JUNE 2021
learning that in italian, the word stanza means room
reading chris tobey’s “when we were neanderthals” and thinking of the person, and his almost-solid shape in cotton, and his almost-liquid hand on my leg, whom I’d read this poem to.
finally receiving no. 7 in the mail and holding the solid, vivid shapes of these words, their indelible nature. something has been wrenched from the mind and given earthly form. then the multiplicity of reality sets in, and I realise I am holding the world.
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
someone must have been flying a plane—the skies rife with the remains of that scripture, emblem of a once-impossible vision.
kathleen ryan’s crystalline, precious, glitteringly opaque sculptures of decaying fruit
shiplights ruthlessly drawing their shape as if a flowering
a bouquet of leaves thick with water, mama telling me the names one by one. the joy of having grown something
the enormity of pina bausch’s belief in what the body is capable of meaning
pina’s impossible incarnations of the somatic capacity for intelligence, the kinetic language of emotion, the woman in a white dress and the synecdoche of the sea somehow both containing and contained within her
sweet nest of green cedar painted forest while the forest rises up like a symphony around it
stained-glass of sky in which some light is trapped and some roams free, breaking down into the waters as spring breaks into a garden
the solid, comforted smell of food as it moves to fill the kitchen
joy harjo’s innate intuition of history as it draws close in the elements, which somehow become words, which she only has to put into lines
poetry and its solid force so that when megan fernades says “Yes. It was joy, wasn’t it? / Even if it was ugly, it was joy.” each syllable holds in its leading beat the distance towards the eye and the heart
warm waters, grey air, vivid wine, laughter
lucid choreography of fire against the brick
Not speaking of the way,
Not thinking of what comes after,
Not questioning name or fame,
Here, loving love,
You and I look at each other.
spencer reece’s “margaret” demonstrating with a detonation the ground for language that the last line creates
the sense that people have come together by way of only affection for one another, which would not be so otherwise if only one thing had happened differently in the past—that all incidences are somehow happy, leading to this culmination
a cold can of coke and a hot coffee
“esse” and “remembering miłosz and esse” entwined in the same history, a flattening of time wherein the poets do not know more than the poems do, for the poems can speak to one another, and the poets cannot
that one certain era of poetry (of which frank o’hara built the house and inhabited) wherein poets just list off their friends and what they were doing, or what one imagined that they were doing, of what was happening that ordinary day, in which nothing was particular until it became rendered in a poem as a earmark to how the pedestrian happinesses cohere to form the great joy of living.
all those wild blue days along the coast
au revoir simone & LCD soundsystem & kate bush & bruce springsteen
glazed donuts, fried chicken, omelettes, instant ramen, french fries, salad rolls, canned tuna, parking lot hamburgers
john ashbery & alice oswald & james schuyler & john koethe
under the words you are my silence
My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.
coming home knowing that there is good work still to be done
let me be found loving
(as you were)
extravagantly the beautiful
