“My soul, embalmed in ink . . .” ~ Elton Glaser, from “Dirge in the Chalumeau Register”

“Moon Night” (before 1911?)
by Jan Sluyters

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“One can sometimes
touch, in the distance between two people,
a moment of another person’s endless dream.” ~Yves Bonnefoy, from In the Shadow’s Light

Wednesday afternoon. Sunny and hot, 90 degrees. Too hot to think clearly.

“Sunrise” (1910, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

Too many thoughts to be cohesive:

• We wish for something so deeply only to have the reality of it be so disparate from our imaginings.
• We write songs in our heads about all of the things we lack, but the words never quite fit the melodies.
• My brain is replete with complex yearnings, yet I am unable to find a way in which to fill these chasms.
• What we are is so very different from who we are.
• Need is identified by the individual, leaving little room for insincere attempts to placate and pacify.

“We look up at the same stars, and see such different things.” ~ George R. R. Martin, from A Storm of Swords

“Morning Glory” (1909, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

I continually find scraps of paper with snatches of words and phrases, but no context, so I don’t know what they mean, much like life.

• So many weeks of being alone and lonely and having no idea as to how to ameliorate the sadness only to have the sadness become a permanent attendant.
• Loneliness is ephemeral, yet incongruously, it can seep into the edges of moments in which we are not alone.
• We traverse the deserts of our lives, travel these landscapes looking for the familiar, the taste of water on our dry lips.
• The heart is a self-fulfilling prophet of despair.
• When talking becomes too tangled, the only victor is silence.

“I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.” ~ Edward Thomas, from “Lights Out”

“Full Moon on the Water” (1912, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

I grow weary of the open-ended nature of life, would that it could be seen in advance.

• How can two people stand side-by-side beneath the same night sky and be unable to share the same brief snatches of beauty?
• Horizons become limited by our myopic views of life, death, and love.
• Love is a word heavy with deceit, laden with misinterpretation.
• I had believed that my viewpoint had merit in your eyes, mistakenly so, it seems.
• The veins beneath the skin, the heart’s steady beat, a map to what we are—yet so many of the blue lines are false horizons.
• I do not understand this reality—its labyrinthine truth is too twisted to discern.

“Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity.” ~ Georges Bataille, from Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Landscape by Moonlight II” (1911, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

I am so tired, weary to the bone, and I do not harbor enough energy to bridge this gulf.

• The joy of life lies hidden too deeply to be found most days.
• There is no corner large enough to hide me, even when I am this small.
• Oh how I long for earnest conversation, the honest camaraderie that once was.
• We all hide our selves from the light, no matter how much we may deny it, because darkness is so much easier to enfold.
• True north is impossible to pinpoint when two people come to it from such different points on the compass.

“I do not know whether to be joy-white with my spirit
Or rent-gray with the blown remnants of my mind.” ~ Maxwell Bodenheim, from A Man to a Dead Woman”

“Forest Trail” (1910, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

I failed to notice that I and my opinions had become irrelevant, much to my own chagrin.

• Longing is the most pregnant of two-syllable words, followed only by heartache, so intricate are their definitions.
• Betrayal is a complicated word, one most people are unable to identify as betrayal is like smoke—dense at first, transparent later.
• The weight of words drags us down to the silty bottom, yet it is only through words that we will be able to float above the water line once more.
• The translucent nature of my need offers you a map easy enough to follow to my heart, yet you spit upon my fire.
• Silence of the heart comes from suffering of the soul, and neither are easily repaired.
• Apology is a word heavy with incomprehensible implications.

All images are by Dutch artist, Jan Sluyters (1881-1957).

Music by Night Beds, “Even if We Try”

                   

Bioluminescence

1. Candela

The eggs burn softly
in the earth, and when glow worms
hatch out, ravenous, each one comes with a tiny
bright square of light like the view-hole to a
furnace notched in its belly.
Can you feel their heat? Their hunger for the tender
moonstruck flesh of slugs and snails?

1. Lambert

Sometimes at night, fire
flies are startled by lightning,
the tympani-drum flutter of thunder rumbling the storm
home, and they all flash at once in surprise—a quick
blinking open of sleepy
green nocturnal eyes, a phosphorescent murmur:
Go back to sleep. It’s just rain

1. Lumen

How vulnerable
we would all be if longing
shone through our bodies, if our skins were translucent
lanterns flushed with yellow flame leaping in the strange
and unpredictable winds
of our desire, like the neon Morse code fireflies
use to brazenly flick the night.

1. Luciferin

You are a dusky
angel drawn to the gleaming
beam of my porch light, a brief embered orange blaze
from your cigarette, sizzle of sparks splattering
the asphalt of my sidewalk.
Your touch like sooty moth wings, and I glow, suffused
with your heat, your scent, your light.

~ Lee Ann Roripaugh

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“Shadow is a fate you involved.” ~ Carmen Giménez Smith, from “Déjà Vu”

“The Sea” (1947, oil on canvas)
by Alice Neel

                   

I feel as if I have been run over and left on rusty monkey-bars to dry in the winter sun.

Is it January 31st yet?

This video made me cry:

Brandi Carlile, “That Wasn’t Me”

                    

Oh well. Poetry for your Sunday afternoon . . .

The National Book Critics Circle Award 2013 Finalists for Poetry:

Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Knopf)

Denise Duhamel, Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon)

Carmen Gimenez Smith, Milk and Filth (University of Arizona Press)

                   

Carpe Demon

Where is your father whose eye you were the apple of?

Where are your mother’s parlor portieres, her slip-covered days, her petticoats?

In the orchard at the other end of  time, you were just a child in ballet slippers,

Your first poodle skirt, your tortoiseshell barrettes. As the peach tree grew more

Scarce each day, you kept running out to try to tape the leaves back on their boughs.

Once, I caught you catch a pond of sunlight in your lap and when you stood,

The sunlight spilt; it could never follow you. Once, above the river,

You told me you were born to be a turtle, swimming down. Under the bridge

Now you take your meals where the thinnest creatures live at the end

Of the world. Carpe Demon, you told me just before you put down the phone

And drank the antifreeze. This year, the winter sky in Missouri is a kind of cold

The color of a turtle’s hood, a soup of dandelion, burdock root, and clay.

~ Lucie Brock-Broido

                   

O my pa-pa

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
“My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Given Your Mother’s Taste
for Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.”
They’re not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don’t know why it’s so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
that they’re the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that’ll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.

~ Bob Hicok