Stephen Dunn and the end of it all

from Stephen Dunn’s “Loves” in The Landscape at the End of the Century  (full text here)

…I love the rituals that bring us
together when sullenness persists,
how the dishes must be done,
the children helped toward bed.
I love how familiar bodies drift
back to each other
wordlessly, when the light go out.
Oh we will die soon enough.
Not enough can be said
for a redemptive caress.
How good it’s been to slide back
the heart’s hood awhile, how fortunate
there’s a heart and a covering for it,
and that whatever is still warm
has a chance.
I’m withholding things of course,
secrets I’ll replay, alone,
when my bones go soft.
Even you have no place for them,
my spacious one, you who have existed
to resist me as I’ve made you up.
Do I sense you getting tired now?
Listen, my truest love, I’ve tried
to clear a late-century place for us
in among the shards.  Lie down,
tell me what else you need.
Here is where loveliness can live
with failure, and nothing’s complete.
I love how we go on.

spam poetry

Surprisingly, spam emails are a great source of found poetry…

Original email (thanks to Anna for passing this along):

hi dear
I am miss BRASILIA by name,really is my pleasure write to you
how are you today,
shall we be friends?please i wish you will have the desire with me so
that we can get to know each other better and see what the future will
hold for us, i will like us to base our friendship on honesty,
trustfulness, love, above all, open minded,
may be later i will write more about me,with my photos
hoping to hear from you soonest
Peace!

 

—

 

Brasilia

It is my pleasure to write
to you (truly) –
you, how are you?
Shall we be friends, for
I wish that you would have desire
(with me)
and that we would get to know each other better.
See: the future will hold (what?)
for us,
within us.
I will like nothing
more than to base this on an honesty,
a trust(fullness) and love, above
all else.
Open minds and all, and it may
be that I will keep writing
(with words and photos and
spaces left       ).
Hope:
this is some soonest thing,
coming to life,
peaceful, full, done.

A star, collapsing in on itself

your skin smells like old sunburns fading
trail dust slept into your hair
dirt walked slowly into the creases of the soles
palms like dandelion sap, pollen on the nose
buttercup dust under the chin and smiles
straight white teeth and freckle clusters
tracing your constellations across a bare back
past rough elbows and quiet hands

no one remembers how to recognize a face
the sound of a warm body turning over
on bright grass blades, flattening
it all out

my hair is growing too fast this year
and you speak too immediately and
not at all

take this flash light
point to the constellations with
the steady beam
there the big dipper and the bear
the throne and ones you have created
lines drawn in light

i’ll wash off the dirt, take your felt-tip
pen, connect your points
hold still

 

firsts and lasts

“I wrote you too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak.”

–Andrea Gibson; “Maybe I Need You“

I will still always maintain my belief that
the cough drop on your breath smelled
like mustard when I knew no better;
that the moving of my hand to your breast
in the dark was love; that to kiss you
in the night, half-asleep, dreaming
before lying back into the pillow, sinking
into us, your arm behind my neck –
that was the end of all beginnings.
I will maintain that compromise was
concession, that change was
a surrendering of too much pride –
holding hands was pushing off,
deflection void of contact.

I put your letters in a box
covered in pictures of stars.
The memory of your sleeping
form curled into mine would not
fit with the paper envelopes –
in the interest of closing the lid,
I am keeping the memory elsewhere.
For now, the warmth of you
in the sheets, every tingling
whispered phrase slipped into
the pockets of the dress
you left in my closet: these
are the things I wish
I could bring myself to toss
into the recycling bin,
to be repurposed, shredded
and reassembled for someone
else’s romance, but my weak
hands are stuck in holding on.
Besides, the bin is too small
for all the things we held
between us.

 
I hope you are crying and
I hope you are losing sleep.
I hope you are writing poems
that I will read in 30 years
in a biography of your life,
lines of verse crowded in a
footnote for that girl
you fell in love with, once,
when you knew no better.
She was a poet of silences,
making you realize
you liked noise.  Too bad,
(I hope you write, one day,
that) we made such great love
with our eyes closed.

a poem for Shelley-Jo Talvacchia

This recent article from NPR describes a young poet whose only profession is sitting in the street with a typewriter and writing poems on topics suggested by pedestrians.  In the spirit of this brave individual’s endeavor to live off poetry alone, I have written a poem on a topic suggest by Shelley-Jo, my mother’s friend.  She asked for “a victory poem for love and kindness,” and so hopefully, the poem below speaks to her request.  If you would like to request a poem, by all means, let me know, and I’ll do my best (which, according to my mother, I always do).

Take all your slow winding-downs,
the watch hands sweeping out their
shadowed paths on pulsing wrists,
the sleep-darkened eyelid corners
where fear collects at the end of
the day, light fast fading.

