Wednesday, April 2, 2014

And Diving the Salt Will Kiss a Convex Eye


      


Since few saw this last night and of those only a few clicked below the fold, here again, ten songs from the 1990s via the first set of Therese's March 30th show. I confess, I didn't/haven't paid as much attention to Shellac as I should have/am. As for P.J. Harvey, who does after all have a tag on this shitty blog, I've theories why I haven't played her here as much as once, Occam's suggesting I played her to much. As for why I don't play more Stereolab, they do after all have a tag on this shitty blog, I've no idea.





   




   





CABOCHON

Nick Laird

She still has some cousins in Leitrim, 
the tall nurse broadcasting our secret, 
and bright eyes bright as trinkets 
when her pink nail taps the screen. 
Between the coda and the dipped head 
a flicker in the quadrant's grain 
steadies to a light bobbing 
rhythmically, unhindered ...

We stand before the elevator's 
mirror now like any other passengers 
disembarking at the gate, late, 
a silent weight of uncut gems 
stitched meticulously in the hems 
of your winter coat, my leather case.





   



PROFESSIONAL MIDDLE-CLASS COUPLE, 1922

Adam Kirsch

What justifies the inequality
That issues her a tastefully square-cut
Ruby for her finger, him a suit
Whose rumpled, unemphatic dignity
Declares a life of working sitting down,
While someone in a sweatshop has to squint
And palsy sewing, and a continent
Sheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground,
Could not be justice. Nothing but the use
To which they put prosperity can speak
In their defense: the faces money makes,
They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse,
Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong;
Only among the burghers do you find
A glance so frank, engaging, and refined,
So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.




  


ANOTHER THING

David Mason

Like fossil shells embedded in a stone,
you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy,
a mouthing out of silence, a way to see
beyond the bedroom where you lie alone.
So why not be the vast, antipodal cloud
you soloed under, riven by cold gales?
And why not be the song of diving whales,
why not the plosive surf   below the road?

The others are one thing. They know they are.
One compass needle. They have found their way
and navigate by perfect cynosure.
Go wreck yourself once more against the day
and wash up like a bottle on the shore,
lucidity and salt in all you say.








[She goes, she is, she wakes the waters]

Karen Volkman

She goes, she is, she wakes the waters
primed in their wave-form, a flux of urge
struck into oneness, the solid surge
seeking completion, and strikes and shatters
and is its fragments, distinction’s daughters
and now, unholding, the cleave and merge
the hew and fusing, plundering the verge
and substance is the scheme it scatters
and what it numbers in substantial sun.
Her hands hold many or her hands hold none.
And diving the salt will kiss a convex eye
and be salt fact and be the bodied sky
and that gray weight is both or beggared one,
a dead dimensional, or blue begun.







A PRAYER FOR RAIN

Lisel Mueller

Let it come down: these thicknesses of air
have long enough walled love away from love;
stillness has hardened until words despair
of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves
back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie
against a weather which holds out on them,
waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry,
some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice
and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips,
syllable by monotonous syllable,
that wash away the sullen griefs of love
and drown out knowledge of an ancient war—
o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain,
let love be brought to ignorance again.







LIKE HOLDERLIN

Rosmarie Waldrop

got up early
left the house immediately
tore out grass
bits of leather in his pockets
hit fences with his handkerchief
answered yes and no
to his own questions
lies under grass
wilted flowers in his pockets
at the fence I pull my handkerchief
he liked to say no
“I’m no longer the same man”
and
“nothing is happening to me”


1 comment:

  1. i took a break from work this evening to view ..autism grows up.. on tvo here, pass it on to those that it would be of some support to view , mister c. has said in the past that tvont. is fairly easy to view on line for most of you there,of south of the border. / i first moved away from home with a man,older, with high functioning autism , in that.. two people with different disabilities(grant and i ) able to afford to live away from , i helped him get his first job at thirty , he is still there ..in his fifties now .

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