RipRap

Sleep Interrupt

A truck
A plow
Goes yawning into the night
Snow in sheets
Peels off bent steel
Sent reeling

Sleet darts
On window glass
Dark molasses sky
After midnight

Imbolc Dusk

The sky
Of Imbolc
Darkens
A bit at
Dusk

Branches
Still
Reach up

Stretch black
To gray

Flake after
Flake
Each embodiment
Of the sea
Drifts
Heavily

In desire
For the
Land

Objectivist Poets

I have been reading the objectivist poets. In particular Zukofsky, Oppen and Rakosi.

Zukofsky has a music but is so hard to parse. Then I read the following in Jacket magazine, in an article by Peter Quartermain
"Half a year later he would exclaim, in another letter to Corman (25 August 1960 [Origin 63]), that as for “content, . . . the sooner I can get that out of the way & buried in the music of the whole thing the better.”[13] The uncertainty – of “Belly Locks Shnooks Oakie,” “The desire of towing,” “the wriggly Wrigley boys” – is part of the poem and essential. Zukofsky withholds reference and meaning because he want you to think through the uncertainty, by means of it. The uncertainty is itself the material and the ground of thought, for uncertainty is, when all’s said and done, how we go through the world in which those particulars we call objects are, finally, inscrutable. The poem is a way of being in the world without claiming power over it."

This has given me new insight. I read with new eyes.

January Evening

Headlights swing into the line of wind
pouring up the driveway; a car door slams.
Her quick footfalls rush towards me.

January Morning

Fall

As they do

From the sky

Just shy

Of the lake

They are it's effect

On air

 

The flakes

Their dander

Lifted by the light

Cold

Wind

 

I gander

As

Each

One

Singles out

A different

Current

In the gathered

Torrent

 

 

Dry river

Below Hawk Hill

Walking

Through the woods

Below Hawk Hill

Oh the rain falls
Clicking it's tongue
On each leaf edge

Here

The seepage
Permeates spaces

Between leaf         and twig

The wiggle room

Japonnaiserie (v.v.g)

The black silhouette of the apple tree
against the street lights on Church street
is the flowering plum.

Muse III

Gently, probing with her tongue, the places where his eyes had been,
she replaced them with bronze Hazels.
The world and each thing now burns in beauty. 

Muse II

She found him lost by the Hazel tree where the three rivers sprang
into the world. In one blow with her staff he fell and was imprisoned with Birch branches. She took his eyes in her mouth.

Muse

For instance, if she hadn't come to him in a dream

he wouldn't have known her at all. But she approached

with mint on her lips and he never let her go.