Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ben estes

Angler Fish Washed Ashore

Photographer: Ben Estes

#ben estes #photographer #angler fish #fish #nature

“No Title” — Ben Estes

No Title

That this mountainside looks like a face is accidental, which is a shame, for I dearly love to laugh. The touch-smoothed redwood cross-section, in its rings of growth and brightness, seems like a sun seen from underwater, wobbly as jelly, mocking my inability to find a job, my food stamps, and saddens me to see the teens tagging themselves in nearby places to earn a virtual friend's respect, or boasting other symptoms of youth while leaving their greasy fingerprints on the thick lenses of my glasses, mocking my desire for artwork to remain packed in straw, and in music for sleepers halfway awake to grow wild in.

It all gives me faith in arranging, I guess, when there is nothing else I seem much good at but fuss and copy and paste, with a head full of so many other worries. Got a check today. Bought a book I can't read without it putting me to sleep with its out-of-date luxuriousness.

So instead of reading it, I stayed up and listened to Harry Partch's song And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, dedicating it to the memory of Ramon Novarro, hoping it would arch electrically above him with all the characteristics of fire all night, all day, and soak his early spring colors in a late autumn sun as pale as silver and fern-green skies

to draw light through midnight

and steer instead his valley's vista toward my own simple neighborhood loneliness with nothing better to do than lie back and lecture those cultured Internet boys on their own death's primitive and permanent cartoons, to walk carefully and not step on any snails, the poor, the rough skin bundles, or shiny boners poking out from satin robes. This light, is dark. And on the seventh day petals fell on Petaluma, forgiving those who hurried past before stuffed with poo and feathers underneath the hot yellow heat that I wish would ignite all the unopened envelopes piling up on the table by my front door, (and burn up all of the time I've spent on all of the things I can't put my finger toward).

I went for a walk this evening and found a speckled turkey egg where the river settled into the mud of the salt flats. I looked at the burnished iris of the eye of a trout. A gleaming Atlantic coin. Thinking even the wind tonight could speak, blowing in seeds not yet caught on the coat of the dog. Still, life. And all the needs in this world.

— Ben Estes

#poetry #poem #ben estes #no title

It all gives me faith in arranging, I guess, / when there is nothing else I seem much good at but fuss / and copy and paste, with a head full of so many other worries.

Ben Estes, excerpt from “No Title”

#ben estes #poetry #poem excerpt #lit #extracts #no title

Illustrated Games of Patience, by Ben Estes NOW AVAILABLE! www.the-song-cave.com "This beautiful work of late Romanticism finds Estes often roaming, sometimes making his bed in uncomfortable places, exemplifying patience, to which he at one point builds an actual broad-bodied monument. He is patient because he has the whole world and all of time at his disposal. The poems speak in riddles, impossible questions, vivid sensuous description, and, on one page, doggerel. Scent fetishists will appreciate the descriptions of crotch smells. In fact, there should be something here to satisfy hedonists of all stripes." - Aaron Kunin “Ben Estes’s poems, with their piquant accentuation and glorious measured sensuality, remind me a little of James Schuyler’s. I also feel: bouquets not previously perceived, a style I can’t fully attribute to the twentieth century or any previous. A strange new liberty quietly makes itself known.” -Lucy Ives

#Illustrated Games of Patience #Ben Estes #The Song Cave #poetry #books

National Poetry Month: April 17

Intention By: Ben Estes The intention was to break Ben into leaf. Break into leaf. River rules break into leaf. It is bent on behalf of the sheet of glass, under the glass shade. That delivery boy breaks into leaf. Our island, overloaded with tourists, the sun, and a towel stuffed in a bell. Tourists break into leaf. Encourage me. Burials were like this. Fast and sad. One too many formations. Burials there existed. The sheet of glass is far and doesn't cover very much. So many kinds of sheet, And so many leaf/scarf : leaves/scarf.

#poem #poetry #National Poetry Month #NaPoMo #ben estes #lamp like l'map #factory hollow press #rachel