2.
Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the whims of
One man loves but is not loved in return by the object
Of his affection there is little to tell of his profession
There is more for it is because he works with glass
That he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable
(she does not love) he knows how to take something
Small and hard and hot and make room for
His breath quickens at night as he dreams of her he wants
To create a present unlike any other and because he cannot
Hold her he designs something that can a bathtub of
Glass shimmers red when it is hot he pours it into the mold
In a rush of passion only as it begins to cool does it reflect
His foolishness enrages him he throws off his clothes meaning
To jump in and lie there but it is still too hot and his feet propel
Him forward he runs from one end to the other then falls
To the floor blisters begin to swell on his soft feet he watches
His pain harden into a pretty pattern on the bottom of the bath

3.
Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human
Form may define external appearance but there is room
For improvement within try a soap dish that allows for
Slippage is inevitable as is difference in the size of
The subject may hoard his or her bubbles at different
Ends of the bathtub may grasp the sponge tightly or
Loosely it may be assumed that eventually everyone gets in
The bath has a place in our lives and our place is
Within it we have control of how much hot how much cold
What to pour in how long we want to stay when to
Return is inevitable because we need something
To define ourselves against even if we know that
Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out
Which is not the case with our own tighter confinement
Inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too

Matthea Harvey

how they root through your chest like vines among
the hackberry. Built of birds nests, thin

tangles of copper wiring: better off
in your skete, better before Aristotle

said man is a political animal.
Better built from burnt ashes of

titans who ate Dionysius. And yes,
of course: the oceans wait to fill your lungs

with eels. Statistically you & I are the person.
And my lungs [baleening/sluicing] the air.

Orpheus said the wind won’t blow all day
& storms eventually tire of their rage,

which reminded me of that band Angel Hair
who sang “No one has the clap forever.”

-Mathias Svalina

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does “flat drink” mean? and the mysterious
“cheap date” (no explanation lessened
this one’s mystery). Among Italian writers we

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic–
and least poetic– so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn’t
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked

“What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

or the statue there?” Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think– “The truth
is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. “If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.
That is how he died,
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry–

(we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)– poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.

-Heather McHugh

John Ashbery, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” from Houseboat Days. Copyright © 1987, 1979 by John Ashbery. Reprinted with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author.

Source: Houseboat Days (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress’d.

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.

W. Shakespeare

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.

Wallace Stevens

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by–
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”–
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”

-William Stafford

Thomas Nagel wrote about Sexual Perversion in 1979… here’s how my old professor, Roy Sorenson, describes what Nagel says:

“In addition to being aroused by Juliet, Romeo is aroused by Juliet’s being aroused, and Juliet’s being aroused by Romeo’s being aroused by Juliet’s being aroused, and so on.”

Something like that happens at a really great concert, between the crowd and the performer. It’s why we see live music – for the off chance that we might get to experience that.

Tonight I went to see a friend’s band, areyougone. He and I have talked a lot about music, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I liked the band – they were playing pretty exactly the kind of band I want to like: country-themed shoegaze. Apparently we’re calling it “Spaghetti Western” now.

Afterwards the guy from Highway had a solo acoustic set. I don’t have a lot of vocabulary to describe guys with acoustic guitars without bands, but he reminded me a lot of a Woodie Guthrie song I just heard again, and he was fucking great.

I talked for a bit with Colin, the bass player for The BJM after Highway’s set. Turns out he’s from Portland (I think I knew that) and playing in a Spaghetti Western band called Federale. I asked him about the heckling at BJM shows, and he says it’s died down a bit – that they’ve moved past that. Which is great to hear because as funny as the juxtaposition of super violent heckling and counter-heckling with slow sad love songs was, I’d really prefer to just hear the songs.

Then 1776 played. And the crowd totally adored them. It was amazing to be a part of. It was a tiny venue, and really not that remarkable, except for the moment after the first song where the band all kind of looked up in shock at the volume of applause. And they deserved it – they were great, and they killed it tonight. Kinks-esque rock, totally tight and with great songwriting.

Courtney Taylor*2 from the Dandys was there – Pete plays in Highway when they’re a band, and Courtney knew one of the guys in 1776. And I thought about the fact that seeing them in Amsterdam in 2001, and seeing them realize how apeshit for them the crowd was, made me understand why we see live music. I kind of regret not telling him “Your band taught me why we see live music.”