Pattern

Something and Nothing                            Katie Ford

In the month my brother began to love a married woman,
the month the lantana took all the heat of late summer
into its orange sanctuary blooms, bearing it, storing it
as if for some suddenly-cold October night, he let her be.

In a twilight in which we are told the stars are portioned
into patterns like goblets and horses and archers he slid
her photograph into a copper frame welded
at the edges with a darker wire melted against it

and in. And it became
something of untiring capacity, growing
like the miles of hollowed land stunned and crafted
so far before us the metallic light of morning
that we could never imagine
unmade the land,
then towered the rain down, centuries worth,

to make a lake of what was gone, desire in which he let
her be and waters where the tired
but living carp swim back and forth. 

**********

We thrive, in part, when we have purpose, when we still have more to do. The deliberate incomplete has long been a central part of creation myths themselves. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women sought imperfection, giving their textiles and ceramics an intended flaw called a “spirit line” so that there is a forward thrust, a reason to continue making work. Nearly a quarter of twentieth century Navajo rugs have these contrasting-color threads that run out from the inner pattern to just beyond the border that contains it; Navajo baskets and often pottery have an equivalent line called a “heart line” or a “spirit break.” The undone pattern is meant to give the weaver’s spirit a way out, to prevent it from getting trapped and reaching what we sense is an unnatural end.    Sarah Lewis in The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

**********

The Pieces That Fall To Earth                           Kay Ryan

One could

almost wish

they wouldn't;

they are so

far apart,

so random.

One cannot

wait, cannot

abandon waiting.

The three or

four occasions

of their landing

never fade.

Should there

be more, there

will never be

enough to make

a pattern

that can equal

the commanding

way they matter.

**********

“I know that I have an instinct towards math and cleverness in structure that I work against, and so I try to make something … I make this whole structure which takes up a cork wall of index cards, and then I feel that is the architecture of the book, and what you do with architecture is that you cover it completely . . . And why I am driven to make something this complicated I don’t know. It’s just a pleasure for me always in all kinds of reading and fiction to know that there is some kind of clock ticking in the background. It could be rhetorical device, the way that language goes in the book. That there’s a pattern to it, because it’s nice to feel when you close the book that there’s a pattern to life.” Andrew Sean Greer in an interviewwith Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm 

**********

Time                                                    Robert Creeley

Moment to

moment the

body seems

to me to

be there: a

catch of

air, pattern

of space— Let’s

walk today

all the way

to the beach,

let’s think

of where we’ll be

in two year’s

time, of where

we were. Let

the days go.

Each moment is

of such paradoxical

definition—a

waterfall that would

flow backward

if it could. It

can? My time,

one thinks,

is drawing to

some close. This

feeling comes

and goes. No

measure ever serves

enough, enough—

so “finish it”

gets done, alone.

**********

Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe. John Keene

**********

Channel Shane McCrae

If you are a fan of Shane McCrae (as I am, see here and here), you may have wished you could channel him, or his sensibilities, while writing your own work. Now you can. Black Lawrence Press, publisher of McCrae's latest book Non-fiction (don't be fooled--it's poetry), is offering a consultation with McCrae over five of your own poems if you purchase a bundle of Black Lawrence titles, including Non-fiction. The bundle total is $10 off the price of the books purchased separately, and includes the online consultation. Sign up by May 31 to receive a written critique from McCrae on your poems. I've already signed up!

In the past, I've used the personalized creative writing sessions of Black Lawrence Press's parent company, Dzanc Books, currently called Creative Writing Mentorships, in which a writer selects a mentor from an impressive list, currently including Molly Gaudry and Alissa Nutting. The writer then purchases time with her mentor, at $20 for one hour, $30 for two hours, or $50 for 4 hours. My experience with poet Michele Battiste significantly strengthened the manuscript I had been writing at the time--it soon found a publisher. And I'm happy to hear Battiste has a new book just out with Black Lawrence now, titled Uprising.

