it was a pleasure to burn

Every time I open the refrigerator, whether it is to get a water or an olive or the baker in my day’s diet coke baker’s dozen, water drips on my head. Every time. It can look like there isn’t dew in sight, like the point of saturation is degrees away, that the molecules couldn’t possibly condense out fast enough to meet strands of my hair, or my eyelash, or my nose. And then it happens. One thick drip.

I’ve been writing all day and don’t have the energy to post something very interesting, but I wanted to get away from the photographs as if they might cover up all of the mess that words, truths and untruths, have caused these many days.

See, the theme of my life is that one drip that doesn’t seem like it’s coming but always does anyway, despite geography, despite the truth of physical conditions. Not all of it is messy. There are some smiles. For example I ran out of vitamins and went to the store to get more One A Day for Women. Only after I got home and took one did I realize that I had purchased One A Day for Active Women over 55. See, that’s a drip in a way, but it still makes me laugh.

Pablo Picasso said that there is nothing more difficult than a line. Some have been able to deal with it or rather rearrange it to make it suit their own need. Pablo certainly did it his way, though he probably never felt as though he could get all the way into the shell and shuck free the emeralds. I think about writers and painters and vitamin buyers, who all try for the line, to avoid the drip. I guess the learning is in the failure sometimes too. When I’m less hopeful, in life and art, I remember what Ray Bradbury said. It was a pleasure to burn.

still

down to the water. and into the water.

i will taste poison and become poison

Tulips

I will taste bedroom.
I will taste nerve, and threadbare
skin, strawberry soft.
I will taste candle wax and knitting pearls
still crossed between forefingers, loop upon orangey
loop. I’m going to taste photographs of tulip rivers
where old women in yellow hats needle
the soil with their knees.
I’ll taste carpet dust tumbleweeding
through living rooms,
and white-laced pillows that catch
in my teeth. I will taste gamma. I will taste
Ohio widely in the yolk yellow morning
before I read the Etta from stereo. I will taste
the way Roman soldiers tasted their lovers’
tongues, deep in blue night, under the many sweeping
dresses of falling stars. I will taste and agonize at tasting.
I will taste cactus green, gorgonzola, mint leaves
waltzing in saucepans. I’m going to taste like elms
in lightning. I’ll taste
right in front of you so that you can watch
the way I have learned to savor. I will taste
chaste as saints.
I will taste beyond the lips
of my ability to taste. If only for one moment, if only
for the marrow in the bone of one moment I can taste multitudes,
entirely, unbearably, drowning against and again under
the buds of tasting you, like blackberry.

i have wasted my life

Today we were asked to consider whether there is a place for poetry in a world where the genius of the age is expressed by prose. Perhaps this is just opinion, but it is here none the less.

Poetry grants a sense of timelessness. When you read prose, you exist as part of the scale. You read a bone at a time and the prose that you read becomes part of your personal narrative. You read a chapter, put it down and make soup, read another chapter. The reading has become part of your personal narrative. The best prose wrinkles us between it like this. But prose has a scale. Poetry has no scale. The poem is the infinite moment. Poetry is the attempt to render that “other” state, that feeling of a dream that you cannot express in the morning with words. It is that feeling, more than anything. Poems are the multitude, they feel the weight of their own vision. Poetry is about creating silences. Prose, not even the best, Not even Joyce or Faulkner could do what James Wright does in his poem “Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota”. This is tranquility:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

and with what body do they come

This weekend, Nin and I had planned to go to D.C for a quick visit before the month bellied into school again. Unfortunately, the best laid plans of unglamorous editorial assistants for Artful Dodge don’t have time for these weekend luxuries. The picture above demonstrates how good Cocoa was this weekend. We looked after her because my parents were gone. This is the dog, remember, that can’t eat just dog food, must have dog food combined with new york strip steak or free range chicken, grilled, sometimes marinated. She wasn’t too bad, actually, stealing Winston’s toys, eating his adult large breed dog food, and generally being a dog jerk. But she’s just so damn cute when she jumps like that.

Here are some tips (this will be an ongoing list) for submitting to a journal like Artful Dodge. I list these tips in no way to seem wry, only to spare even some editors around the world from the unimaginable pain of throwing themselves out of train windows.

1. Do not send more than a few poems unless they are so amazing that they must be included. And by “amazing”, I mean amazing in the kind of independently confirmed amazing, which of course does not include mothers or spirit guides.

2. If you send a poem that is longer than three to five pages, you are indicating that you have never read a poem in a journal, because no one is going to print a five-page poem in a journal unless it has been solicited, or your first name is Walt and your last name is Whitman. Do not sing your body electric.

3. In your cover letter, do not explain what kind of poetic movement you are starting.

4. Do not use phrases such as “Great Grandmother tree, my soul is on fire”. Most likely, your soul is not on fire.

5. Do not write religious poetry that includes phrases such as “Homeless man, I nuzzle you and tell you of Jesus” because these phrases just make readers very angry.

6. Don’t translate your own poetry. It was much more interesting in French, and it fundamentally misunderstands the “translation” option of submissions.

7. Do not send poetry that, after reading, requires editors to question whether or not 911 in your town should be contacted and paramedics or police should be sent to your home.

8. If you do not send a SASE to a journal that asks for one, your poetry will be taken from the envelope, spit upon, and then thrown away.

Well, that was cathartic.