Her breath is a whisper in
moonlight, silvered and silent,
but here, see her opened mouth,
her heart beating under the thin cloth,
see her hair laid out on the pillow,
hear the dreams spilling from her
lips, from her up-turned fingertips,
feel the strong, imagined, embrace -
take it.  It is the only thing laced
with the terror-free taste of
kindness (her sleeping self,
the characters of her most familiar
fantasies with their laughing hands,
their impossibly opened arms.
Fall into them.)  Let this be
the healing of every unmended thing.

Radio, someone still loves you…

Yes, for the next seven weeks, I will be reading and talking about poetry with my lovely co-host, Clare Costello, on Carleton’s radio station!  KRLX 88.1 FM, Wednesday nights, 9pm central time.  Clare and I will be reading our own poetry, poetry we like, and we will be having guests on the show.  Fun times!  Tune in: www.krlx.org

And here’s a poem, because presumably that’s what this blog is about:

Through the kitchen window

The band-aids are on your
five left fingers, the blood
cleaned and gone – it was
the knife moving beyond
its realm of fruit flesh (the
pomegranate sliced open,
exploding seeds, deep red juice).
It was the neighbor, her
bare shoulders, her white
laundry, the fold of her body
bending down, her arm
reaching for the clothespins
(oh, pin me down, won’t you?).
It was your wandering eyes,
your steady, steady hands.

 

a sestina of sixes

A few unbearable and failed wonders

Brought out in the light, words
have silent ways about them – I
have seen hushed vowels who just
wait for the consonants they need
quietly, like so many children, six
years old, proving they are good.

But nighttime’s hushed space is good
for hearing truths, for sounding words
and slow wonderments, the reality I
know after every eye-closing, just
after every dreaming rest, a need
in the winter’s dawn at 6:00.

Of the soft syllables, there are six
in my room.  They taste good
leaving my tongue, the words
with their rounded edges, and I
look them in the mouths, just
waiting for them to speak.  Need

is the coldest loneliness, this need
for voices in the night – six
pregnant silences waiting to do good,
waiting to prove themselves.  My words
fall to the carpet.  Here I
am, lips parted.  I am just

a magician fumbling in moonlight, just
a mumbling midwife with a need
for strengths I can’t conjure: six
lyrical, brilliant tributes to the good.
I have sacrificed all my words,
all the others.  But still, I –

I
just
need
six
good
words.

Winter is almost over

…and so is my second to last term as an undergraduate.  I finished my final poetry portfolio this afternoon, so those 16 poems, some of which have already been posted, will be steadily making their way to the internet.

—

Winter Poems

My words are waiting in their fading
ink dresses, lined up on paper park
benches in the springtime of their
long adolescences, waiting for your
wandering eyes, waiting for your
fumbling tongue to let loose all their
consonants and deep-held sighs,
until they sleep with your fingerprints
and wonderings on their skin,
their lips parted in soft silences.

They are every mystery I have
managed to scrawl in dark pen,
every tired beauty I have watched
and wept for. They are every
silent thing I have wished to say,
every warm hand held while
walking, head down, into the wind.

oh hey there

No, my dear blog, I did not forget about you. I’ve just been so busy writing new poems for my workshop that I haven’t had time to revise any of my already-written poems.  And much to the chagrin of certain people among my readership, I (almost) always revise my poems before setting them free to jaunt about the internets.  It’s like tying your kid’s shoes before letting them loose in a playground (or perhaps it is more like making sure they don’t do weird things with scissors to their own hair so that they won’t be mercilessly picked on by bullies).  But anyway, the long rambling point I am in the process of making is that I’m here and I’m still writing.  And because I just came from a poetry reading and feel a need to live up to the artsy standard I have set for myself by being a part of said reading, I suppose that a poem is in order.

—

One day when passion becomes too much for my lungs to hold and my hands to resist,
I will bind your wrists to bed posts and trace maps across the territory of your torso,
explore the vast uncharted wilderness of pulsating skin.
I will leave teeth marks and make muscles sing,
uncap pens with my teeth and scrawl masterpieces of the most primal kind.
I will discover language for the first time,
new and living on your limbs, under your breasts, down your spine,
and the lines will lace your deep blood with the glorious ache
of making love out of nothing but dark ink.

a sunday event

Break your studies like
your bread – crumbs everywhere:
an interruption to the crusted over
solidity of whole things.
Break your studies with
your bare hands, let them
get under your nails
so your lover will taste them
later under a dark cover.
Break your studies until
they cannot walk to class
over the sidewalk ice.
Let every study
break you take be a
revolution in the disbanding
of tradition, of stillness, of
the murky quiet of
dusty library shelves,
a tearing statement of
boredom and fear and
the love of every breathless glance.