(no subject)

[pachamama.livejournal.com]

Neglect

by R. T. Smith

Is the scent of apple boughs smoking
in the woodstove what I will remember
of the Red Delicious I brought down, ashamed

that I could not convince its limbs to render fruit?
Too much neglect will do that, skew the sap's
passage, blacken leaves, dry the bark and heart.

I should have lopped the dead limbs early
and watched each branch with a goshawk's eye,
patching with medicinal pitch, offering water,

compost and mulch, but I was too enchanted
by pear saplings, flowers and the pasture,
too callow to believe that death's inevitable

for any living being unloved, untended.
What remains is this armload of applewood
now feeding the stove's smolder. Splendor

ripens a final time in the firebox, a scarlet
harvest headed, by dawn, to embers.
Two decades of shade and blossoms - tarts

and cider, bees dazzled by the pollen,
spare elegance in ice - but what goes is gone.
Smoke is all, through this lesson in winter

regret, I've been given to remember.
Smoke, and Red Delicious apples redder
than a passing cardinal's crest or cinders.

 

from Poetry, Oct-Nov, 2002

Place - A.F. Moritz

[schroederjt.livejournal.com]

Place
A.F. Moritz

A place belongs to the one who has most deeply
loved it, they said, has hoped in it beyond
its self-corruption. The land, people, the city

is his if his nights are for recalling it,
calling it in tears of aloneness and amazed
thanksgiving: that luck let him kiss it in his childhood,

that it grew into him, is him, that he still wants
to have it, save it, he wonders what it knows
tonight, right now, how it is with that place,

if it's happy, dying, dead. So he went back
carrying his book of that city: a great book,
yet only a dim sketch of his memory,

though in its pages, closed and dark, the alleys
of cracked windows and lintels, and children's paths
through towering weeds behind the empty stores

and under sycamores down to the river, burn
with bright emptiness that in the city were full
discarded bottles, concrete crumbs, and rusted

shavings in broken light. He did not have
a dollar in that place. He could not find
a door to open. He did not know a soul.

London

[alansquier.livejournal.com]

LONDON

William Blake

I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse

(no subject)

[stephe.livejournal.com]

Libretto
by C. D. Wright


Night is dark
On the streets without names.

Men piss in the ditch, on the toe of their shoes
Thinking it must be rain or hail.

The feet of their women swell like a melon.
Their ironing boards bow
Under the weight of beautiful linen
They do for other women.

Radios are turned up to beat thunder.
Translations of the gospel
Back into tongues.

The tiger lilies' tremble.
Bottles get busted, somebody cut.

A man in a black shirt
Gets off the bus with no suitcase,
Leans on his wife. Umbrella
With a broken spoke.

A girl sits out of doors in her slip.
She turns fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty-six,
Goes crazy.

The saxophone plays it for someone else.
Play hell.

Claudia Rankine

[arielblue.livejournal.com]

Backed up in the Soul
(Collected from CNN)

Hours later, still in the difficulty of what it is to be, just like that, just the way Stevens said, inside it, standing there, maybe wading, maybe waving, standing where the deep waters of everything backed up, one said,

climbing over bodies, one said, stranded on a roof, one said, trapped in the building, and in the difficulty, nobody coming and still someone saying, who could see it coming, the difficulty of that.

The fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place.

Have you seen their faces?

Faith, not fear, she said. She'd heard that once and was trying to stamp the phrase on her mind. At the time, she couldn't speak it aloud. He wouldn't tolerate it. He was angry. Where were they? Where was anyone? This is a goddamn emergency, he said.

Then someone else said it was the classic binary between the rich and the poor, between the haves and the have-nots, between the whites and the blacks in the difficulty of all that.

Then each house was a mumbling structure, all that water, buildings peeling apart, the yellow foam, the contaminated stench of mildew, mold.

The missing limbs, he said, the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters, lying face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors.

And someone said, where were the buses? And simultaneously someone else said, FEMA said it wasn't safe to be there.

What I'm hearing, she said, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas.

He gave me the flashlight, she said, but I didn't want to turn it on. It was all black. I didn't want to shine a light on that.

We never reached out to anyone to tell our story, because there's no ending to our story, he said. Being honest with you, in my opinion, they forgot about us.

It's awful, she said, to go back home to find your own dead child. It's really sad.

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, she said, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.

You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, so many of these people almost all of them that we see, are so poor, someone else said, and they are so black.

Have you seen their faces?

Then this aestheticized distancing from Oh my god, from not believable, from dehydration, from over-heating, from no electricity, no power, no way to communicate

We are drowning here

Still in the difficulty

As if the faces in the images hold all the consequences

And the fiction of the facts assumes randomness and indeterminacy.

He said, I don't know what the water wanted.
(It wanted to show you no one would come.)

He said, I don't know what the water wanted.
(As if then and now were not the same moment.)

He said, I don't know what the water wanted.

Call out to them.
I don't see them.
Call out anyway.

Did you see their faces?


--Claudia Rankine
from jubilat Number 12

Chiyojo

[spiritualorchid.livejournal.com]

Whether astringent
I do not know. This is my first
Persimmon picking.


~Chiyojo