Get Out Get Out
Can you feel your confidence match the billowing crowd? You even feel cocky, believing you've earned the admiration of a few. It is, in fact, what it appears to be: a voice fastened to paper very carefully, a cry cut from its mouth. But then, you think, who is that you're talking to? There's no one here, just paper and ink and you. What is this pathetic game? Get out. Go find a friend.
Apr 14, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Craig Morgan Teicher
Morning on the Island Morning on the Island
The lights across the water are the waking city. The water shimmers with imaginary fish. Not far from here lie the bones of conifers washed from the sea and piled by wind. Some mornings I walk upon them, bone to bone, as far as the lighthouse. A strange beetle has eaten most of the trees. It may have come here on the ships playing music in the harbor, or it was always here, a winged jewel, but in the past was kept still by the cold of a winter that no longer comes. There is an owl living in the firs behind us but he is white, meant to be mistaken for snow burdening a bough. They say he is the only owl remaining. I hear him at night listening for the last of the mice and asking who of no other owl.
Apr 5, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Carolyn Forché
A = A A = A
Mine to ask a mask to say, A is not A. No one, ever the contrarian, to answer. The moon is both divided & multiplied by water: as chance, as the plural of chant. O diver, to be sea-surrounded by a thought bled white-- a blankness as likely as blackness. What is the word for getting words & forgetting? Might night right sight? I, too late to relate I & I, trap light in sound & sing no thing that breath can bring.
Apr 5, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Andrew Joron
Set Apart Set Apart
Set apart from the compound friction of forest, a rough-barked bur oak, mostly trunk, outlives its understory. A sapling in 1700, it rose like smoke from leaf litter, a totem for those who told tales vertically, every episode the offspring of earth and sky. Carotenoids flare through its vascular system in slow time, releasing aromas of black tea and tobacco. Winter-hardened, the oak endures, a column supporting nothing but its own fixed extension. The fine point of a feeding warbler-- a drifting spark or cursor-- ghosts its crown.
Feb 17, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Devin Johnston
The Smallest The Smallest
It is in front of the tree. The houses around the windows are lit by it, it turns off and goes upon knees and wherever the bone is almost next to the skin. It has been defamed. It will become undernourished. It is not without end. It is not. It is not what you can let happen, or cause to happen, or has anything at all to do with happening. It happens as it exists without effect. It is the pure in pure mathematics. It is the sully in unsullied rain. It is the pain in painfully. It is also the fully. It is the light in highlight and headlight, the head in headland, the towering in towers, trees, the outstretched in shadows of mountains on plains and lakes. It is not the water in the lake, however, it is not cupped. If it exists, it is unaware of it. It could name itself however, and does. It contains alphabets. It is infinite and therefore the smallest thing.
Feb 3, 2010 / Books & the Arts / James Schuyler
(Untitled) (Untitled)
night promises to be long there we'll remain alone or maybe there we'll never be lonely artists of the impossible we hardly belong to ourselves our shadows weave the illusion of our dreams and feed with slow movements they shriek across an instant night's envelope is torn they go mad and search about in their blazing heart they need to hear once more silence's echo turned to stone (Translated from the French by Peter Thompson)
Jan 20, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Amina Saïd
Nocturnal Crossing Nocturnal Crossing
Audacity it is you who will console us least right here the animal alloy of muscle and voice in the rainy detonation of the day under the plus sign overflown by a squadron of petrels Thanks to the farmers who regale me with hatred painted on their faces days perch solely on the shoulders of women more than asleep Storm or rain the beaks that put me back between the hands of the scream will guide them laudably Covered with fresh encephalon I rise already even faster silence like the bull under the maul it is a kiss deriving lips from our clogprints (Translated from the French by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman)
Jan 6, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Aimé Césaire
Untitled Untitled
We all die alone however we can, as for me I'll coil in a volcano's swooning crater or dilute myself in the path's refrains And if my heart stays till trail's end I don't see why my blood can't join the flood beneath this ark, snatching from the deluge of my human pasts, from the face each agony showed me, the cross or port's beacon we sailed from (we sought a belly in common to save us from the mass grave!) Make it so blood swamps me --better blood than brushfire! Everywhere the doe flash fire already in their eyes; these deer, they have the knack of dying lewd. (Translated from the French by Peter Thompson)
Dec 22, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Tchicaya u Tam’si