Good Ole Galway

Why Regret

By Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19553

Still Full of Ness. The Sad Kind.

I keep going back to this passage from Anne Carson's book Decreation:

Between grief and nothing
I'd take grief (jean Seberg)
I'd take nothing (Jean-Paul Belmando)

Earlier she says The tough wound plucks itself

It does. And between grief and nothing, I don't know which to take.

I heart Tony Hoagland

Yesterday I bought this:




And I am in love with this:



Love

The middle-aged man
who cannot make love to his wife
with the erectile authority of yesteryear
must lower his head and suck her breasts
with the tenderness and acumen of Walt Whitman.

And if the woman has lost her breasts
to the surgeon and his silver knife,
she must hump the man's leg in the dark bedroom
like a rodeo bronco rider.

Let them be hard and wet again, respectively.
Let them convince, and be convinced.

It is the kind of heroic performance
that no one will ever mention.
It is the part of the journey where the staircase gets narrow
and you must turn sideways to pass.

Over the earth the clouds mutate and roll.
The trees catch their breaths for another try.
Wind rips through the dried-out grass
with a threshing sound.

The man going under the covers.
The woman letting him.
Both of them refusing
to be stopped by shame.

All that talk about love, and this
is what the word was pointing at.

His poem "Poor Britney Spears" was a close second.

SHMO DAY

So, being snowed-in in New York is less exciting than it sounds. But I did get some useful things done today, including watching Inglorious Basterds, eating Thai food (yes they delivered in the snow!), completing another poem, finishing "Eros- The Bittersweet" by Anne Carson, and getting a poem accepted in Opium Magazine. I am very excited that they will be publishing the title poem of my first-book manuscript, which I expect to have completely done by August. It will appear online sometime in the near future.

Besides that, I haven't been blogging much of late because I lost my beautiful beautiful grandmother a few weeks. She was far too young and far too healthy to have left us. But, such is life. I will miss her incredibly. And I have gotten a turtle tattooed on my foot to remember her by. She was my biggest fan. Little did she know, I was hers.