Six Lines Missing
I lost yesterday morning’s translation of Sappho
It was something like
“The rhythm of our fucking
Echoed throughout an open wound.”
(I found it a few days later)
“A pain
that we fucked
open all night”
*
There were 2 Indian bars in Suquamish
both down near the slab
The Tide’s In and The Tide’s Out
I cling to forms (being restless) worried the tides may have deserted me.
Let me write through history’s fleeting light among court poets from Japan,
Through Rimbaud’s sources: A quarry in Cypress
a favorite upstanding
Night Scene
where of course the queens would run amok
“where you will find a place to plant some seeds and tell your story all over.”
“prosody is the articulation of the total sound of a poem”
“the flowers
turn
the characters of the sea”
*
I walk to the other
end of the room
a slender window (no bars)
first sky blue sun
encircles the world
warm collarbones
I see the raven
the stolen light bundled
in his beak
I think of a steel
skeleton passing
back across the room
a sea that washed away
its own rocks
I turned my soul in early
with a roll of the dice
and gnarly flies nest
my demarcations and
illuminations are those
of a wayward angel
sky blue sun and
royal blood moon
balance being a major
hazard of most holy books
lifting the velvet peak
of the cloak over my head
and tip of nose, pointed
down, waking with wasted
sailors, either side,
you will die to thrill
the gods (one night as they
get bored) just the same
as I lived my life
*
The hot water in our building has been shut off till this evening.
Brian is talking about building a salt box house in our backyard in Lofall complete with outdoor
shower and French drain.
I daydream of dotting the front yard with mostly native plants, ones I grew up with: red
huckleberry, salmon berry, black elderberry with dark evergreen leaves that seem
small but shine for seconds when you pass.
*
Mind control takes hold after four poems.
Elaine should be the poet in a cage (booth) at the LA art book fair
or better yet, bill her as a prize fighting Jean Harlow
in a slightly bloodied V neck blouse
and green gold pyramid cuff.
*
Rereading the first Joanne interview in our new book (There You Are)
“Just write what’s going on around you, outside and inside”.
I think of this as a statement on sustaining a variable rhythm within the poem.
The poem is the only hem (the only field?) that Joanne has to land upon.
*
Glass bottles thrown
one by one into a dumpster
sounds very beautiful
though it actually isn’t
they bounce off each other and it sounds horrible
for one solid hour
every morning.
It only sounds good
if a few bottles are broken in a row
(pure accident)
