The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Writing

  • Kirill Medvedev: “It’s No Good”

    Kirill Medvedev’s poems are easy to get into. He explains situations, tells stories about people. You don’t mind listening and want to hear more. He’s contemplative and calm and reasonable, even when he’s making a wakeup call, dissing and dressing down, asking why things can’t be rearranged. The vocabulary isn’t hard. The figurative language is sparse. “I don’t like metaphors,” he says (74). The poems are slim, fat free, figureless. In some lines, he’s almost like a stand-up comic, in his delivery, his next move always a surprise. But the poems challenge in other ways. If you’re not laughing, you might be his subject, and the venue seems either oppressive or empty tonight. Medvedev’s concerns are the Man (government, politics, power), Work and Money (economics, business, family), and Free Time (culture – what we do when we get off work – trust, honesty, values). He puts those concerns into his poems, essays, and special pieces he calls “actions.”

    “It’s No Good: poems / essays / actions” includes selections of Kirill Medvedev’s writing from 2000 through 2012. Published in December 2012 by Ugly Duckling Presse, you can get a copy as a giveaway incentive with a new print subscription to n+1. While Medvedev, like Faulkner’s Isaac, has renounced his copyright, the English translations from the Russian original are copyrighted by Keith Gessen, who provides an introduction, and several other translators. “It’s No Good” is an argument. What’s no good? The title is from Medvedev’s first book of poems. Gessen explains the Russian title, “Vsyo plokho,” can be translated into “Everything’s Bad.” Medvedev is talking about the predicament of a nascent generation, and poetry becomes the window through which everything can be thrown.

    Poetry, for Medvedev, is “an authentic way of seeing, the degree of its expressiveness the only criterion by which you can determine its quality” (125). This would seem to be a good, and it is: “I am, of course, exaggerating,” he says. “I’m forcing reality to fit under my favorite rubric of ‘it’s no good.’ It’s not entirely true; some things are good; there are oases” (124). The problem, why everything might be bad, is that our contemporary predicament includes more than poetry. But to know what poetry is and what you are trying to make with it is not a bad predicament. It’s a good start to know

    “…your own worth)
    …to determine
    THE CAPACITY
    to see and accept yourself
    as you are” (74-75).

    And then what? “We need to do away with this false notion of ‘poetry as private activity’” (136).

    Charles Bukowski is precursor to Medvedev’s poetic attitude. Medvedev translated Bukowski from English to Russian, but he knows he’s not Bukowski, nor does he want to be. Bukowski is rude and raw, cusses in his poems, drinks to excess, and is apolitical and not socially engaged. He’s an outsider, sits alone at the end of the bar, but when he talks, he’s clear. What Medvedev has in common with Bukowski is an absence of compromise, honesty (which means speaking clearly of your predicament, your situation, in a contemporary voice), and a disdain for the various fine clothes and perfumes that poems are sometimes made to wear:

    “everything is
    nothing, everything is
    nothing, just the way it
    started, I kiss statues
    and the flies circle singing
    rot, rot, rot” (Bukowski, from “Song of the Flies“).

    Bukowski, a son of Los Angeles, grew up in good weather, but the Great Depression hit from without and from within. He grew up in a “house of horrors” (see “Ham on Rye“).

    “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State” (see Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner“). Yes, from mom’s syrupy womb, we all slip and fall into our father’s house, a country governed by an attitude, and if your father happens to be temperamental, poetry may be one of the few options available to escape his pincer plier grasp. “I’m a child of the Russian intelligentsia, I’m a person of culture” (122) Medvedev says (his italics), another difference between him and Bukowski, I thought, until I got to his definition of culture. Culture, for Medvedev, is connecting to the predicament of the weary. He speaks a kind of “Weary Blues,” as Langston Hughes wrote. The Soviet Union has collapsed, but there are problems with the renaissance. In the Dylan song “It’s All Good” (“Together Through Life” 2009), the phrase is used sarcastically. The phrase is a political speech, an aphoristic tip of the hat to the power of positive thinking folks, an advertisement for soap or cigarettes, Faulkner’s lament that the US has found no other place for the artist than to use his celebrity to sell something. The phrase it’s all good suggests art must remain a positive thing, to clean up everything bad. Art must not contribute to the bad. Medvedev’s title “It’s No Good” is an opposing viewpoint to the hollow socio-political phrase “It’s All Good”; or is it:

    “so everything’s all right.
    although, maybe the fact that
    everything’s all right is the problem?
    no, that’s not a problem.

    or maybe it’s that when everything’s all right,
    that just doesn’t sit well with me?
    no, it sits well.
    …
    (then what the hell?)” (note: ellipsis in penultimate line is part of the poem, 213).

