to be ready for it

Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices | Matthew Zapruder

hallelujah — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:06:27 -0400

Erstwhile means long time gone.

A harbinger is sent before to help,

and also a sign of things

to come. Like this blue

stapler I bought at Staples.

Did you know in ancient Rome

priests called augurs studied

the future by carefully watching

whether birds were flying

together or alone, making what

honking or beeping noises

in what directions? It was called

the auspices. The air

was thus a huge announcement.

Today it’s completely

transparent, a vase. Inside it

flowers flower. Thus

a little death scent. I have

no master but always wonder,

what is making my master sad?

Maybe I do not know him.

This morning I made extra coffee

for the beloved and covered

the cup with a saucer. Skeleton

I thought, and stay

very still, whatever it was

will soon pass by and be gone.

Things Rich and Multiple and Alone | Bob Hicok

hallelujah — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:56:41 -0400

readpoems:

The litany goes on. First your hair
in the toilet bowl casts a shadow on the bottom
that resembles bacteria under the microscope
at Livonia Stevenson, then there’s mice in the wall.
These are pearls, he says to me, meaning the days
I think, that I have them at all, I just want concrete
from him, not a lecture on the no-armed man,
how he doesn’t complain under the underpass
where he lives. I say finally, how would we know,
it’s not like we hang under the underpass,
not as if the no-armed man could write you a letter,
“Dear Seller of Concrete, This is wonderful,
not having a grip on things.” I’ve been running
very fast up a hill. At the top, I stand and feel
for a moment how I’m at the top, it’s a sensation
all its own, as is turning to run back down,
as is spinning the Lazy Susan to watch flour
come into view and leave me again. Drinks
at five, dinner at seven: now you believe
in structure, little slices of beef on red plates,
her explanation at your elbow
of why the granting agency said no
to the man “you both know causally.” It sounds
like there’s a game of catch in that phrase,
or wearing familiar pants, or looking at cards
in your hand without any intent to win the game.
It’s more about the conversation around the table,
how we need these excuses with Kings on them
to pull up chairs to the moment and let it be
inclusive of us. I’ve always read monads
moan-ads, I don’t know why. Everything with a shell
around it, even the moments when nothing
seems to have a shell around it. One is left
with the sense that romanticism was a response
to the hooks people saw on every bird and lament
but had no thread to connect, or had vast spools
of thread but no feeling for the various eyes
of the various needles, and everything was lost
in full view of everything else. A vortex, if you will,
or a closet with no discipline, or a discipline
one order of magnitude above our understanding of it,
such that, when we’re being shown a face,
we see static. You didn’t know, at the exhibition,
that you were looking at a spiderweb full of pubic hairs
until you were told. Most of us thought it beautiful,
then the fact of the matter went around the room,
then we were disgusted by life and turned
against the artist, saying to people the next day,
it wasn’t much of a show, then looking at the bill,
trying to decide who had the calamari.

Questions of Travel | Elizabeth Bishop

hallelujah — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:54:12 -0400

(…)

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
—Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
—A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
—Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
—Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.
—And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians’ speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the..."

hallelujah — Sat, 04 May 2013 16:05:52 -0400

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

- Mary Oliver (via aforceofcircumstance)

poetrysince1912: —Matthew Nienow, Poetry, January 2013Here the...

hallelujah — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:08:29 -0400

poetrysince1912:

—Matthew Nienow, Poetry, January 2013

Here the Record-a-Poem here.

fluttering-slips: FOREST What cinch.I know, I know. It arrives always & suddenly through the...

hallelujah — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:01:17 -0400

fluttering-slips:

FOREST

What cinch.
I know, I know. It arrives always & suddenly

through the ochre hours of rising
& washing, shadow in the doorway,

a telegram,
a softly wilting thing to staple

behind the honey cabinet unread,
no news being better

than good news, way out here
where the urge to stockpile

is understandable. Where weathers
heave & flatten.

These superstitions. This boiling
water from the stove,

enough for one bowl of orange root
& fennel. As if it is ever enough

to offer tea & burn
the lantern. As if any unbidden guest

leaves easy. Yes. Nothing
more

than the body’s smallest failure.
And in the throat a forest.

Boreal climate of sorrowing.
White gown & room. Metallic & shiver.

In the end, an occasion to feel your heart
inside your arm & beating.

Needle & skin: echo line of trees,
four sunsets’ distance from the clearing.

