( via/ via )

240713.

"Whose pollen triangulates the defusing" --Bill Knott

▦.

"cold night

mother dies again

in my dream"

--Vandana Parashar (via @acornhaiku)

Hex down.

( via / via )

Kiko and the Lavender Moon.

mercurythistle · in a thankless month
spare nary a spoon · fire-spigot
loons gallumph · ludicrous symptoms
scraggly scraping · in the rind cerulean

Keeping an eye out.

"They came to the top of a mountain. The shadow of a hawk fell over them." --@FrogandToadbot

#無言でロボットをあげる見た人もやる. ('#Giving a robot without saying a word People who see it will also do it')

( via / via )

Meryem Meryemti.

"When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time." --EM Cioran (via @isidro_li)

Járbă, máré járbă.

"distant whitecaps
wild sea oats oscillate
along the dunes
a lone piper runs
through sand and ashes"

--an'ya

Ederlezi.

( via / via )

Running to the Sea. (via)

"Sylvia,
you fine-grained piece of white bread,
you piece of lace in an attic dress,
you crystal glass in a beanery,
you satin slippers worn to hike through a muddy wood,
you deserved so much,
and got so little,
or were so mistakenly used,
as many of us are.
But in a classic manner
you died in order not to perpetuate
this commonness.
So this is my day to affirm my survival
and my commonness.
I am thick Polish rye bread,
I am homespun muslin,
I am stoneware,
I am a pair of wellingtons,
I can/I will survive
whether the man I love, who makes me calm on a windy day,
goes away or not."

--Diane Wakoski, from Greed 9).

Unstable square.

"liking the risk of choosing balance in Wakoski's to Sylvia, Greed 9
faces like strange moons, Vermeers, pearls on the museum wall's forehead..."

--Gerald Burns, Shorter Poems

"If a refrain enters the poem I may wonder if the poem wants to be a villanelle (although those tend to be more fun to write than to read) or a triolet (a more explosive form)."

( via / via )

"A lot of times I think, 'What would Osvaldo say about this?' And at times I write against him, because it’s not a question of staying loyal to ghosts."

"Just saw the word 'Romanophile' and decided to coin an Old English word for someone who loves the Anglo-Saxons: *𝘈𝘯𝘨𝘰𝘭𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦, from 𝘈𝘯𝘨𝘰𝘭- ‘the Anglo-Saxons/English’ + 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦 ‘friend, one who loves’. (IPA: [ˈɔŋɡɔlˌwɪnɛ])" --@wylfcen

~strange waves~.

yard friends frolic
the heavens hug close
   Frutiger Hieroglyph
ear in the grown grass

Painting of the back of a painting. (via @GiantRatSumatra)

( via / via )

From White Arena.

a trick in the throat · no more needed
ghost guillotine · gathered over months
it seems ancient · artifact buried

but coughs come · in the same cold shape
not fearsome foe · with fight imminent
a whisper like fire · my whipped skin crawls

Jouz Walla Fard.

" 'This house is a mess. I have so much work to do,' said Toad.

Frog looked through the window. 'Toad, you are right,' said Frog. 'It is a mess.'

Toad pulled the covers over his head." --@FrogandToadbot

Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis.

( via / via )

"It’s shadowed in anguish and literal fires, as in, both Hughes and Plath admitted to setting one another’s work on fire, which is an image I can’t escape."

"A survival-manual has killed everybody
With a single misprint"

--Bill Knott

This pattern appears to wave.

Cicalatide, trees full of loud erasure
briefly arrest, before they reach extinction
these drivers hurrying clad in fugitive purpose.
I don't know when they started or their fading
though foreordained as most defeats in nature;
among us humans, nothing reeks like failure
& we think we're so wise when we disdain it.
The ice of a hundred thousand years is gone now
without so much as one complete farewell;
i watch things wither i had thought would save
here in the autumn of my self conceit
& i cannot prognosticate one falling
or one survival where the jabber falters
except that we raise voices to drown cicadas.

"Prymachenko’s life was marked by adversity and grief: She suffered from polio throughout her childhood, lost close family during World War II, experienced poverty and famine on a kolkhoz, and lived in a region directly impacted by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster."

( via / via )

"Israel does not consider it worth wasting' expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only 'dumb' bombs to kill them in their homes..."

"winter comes
I move from place to place
house-sitting
strange keys wearing holes
in the pockets of my jeans

--Dennis H. Dutton in Tanka Splendor 2000

Percolating minor grid.

