something

I approach with such
a careful tremor, always
I feel the finally foolish

question of how it is,
then, supposed to be felt,
and by whom. I remember

once in a rented room on
27th street, the woman I loved
then, literally, after we

had made love on the large
bed sitting across from
a basin with two faucets, she

had to pee but was nervous,
embarrassed I suppose I
would watch her who had but

a moment ago been completely
open to me, naked, on
the same bed. Squatting, her

head reflected in the mirror,
the hair dark there, the
full of her face, the shoulders,

sat spread-legged, turned on
one faucet and shyly pissed. What
love might learn from such a sight.

Robert Creeley


Photo by Lina Scheynius via Feaverish Photography

a little nurturing

This was a difficult week complete with a very sick child, work deadlines, and slate gray weather. It's time to start the weekend with a little art. Here is a wonderful video of the French artist Nathalie Lete painting in a shop in Tokyo. Keep swinging, I'll be reading your poetry.

les animales

They say we shouldn't look for analogies in nature, but who can blame me if animals parade nightly through my dreams ? All of the strangeness and vulnerabilities of my daylight hours are transformed into rabbits, deer, and dogs.

When I am challenged the bears appear. I would like to say that they come as mystical bear-brothers, but they chase me and gnash their teeth. Sometimes I am able to befriend them, but it takes a great deal of courage.

These seem like rather childish dreams to me, but they refuse to be tamed. I wonder if animals dream of us?

Images found here and here

RWP: Six Word Poem Challenge

Flowers bloom. Milky Way is silent.

-Spring Night in the Left Office, Read Write Poem Six Word Poetry Challenge

Image found here

At first you are afraid...

“Hurricanes, earthquakes and drought, nothing spares us,” says a character in Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet. The book has an introduction by Edwidge Danticat. I've found myself thinking of these two writers quite a bit over these past few days as I hear the tragic headlines from Haiti. Years ago I listened to Danticat read from her novel The Farming of Bones in a crowded downtown bookstore. I was there with a French speaking friend, Karen, who had spent quite a bit of time volunteering in Haiti. We were joined by a group of Karen's friends who had recently come to this country from Haiti as well.

Parts of The Farming of Bones are hard to read. The descriptions from the book combined with the press of the crowd made me feel like I was going to pass out. Yet after the reading it made my heart swell to watch the crowd greet Danticat and compliment her work. My friends were delighted to surprise her by speaking creole, something you don't expect to find here in the Pacific Northwest. I remember that evening how impressed I was by the depth and strength of the Haitian people I had met. It made me think of one central characters in the Bones, Annabelle, who says, "“At first you are afraid to step behind the waterfall as the water in all its strength pounds down on your shoulders. Still you tiptoe into the cave…” Though she is afraid, still she goes on even with the risk of death close by her side.

Photo of Edwidge Danticat found here

Der Struwwelpeter

This morning I found Tadzio in his room trying to wedge a key into the electrical socket. Observing him, I reflected on how I used to do the same thing as a child, and how scary and exciting the electrical shock feels when it runs up your fingers. I hastily interrupted his work and we had a long talk about how nous ne jouons pas avec l'électricité! In the end we hugged and he agreed not to play with the electrical socket, and asked if it was okay if he jammed the key into the phone outlet instead?

All of this made me think of Der Struwwelpeter, the famous book by the German psychologist Heinrich Hoffman. Various people have written about this book over the years and in 2006 it was reinterpreted and illustrated as Struwwelpeter and Other Disturbing Tales for Human Beings. Nothing is quite as terrorizing as the original stories, however, where mischievous actions have disastrous consequences.

The title story, Struwwelpeter, describes a boy who does not groom himself properly and is consequently unpopular. In "The Very Sad Story of the Matches" a girl plays with matches and burns to death. In "The Story of Thumb-Sucker", a mother warns her son not to suck his thumbs. However, when she goes out of the house he resumes his thumb sucking, until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors. The Story of Soup-Kaspar begins as Kaspar, a healthy, strong boy, proclaims that he will no longer eat his soup. Over the next five days he wastes away and dies.

My own personal favorite is "The Story of Flying Robert." In the story, a boy goes outside during a storm. The wind catches his umbrella and sends him to places unknown, and presumably to his doom.

