naranzarian

there is only the numinous art of delay

[naranzarian]

[naranzarian]

Light Pollution

You’re the patron saint of elsewhere,

jet-lagged and drinking apple juice,

eying, from the sixth-floor window,

a kidney-shaped swimming pool

the very shade of Hockney blue.

 

I know the left-hand view of life,

I think, and it’s as if I have, of late,

forgotten something in the night –

I wake alone and freezing,

still keeping to my side.

 

Each evening tidal night rolls in

and the atmosphere is granted

a depth of field by satellites,

the hammock moon, aircraft

sinking into Heathrow.

 

Above the light pollution,

among the drift of stars tonight

there might be other traffic –

migrations of heron and crane,

their spectral skeins convergent

 

symbols, arrows, weather systems,

white flotillas bearing steadily

towards their summer feeding.

A million flapping sheets!

Who knows how they know?

 

The aids to navigation might be

memory and landmarks,

or the brightest constellations.

Perhaps some iron in the blood

detects magnetic north.

 

I wish one carried you some token,

some Post-it note or ticket,

some particular to document

this instant of self-pity –

His Orphic Loneliness, with Dog.

 

Advances? None miraculous,

though the deadness of the house

will mean your coming home

may seem an anti-climax

somehow, and a trespass.

– Nick Laird

[naranzarian]

Separation

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.

– W.S. Merwin

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?”

— John Banville, from The Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

[naranzarian]

Forbidden Music

After the orchestra had been playing for some time, and had passed the andante, the scherzo, the poco adagio, and the first flautist had put his head on the stand because he would not be needed until tomorrow, there came a passage that was called the forbidden music because it could not, the composer specified, be played. And still it must exist and be passed over, an interval at the discretion of the conductor. But tonight, the conductor decides, it must be played—he has a hunger to make his name. The flautist wakes with a start. Something has happened to his ears, something he has never felt before. His sleep is over. Where am I now, he thinks. And then he repeated it, like an old man lying on the floor instead of in his bed. Where am I now? — Louise Glück

[naranzarian]

What Would We Create

It's like being sick all the time, I think, coming home from

      work,

sick in that low-grade continuous way that makes you forget

what it's like to be well. we have never in our lives known

what it is to be well. what if I were coming home, I think,

from doing work that I loved and that was for us all, what

if I looked at the houses and the air and the streets, knowing

they were in accord, not set against us, what if we knew the

      powers

of this country moved to provide for us and for all people —

how would that be — how would we feel and think

and what would we create?

– Karen Brodine

[naranzarian]

Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador

Rain who nails the earth, whose infinite legs nail the earth, whose silver faces touch my faces, I marry you.  & open all the windows of my house to hear your million feral whispers of si si                                                                     sí                                                         sí                                                                             sí

- Aracelis Girmay

[naranzarian]

From thirsty

This city is beauty unbreakable and amorous as eyelids, in the streets, pressed with fierce departures, submerged landings, I am innocent as thresholds and smashed night birds, lovesick, as empty elevators

let me declare doorways, corners, pursuit, let me say standing here in eyelashes, in invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake in the tiny shops of untrue recollections, the brittle, gnawed life we live, I am held, and held

the touch of everything blushes me, pigeons and wrecked boys, half-dead hours, blind musicians, inconclusive women in bruised dresses even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible briefcases, how come, how come I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

would I have had a different life failing this embrace with broken things, iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks in the brain, would I know these particular facts, how a phrase scars a cheek, how water dries love out, this, a thought as casual as any second eviscerates a breath

and this, we meet in careless intervals, in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic conversations, lotteries, untranslatable mouths, in versions of what we may be, a tremor of the hand in the realization of endings, a glancing blow of tears on skin, the keen dismissal in speed

– Dionne Brand

[naranzarian]

I take nothing for the migraine, knowing that nothing will help me and being anyhow cultist of pain. Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it. The air is cool and green even in the afternoons. Sometimes the pain is a solid block behind the wall of my forehead, sometimes disk within my skull tilting and humming with the movements of the earth, sometimes a wave that unrolls and thuds endlessly against the backs of my eyelids. I lie hour after hour concentrating on the sounds inside my head. In trance of absorption I hear the pulse in my temples, the explosion and eclipse of cells, the grate of bone, the sifting of skin into dust. I listen to the molecular world inside me with the same attention I bring to the prehistoric world outside. I walk in the riverbed and hear the cascade of thousands of grains of sand, or smell the iron exhalation of rocks in the sun. I bring my understanding to the concerns of insects the particles of food that must be carried over mountaintops and stored in holes, the eggs that must be arranged in hexagons, the rival tribes that must be annihilated. The habits of birds, too, are stable. It is therefore with reluctance that I confront the gropings of human desire. Clenched beneath a pillow in a dim room, focussed on the kernel of pain, I am lost in the being of my being. This is what I was meant to be: a poetess of interiority, an explorer of the inwardness of stones, the emotions of ants, the consciousness of the thinking parts of the brain. It seems to be the only career, if we except death, for which life in the desert has fitted me.

