spud city

Shruti and Catherine. Just two spuds from two coasts, blogging.

[spudcity]

Ruth Asawa short documentary from MoMA

[spudcity]

An Owl (in memory of Gil)

Owl small be enough

The child for all his feathers was a cold.

Oh wow the owl.

The poem the vowels

The owl, look its vowels

That branch for you

Owl, are you an armature vector

And a large step for mankind?

Owl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift

You give to me give to you

Terrible other things happen.

We stay on our branch.

A hundred eyes

Two will do

– David Shapiro

[spudcity]

CLOUDS

Clouds are on the yardarms, Clouds are sailful. Desires are on pomegranate trees Desires are basketful. Yellow roses are on their stalks, Desires are budding Desires are in my unborn child’s Joy of spring.

BY RÜŞTÜ ONUR

TRANSLATED FROM THE TURKISH BY HÜSEYIN ALHAS & ULAŞ ÖZGÜ

[spudcity]

Times Square 

Corridors of the city End in a deer’s eye. The deer stumbles among legs Of humans.

The humans are tall in the night; Stretching their arms into cramped holes, Twisting their elastic necks Around steel poles.

On the back of the night Pigeons are drifting in a hot rain.

– Robert Davis

[spudcity]

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence. And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

– Louise Gluck

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The Dog Wants His Dinner

for Clark Coolidge

The sky is pitiless. I beg your pardon? OK then the sky is pitted. The yard is sand and laced with roots afloat on rock encasing fire. You think so do you. No. Yes. Don’t know. Check one. Forget all you ever knew. Sorry. Not my romance. What is? Sorry. We don’t take in trick questions. You mean? I do: put down that. Put that down too. Skies of spit, seas where whales piss and die to make a bar of scented soap, uhm smells good. She came in like an ex- cited headline. The deer they all were starving! To death, even, perhaps. And eating people! What to do with these disordered herds of words? I said I would eat my words and do so, now you see. He eats them, all up. Greedily. Yesterday the air was squeaky clean today it’s dull and lifeless as an addict’s armpit. Surely you mean leafless. I have a flea bite, here, pink, of course as an eye disease: the cat , who brings me fleas dies like a dog, sleepily, or an unwatered plant. That was exciting wasn’t it. It’s not that I crave. Uh did you say crave? Some words are briefly worse than others: get the Librium gun and point it and the Kodak at that Kodiak. You see? No hope. So don’t hope. Hop, skip, jump or lie down. Feed your face. Now feed the dog. He ate his. He is eating the cat who objects. Fix the fire. Put out the light. An ice cold hand slides in the window to touch your uncovered head forehead cheeks lips lobes and all with worlds of fire chilled by distance. O night. Bedclothes loosen. Unseen twigs erect themselves in air. You asleep too, O magic root.

– James Schuyler

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Dear Someone

my emptiness has a lake in it   deep and watery  with several temperaments      milk   cola  beer 

at night the selves are made of water  all the openings flooded    streaming with rain 

my emptiness has an aqueduct in it  selves rushing through channels 

dissolving    washing away in streaks 

my emptiness has a fish in it  a piece of seaweed    liferaft     a rocky strait 

all night the selves are breaking themselves  again and again on the sandbar     

you can’t get out from the drowning  nightwatery    the blacksparkling pools 

my emptiness has a nowhere reef    an island  at night the immersion comes deep-running and sudden     

the selves  it washes us under and sudden 

– Deborah Landeau

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Monologue for an Onion

I do not mean to make you cry. I mean nothing, but this has not stopped you From peeling away my flesh, layer by layer,

The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills With husks, ripped veils, all the debris of pursuit. Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.

Things have no hearts. Within each skin of mine Lies another skin: I am pure onion—pure union Of outside and in, surface and secret core.

Look at you, cutting and weeping. Idiot. Is this the way you move through life, your mind A questing knife, driven by your fantasy of truth,

Of lasting union—slashing away skin after skin From things, ruin and tears your only signs Of progress? Enough is enough.

