• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

Wikileaks and Poetry

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
From, "Shirts", to, "Catfish" -

Catfish

The catfish have the night,
but I have patience
and a bucket of chicken guts.
I have canned corn and shad blood.
And I've nothing better to do
than listen to the water's riffled dark
spill into the deep eddy
where a '39 Ford coupe
rests in the muck-bottom.

The dare growing up:
to swim down with pliers
for the license plates,
corpse bones, a little chrome . . .
But even on the clearest days,
even when the river runs low and clean,
you can't see it,
though you can often nearly see
the movement of hair.

I used to move through my days
as someone agreeable
to all the gears
clicking in the world.
I was a big clumsy Yes
tugged around by its collar.
Yes to the mill, yes to the rain,
yes to what passed
for fistfights and sex, yes
to all the pine boards of thought
waiting around for the hammer.

The catfish have the night
and ancient gear oil for blood,
they have a kind of greased demeanor
and wet electricity
that you can never boil out of them.

The catfish have the night,
but I have the kind of patience
born of indifference and hate.

Maybe the river and I share this.

Maybe the obvious moon
that bobs near the lip of the eddy
is really a pocket watch
having finally made its way downstream
from what must have been
a serious accident—
the station wagon and its family
busting the guardrail,
the steering wheel jumping
into the man's chest,
his pocket watch hurtling
through the windshield
and into the river.

Wind the hands in one direction
and see into the exact moment of your death.

Wind them the other way
and see all the tiny ways
you've already died—

I'm going to put this in my breast pocket
just as it is. Metal heart
that will catch the stray bullet
in its teeth.

I chum the water, I thread the barb.
I feel something move in the dark.

- Michael McGriff.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
So many poems, so many bees -

Winter Bees

Swarm

Very deep,
very mobile
the swarm-song
sounds in my chest:
not a beat, not breath

but an older music
remembered—
when a head
turns on a pillow
or hips lift—

one gesture becoming another
in the room
where a shoulder moves
close, moves away
uncovering a picture-window

filled with blossom-streaks,
pale trailers
that might be rain
or flight,
but these are flowers—

swarming white and eager
on dark branches,
while the Airbus
overhead
shakes the glass.


Bee-song

Rises from long grass
to make a mouth between the trees
rising and opening
as if it will never be done

when it opens its dark mouth
breathing and rising
sound filling the space of sound
mostly secret most necessary

trembling and calling
itself out of the dark
ceaselessness of itself
unendingly re-forming

dark in the darkened clearing
between the maize headlands and trees
with the evening gathering
in the long grass—


Bee Samā

If God were a limitless geometry,
that perfection world
reaches clumsily over itself
to articulate—
If he could be glimpsed in the pattern
of limitless addition
but were not that pattern, beautiful
though the turquoises
and greens of the glazed tiles are,
so beautiful
that the eye swoons, dropping through endless form
into form—If God
were neither principle nor dream, resting
his cheek on the earth
for a moment you might have imagined,
a gift of pure grace
from a Perfection that is bodiless
here and everywhere,
bees could be his servants and prophets,
demonstrating beauty
is a kind of humility—
Tonight, they offer us
the hive's aroma.


In the Karst

Here: that old cult—
boards bleaching
in couch grass
on highlands
where no-one goes
along the limestone runnels
above ruined farms—
Remember secrets,
and abandoned hulls
that turn nailed flanks to the sun,
sinking
in a murmur of bees,
bees flecking the air
brightly,
their hum a rumour—
old tunes—


Winter Bees

Every year
the weak January sun
brings bumblebees
nudging and thudding against the wood
of my work shed—
which must smell good, some old pine sweetness
soft in the grain
under the blue cracked paint, a blue
miracle sky.
Still, this banality moves us—
a small spring
resurrection, in the time
just before spring.

What tender precision
directs each bee
to our recurring conversation,
its compass set
by the sun's enormous arc?
The bee Christ
wears his crown of gilt and mourning,
mnemonic
of the winter swarm. Out
of strength came forth
sweetness. Our dark
hearts are hives.