    What’s a good poem in Medvedev’s view? You don’t hear Medvedev talking about craft. A good poem must be new (if what you’re into is craft, your poem is old at conception), and a good new poem must contemplate a new audience, one that didn’t exist prior to the poem. The poem draws a crowd (184). This may sound like a fad or pop art call-out, but it’s a great challenge to “light out for the territory ahead of all the rest,” as Huck said, to avoid the old ways of getting civilized. This is the reason Medvedev turned away from the traditional forms of writing, publishing, and hobnobbing in the literary world. Most of “It’s No Good” was published originally on his website following his renunciation of his copyright. He explains why he started a blog. And “It’s No Good” ends with selected poems originally published by Medvedev on his Facebook page. Imagine John Ashbery or Billy Collins starting to self-publish their poems on a Facebook page. Imagine the look on their literary agents’ faces. These guys have agents, but it should be noted that very few poets have agents, because there’s no money in poetry: a poet could craft a manned spaceship to Mars in a poem, solve the riddle of dark matter in a metaphor, steal the Pope’s hat in a trope – there would still be no money in his poetry. So why shouldn’t Ashbery and Collins earn a bit of dough with their poems? It’s all good.

    It’s not that Medvedev did not have status as a poet. He studied at the Moscow “Lit. Institute,” was published as a poet, journalist, and critic, is a translator, gave readings, but apparently, with regard to those things, “it’s no good.” Contemporary poets like Medvedev take risks, and there’s a certain kind of toughness required. Poetry is no good; it’s all good. Throughout “It’s No Good,” Medvedev talks about past Russian writers, imprisonments during the Soviet era, all sorts of harassment, the risks of failure and loss, and particularly the political engagement that often results in exile, censorship, or worse (Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, comes to mind; and in the US, the McCarthy years of blacklisting and the numbing that came from the naming of names), and Medvedev speaks clearly, eloquently, and with great empathy for oppressed individuals and peoples. And throughout all of this he emphasizes a perhaps obvious but powerful point: you don’t have to be a politician to participate in politics. This is why the anthologized poem is effete and a waste of Medvedev’s time and energy (198). One of Medvedev’s poems, titled “How’s This for a Poem?,” is made from the text of a press interview with a crane operator given after he was fired from his job for trying to help organize workers. Medvedev gets out the caps in the last stanza:

    “BUT IT’S ALRIGHT life goes on
    and as for me, given all the free time
    Surgutneftegaz has accidentally presented me with,
    I INTEND TO USE IT EVERY SINGLE DAY
    TO FIGHT FOR PEOPLE’S RIGHTS – THEIR HUMAN
    RIGHTS” (note: caps are part of the poem, 220).

    “It’s No Good” doesn’t so much end as stop. Because it’s now today, and we are free once again to move about. Or are we? In the last section of the last poem a young widowed mother soothes her child to sleep in a working class nativity scene. She wants her child to grow strong to continue the fight. The fight for what? We’ve been through two decades of “It’s No Good,” witnessed, of course vicariously, the exploitations and losses, the external chaos that seems to galvanize the internal despair, wars and fights, and the competing interests of groups and individuals. That’s all a reader can do, witness vicariously, but a writer like Medvedev is both a reader and a person of action, a true poet, which for him means to influence change. But what if the child wants to “light out for the territory”? Can that right be subsumed too? But there is no territory that is not somehow enabled by connections, Medvedev would say. How should we act, behave, in a fatherless state – this is now Medvedev’s concern. Father Bear has finally wandered off for good, isn’t coming home anymore. We are free to move about, must move about.

    And once up and moving about, then what? “No work of art is a thing in itself, as bourgeois thought claims,” Medvedev says. He carefully considers the values of pure art, straightforward utterance, the new sincerity (or the new emotionalism, which sounds like the breakout of memoir here in the US), and dismisses them all as avoidances, enablements, co-optations. Nor is art “a divine reflection, as religious thought claims, but evidence of all of society’s defects, including the relations of the dominant and dominated. The task of innovative art is to insist on the uniqueness of the individual while revealing the genuine relations between people, the true connections in society, and, as a result, to forge a new reality” (199-203, 237).

    Joyce comes to mind, who at the end of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” has decided to leave his country and home and family:

    “—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning….

    Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

    Joyce was on the run from two masters, the Church and imperial Britain (“Ulysses“), but while Joyce would have, in Medvedev’s view, influenced literature, he would not have influenced politics. He would not have made a difference in his reader’s lives. And what difference he did make might now seem a disaster given how buried and anthologized he’s become in the academy, how many lives have been lost to peer review, a country with a stingy father and stiff immigration laws. Again from the final poem in “It’s No Good”:

    “…for the moment
    the progressive labor activists have a higher political consciousness
    than the intellectuals,
    than the professors,
    it’s just too bad there are so few of them” (271-272).

    “It’s No Good” is full of history, past and present, stories and anecdotes, commentary, reports of daily events. It’s significantly more than a book of poems, more than mere literature. It’s a book to be read and re-read, a book that encourages reflection on one’s place and activity in the web. Gessen’s introduction and the many footnotes throughout are helpful, and there are many paths pointed out for further reading.

    Kirill Medvedev, “It’s No Good.” (2012). Edited and introduced by Keith Gessen. Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich. n+1 / Ugly Duckling Presse, Eastern European Poets Series #30. ISBN 978-1-933254-94-4.

    30 Jul 2013: Interview with Kirill Medvedev at Boston Review
    30 Sep 2013: “Kirill Medvedev’s Personable Provocations” at The New Yorker Blog

  • Verlyn Klinkenborg: “Several short sentences about writing”

    In the beginning was the word, and the word was a sentence.
    And the sentence was an assignment.
    And the assignment broiled in the brain,
    that alchemical brewpub of doubt.
    A devil came near, cooing, “Plagiarize, my dear;
    allow me to serve the sentence for you.”
    A good angel appeared: “Depart, ye fiends of papers for free.
    Ditch, web dwellers of rehearsed research.
    Begone, you bad teachers of bad writing.
    Students can do this on their own.”
    And singing Blake’s proverb, from
    The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
    “No bird soars too high if he soars
    with his own wings,” the angel dropped a book
    into the waiting writer’s lap, and flew away.

    What book did this fresh, good angel drop, which might bargain anew all the how-tos with writing students and their teachers both in and out of academia? Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing (Vintage, April 2013). Klinkenborg challenges schooled approaches consisting of “received wisdom about how writing works” (Prologue). Klinkenborg turns the traditional writing teacher on his head and shakes the bulges out of his pockets. All sorts of found, useless stuff drops out, lightening the student’s load. Klinkenborg speaks to the writing “piece,” considers genre arbitrary and binding. He eschews genres and schools and rules. But not grammar and syntax. Loves the fragment, not the run-on. His style is controlled by “implication.” Implication is a good sentence’s great secret, its ability to suggest thought. His sentences often illustrate their own attributes. The book as a whole is a study and a reflection on that study of the sentence. The book’s prose is cut into lines that emphasize what’s necessary to read a sentence for its syntax and rhythm and space. Some may see this as mere trickery, and maybe the book is a slow, idiosyncratic, quiet rant. His discussion of “rhetorical tics,” the bane of Freshman Composition that remains through graduate school and beyond like an old scar, is funny and sad (118). If you’ve ever completed any assignments on your own, you might recognize yourself in his descriptions of a web of false writing. I did. But I also saw many hunches I’ve had over time validated: writing is learned while writing and in no other way; a good writer is a good reader, a good proofreader, but also a good general interest reader, which means not having to have something that “interests me” before being able to read it, because good writing creates its own interest; teachers have done so much damage to students that many students would rather risk plagiarism than think and write on their own.

    There are contradictions, difficult to resolve. Klinkenborg says, on page 57, “You don’t need to be an expert in grammar and syntax to write well.” I agree. The apparent contradiction is that he then spends the next sizable section of the book on what we should know about grammar. “You do need to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs,” he says, but he doesn’t say why, nor does he try to explain that difference (though the answer might be found in an implication I missed). If we don’t need to know grammar, why spend time on it? This is an important question. And of course we do know grammar. We learned grammar when we learned to speak. But we may not know how to talk about grammar or to read for grammar or syntax. And some knowledge of parts of speech and what we think of as grammatical terms might be important to certain kinds of reading. He wants us to find words in a dictionary and to notice etymology and parts of speech. This is sound. But some of his precepts seem vague, even New-Agey. Explaining implication, he says it’s “The ability to speak to the reader in silence” (13). Well, John Cage did speak to the reader in silence. And Klinkenborg’s many references to the way we were taught to write in school are at risk of becoming a kind of straw man argument. Has no one tried to dig through the dried up crap of fabricated rules before? But the straw man here, if there is one, might be personified as an industry of text books, so the challenge is worth the charge. Klinkenborg may not be an archangel delivering a sacred text, but his book clears the air for a spell.