You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed Through veils. How else should it be seen? How will you strip away the veil of the eye, the veil

That you are, you who want to grasp the heart Of things, who long to know where meaning Lies. Smell what you hold in your hands: onion juice,

Gashed peels, my stinging shreds. You are the one In pieces. Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to You changed yourself: you are not who you are,

Your soul severed moment to moment by a blade Of fresh desire, the floor strewn with abandoned skins. And at your inmost circle, what? A core that is

Not one. Poor fool, you are divided at the heart, Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love, A heart that will one day beat you to death.

–Sue Kwock Kim

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A Sense of Connection, as in

moments like this one, the green carpet looking for once just the right green, is it the lighting, or your shadow thrown from the tan-and-rust couch where you sit, lightly— you seem in your reverie almost to hover— clashing horridly in your incredible socks with the magenta stripes above the sneakers slashed by, even oozing with, crimson shoelaces; and yes, to be completely honest, you’re wearing the T-shirt of yesterday. Orange stripes. But I don’t care, that is I love the angle of your chin when you read and the color of the shadow you throw without knowing it, though even as I write, though I hate to have to accept it just yet, you’ve already begun to move, you’ve gone into the kitchen, now calling softly to me about a peach in the refrigerator, the mold on the peach, asking me considerately do I want to try to save it? and I’m touched, a trifle puzzled but touched and awed to the point of leaving my mouth open to think that the color of it, the peach-mold, probably exactly matches the precise hue of the unshadowed carpet you’ve left me, and I can safely say I’m delighted daily with such unlooked-for symmetries as you in your youness provide, all unwitting, and I want to call softly back not just No, let it go, but a harmonizing phrase, a signal to bring you with a sudden smile in here to evoke again that shadow on the carpet that so often separates us, I’m actually craving physically I think the even-toned, sturdy aquamarine shadow that falls from the changeable zoo of your otherness …

                                                but you’re very busy washing, no rinsing something at the sink, no, now chopping something harder than a peach, I wonder if you’d even hear me, chopping in there, chopping and chopping with disarming diligence at the makings of a green salad.

– J. Allyn Rosser

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The Sound of Water

The night recedes as I prepare to journey toward dawn, towarddreamscapes of memory. Flashes of light across time and place illuminating a run to the ocean and the sound of waves crashing and the tidal repetition of my name being called. Here, before the sound of people racing to an uncertain life, I hear moments in the darkness before the eastern glow lightens dark blue and then finally light blue and the sky and morning star confirm that up until this moment this life has not been a dream and it was true that I’ve seen blossoms fall gently from cherry trees at the slightest change in the sacred wind frozen in time counting the cadence of my footsteps on the graveled path and the sound of my sacred breath, my prayer that other darker memories remain hidden in the night of my soul to be discovered when the morning whispers to me Now you can journey inward to find the child who cowers in fear from lightning and thunder and belts and closed fists.

– Milton Bluehouse II

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Gratification to the Survivors of Daily Damnations

Thanks to the clouds on fire, the burning sunset,  and every diminishing as beautiful as time.  Thanks to the moments that are not yours,  the soft part of the world you are in  when you tiptoe to your mother’s room,  the unending seconds until you hear her snore  because the lost lyrics of the living  will always escape through the mouth.  Thanks to the quietness she drew from the well of nights  and bottled for you by dawn—for the lilacs,  the roses, and the thorns blooming in your mouth.  We pocket the heart until we know what to do with it.  Nature introduces spring to us like visitors.  Living and leaving, we multitask at our best.  When you get home, stare around like it’s another man’s.  Like this can be here, like that can be beautiful.  Cigar this life and light it with the sun.  Breathe this poem in. Own a spot on a cliff or an edge  or somewhere that can carry a stamp of your body.  Become. Open a book and see this trapped time  I left for you to live all over.

– Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi

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A House Called Tomorrow

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen— You are a hundred wild centuries

And fifteen, bringing with you In every breath and in every step

Everyone who has come before you, All the yous that you have been,

The mothers of your mother, The fathers of your father.

