Well, It's Not Poetry, But It Is a Thing, Written Down

Remember the blue whale on the ceiling? I went back. A miniature version of the article I wrote about that visit was published this weekend in the Washington Post. You can read it on page 9 of the magazine, or online here. With luck, I can publish the full-length article soon, too.

What to Do When a Poet, Now Dead, Releases a New Book of Poems

in memory of Deborah Digges



Read the editor's note.

Reflect that this manuscript
has been respected. Wonder,
when you read that they tried
to preserve her intentions,
how much of her handwriting spattered
each page.

Read the epigraph--something
obscure--well, that's how
she would have wanted it.

Read the apologetic jacket,
the back cover with its
flat, detached praises.
On the back flap, her photograph.

Look hard at the headshot
as though her eyes, warm even
in a black and white rectangle,
have some explanation.

Close the book.

Try again tomorrow.




Painting: Cloud #16 by Ambera Wellmann

To the Girl I Was When I Bought This Book

The easy thing would be
to hate you: the smear
of your dull pencil is enough
to sigh my breathing.
You printed your name,

careful and proud, believing
you'd want it forever. I know
this book is brittle
from an avalanche of tissues. I know
you wanted blackberries

but planted only thorns.
These pages are stretched, bowed and tired,
this spine is nearly surrendered.
The hard part--and this
you even know--is arriving

at the endpapers, where (you
know) I will forgive you.




photograph by Signora Oriente

Ode Upon the Poem I Can't Remember

Horse. There was a horse,
and a tall girl also. I want to say one blue eye,
one green, but maybe that was the horse?
He broke her heart--the poet, that is,
broke the girl's heart,
not the horse's. I think.
It all comes in sepia flashes,
as though I'm the one writing it.

A rusted car is parked and stuck
armpit-high in the meadow; abandoned
or occupied I can't tell.
Blonde grass; a sheepish kiss
in porchlight before
she creeps in after curfew.




photograph by Rico Moran.
Does anyone have any idea what this poem is? I'm starting to believe I dreamt it, but my dreams are never this well-composed or meaningful.

The Young Poetess Is Misunderstood

"It's such a shame," she thinks, "that in
Their long lives and studies They
Have not known great art."

But, her villanelles remind her,
nobody who is truly great
Is ever understood in her time.

Better to wait, muse the elegies, until
The hundred-year anniversary
Of your death: see what They think then.

By then, Mistress, you will be so fine, so carved
Of stars and draped in ribbons that even They
Will smile.

What to Do When a Poet Dies

1. Reprint an obscure poem,
something pastoral, with shades
of the scythe.

2. Make yourself an expert.
Nobody knew her work like you; why,
you even met her once.

3. Invoke dear sainted Sylvia
as though your life depends on it.
As though that explains everything.

4. Don't call your sister,
don't call the man you love.
Don't say, please: stay alive with me.
It is simply not done.

The Wrong Way

Don't take this the wrong way,
she said, but I love you.
And inside the lettered breath
of every tongue-carved syllable,
the truth in whispered ink:
I do. I do.








photograph by Alison Scarpulla

Daylight Savings.

I got in.

33: Coming Clean

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;

I copied but did not send it.
I thought a phone call, maybe, but knew
The whirlpool words in my own mouth
Would give it all away.

There is no pressure I have not imagined:
Your teeth on my throat,
Your hair in my hand,
Your eyes on my salted lips. All these

Tide to and from my sleeping shores like trains.
And, too, the gravity
Of my own crumbling, wet face, the heft
Of your apology.

(Once you wrote me a confession, a treatise on starry unknowns.
Wrote it out in one long night,
Found it too true and threw
The whole thing away.
I know this because you told me.)





Original poem by W. H. Auden
Photograph by flickr user tomo.1981
Inspiration by you

Interlude: Other People's Poetry, or, 29. You're a Genius all the time

Essentials

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

-Jack Kerouac, d. October 21, 1969

Small Epistle
You were no angel, Jack but neither
am I and our kisses, writ on dusty paper, will shatter
the very firmament. We seal the envelope
with tongues of young love. Will you come back
when you get this? Not for me.
Not this time.

