to the quiet hammocks buried under leaves.
in my scantily clad tree i keep watch over an aerial memory
that pulls on the others it's stitched to.
leaf cleaving to leaf.
in the shadowy underfoot.
november,
so spiked with punch.
now the beets are boiling, cheekbone bright.
i wish we were required
to idle and bask
at least one hour a day,
i wish i could distill one ounce of perfume
out of everything before it escapes me.
this illustration is from a 1942 edition of "the human body," by logan clendening, m.d. it is titled "the birth of the stethoscope."
i also found this poem i wanted to share by corinn adams, from the latest diagram. i just love the last line so much:
REYKJAVIK OR PRAGUE
It's a dark beer from Brazil.
It's palm-size with a silver finish.
It's fishnet but a tasteful fishnet.
It's number one in Reykjavik or Prague.
It's called "sonnet" but it’s video projection.
It's called "ballet" but it’s video projection.
It's titled something with a backslash.
It's a baby carriage full of press-on nails.
It's Colette of the LES.
It's Rimbaud on Avenue A.
It's Baudelaire on NPR
but it's a little Jean Genet.
It's mainstream before it's time.
It's clever but it's clever in air quotes.
It's knee-high to avant-garde.
It's hearing me use "earnest" as a slur.
It's the way I name a certain inky sky.
It's that blue of every cell phone two years back.
It's you saying, now I know the sky you mean.
It's the kind of coat they only sell in the Midwest.
It's just a field we stood in with our coats on.
It's snow on the porch roof.
It's the first time anyone has spoken in an hour.
Look at it out there, goodness gracious.
jean-michel's post about TLDR and RTFM had me looking into the world of initialisms for the first time. initialisms, according to wikipedia, differ from acronyms in that they are not pronounced as a word but by each of their letters separately. initialisms and acronyms are handy for those who don't have time to spell things out; this is why they seem to abound mostly in the military and business worlds. what i find curious is that this abbreviated form of human communication is also prevalent in casual internet interaction. for instance, the initialism TLDR is a common internet response to a post that is long and boring: it stands for "too long, didn't read." my hunch is that a person who doesn't have the patience to spell out those four little words isn't likely to have an attention span for much of any reading material.
don't get me wrong; i am all about brevity, just not at the cost of meaning. there is nothing tangible about an initialism; no--as it is said in french--'liason.' at least an acronym forms a word, and a word is automatically imbued with associations. as acronyms age, they can harden into diamonds undifferentiated from other beloved pieces of our vocabulary: sonar, radar, scuba. these are words you can use in a poem. and you can use "rolling on the floor laughing" in a poem but you cannot use ROTFL.
i'm sorry you just cannot.
yes, i did get the idea from that genius tom phillips. this website is fantastic. you can see everypage of 'a humument' in all its glory.
the poem below was in my yahoo mailbox this morning. it is written by helen cho, one of those dear friends you can manage to have nowadays without ever meeting them. i was especially taken by her friendster profile about... was it about two years ago...?! i seemed we had much in common, all the way down to our common delight in keeping chickens. at the time i worked at a restaurant very near to her home in the east bay, and i think we even might have arranged a tentative plan to meet on a monday. the memory is foggy now, but the plan fell through somehow. but she put me on her mailing list of lucky people who receive regular little gifts from her via email--telescopic links into the sea of various brilliant artists, tantalizing poems, recipes you want to make right away, hundreds of smart observations about the world, all that have enriched my life to a tremendous degree.
this latest poem is my newest favorite:
Your House
It is an unobstructed view I have
of burnt hills, a bridge touching a city, eucalyptus,
a steel tower, the open moon.
I would give these things away,
like a rich man
sweeping bare his porch
of leaves that have fallen in the night.
I shrug out of my human form,
to cross
rivers as deep as myself, wriggle
down the ravine,
bruised, sliding, holding roots.
It's a blind mile, each tree girth
rubbed smooth of moss, blackened
my hand's cold slide
and finger mark.
Soaked, I run past
the bee hives and mottled hay to knock on the windows,
hail and fist.
I spread out my fingers against the glass,
torn wide, to prove
it is still a hand.
The barbs of a wing feather interlock.
I hear your voice and run
to the back of the house. You feed the geese
white oats
snowed in mud
and see through
my destinations,
even my greed for you.
You have come back.
I say nothing but remain
in place.
I belong here like the geese
and bees, every stone in the house
and field, every finger on your hand,
the dress you wear upon your skin,
and the other you keep new
for better days.
