RipRap

The Milkweed

 

Invites, or seems to,

An interaction.

 

Wind, wisp

Of its white silk

Entices,

 

Like a belly dancer,

Undulates,

 

Pulls the gaze

And flesh

 

Of these water bubble

Eyes.

Returning

Well I hope to be writing here more often. I got out of the blogging habit and miss it a bit. Spent the day Friday hiking the Wesley Preserve and then Mendon Ponds. A glorious day of warmth and sun. Tonight, snow returns to the North Coast, my son Jackson took the garbage out and returned with this years first snowball.

Friday Hike

I am in the vortex of swirling blue, broken by umber arcs of the branches of an Oak. The last warm wind of November twitters a lone leaf, torqued by it's own drying, stubbornly clinging to its thin twig extension. The tessellations of the air around us engulf the curvature of my right arm and palm that rests gently against his trunk. He stands alone, in a minor clearing of tall grass and Milkweed. The raucous chickadees in the stand of saplings to the left has been silenced by my lumbering approach. As I lean in the afternoon, I hear a loud flutter and my awareness attaches to the red flare of a male Cardinal that lands at the edge of the stand.

 

I turn my awareness back to the Oak and the energy that flows through the conduit of my arm. Tenderly, each individual finger presses into the furrows of the tree skin. Inhaling I relax my gaze, I feel the small swirls of energy in my forehead, heart, and navel gently shift and come into alignment with this great being; with his presence.  This is how we speak, palm to bark.

Junk

Spread across

pages, junk,

detritus, hunks

of cabbage,

grape leaves

tossed in a heap

of verbiage.

Gloss,

dental floss

covered in weak

gum blood leaks

across flattened papyrus

in an antiquarian.

Land mines loose

meanings lanyard

meanderings of flowocitical curves.

We pick through minutia

with tweezers,

scissors, pluck them

in metaphorical

lumpectomizations.

Lobotomythic citation

excursions in humus. 

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