These are economical ways to get some one-on-one help with your poems. Plus the writers all volunteer their time so that proceeds can go to the Writer-in-Residence programs that Dzanc offers free to students in elementary and secondary schools across the country.

And I just discovered that Dzanc now has Online Writing Workshops. I don't have first-hand experience, but will likely try one in the future, given my good experiences with other Dzanc programs. Would love to hear from anyone who has had experiences with Dzanc programs. Thanks.

Weather

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
― Pema Chödrön

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

No Narrative                    A. E. Watkins

A paradise forecloses once an aperture—no narrative but trees
are saying birds between them. Sun through green leaves like green

stained glass—a bright room, the birds spoken in through
a window—translating between two

weathers: the birds as captives or portents.
The forest and feathered currents

coursing its chambers; what to think
of open doors, the emptied sanctuary Your trilling

lingers the rafters now branching several scenes.
No narrative but birds on wires humming between

poles—lining the street—front doors and absence cut in each
tree to let wires through: an entrance by which

a blood-thick night can pass.
The birds with beaks pulled to breasts, their small claws clasp

a wilderness humming sun-lit rooms and flitting. 

**********

  from  Ice Cream  by Robert Creeley

Where we are there must

be something to place us.

Look around. What do you see

that you can recognize.

.

Anxious about the weather,

folding the door shut, unwrapping

the floor covering and rolling it

forward at the door.

.

So that’s what you do:

ask the same questions

and keep answering.

.

Was that right.

*********

Language has no weather, and therefore is not, strictly speaking, an environment.

~from Jennifer Moxley's 'Fragments of a Broken Poetics'

*********

APPREHENDING THE WEATHER IN KANSAS                 Jon Kelly Yenser

For Becca

I'd forgotten that
the front edge of a front
seems its opposite

a long in-drawing
a sough up high in the elms
in the maples a sigh.

Just before the first drops
icy and big as dimes change
things for the better

the wind comes up.
You never mistake the storm
for what came before.

I grew up agape
and breathless in this weather
and the pulse it kept.

**********

Ghost                 Mark Irwin

Now your name's just a guest here, one that cancels
all hellos. Fleshless
you come & go through the mansion

of air. How
will I address you, small
weather? Sometimes your name's

a dress like an iron
bell the years
swing shadows from

longer that home. Can you hear
that word peal? I'm going
there now,

carrying the windows
from inside
all the vowels. 

 **********

Tokyo Poetry Reading this Sunday!

Don't miss this weekend's poetry reading by Paul Rossiter!

'Taking a Line for a Walk': The Pleasures and Surprises of the Poem
At 6:30 on Sunday 18th May at Good Day Books, Paul Rossiter will be talking about some of the pleasures, surprises, fascinations, and frustrations of reading and writing poems. In the second half of the talk he will introduce and read some poems from From the Japanese, his book which collects poems on Japanese themes, ranging in time from his first visit to Tokyo in 1969 (the era of Vietnam and Zengakuren) to the post-tsunami Japan of today. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.

ADMISSION: Purchase from Good Day Books one copy of From the Japanese, or one copy of any other Isobar Press book (all at ¥1,500 + sales tax).

Good Day Books, Tokai Bldg. (big-b shoes building), 2-4-2 Nishi Gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0031. Tel: 03 6303 9116.

Five minutes walk from Gotanda station; click below for a map.

http://www.gooddaybooks.com/contents/home/new_location?language=english

Mother

Zero Plus Anything Is A World
~Jane Hirshfield

Four less one is three.

Three less two is one.

One less three

is what, is who,

remains.

The first cell that learned to divide

learned to subtract.

Recipe:

add salt to hunger.

Recipe:

add time to trees.

Zero plus anything

is a world.

This one

and no other,

unhidden,

by each breath changed.

Recipe:

add death to life.

Recipe:

love without swerve what this will bring.

Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.

Like a cello

forgiving one note as it goes,

then another.

**********

Getting Close

by Victoria Redel

Because my mother loved pocketbooks

I come alive at the opening click or close of a metal clasp.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, a faux crocodile handle makes me

   weep.