Allison Titus

Just Once | Anne Sexton

hallelujah — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:21:58 -0400

Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.

Small Town by Philip Booth

kathleenjoy — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:36:33 -0400

You know.
The light on upstairs
before four every morning. The man
asleep every night before eight.
What programs they watch. Who
traded cars, what keeps the town
moving.
The town knows. You
know. You’ve known for years over
drugstore coffee. Who hurts, who
loves.
Why, today, in the house
two down from the church, people
you know cannot stop weeping.

"The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth’s bell. Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue. The..."

hallelujah — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:43:17 -0400

“

The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth’s bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.

The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.

Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away.

The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
My flower my fin my life my lightness my O.

”

- “The Want Bone” by Robert Pinsky (via harleyqueef)

An Essay about Cameron Frye

hallelujah — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:56:41 -0400

scarletfringes:

for example I once stayed with
you all afternoon I remember
you wore that red dress
& yes I’ve been faithful
do you or do you not miss me
now that I’m an honest man
but for the record I don’t recall
ever seeing your house & I don’t
remember getting out of bed
that day I had a fever had religion
1001 hornets up & down
my spine but I could be
making this shit up or I could
be dying I could tell you it’s
ridiculous being afraid
worrying about everything
wishing I was dead all that shit
but I want it to be real though
want to be the suburb
you grew up in
you can be Lake Michigan
I’ll hold my breath
inside of you
but what I’d really like is
to see you wearing nothing
but my hockey sweater
you are so Mia Sara to me
I don’t know what
I want to do with my life
I think I want to let it all out
be hailstorm kick out the siding
glass door at your house so I can
see inside your night your dear diary &
ride the train home hot for you
dreaming about you now
in the bathtub &
how bootleg you is.

Nate Slawson

Superhero Poem - Gregory Sherl

hallelujah — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:05:01 -0400

thefirstaidkit:

Look at me, so worried about the fireflies we caught last night
            in a mason jar. I wrote that sentence wrong & now
all of last night is caught in a mason jar. It’s cool though,
            I punctured extra holes in the lid. Now, we all breathe
like leftover redwoods. Is California still on fire?
            Was it ever? I am convinced it is bad to live
forever, so I’m going as a poet for Halloween. I’m broke as fuck.
            I’m selling this poem to a car commercial.
                        & as the Lexus rounds the bend in say New Hampshire,
            in say the parts of Memphis that weren’t pregnant last week,
                        in say my coffee swirling tornadoes whistling heavy
            train tracks, the narrator will say Sometimes giants
                        only smell like giants. The couple in the Lexus smile
            like old mistletoe.Their blood feels lazy. Sometimes it only
                        takes a stone to kill a giant. Matte pages are never for lease,
            but the strings holding up tomorrow are.
The way today has stretched me out, how do I still have eyes?
            I am sick of trying to buy things with contributor copies.
I was always born old.
            Every bridge I build goes straight up.

An Elegy, an Accident, and a House in the Desert to Be Used as a Map by Dylan Bassett

hallelujah — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 21:38:59 -0400

fleck:

1.

Dear fellow secret grave-goer,

I forget to lock the front door. It’s been eleven weeks since they called and said she won’t be home. And said they found her body in the road. Do you get angry? Do you turn chairs upside down? Do you undo doors from their hinges to make rooms look bigger? Resisting yourself is no good. Wanting to understand is a bad habit.

2.

I was in the wicker chair smoking,
the phone went off and the past
tense began. First, I thought:
At least she won’t have to drink.
Then: the moon is too big to believe.
The smoke from my cigarette was
a stream of infinite zeros.

3.

Dear fellow secret grave-goer,

What matters is having something to do. Yesterday, I walked on the pier watching the waves chase each other away. I cupped my hands over my ear to hear the rush of my blood.

4.

Disaster : a lost star.
Chaos : the place of no more thought.
History of love : a lemon tree.

5. Opening Lines from my Unfinished Letters:

I remember nothing
I remember Beethoven and lemon muffins in the evening
I was thinking of a ruined garden
You know I’m not the romantic one
When the wind pours into us it makes a shadow
You had been reading Baudelaire in the bathtub
Baudelaire lies because sex with a shadow is no fun
I was counting empty churches in the valley
I found a moth caught in the cat’s jaw, its wings wilted like a flower in October
All it takes is the sight of an old glove
I saved your socks in the top drawer
I threw your lipstick away and finally felt something
Somedays I go looking for the car keys you lost in Carpinteria
If you can hear me
Are doors in Heaven open
Is God close enough yet
Today, I have a story
Today, nothing
Today, I remembered your purple summer dress
Today, I remembered your hands
Your hands were like campfires to my frozen moon

6.