- Fiona Sampson.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Sent by a person or persons unknown to the Oz Branch of Wikileaks, Poetry Section, redacted last night to ensure no poet, no muse, and no poetaster lost their life when we published it here today -

The Second Slaughter

Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

And here I turn my back on the epic hero—the one who slits
the throats of his friend's dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement
though it is not.

- Lucia Perillo.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Found at the usual dead drop -

Epitaph

Because I could be written anywhere,
I loved the hard surface of the blade,
my name carved into barn doors, desktops,
the peeled face of a shag-bark hickory.
I pressed my whole weight into it, letters

grooved deep as the empty
field rows along Tri-Lakes where I'd seen
my cousin Nick buried in ground so hard
they had to heat the dirt with lamps
before they could dig. I gutted squirrels

my grandmother fried, hanging
skins from the window,
and with the same knife gouged a B
at the base of the frozen creek bank,
the season breaking

like the rose our teacher, Miss Jane,
dipped in nitrogen so it would shatter.
There were more atoms, she claimed,
in the letter O, than people in the entire state.
I could feel God inside that letter,

the vast sky refigured, buds scrawled
on the black limbs of trees.
Trucks carried spring feed down
Highway 9 as I wove through headstones,
tracing names in the late frost,

looking for Nick's plot
with the wax white roses,
his lucky fishing lure. I could sense
him down there, satin-lined,
curled like the six-toed cat

we'd found bloated in the creek, alive
with lice and maggots. Sometimes
I was sure I could hear him, restless,
waiting for me, the Wabash
pushing its icy waters, my tongue

humming with the fizz. It never ended,
that stretch of road snaking back home
like an artery through my own heart
where an owl gripped a rat in its claw
over I-80. I'd put my hands in my pockets

and walk, dreaming of the places I'd go,
the things I'd do, the dump rising
to meet me at the edge of town,
chrome bumpers twisted as the owner
himself, withered arm swinging a fist.

I waited for something to escape—
mouse darting from a glove box, oil
from a cracked sump. I could stand
on a crushed Chevy, feeling it all
thaw inside me: asphalt

and barbed wire, cows and steaming
pails of milk, even the graveyard
rising, new stones nursing old griefs,
slow bones and winter's cherry trees
making their long walk to leaf.

- Bruce Snider.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
The Spanish connection -

The Orange Grove, Spain, 2005

for Bethany

Pulled over off the highway on a dirt road
cutting into miles of orange groves, we counted
one, two, three, before ducking beneath
a loosened fence line, sure we hadn't been seen.

Inside the silent orchard, we searched
for perfect fruit, sun-ripened globes
glinting in the midday heat, branches bent low
beneath the weight of what we intended to steal—

or borrow—we laughed—certain this was a lesson
we could not pass up. Sitting cross-legged
in blue shade, we peeled the skins and let them drop
at our sides. It was then you spoke of him

more freely than you had before. Distance,
you said, had begun to blur facial features,
the dip and rise of his voice on the phone,
those phrasings you loved, his hands in gesture.

Four thousand miles west, on a continent
swung out against a date line, an ocean—
the cherry blossoms bloomed as if in unison,
as if to frame the Arlington National,

those bleach-white graves lined evenly
along the green he passed each day. His thoughts
were elsewhere, typing letters late
at night, telling of his job, the new apartment,

that place he liked to eat, asking
about your life there, what you saw,
who you met in that foreign land where
the orchards spread out for acres,

ours dimmed finally in the waning light
of evening. And walking back to the car,
smiling, tired—we were caught.
After a few questions, the groundskeeper laughed.

When we offered to pay, he waved his hand—
his pardon that abrupt—and then began
to tell in broken English how each tree
is planted alone, apart from the others,

to give it room to grow, he motioned outward,
a breaststroke in midair, to give it space.
But—he leaned in, and with fingers intertwined,
explained that the roots connect

anyway, that the trees are made sturdier
because of this. That, even from a distance,
each grows around another, a strength
you could not see, but understood immediately.

