“Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.” — Arthur Rimbaud Was Prometheus a poet? Rimbaud says he was, stealing fire from the gods: technology, knowledge, human arts and sciences. He paid a terrible price for his audacity. Whatever was he thinking? Look what we have done with what he gave
Today a Cooper’s Hawk perched itself outside our bedroom window on a low branch of a small tree not twenty feet away. The courtyard of our condo complex. Frequented by all sorts of wildlife: sparrows and wrens, mourning doves, juncos, hummingbirds, now and then a cardinal, chipmunks, rabbits, lots
The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time”
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”
“I envisioned myself old on a mountain hike/a soft breeze lifting my long white hair/I thought I’d live ‘til ninety-five”
“Sinister pinwheel/stuck to a breezeless sentence/as sly ornament—”
“I swore I heard willows cry/through the zig zagged fields,/traveling through my universe/as quickly as the moon touches our light”
“The city never sleeps: the isle of faces illuminated by cell phones/is proof its waking isn’t rising, only beeping, only static,/only the cashier in the convenience store, only flickering.”
the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier
“We thought there couldn’t be anything more./But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods./Beautiful and horrific are the moment’s songs.”
“Bruises bloom roses; the blind bird has fled./Ocean quiet bedroom night light turned dim,/the sting of his fist purple on her skin.”
“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”
“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”
“Seek mercy for eggs we scrambled in a youth/spent banging pots and pans together./For the telling of clumsy lies, our voices/cracking like pecans together.”
“How/it both is, and is not/a type of existence.”
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559) I imagine them in mud, steaming people, bony hands joined to the land, farming with fingers clawing furrows in the earth, dreaming of rain. Someone begat someone who begat someone, who begat someone else (etc) then you and I
“Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams”
“Doom is there staring, everywhere/I go, like a brazen coyote/dead center of the road/half-starved so it doesn’t care anymore.”
“The hand drops a fresh globe/into the scoured skull, secures breath upon/the hemispheric nostrils and stands back,/appraising…”
“Among a murder of mannequins/the guilty can’t be picked out of a lineup.”
“The woods sigh. And then, a thousand miles away,/I’m in your arms again. Your breathing is an ocean./I’m drifting away. You whisper.”
“There is a fervor that I do not surge with,/A saintliness with which I do not sing.”
“Having just emerged from her tv and ac,/she was too sun-shocked and asphyxiating/to hear ‘it’s a lovely shoot’/as my spade severed the root.”
“I scatter the sandpipers who/run from me/but not/the tides.”
“her body, between the buildings/behind her and the parked cars/in front, throwing a coal-black shadow/on the ground the color/of tarnished silver…”
“You had time to contemplate its masonry/and recall that other jail, the temple/of muscle and flesh built by your trade/of bricklayer, now turning wan and idle.”
“The far shore wore a gauzy veil of rain./Dark thunderheads rose over Evian/and shook the silver surface of the lake,/ruffling like shot silk.”
“Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves/clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies/float indiscriminate as my head throbs/then disappear on the next wisp of breeze”
“While others cycled to dusty fields,/sported bats and mitts, shouted to claim/their favorite positions, I was alone,/my red Schwinn and me—no/deception of ritual, no useless chatter,/no bad calls, no vicarious parents.”