"What is it we seek--if not to produce a powerful sense, sustained for a fixed period, that there is some sort of harmony between the sensuous form of a poem and its exchange value in terms of ideas; that the two are conjoined in who knows what mystical union thanks to which we participate in quite another world than the one in which words correspond to deeds?" --Valéry

Border.

( via / me )

Hell of a Drug.

   "When will this mocking light,
This still recurring eye-ache have an end?"

--J Stanyan Bigg

"Close your eyes and imagine a warehouse full of sectionals, all of them taupe." (via @_ryanruby_)

"The Mood of Depression

You dark mouth inside me,
You are strong, shape
Composed of autumn cloud,
And golden evening stillness;
In the shadows thrown
By the broken pine trees
A mountain stream turns dark in the green light;
A little town
That piously dies away into brown pictures.

Now the black horses rear
In the foggy pasture.
I think of soldiers!
Down the hill, where the dying sun lumbers,
The laughing blood plunges,
Speechless
Under the oak trees! Oh the hopeless depression
Of an army; a blazing steel helmet
Fell with a clatter from purpled foreheads.

The autumn night comes down so coolly.
With her white habit glittering like the stars
Over the broken human bodies
The convent nurse is silent."

--Wright & Bly's Trakl

Moonrise.

( via / via )

"I summon every lesion."

a hard rain i'm honing
my hands on · darg target
coughshadow is shuffled
sharpen crystal harp strings
even java's jibwright
jogs in a shirk circle
blaze of early oozings
oobleck & bedecked nowl

Rainy night in our usual bed.

"Things I love: unfinished poems, sour cherries from the tree, the scent of fresh hay, meadows at night, donkeys, books with marginalia, owls that hoot after dusk, moth-pollinated flowering vines, wet hair, archaic idioms, bidets, ruins.

Things I hate: supremacism, cruelty." --@aliner

Red Glass.

( via / via )

Ethics.

"Lake Effect

Chionophilia: a longing for snow. Sirens
shatter through my windows, blue
and red, the color of a headache. Frontogenesis:

zones of air pressure and temperatures
strengthening. An hour ago,
I drove by the lake, waved past by police.

I’m not telling you anything
you can’t find out yourself. I live close
to what produces its own weather, warmth

desalinated into crystals
that melt the packed ice of our streets.
We use 20,000 pounds of lake salt

to clear them, scree and gravel; during storms,
my neighborhood gets constantly patrolled.
'I guess I’ll have to wait for snow,' is the next-

to-last-thing James, my neighbor, said,
manic, before the cop shot him.
It has not snowed in weeks. Ski resorts

make their own storms now, machines
groaning out thin flurries, though metal
cannot duplicate how lake water

thickens the crystals,
gives snow its 'body.'
Body is business. I’m not telling you

anything, James told the cop
who wanted his name, before
lunging at him with a plastic shovel.

They used to call this lake
Timpanogos, built the city
beside it because mountains form a bowl

that keeps all enemies
out. Everyone thinks there’s someplace
safe. I visited James’s house, once,

saw the dishes piled up, the thin-soled
boots ringed along his carpet.
Twenty-one days and the sky is dry.

Salt trucks sigh down empty streets.
It’s only the white
that keeps some people here, where snow

is work, a shovel means business. James
wanted to scrape his neighbor’s
snowless drive when the woman

called the cops about a peeping tom.
Not even stone is immune
to salt, which, mixed with sugar beet,

produces a solution that corrodes
vehicles, bridge decks, steel
plates. Do you see snow here?

The cop demanded. Symptoms of mania
include obsessiveness, aggression;
the sudden, inescapable belief

a man can clear the world of snow.
Herons fade into lake, white
on white, slicked into the grain

boundary where mist
turns everything to scuffed opal.
The cop wore a camera

strapped to his chest.
I watched from his body
the last footage of James pacing

back and forth, eyes
like burn holes. Over the course of time,
everything degrades. Even the lake

is shrinking, endorheic:
no water flows
in or out. Do you see snow?

James’s hand trembles in the video.
He pants, paces. For a moment,
it looks like everything

might be alright.
Then the cop demands,
again, his name.

I am not telling you anything
you don’t already know.
A hand, a shove, a shovel,

the video gone white.
There are not a thousand words for it,
in any language. How it looks

from above: a lake that’s dead
but shining. Blue and white,
and when the sun just hits it, red.

The mind, made too permeable
by its terrible particulates, cannot be policed.
What other word for stain? What word

for gone? There is a body and a color
and a grid of streets swept of white.
I am not telling you anything.