Forwarding Address

after Lady Brett Ashley

I do not write you enough
Love letters. You must have
A new hiding place for them by now;
That cigar box beneath the bed was three bare flats
And two cities ago. Times have changed,
My sky-eyed darling, but the raw hole still remains
Right where you left it,
In my breast.



photograph by RedheadRaye

From: roxanne@gmail.com

Heartsick boys wooed me wildly with your words.
It was you I loved, unknowing--

I ask you the same question now
a thousand times over, my own tongue
faltering into space, your silences as long
as nos.







photograph by Sarah Walker

On Blogging, In Gratitude

Small birds, all of us,
chirping without aim. And when
the breeze parts the branches
we discover one another, fat with song,
blinded by the sudden sunshine.




photograph by Daniel James

Unrequited Poetry, Episode 2

Ghost
for Susan Orlean

I saw it, you know,
On a shelf in the quiet movie-man’s home—
Did you? I
Touched it, let my fingers fall
Into the magnetic pull
Of its heartbreaking white ribbons.

I looked for you
Where you said you would be,
In the gold light at the bees’ dance,
But all behind them
Was blurred and pollinated,
And you did not emerge.

I have crept toward
The shape of you: subconscious selections
In afternoons, hair dye,
Potted plants, all
Give me away, my embarrassing thirst
For that cool slenderness,
Success.

I touched the ghost
In the quiet movie-man’s house, and knew
In that instant
It wasn’t real. And
Did you, in all
Your fruitlessness, freeze
To see a glass house full of them,
Blue in the electric light?

I wonder if you stayed
To the end, if you touched them
Not breathing (like I did), if you
Read my letter, if you saw
My ghost.

Valentines, After

(read "Valentines" first.)

I finished the whole thing
in one sitting, leaning forward
against the comforter, one knee
to my dreaming husband. There were

barns, little barns, and picture after picture
of the same spotted dog. I was not
enchanted. I did not see the art
of an empty heart-
shaped box.

And then it was done, a few
pages of acknowledgments and things,
and the back cover. The red foil
heart on the front had lost
its shine in the night.
The book was smaller, suddenly,
and my hands felt gritty with sand
and bandages
that were neither here
nor in Valentine,
Nebraska.

I wept.




photograph by DeviantArt user Sinse.

Valentines

The library did not have the book I needed.
“I’d better mark it missing,” said the limping man,
returning with me
to the reference desk. “It hasn’t been seen
in seven years.”

The radio news is noise in the car. I wonder
where my book is living, on whose
dusty shelf, if the thief even knows she has
what should be mine.

I park across the street from my house, still
muttering about the wasted trip.
The man on the radio strikes a sudden somber tone.
“The Air Force says now that all four men aboard
a bomber that exploded
over Qatar today”
—he pauses—
“are safely on the ground.” I exhale,
having held my breath for these
invisible soldiers,
the men I did not know existed.

On my way out of the library
I passed a Poetry Month table, the volumes
tipped on one end to showcase their slenderness.
The pages flipped fast
and my answers were not inside.
Lying flat on one end of the display,
an afterthought, a push
of a bored finger, Ted Kooser’s Valentines.
I bring it home.

In front of my neighbor’s house I pull
the Kooser from the car and slam the door.
The street is silent and I realize
the imaginary bomber passengers landed safely—
landed safely, only to return
to the incessant emergency
of war.
I realize that even as the NPR man informed me
of my own relief
they rose from their stretchers
and prepared to die all over again.

The library book, glassy in its plastic jacket,
Slips from my fingers
and lands on the wet road.
In that deafened moment my eyes know only
Black street, white book,
red heart.

Noli Me Tangere II

How would you feel, I wonder, to discover
I drew my resurrected Jesus
Out of your ghost,
Your cold armor of vertebrae,
Your warning like a gunshot:
Don’t touch me.

The Cat's Mother

The third person, she found,
Was the easiest—
She could delight in the color of her own bruises,
She could strike a match and watch her possessions burn—
Under the sweet water-thin veil of she,
She could be anyone; and indeed
She often was.

More often, though, she was she,
Detaching, fantasizing,
Failing to connect and connecting
Too perfectly.

Long ago she had decided
I was the refuge of the very childish
And the very mature,
And sought to distance herself from the both of us.

She dragged herself over shes
She found elsewhere, pressing hard
Into the pages, starving to find
Her reflection there.

She remembered generations of women
Smiling faintly over folded arms,
Watching a whine form in her young mouth—
“Who is she?” they asked, eyebrows arched,
Instructing with words that had no meaning:
“She is the cat’s mother.”


photograph by Lina Scheynius

For Mrs. Sapnar, Whenever I May Find Her

And what I did not know then--
what I pretended not to see:
How much really did depend
on that ridiculous wheelbarrow,
How someone else's rain crept
into my veins and stayed.