Cloud I

Letter to My Imagined Daughter                   Kyle Vaughn

If I could fold this lonely year in half and then in half again, until finally it became next year, I would keep folding until I came to where you are. I would keep folding until this year made a little paper car. This white care would be soft, like a cloud in the air. And even more than a soft cloud, this would be a bright car, more like the sun in the middle of the day. And as it does through certain glass, its light would keep folding , folding in—making the world spin like a red barber’s chair, once around for every fast ray.

****************************************************

You Begin                                                                              Margaret Atwood 1978

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.
****************************************************

Inspiration is there all the time. For everyone whose mind is not clouded over with thoughts whether they realize it or not. ~Agnes Martin

****************************************************

Ring               by Melissa Stein

Control was all
I wanted: a handle
on the day, the night
when it curved,
when it swayed,
when I could sense
the teeming stars
in light, in dark
the sun's bare wire.
Some switch
to turn it off:
each shadow
pinned to each tree
like a radius
of some infant's
milk it spilled.
And the leaves,
their gossip
of claw and beak
and wind and heat
and wing. Tether
lake to bank and
cloud to peak.
And weather it.
Weather it. All this
to say I've
taken off my ring. 

****************************************************

Something goes through the world

Without speaking to anyone.

When it falls in water

It doesn't splash, when it enters a tree

It doesn't rustle.

The less you hear it the fiercer its presence is.

Time stops.  There's a mist in the north

And a branch, only one branch pointing to it.

No creature may now share its stillness.

Cloud, drifting in the direction of my birth,

If there's a Hell,

It must have only one inhabitant.

  

~Charles Simic

Noise

Splinter            Ewa Lipska, translated from the Polish by Robin Davidson and Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska

I like you a twenty-year-old poet writes to me.
A beginning carpenter of words.

His letter smells of lumber.
His muse still sleeps in rosewood.

Ambitious noise in a literary sawmill.
Apprentices veneering a gullible tongue.

They cut to size the shy plywood of sentences.
A haiku whittled with a plane.

Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.

It is hard to remove
much harder to describe.

Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.

****************************************************************

No Sky

Martha Ronk

after Robert Adams’s California: Views


No sky a gray backdrop merely and absence
and below: the scraggle of dusty fronds, the scrub oak and scrub jay
whose abrasive noises sharpen in response.

Shadows proliferate in deep furrows no sky above
merely a scrim registering conical thrusts, a heightened flurry &
outlines of branches, the dead ones slowly petering out.

magnificent ruin the cut through the field blasted chaparral

As I understand my job, it is, while suggesting order, to make things appear as much as possible to be the way they are in normal vision.

An unvoiced series of sentences, without articulation,
with gray shapes, formulating a syntax loosening and then tightening from edge to edge.

The frame sets a border down from which a thin straggle hangs at random &
like purposeful intrusion, and so unlike

and the interstate (in the title) missing from the photograph itself
merely a dry riverbed, the density of shadows trapped in the confusion
of bush and bush-like tree

except from higher up than the rest, its thin trunk arched against
no sky

colorless, less often remarked upon, appositely emotionless these days,

a relic, like the fan palm living at the edges of water. 

**********************************************************

Halo             Melissa Stein
       

A swirl of it: a stain, like cinnamon:
that's how it was, at the base
of her skull, radiating like a halo.
I watched, for a long time, her outline,
her shadow, her second self
sink into sand. They say the soul
lifts from the body; that it takes wing
from sullied matter, a perfumed storm,
petals and light. I saw a slackening,
a gradual collapse to paleness tinged
in yellow, in slate. A lowering, not a lifting
as the earth that once held her up
loosened to take her in. A sigh.
Then a quiet that was more than quiet,
a listening that itself became like noise. 

****************************************************

Anyone involved with the institutions of poetry would do well to remember this. With all the clamor in this country about the audience for poetry, a veritable barnyard of noise into which I myself have been known to bray, we shouldn't lose sight of one of poetry's chief strengths: how little of it there is. I don't mean how little there is in the culture, but how little there is at any one time that is truly excellent. Poetry's invisibility is deplorable and worth fighting. Its rareness is admirable and the chief source of its strength. Indeed, I sometimes think that if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently. Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry – rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

Christian Wiman, Poetry, Dec. 2006

****************************************************

Last Trip to the Island                                      Erin Belieu

You're mad that I can't love the ocean,

but I've come to this world landlocked
and some bodies feel permanently strange.
Like any foreign language, study it too late and
it never sticks. Anyway,

we're here aren't we? —
trudging up the sand, the water churning
its constant horny noise, an openmouthed heavy

breathing made more unnerving by
the presence of all these families, the toddlers

with their chapped bottoms, the fathers
in gigantic trunks spreading out their dopey
circus-colored gear.

How can anyone relax
near something so worked up all the time?

I know the ocean is glamorous,
but the hypnosis, the dilated pull of it, feels

impossible to resist. And what better reason to
resist? I'm most comfortable in

a field, a yellow-eared patch
of cereal, whose quiet rustling argues for
the underrated valor of discretion.