Dear fellow secret grave-goer,

How much is too much? I Googled what to do and what came up was what to do when you’re bored. Is that how you feel? Bored?

7.

Dear fellow secret grave-goer,

Through a window I watched a small child rub dirt into her cuts. A dove wash its wings in mud. A stray dog survived on a pool of rain water.

8. Symbolism from my Bedroom Window:

The desert with its salt represents a body.
Wind chimes are the beloved and the beloved’s sense of time.
A lawn chair is certain confusion.
The shed behind the house is
memory. A shovel leaning against the shed is fate.
The trash in the driveway is just trash, but the cat
digging its way out is a human heart. Rocks
in the yard are meant to distract.
Stars are boxes collecting dust.
The birds require no explanation.
They fly away, leaving empty spaces to be filled.

ahuntersheart: The FlowerI think I grow tensionslike flowersin a wood wherenobody goes.Each wound...

hallelujah — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:17:43 -0500

ahuntersheart:

The Flower

I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.

Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.

Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.

-Robert Creeley

The Telemarketer Takes a Workshop by Gabriel Welsch

kathleenjoy — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 22:40:47 -0500

The villanelle serves the cycle,
the sonnet the turn. It’s all sales.

Chant the bit about despair,
the icicles lingering in a forever fall,
remembered as only potential.

Sing the dog songs, the lapping
thuck of water and the clack of would-be
claws on old linoleum.

Meditate on so many orts of circumstance,
write it and repeat it and take it apart.

Then watch them as they look at you,
so much older, buried in eyeliner or sweaters,
one finger hooked to dial, drumming.

Seven Months Later

hallelujah — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 22:06:07 -0500

rabbit-light:

I don’t feel you in the air.
Maybe you grew tired of the earth, maybe
the dead do. Summer tomatoes and leaves
green with sun don’t matter to the eternal—?
But I am still here,
walking among the shy midsummer trees,
drinking tea.
I go through doors and into cars,
hair wet, a mustard stain on my sleeve.
But you are like a weeping cherry—
the sun nourishes you. No; not even the sun.
Do you need anything?
At night I sleep poorly. When I dream
of your face, the papery cotton sheets
go cool as your hand used to be.
Downstairs, you are there, in the box
I will not look at.
The world is askew without you,
like a lock jimmied by a thief.
When together now, four of us, not five,
we eat quickly, nibbling the corn to the husk.
Even the dogs have gotten quiet
in your absence. The other morning,
I sat in your chair reading.
Next door the mower started up.
I startled at the noise.
Nothing should be growing.

Meghan O’Rourke

If There’s Nothing You Need

hallelujah — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 09:27:06 -0500

rabbit-light:

Suppose I’ll go then to the hardware store
where they still hang steel buckets for bulk nails
I weigh and bag in a small paper sack.
Wander past chain links wound tight on wooden
spools. And rope displays. I test its rough threads,
the hewn braid snaps taut in my hands. Pulling
shroud-laid twine through a fist, I clench

a flame that burns from nothing. My raw palm.
I need the industry of things, flat heads
heavy in a breast pocket, their points cut
the bag, my chest, when I find you alone
watching the road, and force a long embrace.

Adam Houle

we are all animals by nate slawson

hallelujah — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:33:45 -0500

fleck:

if I was an arsonist I would burn
my clothes & yr clothes & bad dog
my head on yr belly partly because
you resemble Newport Kentucky
the way I remember it when I was
six years old partly because my pants
don’t fit right & I wanna jellyfish our legs
wanna be yr sperm whale I have the idea
you get the idea & it’s 1:52 pm in October
would it be ok if I got Meriwether Lewis
w/ yr spine bone I have misspelled finger-
prints & feel terribly melancholy I want you
to lick me like wolves I like you very
ice cream parlor I like you very very
stomach ache when it rains I wish I’d burst
into snow snow covering yr tongue
yr 1988 Oldsmobile yr naked center
of gravity I bet you’ll always remember
how white my heart is it’s the moon
being eaten by a Siberian tiger & it’s magnificent
we shouldn’t talk about my nerves anymore
please it makes me nervous my hands
are religious are castanets so very bumblebee
& dear magazine cover you are a truck
as America as America yr insides are firecracker
I got hundreds of horsepower for you I am
into you like cherries & Diane Lane if you
call me Ponyboy I’ll bleed all my blood
for you I am committed to that &
growing my hair out forever & ever
until you become a giraffe & tell me
I am yr spider.