    A colleague suggested the Klinkenborg book, and I’m glad to have read it and to recommend it for general interest readers, writing teachers at any level, and students at any level, anyone, in short, in or out of school, interested in reading or writing. Yes, Klinkenborg wants to talk to the whole writing world about sentences. He wants to non-specialize the traditional approaches to thinking about writing, remove bogus rules from circulation, instill faith and trust in aspiring readers and writers.

    Several short sentences about writing is divided into four major sections and many subsections. The book (204 pages) does not wear its skeleton on the outside. The main sections are as follows: 1 – a short prologue; 2 – the central text (146 pages), the sentences arranged in cut lines, like verse (opposite of what we’ve come to expect from prose); 3 –  “Some Prose and Some Questions,” eleven short prose excerpts by established writers, followed by a section inviting analysis of the pieces through reflection suggested by specific questions Klinkenborg provides; and 4 – Some Practical Problems, 33 pages of short sentences from student writing, with short comments by Klinkenborg. It’s not a text book, but it could be used as a text. But that would require, perhaps, changing the mindset of an instructor, or even of an entire English department, or at least calling upon instructors to reconsider traditional “received wisdom about how writing works,” or how the teaching and learning of writing might work.

    Here’s an example of a wonderful Klinkenborg sentence fragment: “The faint vertigo caused by an ambiguity you can’t quite detect” (55). This is quoted unfairly out of context (is there any other way to quote?), but who is “you” here? What kind of reading experience must one have to get dizzy reading a poor sentence? And here’s an example of the way he challenges the august teaching community: “…The assumption that logic persuades the reader instead of the clarity of what you’re saying” (117).

    By implication, at least, Klinkenborg’s sentences touch on many of the topics usually covered in composition classes: research, authority, argument, outlining, chronology and sequence, style, ambiguity, rules, rubrics, writing models, imitation, rhythm, revision, editing, meaning, figurative language, transitions, reading, reader, clarity. The sentences wit and cut new paths through this overgrown field.

    If you are into marginalia, this Klinkenborg book is a lepidopterist’s field day. I found myself chasing sentences around the book as if they were butterflies. My copy is a mess of notes. I was inspired to try my hand at an original sentence. Here goes nothing: Thoughts without sentences are like flowers that never bloom, each tightly wrapped petal a word waiting to become part of a sentence to be smelled, to be read or heard in a single breath. Klinkenborg would say it’s too long, ambiguous, cliched, doesn’t breathe. And it doesn’t make sense. Do we hear through breathing? Sounds like something a Woody Allen character might say, the audience erupting in laughter, the irony on you. “The most subversive thing you can do is to write clearly and directly…” (132). Easy for him to say.

    Related Posts:
    As You Like It: Rules for Writing
    Ticker Tape Sentence
    A Year From the Use and Misuse of English Grammar

  • The Business of Poetry

    I’m in a meeting about meetings.
    Someone is talking about needs:

    “…Clear purpose…
    …Keep to agenda…
    …Stick to schedule…
    …Out on time…
    …Take notes…
    …Dress code…”

    I note, doodle, jot down words,
    drop seeds of wild silly weeds
    into the creamy hirsute carpet;
    someday the seeds will sprout

    …into poems…

    the night janitor will sweep up.

    The priest talks of the need for prayer in despair.
    The scholar talks of the need to be read by peers.
    The senator talks of the need for dough and polls.
    The bag lady quietly appeals for a change of where.
    The therapist theorizes the need of rest from care.
    The bartender talks of the need for a road to hear.
    The mother yells just wait until your father comes
    home, until the evening comes when Dad disappears.

    Who knows the source of this need from long ago,
    the need for poems and to live like a fat soiled pig
    sloughing off in a muddle puddle wallow of words,
    but the meeting adjourns with predicable promises
    of more to come, of more to come, of more to come,
    and someone breaks an egg over the speaker’s head:
    a detailed SWOT Analysis called for pastry and pie,
    but the speaker is silent, not a word, about poetry.

  • The Art of the Bus Stop

    It was to be his last day, he dreamed, a phantasmagorical dream
    recurred, after a cup of coffee, in wakeful brain, a near belief in seizure.

    How would he spend his last day? He should limit his options,
    if chance proved him a fool tomorrow, build a hedge of porcupines.