– JM Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country

[naranzarian]

Enough Music

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive, and we've talked enough and listened to enough music and stopped twice, once to eat, once to see the view, we fall into this rhythm of silence. It swings back and forth between us like a rope over a lake. Maybe it's what we don't say that saves us.

– Dorianne Laux

[naranzarian]

versions

1. expansive // slow / each thrust an intense landing / coaxing the come from a dark space / overwhelming waves / gasping into crook of breath on neck / collarbone wet / deep crack of feeling overcome / bathed in hormones / disintegrating / a pulse of dissolving stars

2. perfunctory // see how the word almost has cunt in it? / two bodies performing known roles / clothes off / tongue on clit / condom on / pendulum pounding / knees pushed high / hand on shoulder / hand on ankle / thump thump thump / lying side by side in the dark / what do I know about you? / alert to the vaguest touch / what do I actually know? / scanning the ceiling / for what?

3. missing // film of grease on water / dishes piled in sink / desecration of intimacy / why can’t you clean up for once? / no we haven’t had sex in weeks / blankness on sheets / I want to want you / I want to feel the way I used to feel / dry lips on dry lips / remember kissing? / trying to remember / why we chose this

— Kat Dixon

[naranzarian]

Your Body, Actually

The is only so much content at hand and life has become very straightforward. One option unfolds another: touch me and die. Reassuring as a sinkhole, totally. Seasons come on as a sausage restaurant, hopeful, with all its blinking trinkets and inherited imagery. No other replies needed. We are living in a post-sacred age, so it's official, nothing is sacred. It's official: leather pajamas. Go away, thoroughly, where winds have worn deserts to a whistle, rocks shaped to a gesture. How many rugs were pulled from under us? And we will know a burning platform among all this interference, this life of short graft.

— Alex MacDonald

[naranzarian]

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you. I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring-- afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy in the raw wind of the new world. 

Louise Glück

[naranzarian]

Embarrassment

It’s a wave, isn’t it? Not a particle. A fresh, cool wave, so why am I flushed and not washed? Why dirtier than before?     1. Etymology   On the subject of our names. They’re so embracing, thinking they’re all us   and swallowing themselves into our nausea.   Yet we never quite die on the spot. We put off being what we’re called, we take the hint.   Time is never wasted. It is always spent.     2. Teleology   Sheer fabric trailing through 4 a.m. I thought it was opaque and earlier.     3. Mathematics   I know you know I know. And the mirror multiplies inside.   The world is no bigger, but next time do the math,   because I wanted to know none of what I now know twice.     4. The Principle of the Borg   Saying “There’s no one like me” accomplishes the exact opposite of what you mean.   It is true only insofar as it is true for everyone equally.

— Brenda Shaughnessy

[naranzarian]

I Planted a Banana Tree Outside Our Window

Li Qingzhao speaks to her husband who is long absent

Banana tree in frozen rain: nothing looks more dead, nothing harder to kill. An axe can’t chop through. My garden saw makes it bleed milk. The trunk won’t rot, can’t burn, but a field mouse leaves his footprint. We planted the tree under our window. Even cut to the ground, roots and stump, its heart reaches up to pierce the gray sky, and flower in the sun. Too tired to dry my sandalwood hair. Today I hack it short with a paring knife. Black and crystal against the cinnamon tiles. If you ever rap on the window, remember I’ve grown too old to blush. The nape of my neck needs your breath to warm it.

— Reid Mitchell

[naranzarian]

And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name

You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who look up to you and are willing   To do things for you, but you think It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . . So much for self-analysis. Now, About what to put in your poem-painting: Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.   Names of boys you once knew and their sleds, Skyrockets are good—do they still exist? There are a lot of other things of the same quality As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, Dull-sounding ones. She approached me About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments. Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something Ought to be written about how this affects You when you write poetry: The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate Something between breaths, if only for the sake Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you For other centers of communication, so that understanding May begin, and in doing so be undone.

— John Ashberry

[naranzarian]

For Desire

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best; and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries, or cherries, the rich spurt in the back of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing. Give me the love who yanks open the door of his house and presses me to the wall in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload and begin their delicious diaspora through the cities and small towns of my body. To hell with the saints, with martyrs of my childhood meant to instruct me in the power of endurance and faith, to hell with the next world and its pallid angels swooning and sighing like Victorian girls. I want this world. I want to walk into the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along  like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass, and I want to resist it. I want to go staggering and flailing my way  through the bars and back rooms, through the gleaming hotels and weedy lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks where dogs are let off their leashes in spite of the signs, where they sniff each other and roll together in the grass, I want to lie down somewhere and suffer for love until it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again and put on that little black dress and wait for you, yes you, to come over here and get down on your knees and tell me just how fucking good I look

— Kim Addonizio