"You wanted to stop breathing so you stuck your head in the oven and turned it on. Your last moments..."

hallelujah — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:48:24 -0500

“You wanted to stop breathing so you stuck your
head in the oven and turned it on. Your last moments
must have been brutal—suffocating, your lungs trying
hard to take in clean air. Later, we discovered how
you had meticulously thought your dying through by
stuffing rags and towels underneath doorways and
windows that separated the kitchen from your
sleeping children, as if to quiet the sound of your
secrets spilling out onto the tiled floor. You were a
thoughtful mother. Two glasses of milk and bread
sat out for them, waiting like you should have been.
Oh, Sylvia, how we romanticize you now. Girls all
across America think about death and ovens, plates
of bread waiting for children who sleep. They want
to leave without saying goodbye, want to unpack
suitcases and leave their clothes hanging in the
closet just so. Tell them it wasn’t as easy as you
thought it was going to be. Tell them you hesitated
as you tied the knot to your own noose. Tell them
how you choked on the taste of air. Tell them how
hard it was to give up control over your own body.
Tell them, Sylvia. Because we have spent our nights
buried deep in the dark of our thoughts over you,
have clutched your poems to our chests like tissues,
like lovers, have wanted to try your dresses on and
run your brush through our hair. We salivate over
your thoughts and write your words next to our own.
We cannot stop dreaming about you. You have eaten
our hearts out with a spoon. We would never think
to ask for them back.”

-
Kristina Haynes, “For Sylvia” (via fleurishes)

its been fifty years now of us picking tulips for you, love, i hope the raging seas have calmed for you

the art of registration

hallelujah — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 09:42:20 -0500

yossarianhunter:

it most certainly isn’t the drive
whether ten minutes or two and a
half hours nothing about that is
worth dying for although that moment
that first moment when the strobe
lights behind commit to the out-
side lane when the pumps resume
circulating & the knees start to
shimmy & shake man that feeling
is right there near the top but
near the top never takes home the
royal blue ribbon now does it?

waiting is only afforded a minor
role (although a little anticipation
goes a long way) the cats working
the hot blocks like to keep the
traffic moving with just enough time
for inventory of the dead president
trading cards & requisition of equipment
Becton Dickinson almost always rides
shotgun in moments of forgetfulness
he can be found hanging at the arches
(dumpster diving, an art form) where
you get free water with a much needed
straw when the presidents are just enough
to play the game if plenty a milkshake
is nice too in emergency scenarios
floorboards sometimes hide fossils

the final scoreboard tally really isn’t
the key either the K’s vs. the M’s
(which are really the a’s turned side-
ways only very few care) doesn’t matter
ultimately all magic letters equal four
unless by some odd reason triangular
pipe dreams make an appearance in which
case everything comes up in figure
eights getting down to brass tacks the
evidence piles up that it’s all mailed
home from the same address capital D

it’s not even the come on or come down
(substantial as they may be) & even though
it may be closest neighbor divine in it’s
own right nod doesn’t come close nor does
the cum shot (what cum shot after this
cumming means the point has been missed)
any fucking is done purely for fucking’s
sake besides no one is coming & even if
they did it couldn’t begin to match the
beauty of that moment that seven-tenths
of a second when everything that came
before folds into itself what’s to come
just slipping off the press most natural
red meets the neon yellow glow becoming
mashed potatoes & gravy orange fibonacchi
spirals roadmaps of descent it’s that moment
that sets the hook right in my gill every god-
damn time set ‘em up Lloyd time to take
the plunge

Detail of the Hayfield

hallelujah — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 07:46:18 -0500

rabbit-light:

I followed myself for a long while, deep into the field.
Two heads full of garbage.

Our scope was larger than I realized,
which only made me that much more responsible.

Yellow, yellow, gold, and ocher.
We stopped. We held the field. We stood very still.

Everyone needs a place.

You need it for the moment you need it, then you bless it—
thank you soup, thank you flashlight—

and move on. Who does this? No one.

Richard Siken