The Watertower

My Body in Rain

2012-01-16T16:56:00.000-08:00

This piece continues to evolve - expanding and contracting in and out of itself. I have at least 5 versions now!

Song and roll,

how I love the blinding rush

of that waterfall

when it gulps

all attempts of the brave morning

to rise,

until there is none left

but the heap of my body

in rain.

The unseasonable storm,

in the long limbs

of my June days,

newly bred, double-jointed,

curling over me

like sex,

I cup the conch shell

over my ears,

the cool musty whisper

echoing,

the tongue of your strange

inhabitant.

Mint moist, dull-thud,

the land of every hit,

careening my skin

like pavement,

eroding some shear

of me you slide right down,

always down

for the storm water drain,

until I am sodden,

creased in rain,

my brown strands shredding

across my flushed cheeks,

my blue eyes

filling up like music.

And then I am glittering,

I am all breathless bent

and angled,

I am cold sweat

and misty-minded,

I am aging in the act,

I have gained weight

and I sag with rain,

my shirt hangs off me like wings,

I am a flightless bird

in the rain,

suddenly flying down the street

howling to the rain,

the bombing of my foot-fall

chewing up the sidewalk,

the pools popping in rapid

succession.

I have let myself believe

I could escape,

I did not let myself think

that perhaps I did not want to,

that my body by the searing glow

of the electric stove

boils for the shatter

of the rain,

that I do not hear machine guns,

but rather the skitter

of your relentless purring

against my windows,

my body longs

to the ever-flowing trees

of you –

all your arms

and hands

and legs

and mouths.

Image Post: Into the Water

2011-11-26T14:15:00.000-08:00

Isolation

2011-11-13T16:02:00.000-08:00

The sun is falling,

all I want is to gather my bones

and get inside this poem.

What can I say of isolation?

I am far too good at it,

I study worms that live in the bottom of the sea,

it is my master’s thesis -

the Cambrian radiation of polychaete species,

they live skin deep, coiled

beneath an endless rain of matter,

a sordid mix of all debris

abandoned somewhere above,

to fall and fall...

Slammed by glaciers 17,000 years ago,

the Gulf of Maine is the battered woman

of whom she once was,

banks loom over black basins

as though his stone sculpture

forever gapes over her.

She is a cauldron of endless winter,

fragments raging and raining -

plants, carcasses, broken heart -

shaped plankton chewed to pieces

by cyano-bacteria

again and again as they fall.

On this my worms feed -

anything you ever tossed out,

those hobo plastic trash bags, or

wasted apple cores, or

that wine bottle you didn’t recycle, or

those friends… that man,

oh the one who got away, or

the goldfish and the puppy once adopted,

wrapped in all those golden intentions, the fish

that drove useless circles around that bowl,

its limp body now swirling down and down…

Yes! I tear my own natural history to pieces!

I am desperate on and on! Listen -

that is my master’s thesis,

my continuing enriching falling

education,

I am no sum of dependent parts,

the body of a polychaete under my microscope

is distinctly segmented,

each piece its own mad web

of water and muscle and nerves,

and the resulting S-shaped swerve

of their cylindrical bodies -

isolation coordinated!

I am at the bottom of the poem,

the place it will do anything for anybody.

Waves gnash the backs of my teeth.

I am driving home, car blazing north,

beneath the mortar fire of star-fall.

White streaks shock the corners of my eyes.

A stroke of violence

to drive my perspective into shift.

This poem means to imagine

all the way to death.

Back home, in my room,

I hold it to the light of my microscope.

Examine the letters' bold curl -

waves writhing, folding, incompressible,

silently deforming, but never losing.

Shores of the underside of my skin slip back.

Image Post: Surf Fishing

2011-10-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

Image Post: Kansas Windmills

2011-10-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

Poetry Bombing!

2011-06-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vneTvZ-d-44&feature=youtu.be

Make poetry a part of your every day life, this is awesome!

Star Chamber by Davis McCombs

2011-05-04T14:58:00.000-07:00

Friends, one of my favorite poets, Davis McCombs

Once, the Doctor spoke to me at length
of stars and prognostications, how,
when we observe the waxing of the Moon,
everything cognate to her nature--marrow
in bones and in trees, flesh of the river
mussel--increases also. He told of tides
and how the ocean is affixed as with a chain
to moonlight. I think it must be different
in the Cave, where no light penetrates.
There, I have lost hours, whole cycles of the Sun.
At Star Chamber, I control the spheres--
a lantern hung just-so will produce the night sky
as if seen from a gorge; wobble it, and a comet,
smoky, pestilent, streaks across the Ether.