    But if today’s feeling did not pass, his options were not so limited.
    He could fly anywhere, stay in a Six Star hotel in bikinied Marseilles,

    fly to romance Rome and get in line for a final Papal blessing,
    parachute into the Mojave desert, jump off Saddleback Mountain,

    surf the Banzai Pipeline – like in the old days, take the board out.
    Who would dare cut off an old man on a wild wave on his last day?

    He got his surfboard out of the deep basement, his lovely wife still sound asleep.
    He walked down to the bus stop. He waited with his surfboard on the poetic bench,

    beneath the ancient acacia tree. The bustling bus came but the discreet driver said no
    to his putting the untethered surfboard in the bike rack on the front of the bus.

    He went back to waiting at the busy bus stop, and this is how he passed
    his penultimate yesterday, talking to bussers about the art of surfing.

    Related Posts: Winter is icummen in, Lhude sing Line 15
    Reading Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero on Line 15

  • Poetry Footprint

    Poetry High FiveAccording to the Global Footprint Network, the Ecological Footprint is “the metric that allows us to calculate human pressure on the planet and come up with facts, such as: If everyone lived the lifestyle of the average American we would need 5 planets.” There are several footprints currently being measured, carbon and water, for example, and we are encouraged to measure our own personal footprint and to reduce the size of our footprint, “to tread more lightly on the earth.”

    Maybe poetry does not have a footprint, but a handprint. A print that shows who was here, and this is what they saw, what they heard, what they tasted, what they touched and felt, what they smelled. But also, what they and those close to them thought about this sensorium of experience, how they responded, how they changed, what they promised and what they betrayed, how they might have wronged and how they might have been forgiven. To do all of that, poetry needs a wide spectrum of possibilities. Some of these possibilities might lead listeners, readers, away from well worn paths, into uncharted waters, rough seas, or lulls, or blank spaces with no echo. Other possibilities might lead readers back into cities with crowded sidewalks, or into libraries full of musty, dusty books. Or into parks, or taverns, or beaches, or mountains and lakes and rivers, or nurseries or old folks’ homes, or orphanages or prisons, or churches or corporations, or onto ships or bicycles or cars or helicopters or surfboards. The point here is that any of these possibilities, for any individual listener, might wind up a dead end, but it can’t be wrong if it widens the spectrum, for the wider the spectrum, the greater the possibility of poetry.

    I sometimes wonder if human nature improves over time. In other words, are we better than our ancestors? We might like to think so. Technology and medicine, the comforts of modern housing and transportation, what we call advancements and improvements resulting in higher standards of living might lead us to think we are smarter, more accomplished, in a word, better than our ancestors. But what of our essential nature? Has that improved? Does it improve? Can it improve? I have doubts. I think we’re probably the same inside as we’ve always been. It’s the same old heart beating in the same old chest.

    In any case, what inspires this post is another skirmish posted in the poetry war, an internecine, academic argument. I’ll just point to David Biespiel’s response over at the Rumpus, and interested readers can follow the trail-links from there. Like most wars, it’s sometimes hard for an outsider to get what it’s all about, but like most fights, this one’s about territory and who’s to have the final word. But it’s also about values, what we value in poetry, and whose values ought to prevail. It might be important to remember that what we value is not necessarily what’s good for us. What we value is simply what we want.

    There is something about poetry to value, to want, that is relevant to the discussion. One of my favorite books of poems is “Paroles,” by Jacques Prevert.* Prevert lived in Paris during World War II, during the German occupation. Writing in 1964, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in his translator’s note introduction, said, “I first came upon the poetry of Jacques Prevert written on a paper tablecloth in St. Brieuc in 1944…a poetry (his worst critics will tell you) which is perfectly suited to paper tablecloths, and existing always on as fine a line between sentiment and sentimentality as any that Charlie Chaplin ever teetered on.” That “perfectly suited to” is important, for it values a poem for its success in achieving its purpose. Even if we might think the purpose is bad, it can still be a good poem. This is a sentiment many critics find difficult to stomach, but it’s vital to the health of a wide spectrum of poetic possibilities.

    But there’s another reason I like Prevert, and that has to do with the idea of sitting out at a sidewalk cafe table writing a poem on a paper napkin, not even a paper tablecloth, a poem someone might read, or no one might read. Poetry was a way out of oppression for Prevert, and poetry remains a tool today for release from the natural malaise that comes from everyday life, even if that release is only temporary, and even if that malaise is from human pressure. The release comes in the act of writing the poem, not from the possibilities of someone else reading it or of having it published or some fantasy of poetic fame, but from the existential act that says, I am here, and this is what that means, for now. The act of poetry leaves a tiny Ecological Footprint. That sidewalk cafe napkin poem might be a good way to “tread more lightly on the earth,” even as it adds to the size of the poetry footprint.

