June 2, 2012

A Good Hunger

We spend the first weekend of June at your parents’ house
in West Chester, Pennsylvania, but so what?
Your mother makes a stiff gin and tonic;
your sister has a boyfriend now, she doesn’t always need you.
Let’s retire, you and I, to the basement after dinner,
while your parents and your sister and her fabulous new boyfriend
crowd around an apple-cranberry pie. You and I

will go with tall glasses of strong drinks
to the red leather couch in the basement –
love – love – love is a heavy drinker; love liquors up
and pirouettes across the faux-marble coffee table
in your parents’ tasteful living room and descends; love
was made for howling underneath things: floorboards,
big skies, other people, whatever – love! –

and I will fuck you unceasingly with a good hunger
for your skin, a trembling need for the sweetgrasses
of your cunt – which is a kind of pinpoint because
when I’m near it I know where I am; and it is a kind of
keyhole, and you a lock, and when I’m in it the universe
swings open, a door, and what am I? and what are you?
Two ghosts, two things unencumbered save for pleasure,

that laving nothing,
that loose lightning shredding the bonesacks of our bodies.

9:27pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMeLrhb
(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: poetry 
May 31, 2012

　Poem for the Woman Who Almost Ran Me Over

I was about to curse her off,
the woman descending
from the driver’s seat of a Yukon XL,
about to give her the nearly-struck
pedestrian’s righteous hell,

when I noticed the tender crooked smile
on her cheek, the pink apprehension of scarring flesh
running from the seam of her mouth
to the lobe of her right ear,

and I knew then: knew that she was attending to
a soft fresh sadness of her own, and what
was I, then, but some strip mall parking lot’s Narcissus,
loving only myself in the lake of the world’s hurt?

6:30pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMVi9xR
(Notes: 14)
  
Filed under: poetry 
May 30, 2012

Anonymous asked: A curiosity -- how do you compromise your admiration for a poet's work with the more unsavory facts of his life? For instance, Anne Sexton's sexual abuse of her daughter, Linda. Do you take it into consideration? Or do you prefer to separate the two entirely? The latter is of course more difficult with someone like Sexton, who integrated at every turn her poetry with the most private and sensitive details of her family life. Is it irresponsible to subsequently splinter the two in reading her?

There’s an adage I live by when it comes to appreciating art: “separate the art from the artist.” “Good” people don’t necessarily make “good” art, nor is the art made by “bad” people necessarily “bad” art. One of art’s jobs is to tell us things we don’t want to hear, to explore the secret awful parts of our humanity. This includes things such as the infliction of sexual abuse. When we read a poet’s work, we shouldn’t be looking to take sides in moral arguments. We should be asking questions, considering everything the poem brings to us, testing dark waters which we would otherwise avoid. It is far more irresponsible to consider art in the limited context of the artist-as-person’s life — even with a confessionalist like Sexton — because art is a communique and, as such, it doesn’t reach it’s full potential unless it operates (and is considered) in a larger, life-spanning context. Anne Sexton is not her poems, and her poems are not Anne Sexton. 

2:17pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMQqwSt
(Notes: 8)
  
May 29, 2012

For You, Miss Sexton

Oh Anne,
oh sweetheart –

you lick me like the awful tongue of God
must lick: long, red, ragged, alone, a miracle

like instant mashed potatoes, like the combustion engine;
like cellular telephones, like inexpensive digital cameras.

Anne, wield your heavy arms in a stone ballet;
wear your skinny bathing suit on your skinny body,
the fish’s straight signpost, the ocean’s salty iteration.

How much suffering can a single spinebone register?
All of it, all of it – and like a splinter through the decades
let it pierce my rattletrap heart, my rattapallax brain.

Anne, let what you suffered be a candy dish or ashtray:
something to hold what’s sweet, what’s refuse.

But know I know this changes nothing:
for all my touching your hurt is a private ledger,

palpable and incomprehensible.

4:52pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMNRjHX
(Notes: 9)
  
Filed under: poetry 
May 28, 2012
My great Uncle Jerry, in the intermediate stages of Alzheimer’s, rises from a nap and consider a chocolate.

My great Uncle Jerry, in the intermediate stages of Alzheimer’s, rises from a nap and consider a chocolate.

3:47pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMJJqnd
(Notes: 3)
  
May 28, 2012
Here’s a picture of me and my first cousin once removed. She’s just the cutest. So many GPOYS from me these days.

Here’s a picture of me and my first cousin once removed. She’s just the cutest. So many GPOYS from me these days.

3:44pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMJJDDs
(Notes: 6)
  
May 27, 2012

For Nathan, Who Left Us

You are tall and I imagine your tallness loping through New York City
down the long arch streets of Brooklyn or I don’t know wherever
the young art school students are situating themselves these days.

I forget about you a lot. You become a sort of shadow and people who
know you from back then will recognize that this is both a joke and
a very heartbreaking fact which we have no choice but to accept.

It was funny for everyone except you when you kept smoking
everyone else’s cigarettes because you claimed you were trying to quit
and it was funny for you and no one else when you broke Joe’s guitar cable
at that show in the living room of that fashion student no one seemed to
   know.

What made it such a big deal was that you never said sorry.

Never mind the impossibility of forgetting the past, you are
going to cut it clean off like a malignant growth by disappearing
into New York City and refusing to call any of us back so that

now all we know about you comes secondhand. Like that you were
kicked out of your first apartment because you were smoking in it
even though the kid who let you stay in the living room for way less
than his own rent had asked you politely to not do that anymore.

Or that you’re trying to sleep with a girl who sleeps with girls. At least
it is because you love her or think you do. Remember your broken heart
last March when you were still talking to us and at a party in the city

you found her and the girl who would later take Dan’s virginity tribbing in a
   closet?

So never mind the impossibility of converting a lesbian and never mind
that all we wanted to hear was some sort of apology or that we didn’t want
   you
moving from your parents’ basement in New Jersey because we didn’t want
   you

to end up trying to live off of a barista’s salary and selling your guitars
to make rent which is exactly what has happened to you. At least we think
it is but everything we know comes from other people as if you were a ghost

and these strange art-punks a collection of psychically fucked mediums
we pay by the hour to call after you. We can never know if what they
tell us you’re saying back is true because it is never you that shows up for the
   séance.

Only once in a great while we get a slim replica, a tall beautiful man who buys
someone a shot and then goes back to the hard work of forgetting

rolling all of us like a boulder of limbs up some terrible mountain in Manhattan.

10:39am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMEKH6x
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: poetry 
May 26, 2012

Three Observations of a Body that Hates Itself

I.
Hunger’s screaming arc; the curvature of suffering;
like the stomach is a melon scooped, balled, considered, deplored.

II.
The hard walnut of panic beneath the sternum
to be cracked / to cause a heart attack.
Certain against all medical advice:
this is the insistent thrust of death’s seed germinating,
of death’s green stalk protruding from myself, my soil.

III.
Sometimes a left arm disappears. You think it’s there
but it’s not; it’s gone far away from you. And part of you
claws at where it used to be with your right hand; but
the other part of you says, Good, good, it’s almost time.

Time to be without myself.

4:04pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMBTz_u
(Notes: 41)
  
Filed under: poetry 
May 26, 2012
Montreal is just such a lovely place

Montreal is just such a lovely place

3:53pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayMBRZog
(Notes: 9)
  
May 25, 2012

Sometimes when I’m alone, I like to discuss what I’m reading with Sam. Also, Sam is my dog.

9:58pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7_ZayM8oF8b
(Notes: 5)
  
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