Category Archives: The Drift

For Tomas Transtromer

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For Tomas Transtromer

 

The ice on the road sees us with our own eyes
and is no better than we are at helping ourselves

as direction changes. In a winter far south of here,
the edge of still water is guarded by cypress knees,

like a tired army that lay on their backs for a nap
and never found a reason to get up. Beyond them

I heard the bellow of a bull alligator claiming the world.
By a cold spring corn field a thousand miles

away, watching the storm’s wind sprint across
before it could be heard or felt, I know everything

can be claimed, like these memories—are the endless
chances to say hello merely a shout over the slumbering?

Is the wind with its violence finally hearing us with our ears?
I will sit here with you for a while and see what comes.

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

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Note: one of an occasional series of poems with this title…

 

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written [5]

Leaves gather into a shape in a doorway, like an animal
sheltering from the wind. The hiss of cold wind

through the emptied maple. Stand in the small area
which owns the sound and close your eyes — like newspapers

burning in the fire place with the kindling. Late afternoon
all the steeples point up to forgetful blue emptiness.

But they’re empty on the inside too. In the dark, the moon climbs
up the roof and leaps in slow motion

Readings: Bridgewater Fest Poet Aimee Suzara

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Over the next week I’ll be posting information on the poets who will be reading from their work at the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Jan 15th-18th. 

Aimee Suzara will be reading her poetry on  Saturday, January 17th, at 2:30pm, and also leading a writer’s workshop, “In this Skin: Writing the Body” on Friday, January 16th, at 7:30pm.

*

Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer. Her mission is to create, and help others create, poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Her poetry appears in her debut book, SOUVENIR (WordTech Editions 2014) and collections including Phat’itude and Kartika Review. Her multidisciplinary theater work, A HISTORY OF THE BODY, received several grants and commissions including ones from the National Endowment for the Arts and East Bay Community Foundation. A YBCAway (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) and Spirited Woman Fellowship (AROHO Foundation) awardee, her work has premiered at the Thick House, CounterPULSE, Berkeley Repertory Theater, and been selected for the Utah Arts Festival, One Minute Play Festival, United States of Asian America, APAture, and others. As a performing poet and educator, she has graced stages and classrooms nationally, and she has collaborated with many artists, including Deep Waters Dance Theater. She was a two-time Hedgebrook Resident, and an alumna of VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation). Of SOUVENIR, Luis Rodriguez said, “Aimee Suzara is a deep chronicler of our hopes, dreams, pains, and future…we need these poems more than ever.” http://www.aimeesuzara.net

From SOUVENIR (WordTech Editions 2014)

Suture

At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair

Oddities. Body
parts wrapped to be sold
as souvenirs.
Cold fingers
peel mummy layers
undoing the stitch.

It is invasive,
a sort of jigsaw-
suture the way
Navajos and Igorottes,
Rajasthanis pose
with elephants
at the artificial
Pueblo Cave Dwelling.
You note the backdrop
of painted sand pillars;
that Disneyland
cirrus cloud sky.

Wool jackets rub
loin cloths. Feathers
tickle Victorian necklines.

Hands sew together
what does not belong.
One day, it will heal
into something unrecognizable
with the parts of a person:
a teratoma
with teeth, hair and nails.

Come upon these
measured feet,
this list of names
without warning.
Come from thousands of miles
to witness the exhibit
of the exhibit. Come
to participate in
something, for
your own story does not
allow you to participate.

The candidness of naked
eyes, bare chests devoid
of goosebumps. The smoothness
of distance. The shadows
of the uncaptured. Something
tells you to stop looking,
but you are spun: sutured
to your subject.

Early Morning, January, Outside

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Early Morning, January, Outside

 

I have seen crows measure themselves against a hawk
to secure territory.  A single crow settles into a branch

a few limbs away from a red tailed hawk, hopping awkwardly
closer then gawping its recognition and the echoes

of recognition bring more crows as if the crows
themselves were the echoes coming back. We know

how this ends, with the hawk taking flight and shrugging
them off, literally–with a few flicks of its shoulder

it is gone. But stronger or not, in the end it leaves.
This morning the crows behind my house

were raising a racket but nothing was rising
over the treeline. They hopped agitated from

tree to tree but kept to the lower branches.
Overhead like staples in the gray sky a hundred vultures

circled and swerved, like figure skaters
freed of all pretension of looking human

but they did look human, these angels
of death, or maybe turning to go back inside

I caught their reflection in the kitchen window
as if they were already inside the house,

waiting for me there, a semblance of the thing
that has crows giving ground without lifting

a wing. That after all there’s no owned territory,
that there’s something recognition alone won’t harry.

Still

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Still

Waiting on this cold night for the moon to rise over the roof
of the house next to mine. So cold if the stars shiver the sky

will crack. So still that a moon cannot rise.
Still enough that I get tired of waiting on the world’s motions,

crawl in bed and shoulder under the blanket
and when I raise my head stars and  moon have sped their arc

into tomorrow, the spears of dawn are rattling in the street,
and nothing has stayed still about the world

except my place in it, beside you, still spooning me
in your sleep, your breath soft on my neck as a bird

shadow skims the winter wind outside the window
and a shaking branch stands by, slurs, stills, and you stir.

