a legitimate reason to give yourself a break as to
your normally barely doable responsibilities (and you deserve
to be able to say why), but on the other hand you become
the illness you have. You're not you anymore. Obviously
there is no "correct" way to act going in either direction, as
someone who is sick, as someone who knows someone who is sick.
I've had some very bad experiences with the "health care system"
this month in that I have found not a single soul who is willing to
have a dialogue about the cancer it appears likely
I have. (I've been lied to, and I've been treated like an old
senile person, as if my poor brain can't process the implications of
the possible outcomes I'm facing.) This has prompted me to
consider postponing quick testing in order that I find someone I can
trust. Shouldn't I bag the first specialist I visited. I don't know when I'll
know what I need to know--mid December? I have another
consultation in less than two weeks. I grew up surrounded by
attention seeking sick people unfortunately. Life was--and still is--
all about being sick. So of course I grew up simply refusing to believe
I'd ever get sick since my disgust with such behavior leaves me at
a loss as to how to even be sick (quietly, I'm thinking, allowed to
not answer my cell phone any longer if I don't want to).
Of course I'm emotionally a wreck. That goes without saying,
and I will be for a while. One day I'm wracked with symptoms,
the next I'm close to normal. I've been hyper and wired my entire
life and you can bet I'm hyper and wired right now. Sleep,
what is that? Anyway, some people know about this but I've
been busy simply going through it. So I am saying here, I guess, if I
seem other than usual (vanished) it's because I am preoccupied.
It's very strange. I feel this odd need to apologize for all this.
And then, immediately after I feel THAT, I just feel pissed off.
Long long walks help with this immensely, possibly, if you're like
me, while listening to pop bands like The Shoes.
11.04.2006
THE BEER DRINKERS
(an Ashbery Erasure Poem)
Think of it as something
merely in the way, go over,
eat it.
Look at this season
Trees draped in umbrellas raw
like beads from a string
subliminal magic.
Just keep out of the way.
Be young.
Final.
Weather as lame, a crowd,
and us of course, folks home for the newspaper.
Tell a nurse to color these Americans,
coin extracted from the truth.
Add distance.
Camp embarrassed in a bathrobe.
He was in the rut and he came,
one fat annihilated darling.
(an Ashbery Erasure Poem)
Think of it as something
merely in the way, go over,
eat it.
Look at this season
Trees draped in umbrellas raw
like beads from a string
subliminal magic.
Just keep out of the way.
Be young.
Final.
Weather as lame, a crowd,
and us of course, folks home for the newspaper.
Tell a nurse to color these Americans,
coin extracted from the truth.
Add distance.
Camp embarrassed in a bathrobe.
He was in the rut and he came,
one fat annihilated darling.
11.03.2006
THE END, AND THE BEGINNING AGAIN
A man heats broth in his stone tower,
A few degrees slowly. A loaf of bread shines
On the cutting table, near a fish.
Trot lines bristle over the river, a chess game
Of quick tugs, and the minnows
Leaping in schools make music of the current
While in the shorter of two towers
A woman sprinkles salt that gets deep into the table there.
It is made of fine dark cherry.
He scorches the fish on high heat.
She broils some thin sliced chicken, with curry.
He cuts the bread and pours ice coffee.
She imagines sun on the glass sculptures in town.
Deep underwater dark fish swirl the pulpy dust out their gills.
Napkins are folded, candles blown out.
The man pulls wide open the curtains, thinks about the stars emerging.
The woman sighs, washes late things in her warm kitchen.
A man heats broth in his stone tower,
A few degrees slowly. A loaf of bread shines
On the cutting table, near a fish.
Trot lines bristle over the river, a chess game
Of quick tugs, and the minnows
Leaping in schools make music of the current
While in the shorter of two towers
A woman sprinkles salt that gets deep into the table there.
It is made of fine dark cherry.
He scorches the fish on high heat.
She broils some thin sliced chicken, with curry.
He cuts the bread and pours ice coffee.
She imagines sun on the glass sculptures in town.
Deep underwater dark fish swirl the pulpy dust out their gills.
Napkins are folded, candles blown out.
The man pulls wide open the curtains, thinks about the stars emerging.
The woman sighs, washes late things in her warm kitchen.
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