Walking Stick Walking Stick
We didn’t protest. It’s not like you’re going to get anything from anybody. They don’t have it either. And the new system moved pretty quick— I had found a feral walking stick stripped from a tree by a new June shower nursing trumpets of crumbled lilac & held her scarlet eye on the outpatient pharmacy line— If the breadth of the difficulty rejects one ardent name I may still call the hour a phasmid or phantom freely stealing my heart from the other needs that burn it.
Jul 2, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Joel Felix
Mugwump Mugwump
O beggar, bigwig, mugwump —W.H. Auden If you got to look it up, don’t use it. A pity since we’ve all known one, guy checking time cards, signing requisitions, woman working her way center stage of my worries. Every decision she weighs, I’m on the balance, the bigwig. Turns out, as from the mess of history because the Algonquians had no clue about Imperator and Centurion and seeing no way to excise dominion and ranks from the account, giving Caesar what’s Caesar’s so to speak, and Antiochus the Seleucid’s also, John Eliot, to let his catechumens into the kindling of the lord, his Praying Indians in Natick, Ponkapoag, Lowell, rendered the smug of sovereign, war-lord, arrayer in a single Wampanoag word, come down as Mugwump, dated but still chiefly American in its broad-brush picture of the nothings who oversaw our stints at register or sink, or the guy tightening the dirndl strap on barmaid or mid-level manager and CEO too. They’re fine, I figure, with our menial seasons, the bosses seeing us cross over—shrugs of resignation—v from knuckle down to knuckle under and since acquaintance with the eternal requires no minutiae, lives by mass or matins, Mugwump serves their kind right.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sebastian Agudelo
Therianthrope Therianthrope
As with the exuviae burring to the bark minotaur had to have a live animal as source and hunger, the moil that attends a kill and props beast near night start, lets it squat in dream to mix and match till monster mitigates unease. Enter King, husband, father ready to co-opt, adopt, foster. He’ll dream a decoy, strap it to the wife, awe with labyrinth and cash-in on mooncalf, exacter, changeling, the horror, the first puppet of the state.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sebastian Agudelo
In Shape In Shape
Here are the old folks anchored by old wisdom to the ground, or by old wisdom swiveling on one foot and deliberately tracing a camber in the horizon, karate chop by karate chop. So many meticulous minutes into this, if no castles in the air, they’ve outlined that curvilinear ebb and flow in one of Gehry’s pipe dreams: receding chambers, curls, soft arches cantilevers, like canvases unfolding to wind. The dog stops dead on its tracks, sits and gives a slant look that’s all dog candor and nosiness. The embarrassed owner pulls. The cellophane-wrapped jogger turns also. Pure formalists, they are, the old folks, focusing on the movement of an ostensible form, a structure, something wrought within and needing outing though it’s nothing like art, just fending off stuff inside, cancers, heart attacks in the slow-mo, real moves of fight and war.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sebastian Agudelo
Antiquity Too Antiquity Too
—after Goethe Antiquity too had arms, legs, loins, and while its shadows thrashed on stone it would one day be, fucked, flicker-lit, like you, like me.
May 6, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Christian Wiman
Money / Talks Money / Talks
O that common verb. Dress me in spatulas put the moon around my neck. Parting air the poet waves a hand, too much lace and I wonder if the trolley’s real, a giant upside-down flying spoon. God and hair I knew you in the Mechanical Age. Now I am someone who gets off and on trains with dads and bags everyday. Look, it’s 4:43 in the afternoon people go home. My mother wore Obsession in the eighties. I smell fire which has no hands, did you hear me? I have no horses now. Someone did not make your sweater, someone didn’t make it who loves you.
Apr 22, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Amanda Nadelberg
The County Seat of Presidio County The County Seat of Presidio County
One thinks of boats this far from water then goes back to just so crushing into sculpture the rear and forward quarter panels of three cars pasteled for half a century by the Big Bend sun, by the windy grit, tarantula spit, and even piercing starlight for that singular space in the mind of art: an abandoned barracks in afternoon’s half-shadow. Even in winter, it’s a long way for the glare to chariot his old welder across the sky. Boyd Elder sweeps the wasps from Prada Marfa a good twenty miles from Marfa proper. Someone else hates that someone by accident swept the Russian schoolhouse everyone loves to hate. A colossal horseshoe crucified with a ridiculous man-sized nail against the sky casts the shadow of a sickle and hammer. Yuccas lean for decades, and the rust on all maybe-likes the sun. After a downpour flees east to Alpine, it’s best to shake your head at the green that nearly tries. It didn’t rain last year, and it won’t rain this year, says the mayor to the hung-over travelers who could be artists, and one of them writes this in a notebook to an angel he saw late last night down the long Judd-red counter of the convenience store, her entire right shoulder’s agave-blue agave tattoo lit by the cash register candy bar light. She bought cigarettes as they locked the doors. Who could know she would come all this way with her soft bangs, her confident nostrils, and that utterly touchable old white sweater? He hopes deeply she might run him over with the land yacht of her prevailing aesthetic.
Apr 12, 2014 / Books & the Arts / John Poch
Mule Mule
The quiet country midnight got quieter. You said, “I hear snow,” and turned on the porch light. Carrot: pillow fight of light out the window. Winters passed. I brought you presents. I kept remembering your magic, hearing the deeper silence. Then one spring you sent everything back. Stick.
Apr 2, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Christina Robb
I, Diet I, Diet
out of this world & out of time & out of love & out of mind & out of the pan & out of butter, out of anger & out of mother, out of the cradle & out of pocket, out of space & out of cash & out of change & out of sight & out of range & force of habit & out of oil & out of whack & out of water & Damascus, out of courtesy & out of shock & out of duty & out of turn & out of tune & out of line & out of the ground & out of his gourd & out of all the possible solutions, out of the ashes & conviction
Mar 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Anna Maria Hong
Autumn Journal Autumn Journal
Gingerly the moon moves near the hilltop church and slides around the transept, slow, to peer inside the cloister. No: those are not friars there, but children… outside their nests. She rests against a brim of wind. Their wings are hurt… But lying in ordered rows of narrow beds they’re all asleep, as if they’re tired. Tired from flying, at least in dreams, and so in dreams their mothers hold them close against warm skin. The moon, she listens in. She doesn’t want to wake them, she only wants to see. And then she leaves, but rises high. She needs to make the hilltops gleam, and drape a sheen across the sea, but too she sends a beam back down to where the children sleep. And up she climbs, up through the sky, the high good sky, and searches far and wide to find the stars. Where are the stars? She scans the sky. Where can they be? She wants to tell the faultless virgin stars what she has seen. (translated from the Italian by Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston)
Feb 11, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Giovanni Pascoli