*

for my wife Mary, on her birthday.

Readings: Bridgewater International Poetry Festival (1/15, 1:30 pm)

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January 15th-18th I’ll be one of a group of several dozen poets reading at Bridgewater College, just up the road from me in Bridgewater, Virginia, as part of the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival.

The festival pairs poets, who each read for 20 minutes, and then answer questions from the festival attendees for another 20 minutes. The poetry festival is the brainchild of fellow Virginia poet Stan Galloway, a professor of English at the college. My slot comes on the first day of the festival at 1:30 pm. The most up-to-date version of the schedule can be found at the link above.

The writing of poetry is a solitary type of thing, as we all know, and I’m looking forward to meeting with so many poets from different backgrounds and different parts of the world.

My plan is to split my 20 minutes between a selection of poems from the Mei Yao-ch’en sequence and a group of poems from the non-Mei output of the last year or so, all of which is on this blog. So here’s your chance to use your social media savvy to become an “influencer” and let me know if there’s a poem you want me to read on the 15th. I might even record a few as a way of practicing, and try to create some audio files to share. A few poets I know have done something similar, and I have always enjoyed hearing a poem read by its author. So go ahead, be a disruptive influencer of poetry, and let me know what you want to hear.

Attendees to the festival can buy one-day or full festival passes. So, fellow WP writers, if you happen to be driving down Route 81 sometime in the middle of January, feel free to swing on by and say hello. Leonard, I know you can make it for this, right–isn’t there a Greyhound from Turkey to Bridgewater? Dana? Robert? Esther? Come on, now. Being on the other side of the world is no excuse! O C, I do not consider attendance optional. This is one of the issues with WordPress–being merely a digital poem’s throw from a bunch of writers doesn’t mean they can meet you for coffee.  What about you, Ann? Anthony? Ron? Gunmetal Geisha, you on my side of the continent this month? Ah, well.

Besides my regular reading gig at the local writers’ open reading here in Staunton on the second Wednesday of every month, I also have a reading scheduled for National Poetry Month in April–I think that’s at the Massanutten Library, in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains, and will have more information on that soon as well.

In other news: Over the next few weeks I’ll begin to design and format the collection of Mei Yao-ch’en poems, as well as a collection of other poems written in the past year, tentatively entitled The Drift.  I may post new poems in this time, and may post some work from my previous books, which have not been posted on this site yet. I hope everyone’s new year is off to a good start!

 

/Jeff

 

Conditional

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Conditional

 

Frost flourishes in the shade like flowers in the sun–
the gain may be temporary but isn’t the temporary

gain all that can be measured and for frost after all
isn’t the temporary a permanence itself? External

conditions set it stony and sharp, a marker
of the cold we feel—things being different

it might be the drop of dew in which
you glimpse the moon you’d otherwise miss

Walking in the Dark

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Walking in the Dark

 

Late night walks are making more sense
as I realize how little of my life

I am really seeing.  Making it home each night
through the black ink of every word of hope

and doom engraved into the emptiness
surrounding me—isn’t it much better

practice than bounding about in daylight
thinking I am understanding everything?

In the dark the actual tree spreads without end,
across time and space, and I begin to sense

that my blindness also travels a route
set in deep earth, exposed to the sky.

Setting Moon, with Constellations, One Night Before Its First Quarter, Late December

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Setting Moon, with Constellations, One Night Before Its First Quarter, Late December

 

When the moon sinks low in the western sky
I pour a day’s memories into its gold cup

as the old rules state. Evening is cooling off
but mild, as if between myself and

the stars there is an owl flying away while at the same
time a distant unknown bird is approaching.

When they pass each other I am finding the key
in my pocket and feeling blindly for the lock.

When the cup is locked in the cupboard
of the past for another day, in the quiet house

I take out the moments I withheld from the moon
and place them in the dark above me: your hand

on my arm, your head against my shoulder.
The phone ringing. The living warmth of you

like a foreign language I can suddenly read
as words pour into the room and we listen.

The Invisible

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The Invisible

 

Roads diminish and clarify. People disappear.
The skunk is just being himself on the edge of the dark sidewalk.

On a certain night even he can see the dog-star.
Not shaking off the weather. All last summer the stooped old lady

laid her traps and could not flush him out of hiding. All summer
I spent mornings freeing trapped squirrels and possums

before the noon sun dehydrated them. She never came out
to see and neither did the skunk in her crawlspace. Now, crossing

the road, he looks up to the house as if remembering
or as if seeing through walls and latticework: here’s a place

I could make a home beneath. Here is a place I can depart
and come back to. A place I can impart the secret:

How to disappear but never leave. How to settle in
when all you will do at this age is preparation for leaving.

I would kneel with you any hour and pray to find that place.
If we wait long enough the wind will move the invisible aside.