Earthquake

such great stretches of dreamscape
such lines of all too familiar lines
staved in
caved in so the filthy wake resounds with the notion
of the pair of us? What of the pair of us?
Pretty much the tale of the family surviving disaster:
“In the ancient serpent stink of our blood we got clear
of the valley; the village loosed stone lions roaring at our heels.”
Sleep, troubled sleep, the troubled waking of the heart
yours on top of mine chipped dishes stacked in the pitching sink
of noontides.
What then of words? Grinding them together to summon up the void
as night insects grind their crazed wing cases?
Caught caught caught unequivocally caught
caught caught caught
head over heels into the abyss
for no good reason
except for the sudden faint steadfastness
of our own true names, our own amazing names
that had hitherto been consigned to a realm of forgetfulness
itself quite tumbledown.

-Aimé Césaire (c. 1950?, translated from the french by Paul Muldoon c. post-Haiti)

from The Poetics of Space

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling those memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

--Gaston Bachelard

this essay has come to mean much more to me than it once did

thinking about buying the poetics of space

i don't know why, if i have such anxiety about linking this or that thing, i still have an impulse to this blog. anyway, a first draft for today's workshop--why the fuck not. maybe i'll even put revisions here. it might give me a certain motivation outside of class.



The Oneiric House

You knew this place before your own sensibility;
knew its frankness like the sound of clipping fingernails

or sticky frets swollen by solid air.
This house is motionless the way all immemorial things are

yet you remember the tremble of muslin curtains in certain heat
the echo of Naima in a ribcage of wood

night light a specter across floor as cool as sheets.
Once more you will return to this lake house

of lightning and frost, where crawfish keep under rocks
as smooth and flat as memory: the clicking of locks

a shiver distilled across decades.

remember who you are

dark of his narrow hallway, nowhere to go
but into him, his kiss is so gentle and i think
it was my numb hand that wrapped around the side of his face

poetrying something new

a poem from cross outs; a three euro book i picked up at shakespeare and co. The Arena by William Haggard. dry, something about profit and greed. i've never done this completely. untitled yet, draft one.


Great chairman of a second
deprecatory hand who thought money was
the name of a place where he strained

for two frightful winter boyhoods.
History isn't information
for a partnership of paper:

it is something to be inescapably
burdened by. Contracts
pretend people ought to confess.

Self-pity is vice of a certain drama
and words look a considerable mess.
You are wrong—intelligence can't be solid fact.

The issue is four thousand delusions
of a shadowed man who keeps his appointments
with a priest in his box.

Peace had only one head in silence
so I thought tomorrow was
a ring in the morning.

tummy

bastille day. all the bars are closing. i can sit here and kiss my leg all night but that's not going to write my poem. and tomorrow i'm to meet with yusef, without drafts, pathetic and crestfallen, ready only to talk about jazz like tonight on the boat. he told me my work was interesting. i must've blushed, then: remember coleman's free jazz or on the corner sessions? his favorite is bird but i haven't been there yet. let me name drop all night, i can do it, but it depends on you to make a difference.

i've been feeling for new york. it has been an experience being in paris but it makes my city glow differently and from afar. the air conditioning, the all-night subways, the bars open 'til 4 am, but who am i kidding? i'm not that girl anymore. i miss already corona park, moses' to-scale model of the entire city--daunting yet lovely, i could even point out my apartment, my favorite place to buy pad thai.

there is a sprig of lavender on my bedside table, atop the pass navigo portrait i have yet to adhere. i watched blade runner this morning for breakfast. i have been studying the surrealist's in class. they were so madly in love with love, something real yet intangible, nondescript, amorphous. there is also medicated blistex on my side table. i used it to heal a scar in cadaques. cadaques, cadaques ghost melody of leonard cohen. i'm tired. i think i'm losing my head.

so help me, ira.

whilst trying to like that my friend liked ira glass on facebook, i sort of accidentally ended up "liking" ira glass. i try to keep the amount of things i "like" that are radio-centric to a minimum, although i'm not going to go back and un-like ira because that would just be untrue. liking ira reminded me of that very awkward conversation i had with the man, palms sweaty and mouth running unabashedly out of nerves--me trying to justify my independent major to him without sounding so desperate to be like "YOU CHANGED MY LIFE" although it may be true. when telling him how a teacher of mine used his show to advocate a tenderness with which materials can be treated he looked me sideways and said, "well, that doesn't sound like it would work too well." and i said, "but it did." i must have been ten shades of pink at that moment. i think i had a hotflash while almost crying and smiling too. i'm still feeling through the field, although i think..i guess i'm making progress.