James wanted to be friends,
he told me once
as I watched him scatter seed

outside his house. Black
and yellow and red, the color of buntings
that migrate through the city each spring.

I like the white ones best,
James told me. And tossed some seed.
And the birds rose up around him in a circle.

--Paisley Rekdal in Orion Mag

The Red Tower.

"I translated this by Mahmoud Joudah:

The death of a girl means that a tree in the garden of heart has withered, that a major malfunction has struck the mood of the dawn, and that someone will sleep in an undying eclipse, will not perform his morning practices.

The death of a girl means that a dance has ceased forever, a song has gone astray, a laugh muted after which countless smiles will die out.

The death of a girl means that someone will walk in the streets on his own, eyes welled up, heavy-hearted, and too melancholic and about to weep people think he’s mad.

The death of a girl means there is a shortage in food for the impoverished, a raging thirst striking the throats of birds, a summer followed by no winter, and an everlasting arthritis in the joints of Time.

The death of a girl means that a poem will be unwritten, a painting will be unpainted, a love will be orphaned, an embrace will be postponed, and that there will be grief in a present tense that never stops."

--@MosabAbuToha

"Collecting these objects was both a passionate vocation and the enactment of a shared aesthetic."

( via / via )

In America you have to check power outages on a hamburger app. (via @sashafrerejones)

hours when the whirring
hence hatches a matchbox

"We're about to drown in a sea of pedestrian takes. An explosion of noise that will drown out any signal." (via Mefi)

"The Lost Pilot

for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger’s life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us."

--James Tate

"...climb every last green stem..."

( via / via )

Powerfully pointless.

"1 SEPTEMBER 1939

The first scattering rain on the Polish cities.
That afternoon a man squat' on the shore
Tearing a square of shining cellophane.
Some easily, some in evident torment tore,
Some for a time resisted, and then burst.
All this depended on fidelity.
One was blown out and borne off by the waters,
The man was tortured by the sound ol rain.

Children were sent from London in the morning
But not the sound of children reached his ear.
He found a mangled leather by the lake,
Lost in the destructive sand this year
Like feathery independence, hope. His shadow
Lay on the sand before him, under the lake
As under the ruined library our learning.
The children play in the waves until they break.

The Bear crept under the Eagle's wing and lay
Snarling; the other animals showed fear,
Europe darkened its cities. The man wept.
Considering the light which had been there,
The leathered gull against the twilight flying.
As the little waves ate away the shore
The cellophane, dismembered, blew away.
The animals ran, the Eagle soared and dropt."

--John Berryman

"...the necropolitical management of annihilation requires hiding of corpses."

"I want you to think of critique as a point of generosity."

- Vievee Francis (via @EverySongIveEve)

The Hand of Glory.

( via / me )

"I also don’t know anyone who is writing what I write, so clearly, I’m in my own little hell." (via @aliner)

"I know no speck so troublesome as self."

– George Eliot, Middlemarch (via @eleventhvolume)

Secret poison cabinet.

"Prodigy

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.

That must have been in 1944.

In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

I’m told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time."

--Charles Simic

Gaza chasers.

( via / via )

Early Shift.

   counted out
spoons · carrying
   a tally

Looseleft.

"...after a time the Exile, hurrying his trot to get a little closer to the Captain, asked her if it was thought that gods lived in darkness or perhaps in light. To which the Captain replied shortly that in her experience they lived in empty heads and the pockets of priests, both of which were dark enough." --M J Engh, Wheel of the Winds (1988)

صور للجزيرة توثّق اللحظات الأولى للغارة الإسرائيلية على مدخل مدرسة تؤوي .

( via / via )

Have You Forgotten?

"All things seem mantled in a sad unrest" --J Stanyan Bigg

"None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep."

myriad cascading
cataclysms follow
boost foreground to background
about this be fading

dropped explosives dribbling
adroit our erasure
plenty of plain murders
piling in the record

hurricane coolth hoicked us
howsomever elsewhere
burning knowledge knackered
with now this cerulean

Laketrail off my main route

Memento Mori.

( via / via )

Snowy nights ❄️.

spiral faring forms
finishing here when
a cloud leaves its load
lingering coolth pools
where the branch heaps hunch

high 'wildering still

"One imagines the hinges of the trunk creaking as he shuts it for the last time, motes of dust swirling in the weak November light, his fingers pale against the dark red wood, their motion momentarily arrested, paused in brief uncertainty, and then drawing the lid down, closing it for good."

"Indisputably, belladonna (as the deadly nightshade is called) has become our muse, our prima donna and madonna, and we live in a poetical nightshade sabbath." --Jean Paul Richter via

The White Dog.

