Tag Archives: poetry

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

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To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

 

The sun departs through a throng of clouds
on the horizon– an overexposed photo

of an old explosion. Did it happen in our time?
the cold street wants to know. The street

which is always asking, asking! An amateur’s
snapshot, I tell it. I am always on this street

that happens to be going the way
I am going. It knows only one question

but has the patience to repeat it.
Without that question to what purpose

could a street put itself? I know eventually
the pavement will give way and the question

through the voice of dirt and rocks
and sun-warmth escaping long after dark

will sound like a song without words
or the faded caption on an old photograph

someone took of us looking at the sun
standing still against the pathless sky

Morning, After the Ice Storm

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Morning, After the Ice Storm

 

The bluejay’s query from the previous twilight
hangs in the mostly empty air between branches.

On a brown maple leaf last night’s tear
has still not fallen. Though in a few hours

this moment will be gone like all the others
even grief sometimes has to wait its turn

Eschatology

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Eschatology

 

The end of the stem
is where a flower starts. At the end

of a ragged leaf a sated bug steps.
The end of the trunk is where the tree

plunges past seeing and the roots’ ends
commence the purest conversion.

The river turns out on the ocean,
the sky turns over the bowl of stars

with no end to the spilling space.

Humble Poem #1 [Garden Drive]

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Humble Poem #1 [Garden Drive]

 

I’m grateful for this quiet night, and sleep
and waking from a dream of my children

in my childhood home they’ve never seen,
staying up late singing “Dance, Dance, Dance”

with their uncle my brother around the living room

Readings: Bridgewater International Poetry Festival Wrap-up & Alumni Page

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We saw it all in those four days at Bridgewater. Poetry in other languages. Poetry in English that appeared to be in another language. Poetry in another language that appeared to be in English. Spoken word performances. Amazing stage presence and outlandish stage props. Cellos and calls from Paris. Wildlife and the deep internal horizon. Minds coming together and all the space in between.

By Sunday afternoon, invigorated and exhausted (and I did not even attend the evening workshops and readings because of family stuff back down the road in Staunton, so I’m not sure how some of you survived it!) I stumbled back to my house on the hill, unburdened with several hundred pages of new reading material, a couple of CDs, business cards, scribbled emails and even a draft or two for new poems, and a feeling that the world was now wheeling around me in a slightly different rhythm, with a palette of new colors I could suddenly see as if in a new landscape not quite winter and not fully weather either.

So still dizzy with the event, I’d like to bottle a bit of that magic and cast it forward. I’ve changed the title of the Bridgewater page on the top menu of this site to the Bridgewater Fest Alumni page, and I hope some of the poets I have met in the last week will use that page to continue to announce new publication of their work, be it in print or online journal, limited edition letterpress work, or big ol’ book publication events. Maybe some of us will see each other again in a few years at the next Festival, but in the meantime let’s visit and share the news with each other, and with the wonderful community of poets and readers who regularly visit this humble and grateful site.

Attending a Poetry Festival I Wonder What A World Full of Poets Would Be Like, And As I Leave the Building Into the Mid-Winter Afternoon Air I Hear the Late Migration Of a Canada Goose

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Attending a Poetry Festival I Wonder What A World Full of Poets Would Be Like, And As I Leave the Building Into the Mid-Winter Afternoon Air I Hear the Late Migration Of a Canada Goose

In a room of a hundred poets my ego diminishes. My name grows so small
I can no longer find it on the program. But it turns out I am everywhere,

in every poem I hear, someone is calling my name! In the parking lot, in the cold air
above me a lone goose is calling as he flies, looking for companions traveling

his way. I look—no, he is not alone after all. There is one, silent, flying beside him.

Bridgewater International Poetry Festival: Day One

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Well, Day One is in the books and even at half a day it was a whirlwind of readings and meeting lots of fine people dedicated to the craft of writing and the art of poetry.  Festival Mastermind Stan Galloway, a professor of English at Bridgewater, has convened an eclectic group of poets here to this cozy college, and a roving gang of 18 student volunteers has helped support the festivities with tech help, directions, pizza and, of course, coffee.

Once the festival really got going, you are faced with two different reading locations, each hosting two poets an hour. I was paired with Jim Gaines, which was a good match as we were both working on translations as well as on our own work. Some other interesting or odd tidbits from Day One:

  • The first two poets, Stephen Corey and Pamela Uschuk, both read poems which included peonies in them. Strangely enough, one of the poems I read, directly after their reading, also included peonies. Wha?
  • Sirwan Kajjo, a Kurdish poet living in the DC area, read three poems in English and (on request) another in his native tongue (English being his third language!).
  • Matthew Hamilton has had so many lives — soldier, peace corps volunteer, benedictine monk, and librarian — that I had the surreal impression I was meeting someone who had just walked out of a Mark Helprin novel, who happens to be a darn good poet as well.
  • I missed as many good poets as I got a chance to see, but this is the trade-off of a festival like this. it’s invigorating and exhausting at the same time.

Emily Hancock of St Brigid’s Press, along with several other supporting literary establishments including the Georgia Review, whose editor Stephen Corey can be counted among the poets presenting their work, were present and selling their books. Although I forgot to mention this in my own reading today, three of my works are available at the St Brigid table — the broadside of the prose poem Drop Everything, a handsome broadside with moon-shaped matting of my translation of Li Ho’s Sky Dream, and the omnipresent haiku coaster sets.

I survived my own reading early in the afternoon with the help of a supportive audience. Twenty minutes can seem like an eternity or like the snap of a finger when you’re reading your work. If you’d like the silent virtual tour of what I read, you can follow the links below. On to Day Two!

Poem for the Back Cover of a Book

Self Portrait at Forty Nine

Fire Followers

Nobscusset Burial Ground, Dennis MA

On Translating a Poem from the Chinese

Two poems about the moon, one mentioning the moon six times and one not mentioning the moon at all

Mei Yao-ch’en and I Lament Missing the Lunar Eclipse…

Mei Yao-ch’en and I, Walking Downtown for Pizza on a May Afternoon…

…Mei Yao-ch’en and I Await Fourth of July Fireworks…

 

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

No. 36

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Note: While preparing for the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival — and working on some book design for “The Drift” and “Moon & Shadow” (tentative title for the collection of poems featuring Mei Yao-ch’en) — I will from time to time post a poem from one of my books published before I began this blog. This is from The Artificial Horizon, published in 2013.

No. 36

Quiet night. Even the crickets are whispering,
Beneath the green stamp of this date, your name
In a language I can’t speak but can read.
Above the summer moon’s shiny memory
A thought of you coaxes deep stars
Into the precise constellation
That is your voice saying my name.
The rudder of years has shown my choice.
This year will not accumulate around you
Any better than a kitten accumulates moths.
The moment is the distribution, not a sum.
Of everything a cricket can sing, or not.
Of every thing you understand because it’s not clear and caught.
So I will walk in the empty feeling house.
The night hangs on every wall, black mirrors.
When I look at it I see myself looking in
Wondering what I am doing out there without you.
The danger of reflection is thinking you’re alone
When you’re not. Of thinking crickets without voices
Are whispering your name when it’s me whispering,
In a language I can’t read but can speak.