And above this, I admire a certain quality of
sky, like an older woman who wears her jewels with
an air of distance, that is, lightly,
with the right attitude. Unlike your ocean,

there's nothing sneaky about a field. I like their
ugly-girl frankness. I like that, sitting in the dirt,

I can hear what's coming between the stalks.

Control

Ring               by Melissa Stein

Control was all
I wanted: a handle
on the day, the night
when it curved,
when it swayed,
when I could sense
the teeming stars
in light, in dark
the sun's bare wire.
Some switch
to turn it off:
each shadow
pinned to each tree
like a radius
of some infant's
milk it spilled.
And the leaves,
their gossip
of claw and beak
and wind and heat
and wing. Tether
lake to bank and
cloud to peak.
And weather it.
Weather it. All this
to say I've
taken off my ring.

 

 

******

Kiki Smith: "Just do your work. And if the world needs your work it will come and get you. And if it doesn't, do your work anyway. You can have fantasies about ...having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision."

******

 

To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first, let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p. 32

*******

Ars Poetica               Henrietta Goodman

Why do we think we have any control
at all? My breasts are soggy cartons.
The baby is greedy. He grabs
my skin in his fists, twists my hair.
He seems to know everything
already, the checkbook, balanced wrong,
the ignorance I'm not supposed
to confess—my friend says Giotto
and I hear Choteau, tiny town not far
from here. Clearly, I can imagine
no farther. The valley's a funnel,

skyline blurred by charcoal clouds,
the valley's a tornado and I'm
the eye—doodlebug, doodlebug
your house is on fire—
the room spins and spins
until the floor drops away
and I'm dizzy, frescoed to the wall,
Madonna Defying Gravity.
You can't tell it yet,
but I'm slipping, scratching the days
in my skin with a dull blade,
too afraid to just cut clean
and deep. This is how prisoners do it,

one scratch for each day
on the wall that holds them in,
one for each day I've lost
in half-sleep, the baby curled
like a snail on my chest, my hand patting,
patting, stomach bulging
over the top of my pants—

what is restrained in one place
escapes in another—

 

******

"I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert," Charles Bowden writes in his recent book, "Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing", "and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control."

******

To Mirah: In Utero: On Being Named                                Jennifer Perrine

I lost control of my car one summer, blacked out
on the way to work: when I woke, I’d lost
a random taxonomy: paper, sieve, sand dollar:
stuck in some synapse between mind and tongue:
others lost in their fumble of letters: I found
driftwood on the river and called it derby:
my doctor gave me a name: aphasia: like Adam
knowing he’d gotten it right when he found
gecko or ant lion under a dead leaf: no doubt
there’s a purgatory for lost language: the dark
burning-off before ascension: a lexicon
shaken loose from etymology: uprooted
rhizomes shucking their dirt: and you: swathed
in the hum of your name: all the world your alias.

******

Did We Betray the River                                                      Dionisio D. Martínez

Did we betray the river or did the river betray us? You've noticed, I'm
sure, how, under certain conditions, a ladder leaning on a wall is a draw-

bridge waiting for a sailboat that keeps delaying its journey, calling
the man who operates the bridge, layering elaborate excuses so neatly

that the man only hears one excuse: the boat's coming, just not yet, not
while the water's in control of the situation. The man waits—drawbridge

up, traffic on hold. Sometimes the world is all patience and silence
and there is nothing you can do to stir up trouble. The driver who keeps

a knife beneath the seat is tapping on the dashboard a song coming from
another car. This is an exception. Others are praying to their private

rivers, as if the one just ahead were not there: seeing is too easy: one
acquires increasingly complex needs, like the taste of earth just

turned by oxen who know the plow as well as a man knows his river. We
know this blue's an illusion: the things that shelter us are colorless and

hover just so, not quite halos and not quite hats, and they can all be named
even if the names are arbitrary, even if they're not quite words. Our boat

waits for the water to go from blue to brown to ocher, as in a Turner
vision—a realism so crude it borders on beauty, the way beauty

was meant to touch us: with its repulsive allure, its unwashed mirrors of
heavy morning fog. We have to look head-on, and learn to forget again.

******

Equilibrium Update                                                                    J. Allyn Rosser

      Look there, a man caught smack in the middle of his life
and almost aware of it; not quite yet resigned
            but past most of the old impatiences, having
developed a consciously casual walk, not quite
      the swagger of yore, nor the dignified limp
to come; rather like a man carrying a long heavy plank,
            glad of his hard-won, admittedly modest momentum;
calmly dreading several varieties of misstep
            such as tipping the future a little too far forward or
letting the past plunk down heedless behind; or merely
            looking down; or turning so quickly to look back as to
whack the one just now bending to pick her own burden;
      still staunchly bearing it onward in splinterless grip
            across the rooftop lifescape—bicep, trapezius and
thigh muscles in play, also those of the spine, the upper lip,
      he is at last in control, yes, in his element, in his heart
            of hearts wondering how long he will bear it, where to
and, as ever, what for.