Photopoetryblog: Response to Tragedy: My daughter is 7

Poem: "My Daughter is 7" by me

Photo: "Home on Sunday" by me

 

"My Daughter is 7"

 

My daughter is 7. She likes to twirl in her dress,

                                                to laugh when I laugh,

                                                   to cry when she's hurt,

                                                      to sleep when she's tired,

                                                         to ask questions I can't answer.

My daughter is 7.

 

"Home on Sunday"

Photoblog: Running Through Flood Irrigation

"Running Through Flood Irrigation" by me

Photoblog: Falling Asleep Series*

"Chiaroscuro"

"The Rabbit Hole"

"Falling Asleep"

"'And She Was..'"

"Descending"

"Rest"

"Quiet"

*Thank you wife for not being upset that I took pictures of your sleep.

Photoblog: Indie Album Cover*

"Indie" by me

*For some reason this close-up picture of moss with the sunset backdrop makes me think of Indie music. 

Photoblog: Portrait of Time

"Portrait of Time" by me

Photoblog: Dualism

"Dualism" by me

Photopoetryblog: "Vertigo" and "The Visible World"

Photo: "Vertigo" by me

Poem: "The Visible World" by Jorie Graham

 

"Vertigo"

 

"The Visible World"* by Jorie Graham

 

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface
                                                   breaks
into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances. . .
Frames of reference moving . . .
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged
                                                 and rippling
mosses. What heat is this in me
that would thaw time, making bits of instance
                                                    overlap
shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through
                                                          this culture
slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,
                                                      opportunities
taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I
                                         break it apart without
crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled
                                                            airy loambits,
and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot
                                                           in . . .
Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.
Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now
                                            as on this patch
of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out
                                                              of
sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what
                                                       would it
take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will
                                                         insist on
making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this
                                                           shovelful
and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single
                                                     clots
in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un-
                                                  hinge it
from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can
                                               eventually
abstract it. Do you wish to?
Disentangled, it grows very very clear.
Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay
hardens and then yields, crumbs.
I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed
                                         hallucination,
mating, forgetting, speckling, inter-
                                  locking,
will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous
                                                             veil of
echoes and muddy nostalgias will
be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me
                                                           how large I
am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press
                                                           their slowest
electricity. . . . What speed is it at?
What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now
                                                                and just begins
to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the
                                                               dark oaks,
are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for
                                                                       a moment
on them alone in the small wood.
White hands in the black-green glade,
opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots
                                                                    of the moss
apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white
                                           in these greens—
make your revolution in the invisible temple,
make your temple in the invisible
revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming
                                               for this instant longer
like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall
                              whispering oaks . . .
Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse
                                                 has not four
legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence
because there is no time”—and since
at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands
serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated
                                                          fates
—mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds—
my hands are living in myriad manifestations
                                            of light. . . .
“All forms of imitation are to be despised.”
“All subjects previously used must be discarded.”
“At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . .
Oh enslavement, will you take these hands
                              and hold them in
for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny
                                                       golden hands
pushed, up to the wrists,
into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light
                                                       and airy star—
I put the seed in. The beam moves on.

*poem courtesy of The Poetry Foundation (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/242176)

Photoblog: Last Day of April

"Stack"

Photopoetryblog: Innocence

Poem: "Innocence" by me
Photo: "Innocence" by me


"Innocence"

Through many colors of that eighth year, 
before wonder struggles against regret, 
she begins by stepping away from the 
innocence she has stored away like
life does with first days and birthdays.

Passing through another veil, she'll lay
her days one after the other, writing them
in the faces of those she scars and heals.
But when will she claim that she knew  
all along that the fruit was bittersweet? 

For a new life as a new creature, the
ghosts of childhood will carry her under 
water and cling to her wet, white slip;
a fire will sear her lives together and make
them whole: a new life, a new creature.

Yet, not yet. Now she can hold a vigil,
not to push tomorrow away but to keep
today awake, bright with Orion's belt and
picture books and Mother's braids, before
she sleepwalks her last year of innocence.

"Innocence"

(Happy 7th b-day Lil')

Photoblog: Suspended

"Suspended" by me

Photopoetryblog: Day of Poetry

March 21 is UNESCO World Poetry Day and this entry is in honor of this day.


Poem: "Radar en la tormenta" by Alfredo Veirave (an Argentinean poet that I am writing about in my dissertation)
Photo: "Break in the Storm" by me



Radar en la tormenta


Y alguna vez, no siempre, guiado por el radar
el poema aterriza en la pista, a ciegas,
(entre relámpagos)
carretea bajo la lluvia, y al detener sus turbinas,
descienden
de él, pasajeros aliviados de la muerte: las palabras.

"Break in the Storm"

Radar in the storm (my poor translation)

And at times, not always, guided by radar
the poem lands on the runway, blindly,
(in the midst of lightning)
taxis in the rain, and when the turbines stop,
from it emerge
passengers relieved from death: the words.

Photoblog: "The Great Bend in the Susquehanna"

"The Great Bend in the Susquehanna"

Photopoetryblog: Wings

Photo: "Angel of Air and Water" by Me

Poem: "Men Say they Know Many Things" by Henry David Thoreau

"Angel of Air and Water"

"Men Say They Know Many Things" by Henry David Thoreau

Men say they know many things;

But lo! they have taken wings, -

The arts and sciences.

And a thousand appliances;

The wind that blows 

Is all that any body knows

Photopoetryblog: My Ismaelillo

"My Ismaelillo" (poem and photo by me)

Muses like to hang upside-down.
Head under feet, they kick at the
moon.

Their happiness arches
over the world they gather in.
Each blossom is an
incandescent idea:
manna from
heaven.

My muse, my Ismaelillo,
doesn't scatter my papers
like capricious Spring,
he speaks with a voice of
dust.

He embraces the garden's
spine, he breaths the living sap
brought down by the setting
sun.

He speaks down to me:
"You are the son of your son
We are all but cut grass.
We fodder the eternal wheel.
Our paths are burning
stars."

I don't understand him.
His words wrap me inside-out like
the lightning-struck birch.
I stare at his burnt
soles.

My Ismaelillo sighs,
his heart floods his head.
He points to the southern
cross.