“Maceta” she said
a place for flowers
chilled white wine
cafe nights, friends
stopped at our table.
Step by step walking
each other home
the stars not there
just the rain, the lluvia
the closed secret
of her name.
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Thanks to Gabriela Marie Milton, editor at MasticadoresUSA, for this publication:
* * * Click covers for links * * *
I haven’t seen you in 20 years
except in my mind’s eye
the hurricane center of the hot black night
when I slip to our trip to
Galveston. We drove all night,
knowing already it was the end,
and rode the ferry at daybreak,
the sound of the sea and the sad
cry of the gulls
scored upon us.
Then earlier, the southward journeys
past rice farms and shrimping towns
the thick humid patio nights
catching lizards
and laughing.
And earlier still, in the beginning
when we took LSD and lay
all night in a field of sugar cane
tasting the forbidden fruit
afraid
but liking it
* * * Click covers for links * * *
I too have seen the winter stream,
waves beating the swords
of ice, dreamed
of imperial jade, green and blue,
of topaz the color of honey.
Cold streams crumple
the ragged banks of dreary forest,
Above the stream the swells of snow,
Further still, the stars by time and distance frozen,
as far away as your language from mine,
as your solitude from mine.
Spring comes on apace.
The waves beat harder. The swords
of ice break like paper branches. We turn
inward, you and I, creatures of the winter, to seek
someone or something approaching,
cold comfort in translation, here,
the icy clarity of the mirror.
Meng Jiao (751–814) was a Chinese poet during the Tang Dynasty.
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Here are 3 versions of the haiku poem I posted last week. No need to read the original post. Just pick one of the 3 here 🙂
#1
a million falling
stars at once, filling the sky,
hands catch the hot ash
#2
a million falling
stars at once, filling the sky,
the ash they leave us
#3
what dreams may come
A million falling stars
at once, like angels they light
the sky against darkness, but some
thing is wrong. Unlike angels they burn.
Open your hands. You can already
feel, maybe taste,
the hot ash.
* * * Click covers for links * * *
a million falling
stars at once, filling the sky,
hands catch the hot ash
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Who needs gods or heaven or moral philosophies?
Your body at rest on the hammock is worth
more than all the imaginary heavens
of all the religions
ever invented
more than all the first principles
of all philosophies. All you
need to do is look at it
and see. If you listen
closely
you can hear the birds singing
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Dragons of the earth flashing
red and green and gold
once moved to the galaxies
above cry out, they rage
against fate and thrash
their tails in a glitter
of fiery stars.
Sirens of the ocean weaving
seaspawn and seawrack
removed to the same
night sky, they rage
against time and weep
for their watery home
in teardrop stars.
And we, what have we to do
with dragons, with sirens, we
who see only the stars, only
beauty, we who’ve lost the exquisite
pain of those elemental beings?
We have nothing to do but
await the next wound, await
being ripped aloft from the earth,
soothed for now in soft forgetfulness,
in the bare beauty of the night sky,
where sirens silently weep the more
because they cannot
weep for us.
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Also on Amazon at linked covers below.
Review of Robert Okaji’s chapbook of poems, I Have a Bird to Whistle (Luminous Press, 2019, 27 pages), by Gary Gautier
Beautifully crafted, each poem is an uneasy marriage of image and concept, of fullness and emptiness. Each is suggestive without yielding a fixed meaning. Meaning, like the sense-rich images, follows geometric curves through space to the vanishing point. The logic moving through each poem is like an extended haiku concatenation, jumping from one discrete image or cluster to another sometimes unrelated one. So far, so good. But the discontinuity, suggestive as it is, is sometimes too much, and I wish Okaji had given us a more stable throughline to hang onto as we move across the flow of language. When I set these prose-poem paragraphs against Okaji’s pre-existing work (see his blog here), for my taste he flourishes better with the more traditional poetic line structure. Still, those who revel in the sheer beauty of poetic language, in the compression of image and concept, in this case coming in bite-sized, one-paragraph chunks, will be pleased with this short collection.
x x x
(Click images for links)
