November 5, 2009
The Hooch family is large and poor.
I have seen the moon make an opaque ghost of the backyard, and I have seen the Hooch animals roam out into it, smelling the life of themselves. They enter the border of visibility and pass through it into the uncanny. . .
. . . From the back of the house, looking over the fishing boat and past it to the wide, brittle leaves at the crown of the unhealthy magnolia, there comes Mrs. Hooch with her Pall Malls, a blotched woman in a bravely colored wrap, her legs lean and veiny. She arrives out of breath. She sits in the flaking chair.
“What are you looking at, Doc?” she says.
“Everything in your back yard looks hungry,” says I. “There’s a bird that looks like he doesn’t know what to do.”
“It’s all we got.”
Looking out at the unhappy foliage.
“Ever since I wasn’t a virgin no more, things have slid down,” she says.
“There must have been love or something,” I say.
“Sure, but it was all downward.”
Barry Hannah’s Ray. It’s like listening to a long great jazz song, or studying someone you have loved and cursed and loved and being able to read the emotions instead of sense them, as if they were written in plain words in short passages that because of the content exceed the normal boundaries of words.
October 30, 2009
I’ve seen you in the teeming, concupiscent
streets, I married you, at dusk I followed you
into bars; every time I found you
I recognized you as someone seen before.
I could not choose not to respond to desire.
Only you understand.
Old now, I admit to you
I’ve been content for hours watching deer
play out their nimble, nervous lives.
I’ve considered flowers and without sadness
watched them drop their yellow leaves.
Yes. Right. If you are lucky at the right time and in the right place when you are unlucky. We have deer in our yard every morning, every night. The poem goes on for 15 more lines, three stanzas, then picks up to end:
We’ll be sitting side by side,
noontime, in a park.
We’ll not be able to see the sun
due to the excess of light.
I’ll raise my hand to your face
and you’ll tilt your cheek my way,
and I’ll move that lock of hair, now gray,
to where I’ve always liked it to be.
Stephen Dunn. Different Hours.
October 24, 2009
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard.
I also finally read read Matthew’s All-American Poem.
October 13, 2009
He’s dead
the dog won’t have to
sleep on his potatoes
any more to keep them
from freezing . . .
Love’s beaten. He
beat it. That’s why
he’s insufferable—
because
he’s here needing a
shave and making love
an inside howl
of anguish and defeat—
He’s come out of the man
and he’s let
the man go
Got onto a real WC Williams kick after pulling one out for Natalie’s lunch poems a few weeks back. I like the humor, the resignation, the freshness, the various ways of looking at death in this one. Most of all I like “he’s come out of the man.” It reminds me of what I tell Natalie about the difference between souls and bodies.
October 8, 2009
Something very much like nothing anyone had seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.
“What is that?” the Duke asked, palely.
“I don’t know what it is,” said Hark, “but it’s the only one there ever was.”
Magnificence from James Thurber. The 13 Clocks. I guess it’s a story for kids, but, I mean, goddamn, just start taking apart those sentences. How can they be so simple?
October 3, 2009
the old man who goes about
gathering dog-lime
walks in the gutter
without looking up
and his tread
is more majestic than
that of the Episcopal minister
approaching the pulpit
of a Sunday.
These things
astonish me beyond words.
W. C. wrote another poem titled “Pastoral,” another riff on the same idea, from a direction skewed and keyed just off the other, just as good, I think.
