Lavender Vista, Pastel, by John Cummings
Collage
In the oldest story we know of, sharks came first:
the perfect idea, perfect shape.
And then the rest of Creation–the sun, the moon,
this planet–to give them a home.
We live on that afterthought,
build boats to crisscross the water,
build churches like islands
surrounded by our cars.
We kill sharks by the millions
and sing along from our hymnals.
In the end, standing at the gates of heaven,
what if we’re asked one question: “How are My sharks?”
–Rob Carney, from The Book of Sharks
Thanksgiving at Snake Butte
In time we rode that trail
up the butte as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top. Antelope scattered
through the rocks before us, clattered
unseen down the easy slope to the west.
Our horses balked, stiff-legged,
Their nostrils flared at something unseen
gliding smoothly away.
On top, our horses broke, loped through
a small stand of stunted pine, then jolted
to a nervous walk. Before us lay
the smooth stones of our ancestors, the fish,
the lizard, snake and bent-kneed
bowman–etched by something crude,
by a wandering race, driven by their names
for time: its winds, its rain, its snow
and the cold moon tugging at the crude figures
in this, the season of their loss.
–James Welch, from Riding the Earthboy 40
hour entry: The animal was a light fixture
I was privileged to have time to write this on a weekend with gauze curtains and electric light before my eyes. I was privileged to be fed and for the most part unscathed and able to follow the animals of my fingertips moving in purchased light.
The animal was a light fixture, no the animal was the industry of pocketwatches and light fixtures, the animal was the industry and the privilege was an economic privilege to hold the control of light or time in the animal. It had a mechanical heart, yes, the animal had a mechanical heart and it was more dependable than any palpitation it cut through. There were people who worked in factories to create mechanical clocks or unburnt fuses, their tiny spindle valves from dawn to dusk, that was the workday, dawn to dusk. They were soft, softer than boiled beet flesh, softer than oyster pulp, softer than luck. The animal crawled into them and they crawled into the animal.
second entries: |lickedthreadfray|
|lickedthreadfray||beginningsstay||demographicflowerclusters|
|wreathspeech||spelloutpercent||pluckedtent||sickdayflint|
–Endi Bogue Hartigan, from oh orchid o’clock
My literary tastes of late are manic, Hopkins, the complete Grimm’s, just now “The Shoes
That Were Danced to Pieces,” Chekhov’s notebooks, and on TV a Hitchcock episode about
a murderous ventriloquist and Riabouchinska, the dummy he loves, a woman puppet
who wears a crown, I move from novel to story to Chekhov’s precious but banal ramblings,
“the wife of the engineer Gliebov, who has been killed hunting, was there. She sang a great
deal,” to a current novel, this one I read on a small apparatus with a screen on which one
turns virtual pages, and is most directly about doomed love, that’s the through line of all
my selections, and then my sonnet begins to speak back to me, it is my lone companion, my
absinthe drinker, my crowned confidante, why, it asks, do you leap madly from text to text,
and I tell my sonnet of leaping from my own bed to my sister’s when the doctor made a house
call to inject me with a vaccine, bed to bed to escape his serum, “Do you want typhoid fever?”
he shouted, but I leaped, imagining myself royalty who fled the king through a passageway
under my bed where my prince waited in a boat to carry me to the ball where I would dance
holes in my shoes and sing a great deal, then die of typhoid fever, like Gerard Hopkins.
–Diane Seuss, from frank: sonnets
XXIV
Love, love, the clouds went up the tower of the sky
like triumphant washerwomen, and it all
glowed in blue, all like a single star,
the sea, the ship, the day were all exiled together.
Come see the cherries of the water in the weather,
the round key to the universe, which is so quick:
come touch the fire of this momentary blue,
before its petals wither.
There’s nothing here but light, quantities, clusters,
space opened by the graces of the wind
till it gives up the final secret of the foam.
Among so many blues–heavenly blues, sunken blues–
our eyes are a little confused: they can hardly divine
the powers of the air, the keys to the secrets in the sea.
–Pablo Neruda, from 100 Love Sonnets, trans. by Stephen Tapscott
Across the Creek Is the Other Side of the River
No darkness steps out of the woods,
no angel appears.
I listen, no word, I look, no thing.
Eternity must be hiding back there, it’s done so before.
I can wait, or I can climb,
Like Orpheus, through the slick organs of my body.
I guess I’ll wait,
at least until tomorrow night, or the day after.
And if the darkness does not appear,
that’s a long time.
And if no angel, it’s longer still.
–Charles Wright, from Caribou
34
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like eached tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves–goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is–
Christ–for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the feature of men’s faces.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems (1876-1889)