Image Post: Car Wash

2011-04-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

Alabanza: In Praise of the Local 100 by Martin Espada

2011-04-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

Friends, I want to share with you this poem - Alabanza by Martin Espada. The
subject matter of this poem is one very close to me as I was living and working
in New York City right near the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks. I 
had not heard this poem until recently - but I really love that it chooses to 
celebrate. That is not me - so often when I think of that day, I think senseless
death, and that is all. So many voices lost that will never be heard, and that is 
the truth of this life. But this piece goes beyond. Perhaps that is one reason why 
this is such a special poem, and why poets remain so important. In a nutshell,
they take us there.
 
Alabanza: In Praise of the Local 100
Martin Espada 

For the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, 
working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the 
attack on the World Trade Center 

Alabanza. Praise the cook with the shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, 
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher 
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.

After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the booming ice storm of glass from the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan to Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.

Image Post: Lone Flower in the Grass

2011-04-06T08:25:00.000-07:00

The Work of Alison Luterman

2011-03-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

Hello friends,

So I just wrapped up a great poetry class in Berkeley with poet Alison Luterman, and I want to share with you some of her work. She has two books: "The Largest Possible Life," and "See How We Almost Fly." Check them out! Also, her website is www.alisonluterman.com and she also has a blog called 'see how we almost fly' - http://www.seehowwealmostfly.blogspot.com/

For today I chose one of her poems from "See How We Almost Fly." It is a gem - I love how it has a touch of humor to it, something I always admire because I have never been great at bringing my sense of humor to my poems, so I always envy others that do! So here you go...

"I Confess" by Alison Luterman

I stalked her
in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,
the way she placed yogurt and avocadoes in her basket,
beaming peach like the North Star.
I wanted to ask “What aisle did you find
your serenity in, do you know
how to be married for fifty years, or how to live alone,
excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess
some knowledge that makes the earth burn and turn on its axis—”
but we don’t request such things from strangers
nowadays. So I said, “I love your hair.”

They Feed They Lion by Philip Levine

2011-03-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

I read poetry. A lot. A new thing I am doing with this blog is share some of my favorite poems. There are so many great poems out there, and yet poetry is such an under appreciated art form. It shouldn't be. We should come back to it here in America.

Posted below is They Feed They Lion by Philip Levine - perhaps you know this one. I am reminded of this considering everything that is happening in Wisconsin right now, and yet I first heard this poem over ten years ago. It goes to show that poetry is a relevant force in our society whether it is widely read or not, though I hope some day it will be again here in America.

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,

Out of black bean and wet slate bread,

Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,

Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,

They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills

Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,

West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,

Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,

Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,

They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,

Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,

“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,

From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,

From the furred ear and the full jowl come

The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose

They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters

Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower

Of the hams the thorax of caves,

From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”

Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,

The grained arm that pulls the hands,

They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,

From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,

From my car passing under the stars,

They Lion, from my children inherit,

From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,

From they sack and they belly opened

And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth

They feed they Lion and he comes.

Image Post: Rainy Oakland, During and After

2011-03-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

Friends, it has been a rainy rainy week here in the Bay area... the rain passes over, clears and passes over again, maybe a dozen times a day.

During

And the beautiful after...

Image Post: Boston Reflection

2011-03-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

Image Post: Birds on the Lake

2011-03-07T08:37:00.000-08:00

Image Post: Pavement

2011-03-01T20:13:00.000-08:00

Image Post: Wind Chimes

2011-02-05T17:25:00.000-08:00

Image Post: Big Basin

2011-01-14T20:39:00.000-08:00

Image Post: One Light

2011-01-03T19:35:00.000-08:00

Image Post: Random portraits

2010-12-11T10:31:00.000-08:00

Image Post: The Spotlight

2010-12-04T13:01:00.000-08:00

Image Post: In the Blue Light

2010-10-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Image Post: Make

2010-10-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

Image Post: Skeleton tree

2010-10-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

Image Post: I kissed your lips in the aquarium...

2010-10-06T13:57:00.000-07:00