FEBRUARY LYRIC

Day bright
blues white
and toed by birds.

Liquid headlights
in pantheon spray
and light of the boundaries
stress

level with icicles
the blossoms that condense.
Nothing is apparent.
It's winter.



Can you name the author?

Read this.

I haven't become I wait for

no Tuesday fortunes you
are that vast in that night too
or made of poor interiors
I fail to pledge lit
at every indentured turn
forest of lightened brashness
roughed to marred silhouette
it hurts too much to make do
no single pleased reason
what lies in fields un-mown cryptic lisp
these time and again eventual wings
two dollars for the first part where I have
she just you don't know with rows of iceberg
no one it'll all come to
no idea, no first day

more Duncan

But what one knows is the utter fallibility of one's self, a saving grace: and the wondrous fallibiility of the universe. "So many faces, forms, glances." Contradiction may render false to logic; but poetic dialectic comprehends contradiction. Experience insists upon the reality of contradiction.

*******

What more central love than the disturbance and trembling awakend by each new song; the calling up of one's own spirit in answer, the still center in the excitement that comes as the poems are comprehended. A challenge. But to the intoxicated mind a more marvellous alcohol--a nourishment. Of my own otherness. My entirely differentness. It's the coming back to the core of speech -- that poetry might be a revelation of the language written by, created by Man -- a closet of speech wherein one speaks with the vastest spirit -- a revelation of language not personality. What more central love than the comradeship in devotion to art?

Then, but it is not central yet, it is still coming in view, another devotion. The wisdom we seek. The counsels of the language. The purpose, the effort -- is part of the wisdom.

Duncan to Olson

If as Flaubert has it "A Simple Heart": simple means single track, in a sense--and there is a duplicity not an ambiguity. What one reads is the unwitting verity reveald in the helpless effort to conceal the source and nature of the actual content.

A White City

My thoughts turn south
a white city
we will wake in one another's arms.
I wake
and hear the steampipe knock
like a metal heart
and find it has snowed.

James Schuyler

formerly

sky yet another
you vault

black and white
life you are so

very far away
upside down

repeated shove
scotched autumn

trees and day
breaking at your

lips where bees
seize in your whisper

adds up

for Andy Mister

printed a mess of things
worked on a order for yours
valentines for blunted rewards
barking dogs coaxing snow
wishes kicking down doors
Jonsing for frail leaning, something other
white flowers need evening pollinators
picture window smudges flies dead legs up
beer stains on the local rag
windfall fast I feel it most
it wasn’t anything to begin with
the grip of it
the one thing in common

written on a paper bag

clover flowers splay,
fleck to dirt rain depressions
road drought withered ferns
nuzzle, furl

plaid oak leaf mossy
incline through eaten
leaf pinholes slunk
rotted hemlocks, crocus
or lily like leaves eclipse
pond’s surface drunken
yellow jackets, bees and reeds birch
branch in beige sand flower
shadows wobble, wind peaks
near dusk

artificial

say the same in words
with instinct

you are vague to every
fire hydrant

find in feeling location

this reckless haphazard

to undermine the pretend to know

the remainder with sunlight

part of those resembled portions

the reason I always linger
in my own limited heart

of wild cheering

keep sending waves
ebb and I am giant
to no butterflies
grace the sun warm flutter
reaching to some core
and hardening branch
green sea Clementine science
turns out season as
trying as your face in
window in winter

New Coolidge at Penn Sound. Look-see the sidebar.

Harvested about 70 heads off garlic last night, stripped them, hung them. Planted a fall crop of kale, collards, and cabbage on their heels. Soon to plant brussel sprouts, broccoli, more cabbage, etc.

Trying to catch up with the weeds... hard to do one handed (broken pinkie).

Bunch of F&F stuff about to drop, keep your eyes peeled.

Phone died right after hooking up dial up, working on that.

Anyone interested in trading book assembling help for wine/beer/produce, holler via back channel.

Belated thanks to everyone in Milwaukee and Chicago who made those readings and the trip itself so excellent. Couldna been better.

Reading Olson-Duncan letters.

Soon to be working on a collaboration with Amy Borezo.

Way behind with correspondences and orders due to injury (see above) and lack of internet at home, which I just reconnected.

primeval landscape, 1944

ochre beads drop 
wobbled bends
striations harp 

pollywogs       sensitive fern

piano chords wed

motes noise margins

The Antagonists

an amateur brainwasher?
now there would be more delay than increasing agony

a formal lecture made his hands enormous

a realist prestige began to blame the fact that it happened so long ago

breakdowns through an overworked smile

as small as shamelessly as usurious

flinching, his head moved making his grab a slick lead-in

had it been refused, you would see it breaking?

that’s the rod I keep in pickle, well enough to wish him ill

shoot the awkward question, a god-awful bungle, stark riven

gratefully the left handed undreamt of success

in an armchair too small to stain

capitalist determinacy called the arts his way of life
the odds he’d been told every second of it

alive from both of them, an important fine too civilized to this sunless land

magnificent teeth, go to sleep

his heels here without reason

you can count in the inception of missiles

best microwave man alive

prynne

To swell up so long, this time indwelling
      in clouds going to flowers,
in order routine adjunct and smother
      the meaner grace below us.