Friday Song: "Winter Song #1" by Chris Garneau

A song I've been poemin' to lately. It's so haunting, don't you think?

Here’s the Thing

Here’s the Thing

You keep bringing places with you

Clover and brick and icicles
tinker toys and glass bottles clinging to your robe’s hem
waterlogged and heavy

This isn’t a problem
that will maul you

This is an issue
of saturation

You can’t hold anything new
if all your limbs are full   

About That Wandering

About That Wandering

It will take you
by which I mean you
will take you

to rocks that you will adore
and have to leave
all within an afternoon

Sure you might return
but this place cannot stay as it is

Three Carat Rock Salt

Three Carat Rock Salt

Salt is the residue cast aside
as the ocean remembers
remembering

dagger rocks softening
under the water’s worry

sand satisfied by even
one life disturbance

What has been made from water
will again ask for water

Kite Story

Kite Story

You and I take a kite out
of the box

creases and all we dangle it in front of the wind
like a string before a cat

to say
take it take it

When it flies we forget about the wind
and it feels good

All afternoon we wave down at the land from up
in the sky

Friday Song: S. Carey's "Neverending Fountain"

Here's something lovely to listen to, courtesy of S. Carey.

Happy Friday, everyone...hope you're staying warm, wherever you are!

Equuleus

Equuleus

I have been the horse and the erased horse
and the horse that was never there to begin with
and the horizon which is our name for that which we can
never get close to

And of these what felt most gratifying was
when I was the blue evening
and the light-wreaths the street lamps put into the branches

because you could rest
knowing you were less alone

Fine Balance

Fine Balance

This is the land and these are its people
This is the land and here are its pockmarks and divots
These are the people and here are the homes they have made
Here are the homes nestled into spots between where the land is and isn’t
This is the gone away son
This is the returned home son
These are the never left sons and their songs of the land
This is the owner of that old truck
so old that the land looks at it as a pet insect
This is the mud drying as it tries to become more like the light but fails
This is the light never trying ever to be anything
These are the original trees that the planet was formed around
These are the praying rocks
This is the dust that the people brush from their bodies
Here is the aging town becoming new every twenty-five or thirty years
These are the people and here are the children they give to this place
This is the story of where your body came from and this is not
the only story This is one in the pile One in the millions of piles

Under the Hood

Under the Hood

I make the bed
while lying in it

This is another way of saying

that a problem can be muscled through
most effectively from the inside

of the hamster ball

When the piano can no longer hear
its own voice catch the slipped pitch

in the roof of its mouth

Window Watercolor

The window in my shower has been practicing its watercolor landscape/abstract work. What unintentional art have you discovered lately?

In related wonderings...are you on Instagram? I am! Feel free to share your link/account below, and I will happily peruse.

Fortuitous

Fortuitous

A seashell can travel
merely by the grace of fingers and eyes

just by being a pink seashell
in the right place

Every place will follow you home
you barely have to love it

Not as a pet Not as an object
As the ocean thirsty for your pant leg

Longer (Beautiful) Reads

Three gorgeous pieces I recommend. Yeah, they'll take a little bit of time to read (by internet standards), but all are so very worth it.

• "The Abyss," by Rebekah Frumkin in Granta (on working in a haunted house and being haunted humans).
• "How Long Has It Been Since You Smelled a Flower?" a mini-collection of prisoners' writing curated/introduced by Richard Shelton.
• "The Fourth State of Matter" by Jo Ann Beard in The New Yorker. This is so beautiful and moving and upsetting and perfect. (Many thanks to Richard Gilbert, whose newest blog entry sent me scrambling to read this essay!)

I'm just happy that writing like this exists. What are you reading this week that's keeping you warm, friends?

You Do Not Scare Me One Bit

You Do Not Scare Me One Bit

Tree in the form of a monster lunging
even you should not be ashamed of your body

Kosher Salt

Kosher Salt

Do you know yet how the calendar
is a liar Three days ago ice and now

mud There are avocados and apples
and strawberries in the market

You can buy whatever you want
to taste The grass is alive Today I saw

a weed in February healthier than
I felt When the snow falls sometimes

I imagine standing in it and eating
a soft pretzel letting the salt rain

down around me making a puddle
of dry ground in the snow to remain in

Building Code

Building Code

On this the walk back to yourself
every tree seems to shimmer under its own
history The water makes pictures
of the land and sky for the sky
and in leaving the water can say
I have been near you
You will pass the statue and see
how it was always a fountain
Bedrock of pennies some pumpkin-bright
some darkened The downtown tower
muscled with offices will live emptied of people
and light for half its life We made the buildings
in our own image but it has been tough to learn
We can empty out We can be full

Mirror Party

Mirror Party

Your mirror and my mirror have a party
a joyless party
They invite their mirror friends

They thought they had plenty of stories

but once they were together
they saw that among the hundreds of stories there was
little variance

A face
A face
Faces

Teeth in a line
Dark hair
An eyeball
Finger stretching an eyelid for white of an eye
Finger prying off the lash that climbed in

Tears and then water tossed lightly on the face
Yeah bodies
Faces mostly

Naked skin
an appendage

Still the conversations went on plainly for hours
geez, those faces
because it felt so good to be around other mirrors
that understood what it was like