I'm not sure how Tadzio would feel about this book. He tends to be a worrier, like his parents.

the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice

I’m not expecting to hear her speak, stopped as I am
at a red light in Stoughton, Wisconsin, on the daily, desperate
dash home from work, my fractured spine throbbing
as if it housed my heart not my nerves, this snippet
on NPR as unexpected as recent November warm weather.
But here she is, sounding husky and a bit tired, her plummy
accent drawn out as she speaks about words, English
words…full of echoes and memories, associations
she does not name. It’s still 1937 in her mouth
and later I’ll learn that she’s not really talking at all,
but reading a talk called “Craftsmanship” on the BBC’s
program Words Fail Me, the script held up before her,
like a tablet of light in her long, white hands. Or a window
the sound of her voice opens in my head, her deliberate
phrasing a kind of eulogy to words and the way
They’ve been out and about on people’s lips, in houses,
on the streets for so many centuries, time passing in the hiss
and skritch of the tape. As I imagine her in the studio,
a bit tense perhaps, her hair in that dark knot, dressed up,
though no one will see her, though years later her nephew
will describe the recording as too fast, too flat, barely
recognizable, her beautiful voice (though not so beautiful
as Vanessa’s, he’ll add) deprived of all resonance and depth.
But I don’t know this as I listen, nothing to compare her to
but the sound her words made in my American head, as I lay
on my narrow dorm bed in my first November in college,
underlining phrase after phrase from To the Lighthouse
in turquoise or fuchsia ink, not because I understood
what they meant but because they sounded beautiful
aloud and my teacher had her photograph up in her office.
After my mother died, the first thing I forgot was the sound
of her voice, nothing to preserve it but a moment or two
on tape where she speaks in the background, saying
“Not now, not now,” as if no time would ever be right, even
that scrap vanished somewhere in the past. Though I recall it
as I listen to Virginia Woolf, her voice—which is nothing
like my mother’s, which my Woolf-scholar friend tells me
she “needs some time to get used to”—drifting on for eight
entire minutes, a kind of dream one could fall into, as words
stored with other meaning, other memories spill like smoke
from her throat and the light changes, and I drive on
through the gathering darkness, thinking about voices
and where they go when we die, how to describe pain
then leave it behind, her lamp in the spine
glowing, briefly lighting my way.

– Alison Townsend
from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
Pushcart Prize Nominee

Image via We Heart It

On a cold winter's afternoon Hedda discovers that hum bao are basically Chinese hamburgers

January rain
Hedda looks down at her boots
She is pulled into the market
By the warmth and the colors
and the black and white characters
She cannot read
She buys two bao
and waits out the downpour.

-Resolution Poem Number One by Spring Night in the Left Office

the door ajar, expecting a sound

a furry sound
As a cuckoo rising from fire
As your arrival scented with leaves

I do not know how waves connect to childhood
Yet when evening falls, I always hear
You stoop inside me, washing your hands
In ready tranquility

Perhaps an earring can be a small sunny day
Perhaps autumn's accordion trembles like a stream

Strolling at dusk, breaking dew and butterflies
I hear grass tickle doorsteps, as sweet a sound
As your arrival
Scented with leaves

Water's effort to remain calm pains me most
And even the blossoming pear tree grates me
I fear the shape of the wind, as leaves
Hold their breath near the fruit's skin
And three roses bow to me in profusion

This is when I know
I am ajar
Between the anticipation of the ring and latch
In a lonely sort of joy

As the swing in the woods, and outside the window
The snowy evening

-Snowy Evening by Zheng Danyi

Image via Avignon in Photos

off

When I’m awake,
there are times I
feel I don’t have
anything to say
I’ll take a walk so I can go take a look.
I’ve seen it, I have,
And so I went walking. Wondering
if something will occur to me, to my
heart

-"Off" by Yosuke Tanaka
Translation by Jeffrey Angles

Photo by Jordi Gaul

a day when the mountains are visible

Being nice to people—what was that again? People who aren’t used to being nice just act worn out. People who aren’t used to being treated kindly just keep on living their cold lives. In any case, it doesn’t do any good to complain about that.

The fact that the sky is clear doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to see the mountains out there in Okutama, but it’s impossible to see them if it isn’t. When was it I realized you can see the Okutama Mountains on the horizon from the hills of Suginami? Thinking the small outlines of those lovely mountains are probably visible right now, I lean out the window and find I can see the khaki-colored mountains clearly. They’re even bigger than I had remembered.

On days when your heart is clear, it’s fun to be nice to people. When you can’t be nice, you probably won’t have much fun either. Most likely, you’ll spend the day alone, gloomy and cheerless. Just look at all that frustration offered under the guise of high literature. Still, there must be something on the other side of that mountain. It’s hard to always be gentle, and that’s why, for instance, the temples in those mountains have been so important for so long. That’s why.

It’s hard to be nice to people you work with. Selflessness isn’t a virtue to them, and if you run off to paradise, you’d be distancing yourself from your work. Even so, one can’t indulge the serpent of the ego when it slithers out from the boundaries of charisma. There’s something wrong with it—that serpent of the ego, which lives by consuming distorted, dark energy . . .

I needed the proper grandness of nature so as not to get tangled up in the twisted, unreasonable serpent. I needed the quiet, gentle power of nature so that I not bow my head as the cruel, double-headed serpent stuck its head from under the invisible table and flicked its tongue.

How wonderful it must be to live without feeling animosity toward people. The bus is driving down the tree-lined street toward me, while the mountains are visible in the distance.

"A Day When the Mountains Are Visible" by Yosuke Tanaka
Translation by Jeffrey Angles
Image by Jordi Gaul