Sunday, April 18, 2021

Amped-Up Windup Maniac Yo-Yo

Both can be true by
common denominator
neither of them real

Personally I'm
eyeing retirement, my
complicity my

blindness my in
ability to STFU do you
nine, my head sevens

We've done the math re
tire who tire quicker
of a not dire

alarm Cassandra
please don't kill the canary
Please be fool and do

whether vain or not
keep telling the same damn joke
Still funny to me

 

 

Worked better than I thought, the gags, I credit Charlotte for webbing around Wilbur at the junction of Windy Ridge and Browning Run trails
The Occult TechniqueOpinion fetishism
CantThe aliens are not comingThey* started a jokePigs
Minnesota deploys national guard ahead of next week's police shooting
Maggie's weekly linksHobsbawmFaith{ feuilleton }'s weekly links
Art for art's sake, motherfuckers
Prehistoric notation systems in Peru w Chinese parallels
LispectorScreamers
Alan Vega

 

 

MONGREL HEART

David Baker

Up the dog bounds to the window, baying
         like a basset his doleful, tearing sounds
             from the belly, as if mourning a dead king,

and now he’s howling like a beagle – yips, brays,
         gagging growls – and scratching the sill paintless,
              that’s how much he’s missed you, the two of you,

both of you, mother and daughter, my wife
         and child. All week he’s curled at my feet,
             warming himself and me watching more TV,

or wandered the lonely rooms, my dog shadow,
        who like a poodle now hops, amped-up windup
            maniac yo-yo with matted curls and snot nose

smearing the panes, having heard another car
           like yours taking its grinding turn down
               our block, or a school bus, or bird-squawk,

that’s how much he’s missed you, good dog,
         companion dog, dog-of-all-types, most excellent dog
             I told you once and for all we should never get.

2 comments:

  1. it has been written

    Reviewing Baker’s new and selected collection of poetry, Swift, in the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson recognized the unique “anti-pastoral” vision of Baker in a time of ecological collapse: “Baker’s poems depend on long acquaintance with a small place, where year-over-year comparison makes even the arrival of a feeding monarch or a nagging blue jay a standout event,” Chiasson noted. “His work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape: in our era of climate change, poetry’s mandate to measure the rhythms of the year has become a valuable form of witness. Baker’s reports from the interior leave in all the encroachments that threaten it.”

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  2. In Sheenah Pugh's FAQs, she says, in answer to the question 'Why do you hate Sometimes so much?'

    I think most people read it wrong. When read carefully, it says sometimes things go right, but not that often, and usually only when people make some kind of effort in that direction. So it isn't blithely and unreasonably optimistic. But a lot of people read it that way, which means I didn't write it well enough - the writer can always make the readers see what he wants them to if he does the job right. Also I know, because language is my job, that I have written poems in which the use of language is simply a lot more interesting and imaginative than it is there. So it bugs me now and then that this is the only one a lot of people think I've ever written....

    'Sometimes'

    Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
    from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
    faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
    Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

    A people sometimes will step back from war,
    elect an honest man, decide they care
    enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
    Some men become what they were born for.

    Sometimes our best intentions do not go
    amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
    The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
    that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.





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