- Tori Sharpe.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Decyphered from the static last night and posted today -

All Dharmas Are Marked with Emptiness

I'm talking now about the destitute and the wild-eyed, I'm
talking about the lady who made the head of the Virgin Mary
out of cut up pieces of magazines and broken glass and a
can of carpenter's glue—and then there's the girl I know
who works in the supermarket, who printed an entire anthology
of poems on a single eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of
Xerox paper and folded a hundred copies down to wallet size
and passed them out to anyone who dared look her in the eye.
You know what I mean: there are all those lonely, desperate,
weird minds—yours among them for all I know—and the
Dharma is everywhere, books and words and people thinking,
beat-up notebooks from the dollar store, scribbling the world
into them—a man has a mystery, a woman has an adventure,
the kids are banging rhymes together like tin cans full of
old nails. Where's it all going, this clatter, this wonder,
this rant against anguish? I tell myself to stay calm. I tell
myself to step back and take a breath. I twist and shift in my
tall black chair. I can hear the city coming in through the kitchen's
window-screens. Night birds, crickets in the unseasonable heat,
some might say dead souls keening in their rivers of fire or
choirs of angels out in the eucalyptus trees, but beyond it all you
hear nothing but the deep nothing—or maybe that's the far-off roar
of a motorcycle: If the night is just right, if the moment is perfect,
you know as well as I do that you don't need to tell the difference.

- Frank X. Gaspar.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
This bag of fruit masquerading as a suit was sent in by, you guessed it, anonymous, for you to tear to pieces -

Buying My First Suit

I remember thinking
how I had grown

too few hands
to fill the outer
and the inner pockets.

Then, as instructed,
I checked the pockets.
Hands.

- Mike White.
 

NotOfTwo

small potatoes
Joined
Jan 30, 2010
Messages
509
MBTI Type
INTP
How about a gosling...?

canada-goose.jpg
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Filched last night and forwarded today -

New York Song

Think of the pear
and its grainy room the color of parchment.

How the weight in your hand
becomes the first song from the grave.
Brother bone, I have knelt

in furious beauty,
drunk root to crown,

loved you in your sleep, and sleeping,
felt your spine
in the shadow of my breasts,

and waking in the first wine
of morning, known the nautilus,

marriage of pearl and roaring.
I know the scent of pepper
and gunmetal,

dark braille my fingers comb.

There is no loneliness
like finned mouths opening on the eve

of something without name.

- Karen Rigby.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Sent to Wikileaks, Poetry Section, last night and posted today -

The Swim

The lake, wide but longer
than the imagination (it makes its own
north and south), comes prettily
to our feet, a giant animal grown
gentle. Is it like anything else
we know? I remember being thirteen and
briefly in love with a boy already
as large as a large man, and him offering
his tender lips to mine—the rest of his
body there, but not touching, not yet.
Have we forgotten everything else?
If I want I can remember everything—
the not tender, the not gentle—
but look at what were being offered,
the chance to strip down, accept grace
with our grace, dive in and forget.

- Gigi Marks.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Never moved, stirred nor shaken, the -

Delinquent

Odd that the office would be so bright, painted in warm
shades of butter and honey, while outside the light

slammed down on fenders and on concrete posts and frozen
snowfields glazed with melt. This lockdown they call spring.

I had, God knows, no love for the grackles
mobbing the edges of the parking lot. The ice had melted

at the edges of the asphalt, and the frozen earth appeared to yield
some crumbs of seed or grass or insect carapace, yet I could not

stop watching them shoulder each other and threaten, with their
street-punk strut, bickering over privilege to pick at the hard ground.

In winter everything is winter and some must die, I thought.
I slouched in the blue eggshell chair, pulling at a thread

unraveling on my jeans and would not look up; sun hit my eyes
as voices hammered talk of consequences. All that was desired

lay frozen at my feet, lay on the other side of the wall.
I would fly through the window, scattering daggers of glass.

I would disappear in flame, leave only a shape of char.
When the world is your enemy, and speech an invitation

to open season on your body: slapped for a word, arrested for a sneer,
even silence a gesture interpreted by double agents of the mind,

give nothing away. Lock down. Hunch forward. Erase your face.
When they take you, as they will take you, away to where

they are going to take you, you'll be wound so tight you'll bounce;
you'll make a rattling noise on the ground, and whatever they break

in you, or break out of you will drag along behind, banging
and scraping, giving off long shrieks, obnoxious to their ears.

- Cynthia Huntington.
 
Top