NPWM Day 7: Sonnet for Paypal

Sonnet for Paypal

I stumbled on to grace and speed, when you left

your devotion to bloom in the mud. Your doubt has

since become an impasse. Secret ape experiments

might be breaking us in two; unflattering portraits of

each other in mirrors turned to face boards where

windows once… what? what does a window *do*?

 

Besides make us all wallet sized. The hill-ette has

become the home of Mole, Jr., and the hangman’s

on the lookout for a mountain. These are our word

salad days, with the dressing served on the side.

 

John, I… John! Stop painting photorealistic portraits

of Ren & Stimpy cartoons. Let’s get back to writing

the Twin Peaks pilot. You be Frost this time;

I’ll be Lynch.

 

 

Poem for September 2

RUTH

We think of
you often
in Portland —

One night there
Mark & I
walked around

a small pond —
raindrops made
ripples. At

that moment
I said to
Mark – Somehow

this makes me
think of Cid —
and he smiled

and said he’d
been thinking
of you too.

A little rain
has begun to
fall as night falls

* * *

(untitled)

Quiet quiets
if we’d only
sometimes let it.

-Cid Corman, from YEA (The Lapis Press, 1989).

Poem for September 1, 2012

The Unturning

for Ben S., 1936-2010

My friend said: write about the dog in The Odyssey—
four hundred pages in. I found him lying on a dungheap
where ticks sipped his blood, though in his youth
he’d taken down wild animals, eager to kill
for a man the gods favored! Who comes back
in disguise; you expect the dog to give him away
with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.
Instead we’re told that “death closed down his eyes,”
instant he saw his master after twenty years away.
And I wondered if my friend had played a trick–

setting me up with this dog who does not do much
but die. When the gods turn away, what can we do
but await their unturning? That means: don’t think
that after so many years of having such a hard pillow,
the dog wasn’t grateful. But I wonder
if, for the sake of the shape of the plot,
the author ought to have let him remain
for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.

-Lucia Perillo, from On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon, 2012)

Poem for August 19

Excerpt from SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE (1978)

~

Numerous singularities

slight stutter
a short letter

embrace at departure

body backward
in a tremendous forward direction

house and host

vanished.

 

-Susan Howe, from Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974 – 1979 (New Directions, 1996)

Poem for August 18

relic / relict: some users of nails

for Divya Victor

1. take a disused verb– say : disorb– & stick
a pin in it. what is left. in the area of interest
due to age or having been relinquished
or surviving in the sense of all else is lost.
let me burden your head with firn.

2. the precision of a suffix, bereft
of all superstition & filthy lucre. (remember how
Krapp looks up ‘viduity’?) disambiguate, revive a word
for it– say : depintrix– & count
any number of hands remaining,
a rehearsal of our best grammar.

3. objects in the category brandea do not concern the body, but rather
contact with the body. the witch Erichtho went grave-robbing specifically
for insertum manibus chalybem, iron that has passed through the hands.

4. frags, smithereens. we need
a useful word– say: the days in nowadays
or the qua in quag & its antecedent hwaet.
the orts & scraps & bits, to paraphrase,
that remain, a fraction of the body & we parse
the vernacular, unless it’s a dialect (with
or without an army.)

-Pattie McCarthy, from Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (Apogee Press, 2010)

Poem for August 17

August

Who remains in the city in August?
Only the poor and the insane,
Old ladies left behind,
Pensioners with Pomeranians,
Thieves, here and there an aristocrat, and cats.
Along the deserted streets
You hear a percussive beat of heels
And you see women with plastic bags
Standing in the line of shade along the walls.
Under the fountain with the turret
In the green algaed pool
There’s a middle-aged naiad
Ten and a half centimeters tall
With nothing on but a bra.

A few meters away,
Despite the well-known prohibition,
Panhandling pigeons
Set upon you
And steal the bread out of your hand.
You hear in the sky the whoosh,
In exhausted flight, of the noonday demon.

 

-Primo Levi, translated by Harry Thomas & Marco Sonzogni, from the anthology Counterfeits (Center for the Art of Translation, 2011; no. 17 in the Two Lines: World Writing in Translation series)

Poems for August 16

Two Poems

~

WE ARE MADE UP OF SMALLER VERSIONS OF OURSELVES STACKED UP ON TOP OF THE SMALLER VERSIONS OF OURSELVES’ SHOULDERS LIKE A HUMAN LADDER WEARING A TRENCHCOAT SO THAT WE LOOK LIKE JUST “ONE NORMAL-SIZED PERSON COMING THROUGH HERE, NO REASON TO GET SUSPICIOUS”

Whenever you were not going in from
the cold, you were gloveless.

SAPPHIRE: You had little hands
THE BUTCHER: And a sapphire
THE CHILDREN: And a butcher
THE MOTHERS: Give us our children.

In the spaceship, they were increasing
the parameter of experience

slowly. Back down, children.
THE LITTLE HANDS: Where are the little gloves?

THE LITTLE TRENCHCOATS: Are we alone?
THE MILES: We better stop.

I like that song that goes:
God only knows what I’d be without you.

 

~

 

GOD REMEMBERS THE NINETIES

Everybody has been hanging around here
a lot.

ANITA: I stubbed my toe on the ottoman.
JEAN-BERTRAND: I touched myself in the eye.
A LAMP: If there is some music, there is a room.
WIKIPEDIA: Some people are listening to “The Dolphin’s Cry.”

I cannot think of anything sadder
than your parents’ clothes in a suitcase —

besides the mass production of spoons.
DOLLY (THE SHEEP): If the world had a face, I’d spit on it.

LOVE (THE SHEEP): I’m famous for being famous.
THE CARNIES: Philosophy can be a means.

of exploring joy and its intricacies.
There is a wooden bird that drinks water.

 

-Paul Legault, from The Other Poems (Fence Books, 2011)