    *Jacques Prevert’s “Paroles” is Number 9 in “The Pocket Poets Series,” first published in the City Lights Books edition in July 1958, in San Francisco. I have the Sixth Printing, February 1968.

    Related Post: Bukowski for President! David Biespiel and Poets for Democracy

  • Dictatorial Decree

    Already the sun slipsSun,
    filches off
    at a sneaking speed.

    The despot rising
    declares a natural
    state of emergency.

    The pompous papa
    prays on the instant
    for a sum of leniency.

    Alas, mere poet, see?
    The sun protracts
    your high-pitched misery.

    Tonight a summer
    full moon calls
    a ball of lunacy.

    The sun dictates the noon,
    casts down dress codes
    on the darling horology.

    The moon denudes the day.
    The night goes without
    a blanket of authority.

  • It’s “After Midnight” at Berfrois

    The Toads review, posted back in May, of “After Midnight” was reposted today on Berfrois. After the last few weeks of more unrest around the contemporary world – on the ground, in the air, on-line – Irmgard Keun’s short novel about the life of a young woman in Germany during the build up toward World War Two feels increasingly relevant. Whatever time it is locally, cruise on over to Berfrois and check out the review and more.

  • A Pith Zany

    Nook EveningAnd what he did last just
    before his personal power
    rose and surged
    then tweeted out
    was check his e-mail.

    “Heaven will be full of spam,”
    he decried, “because
    everyone wants to be there,
    while hell will be whiteout,
    an empty inbox.”

    “Or the other way around,”
    I replied.
    “Oh, that’s pithy,” he said.
    “And there’s nothing I dislike
    more than an epiphany poem.”

  • The Look of Love

    Climbing bolt eyes tightened so tight the threads
strip, and the tongue, a dirty oiled belaying bolt,
slips and slaps, and the whole edifice collapses,
as if a plumber has grabbed the head by the ears
and sucked on the nose with his plunger.

The smith smites a bass anvil,
     hammering
          the hot steamed milk face
     forging
          the steel bridge nose,
     sculpting
          terrible white teeth,
     drawing and cooling
          the pendant tongue,
     punching
          eyes opaque blue,
     curling
          thick creamy hair
around the handle of his hammer.

This hyperbolic happy acid oozing 
cold blue face bowl of plum pits,
bonbon pate of goose liver. 
“Don’t look at me!” cry the eye bolts expanding, 
lips stressed taut, ears hung like life rings. 
Far back on the tongue, a bitter spot to nap. 

The old couple lives now in a window box. 
The sash opens and a hand appears. 
A palm with a long curved neck 
pours water clear and concise. 

An electrician comes to replace the eyes. 
He breaks both sockets unscrewing the cold bulbs. 
Memory starts to flicker, the call of a far-off bird. 
In brackish blue eyes the tiller tongue feels spaces, 
loosed from its mooring, and on the sail of the nose, 
beating upwind for a kiss, ripples of sound,
the soupy surf ringing in his ears, 
snores an old surfer paddling about
on a dinged, wax-worn, sun bleached board, 
wanting to swim with you.

  • Watermarks from a Night Spring

    Embers of a partially burned ocean
    In a box in a dank basement molting notes
    A weathered surfer slowly descends the creaking

    Worn stairs, dark swells yawning
    Fish eyed and barnacle knuckled he climbs
    Finds and opens the box, peers in, smells the pages

    Runs salted fingers over the raised words
    Rusting paper clips, chiseled letters in Courier font
    Fading beached seagulls washing away in an incoming tide

    Wired spiraled journaled waves
    Bleaching across the page ink in water
    Blistering sun burnt tattoos on old shivered skin

    He can no longer read without bottled glasses
    He chuckles, the tide receding washing scouring
    White out rocks across words stuck buried in red tide pools

    Breathing with a snorkel
    The surfer leers over the smoldering sea
    Takes up the seaweed soiled waxed manuscript

    And paddles out of the basement
    Walks down to the beach and what remains
    Of the water and casts out the paper fish net

    Into a set of scaling waves
    Lit with a lustrous industrial moon
    The waves curling letters in blue neon.

    (Click any photo to view gallery)

  • facephenom

    facebrick

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    faceless facemuse faceup facestop faceboom