Disarming

Disarming

The cactus looks especially prickly
which makes me want to touch it
more. The terra cotta pot looks just
like the terra cotta crayon I remember,
or maybe burnt sienna. When I see
the tiny spider lowering onto the table,
I hold a cup out, and the spider drops in,
cooperates. There cannot possibly
be more clean forks, I think, but when
I open the drawer, there are four, the
tray is full of clean utensils. The drawer
opens and closes, I am playing the
violin in my kitchen. I don’t check
the bus times, and I don’t rush,
and I see it a few blocks away when
I reach the stop. A twelve-year-old
boy glows when the teenaged girl
sits next to him on the bus, he reaches
to help her with her stroller, stares
adoringly into the sleeping baby’s face.
Aww, what’s her name? She’s just
so cute! The girl’s irritation melts
from her features, a wave flattening
into glittering ocean. Fantasy, she says.

It Matters to Me

It Matters to Me

What did the ice cube say
to the kitchen counter.
Let me slip into something
more comfortable.
We solids have it hardest,
don’t we, all crammed
up inside ourselves, content
and container. Where
does ice go once it becomes
water. Where does
the puddle go once it lifts
from itself, like smoke
leaving the flame. One day,
it will rain, and you
will wave, say, hello, puddle,
why, hello, ice cube,
I barely recognized you there.
And when the flood
you’ve come to love dries up,
you can think of it as
a piñata in rewind, butterscotch
discs and chocolate-
flavored chews and wax-papered
bubble gum retreating,
a startled flock, sucked up from
the floor back into
the sealed belly of the donkey.

Spitting Image

Spitting Image

The mountain with a mouth
spitting out an upside-down
mountain of ash into the air.

The tree reaching for light,
and the branchy roots
snuggling into dark dirt.

You in your bed, sleeping,
that dim reflection of you
floating overhead, facing down.

Woodman

Woodman

I was staring at the dead white ash,
at the two holes in the bark, like two
framed pictures had been hanging there,
then removed, then the nails ripped out.
White X’s painted on hundreds
of ash trees that summer, and more
next year, we knew already, as the babies
grew into beetles, green, the same
oily iridescence as a fly. Damn
Emerald Ash Borers, we said to folks
who asked, but secretly, I knew we felt
grateful for that work. Like I said,
I chose a tree to start with, lifted the ax,
noticed the holes. That’s when the ash
handle started shaking, sliding out
from between my hands as I tried
to trap it. I hollered but the men
were too far to hear me, only a few
of us, anyway. The ax floated, inches
above my hands, rotating, trembling.
No voice in my throat now, nothing
to say with it. Above us, me and the ax,
a woodpecker lit into one of these
trees. Quiet besides that. There goes
the handle, it spun away from me,
like a wide open door swings shut
when pushed. The blade was facing
me, looking back at me. I knew
it would strike. I backed up, still
looking at it, still holding my arms
out to it but my palms up. Woodpecker
again. And the blade lunging past
my cheek, into my left shoulder.

On Creativity (featuring Dick Jones)

I got to know poet and musician Dick Jones (who lives outside of London) through his blog, Patteran Pages, and admired his thoughtful, elegant poems. I’ve always enjoyed his readings of poems (and was honored when he read one of mine for Whale Sound).

I find his work to be extraordinarily sensitive and full of surprising details (because we carry who we are into our art!). He has a great voice, and I’m happy to share a couple of audio files of him reading his work with you here. I’m also very excited that Dick’s first collection of poems, Ancient Lights, is now available (from Phoenicia Publishing), and it is a beauty. Note: text of "In The Daubigny Chapel" appears after the interview.

Q: Many of your poems in Ancient Lights are concerned with time and memory. How do you use memory as a muse? When you revisit a memory in a poem, what does it feel like to you?

A: I never seek out memory consciously as some kind of goad to inspiration. I can only write in response to some jolt from without or within and long periods may pass between such events. Then a small linkage of words or a complete line will simply appear, often enough in the midst of a sequence of either focused or disconnected thinking. Many poems begin when I’m driving on my own. The pairing of concentrated attention behind the wheel and the freewheeling bundles of randomised thought-bursts stimulated by music that might be playing or by the passing scene seems to provide particularly fertile conditions for the start of a poem. It’s within this kind of creative context that memory might interpose itself at some point. So there’s no conscious attempt to site an emergent poem in some recollection of the past: if it’s going to happen it will simply happen. But when it does the greater likelihood is that a first draft of the poem will be completed swiftly and its emergence will carry with it an immediate and commanding emotional charge.