Breathy clearing of throat, a smooth arm, heels on pavement, she

   lingers, sound tattoos.

I go to the thrift store to feel for bobby pins caught in the pocket

   seam

of a camel hair coat.

I hinge a satin handbag in the crease of my arm. I buy a little

   change purse with its curled and fitted snap.

My mother bought this for me. This was my mother's.

I buy and then I buy and then, another day, I buy something else.

In Paris she had a dog, Bijou, and when they fled Paris in 1942

   they left the dog behind.

When my mother died on February 9, 1983, she left me.

Now, thirty years later and I am exactly her age.

I tell my husband I will probably die by the end of today and all day he says, Are you getting close, Sweetheart? And late in the afternoon, he asks if he should buy enough filet of sole for two.

From a blue velvet clutch I take out a mirror and behold my lips in

   the small rectangle.

Put on something nice. Let him splurge and take you out for

   dinner, my mother whispers on the glass. 

**********

The Major Subjects           Lawrence Raab

Death is easier
than love. And true feeling, as someone said,
leaves no memory. Or else memory
replaces the past, which we know
never promised to be true.

Consider the sea cucumber:
when attacked it divides, sacrificing half
so that half
won't get eaten. Can the part left undevoured
figure out what to do?

The natural world is always instructive,
mysterious as well, but often
hard to praise. Love
is also difficult—the way it slides into
so many other subjects,

like murder, deceit,
and the moon. As my mother used to say
about anything
we couldn't find: If it had been
a snake it would have bitten you.

Fellow poets, we must
learn again to copy from nature,
see for ourselves
how steadfastly even its beauty
refuses to care or console. 

*********

'A woman knows when to be inside and when to be outside, her mother’s only useful lesson, and of course when to be neither.' Guy Davenport, from “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg” in Da Vinci’s Bicycle

*********

The Dome  by CHAD SWEENEY

I’ll give you that red one.
When we were the poorest,
mom paid my weekly allowance
in birds. That one is yours, she whispered

so as not to disturb it.
If you clean the oven

In a few months
I owned all the birds on the street,
blue jays, finches, a lame owl

cowled in the clock tower.
We had to walk farther each Saturday
to find a new fountain or thicket

 

so mother could pay me what she owed.
We stood on a bridge.
Our soldiers were marching away,

singing
and trying to sound brave.
Their numbers were staggering.

I invented a mathematics
to understand them.
I subtracted them from summer

and it was winter. Most of our houses
were gone, and the birds too.
The university had been bombed

with my father inside, attending a reading
by some Polish poets.
The poems were so sturdy, he said,

they held up the dome of the ceiling.

*********

Family Portrait                                James Allen Hall

If I could turn the photograph, bring my mother's face
to the bright eye of myth, my unflinching lens,
you'd see she's mouthing the words: Take the picture already.

You'd see my father's lust, his loathing
molding her body into some four-legged
photogenic thing, whipped and adored.

You'd see my mother emerging from the ghost world
limb by limb, carrying on her bowed shoulders
Eros and his sadomasochistic twin.

In the dim violated light, she's marked
by a man who can't let any part of her go.
In the light my father makes in the dark,
I was mothered into art. 

*********

To See My Mother                                                Sharon Olds

It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone. If she hadn't looked so exalted, so
beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly
hopeful, more than hopeful—beyond
hope, relieved—if she had not been suffering so
much, since I had met her, I do not
know how I would have stood it, without
fighting someone, though no one was there
to fight, death was not there except
as her, my task was to hold her tiny
crown in one cupped hand, and her near
birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,
nests. Winds, stems, tongues.
Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,
my mother's dying was like an end
of life on earth, some end of water
and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,
till only that still, ocher moon
shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.

**********

Sleep Chains                 Anne Carson

Who can sleep when she —
hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
fan her restless decks.
Cicatrice by cicatrice
all the links
rattle once.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

*********

Lament for the Makers                                                     Frank Bidart

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek

within itself what to make

My father's ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

                  •

Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.