If someone in your family tree was trouble, A hundred were not:

The bad do not win—not finally, No matter how loud they are.

We simply would not be here If that were so.

You are made, fundamentally, from the good. With this knowledge, you never march alone.

You are the breaking news of the century. You are the good who has come forward

Through it all, even if so many days Feel otherwise.  But think:

When you as a child learned to speak, It’s not that you didn’t know words—

It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many, And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.

From those centuries we human beings bring with us The simple solutions and songs,

The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow. What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going. 

Look back only for as long as you must, Then go forward into the history you will make.

Be good, then better.  Write books.  Cure disease. Make us proud.  Make yourself proud.

And those who came before you?  When you hear thunder, Hear it as their applause.

– Alberto Ríos

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Over the Counties of Kings and Queens Came the Second Idea

After a long night swimming In the dry dark of a book I heard outside my window A sound that changed my window.

Each of the planets unseen sang As though in the grooves Of a record I loved. Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Mars,

A scratch where the Earth Where the Earth should be Where the Earth should be And is.

I stared out into the darkness For some sign of the cold consoler, That perched spinning Night nurse who tends

To the sleeping sun Destined to rise irresponsibly Over the counties Of Kings and Queens.

What are we during these Archaic moments Of mind-made Shangri-la But bees trapped in amber,

Storyless and beheld, By the amber god Who makes it so And the living god

Who undoes it?

– Rowan Ricardo Phillips

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Horses, Which Do Not Exist

The strong horseshoe shape of a horse’s mouth Of his teeth, set that way of a suitcase handle And the way a bit, in just that way, pulls him: Come here to where it is I say. Like that A horse’s mouth, and so his manner, broken Those horses no longer running along the far Distance visible from a Tucson highway thirsty Stopping for water, making one of those paintings Living rooms wear as pendants. Those paintings Too unreal, laughed at and finger-poked And so these horses too must be unreal, A bad painting of nine, A pond of browning water. Birds, two kinds. Grass too green—spring has come this year, And water—mountains too blue, too many shades, In the distance. And so they are, this all is‚ As children say, like a dream, Laughing hard at how good it seemed at the moment.

– Alberto Ríos

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Fin de Fête

Sweetheart, for such a day

     One mustn’t grudge the score;

Here, then, it’s all to pay,

     It’s Good-night at the door.

Good-night and good dreams to you,—

     Do you remember the picture-book thieves

Who left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through,

     And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves?

So you and I should have slept,—But now,

     Oh, what a lonely head!

With just the shadow of a waving bough

     In the moonlight over your bed.

–Charlotte Mew

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Stars of the Trees and Ponds

O blue and nerveless stars. The night and the distance of the lake. The lake: mosquitoes, the uni-inter air—the pond of towering mosquitoes we float through. Float: the tents as we use the lumpy earth under a blanket. Cars: the

blanket of cars facing your vision of stars and thoughts never concealed to the lake. Conceal: Thoughts are never hidden, the mosquito cries to the lake. And brings the lake’s invisible man

Invisible: a woman rises into the lake and out of the lake Pond: you are left in the tent and see the beige pond. Leak: a woman stands over you. Woman: the pond leaks. You hear it.

– Joseph Ceravolo

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Plastic Bag from Corner Store Laments the Self

When they finally find me                         all sprawled in the limbs of this tall oak who can’t look me in the eyes anymore,                         I’ll ask that simple question of myself, where I might be taken, or take myself,                         when the power lines quit humming their work songs to the fading red & black & blue                         graffiti lining the underpass where I spent my youth grazing,                         or when the moon turns blood-red & maudlin & coughs me back up                         on the mangled Chesapeake shores. And when they ask why I’m there, I’ll slouch my shoulders.                         And when they ask where I’m going I’ll quote the sky again. I learned at birth to smile                         where my teeth are not. And I learned after: everything that opens is a mouth.                         Every mouth will spit you right out.

– Aliyah Cotton