( via / via )

Ivy grows on the sides of one of the many towers...

"He found one word, one only for the moon." --The Waves

Request Letter.

   the hawk-eyed stakeholder
   hovering thronged coven

   all the pallid pundits
   perch at dawn in search of

   next sneer in the story
   as neighbors park sharkfins

coughs catenate · in the growing dusk
   the cicadas barely sounding

Triolet.

( via / whatever )

"The book is named after the poet Naomi Lazard, whom Knott met in the early 1960s at a poetry workshop run out of the University of Chicago, taught by John Logan."

"How Goes the Night?

How goes the night?
Midnight has still to come.
Down in the court the torch is blazing bright;
I hear far off the throbbing of the drum.

How goes the night?
The night is not yet gone.
I hear the trumpets blowing on the height;
The torch is paling in the coming dawn.

How goes the night?
The night is past and done.
The torch is smoking in the morning light,
The dragon banner floating in the sun."

--Helen Waddell (translated from the Shi King, or Book of Odes) via Black Cat Poems

Seed for Sowing Should Not Be Milled.

"Light is only a shadow which has learned to write its name" --Bill Knott

Paying Attention.

( via / via )

"The oddity is not that there have been a few extraordinary war poems, but that war poems exist at all."

"On still nights a wall of water fell with a roar a mile off." --The Waves

GOO...EBRE...CARX...

"For example shimmer-aquariums
Which are emptied out into a syringe of barking darkrooms
Whose needle smacks its lips
Like the stifled screams of a juggler glancing at a map in which Copernicus is prying
   open a child's fist
Blue as the shape of a dune when it leaves your lips
Years spent wandering in front of a stab"

--Bill Knott, from Nights of Naomi

Hidden Numbers.

( me / via )

Lingering in Happiness.

the word 'jobs'
written in letters
of bright blood;
'policy'
written in screams of dying:
so tired of these words

In Defense of the Latent Space.

"Schürmann calls philosophers 'the professionals of legitimation' (negative connotation)" --@albernaj

"It is the same bombing..."

( bodies in gaza via / via )

XYLOPHOBIA.

"I have filled innumerable notebooks with the phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask: Are there stories?" --The Waves

Grabby-pocket.

only enough · of those nights with stars
to have learned small lore · of the open road
drizzle in the demiglow · dregs of Beryl
subject still · to the chains of the skyways
i roll restless · ruing each slowdown

Somewhere in Seoul.

( via / via )

The Reading Experiment.

slotted light
bug voices waning
my new book
out there flung
like a piece of the broken
house after bombing

Rug from Lahore.

"We have no ceremonies, only private dirges, and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate." --The Waves

Emotional Hell.

( via / via )

"It should be one of those nights when you were wise & singular..."

"Can anyone recommend some introductory shadows projected on the wall for someone new to being deceived about the ultimate nature of reality?" --@john_attridge

"It’s not necessarily for you quarrel with me when you find out that my resilience differs from yours. We both bought from the same shop."

"A pair of eyes

This creature is hidden · behind walls,
concealed in confines · clasped tightly shut,
or whisked away · in wheels and hutch.
A pair of eyes · inside steel slots,
peer into mine,· pupils brightened
black as onyx, · an unblinking stare.
I touch a tuft · of tangled fur,
long hairs flecked · with fleas and dirt,
a tail flicking · flies crawling
on scuffed hooves, · stone hardened.
I see such pale · nostrils flared,
smelling soured · piss on matted hair,
the grating wet · with waste and gore,
or poison methane · masking air.
Still, I discern · two docked ears
through tiny cracks · carved in the wall
and hear the moans, · muffled and dull,
the clang of cage,· the cold, hard metal
and two dark pupils · placed upon me."

--Cassidy McFadzean

Various attacked screens.

( via / via )

Boudoir Boogie.

the dread-bundled dragnet
adroit at quern-sunrise
two wisps & a wintry
whisper among roadblocks

crumbs on the cranch table
accrue bearing vowels
i glance out at glaucous
glories knived & hidden

this too will be gathered
thronging the dry spillways
a journey death-jostled
& only ant-storied

Wechselwirkungen.

"US has so spectacularly co-opted, bought, conscripted its writers into empire it has less need of the more dramatic punishments we might see in less 'democratic' nations." --@meadowasylum

"Beginning with a small plaque in Athens, Georgia, this ever-deepening undertaking now spans from the mountains of Nepal to the underwater reefs of Indonesia..."