This Moment: November 17, 2010 1:37 P.M.
The insect buzz of heavy metal is coming from the earphones of a man seated next to me. His large sunglasses are held tightly to his brow by the red bandanna knotted to his head. It is a room with very little light and I wonder what light is it that he is shielding himself from. White noise fills the hollow spaces in this ordered room. Our faces are bathed in a type of incandescent blue from the illuminated light of our computer screens. It is a cinematic space age kind of silence we exist in while we write our emails, then break to tap out our texts. We tell the stories of our lives in installments of one-hundred twenty characters and send them tumbling through the ether. The insistent drum of fingers on keypads is a tumble of rhythm like fingers tapping out chords on a wooden table. We are insular musicians, sending failed compositions to those we hold in our hearts, our heads, our hands, rather than look up and around us or peer into the eyes of the man seated next to that we're sharing our intimate air. We are all like the man in dark sunglasses. Not one of us dare to look over our computer screen and lock eyes. In this room, we are all cowards insulated in a thick wrapping of loneliness, hoping that someone will make the first move, look up, and see us.
Willow Pine Lane: Early Winter November 15, 2010
The season is trying to make up its mind as to whether it is fall or winter. We've had frost and snow, but the leaves still hold their color. The air is crisp, but not severe yet.
Poem Therapy at 1:18 P.M. November 15, 2010 - Matthea Harvey
Wac-A-Mole Realism™
Matthea Harvey
At the carnival, Robo-Boy sees only things he recognizes. The Ferris Wheel is an overgrown version of his own bells and whistle eyes. His Flashers, his mother calls them. The Tilt-A-Whirl is the angle his head tilts when the Flirt Program goes into effect, usually in the vicinity of a Cindy or a Carrie, though once he found himself tilting at the school librarian which caused him to wheel in reverse into the Civil War section knocking over a cart of books that were waiting to be shelved under B. There’s a dangerously low stratosphere of pink cotton-candy clouds being carried around by the children. If Robo-Boy goes near them, the alarms will go off. It’s the kind of sticky that would cause joint-lock for sure. In a darker, safer corner Robo-Boy finds the Whack-A-Mole game. He pays a dollar and starts whacking the plastic moles on their heads each time they pop up from the much-dented log. He wins bear after bear. It’s only when he's lugging them home, the largest one skidding face-down along the sidewalk getting dirt on its white nose and light blue belly, that he remembers the program: Wac-A-Mole Realism™—the disc on the installer’s desk. Suddenly it all fits together: the way a deliciously strange thought will start wafting out of his unconscious—and then WHAM, it disappears.
I chose this poem today because of its pugilist title. I have a few moles I'd like to wac, but waccing begets waccing and so on and so on until the whole of existence becomes biblical or Shakespearean, in the sense that by the end everybody is dead or bloody. In reality you can only wac so many moles until you yourself get wacced.
In any case, my current mood led me to Matthea Harvey, a new voice, for me at least. Her prose poems read like micro fiction. If you are interested in reading more of her work, here's the link.
fyi: I always thought wac was spelled whack.
Matthea Harvey
At the carnival, Robo-Boy sees only things he recognizes. The Ferris Wheel is an overgrown version of his own bells and whistle eyes. His Flashers, his mother calls them. The Tilt-A-Whirl is the angle his head tilts when the Flirt Program goes into effect, usually in the vicinity of a Cindy or a Carrie, though once he found himself tilting at the school librarian which caused him to wheel in reverse into the Civil War section knocking over a cart of books that were waiting to be shelved under B. There’s a dangerously low stratosphere of pink cotton-candy clouds being carried around by the children. If Robo-Boy goes near them, the alarms will go off. It’s the kind of sticky that would cause joint-lock for sure. In a darker, safer corner Robo-Boy finds the Whack-A-Mole game. He pays a dollar and starts whacking the plastic moles on their heads each time they pop up from the much-dented log. He wins bear after bear. It’s only when he's lugging them home, the largest one skidding face-down along the sidewalk getting dirt on its white nose and light blue belly, that he remembers the program: Wac-A-Mole Realism™—the disc on the installer’s desk. Suddenly it all fits together: the way a deliciously strange thought will start wafting out of his unconscious—and then WHAM, it disappears.
I chose this poem today because of its pugilist title. I have a few moles I'd like to wac, but waccing begets waccing and so on and so on until the whole of existence becomes biblical or Shakespearean, in the sense that by the end everybody is dead or bloody. In reality you can only wac so many moles until you yourself get wacced.
In any case, my current mood led me to Matthea Harvey, a new voice, for me at least. Her prose poems read like micro fiction. If you are interested in reading more of her work, here's the link.
fyi: I always thought wac was spelled whack.
Poem Therapy at 11:12 P.M.: November 13, 2010 - Melissa Kwasny
Reading Novalis in Montana
Melissa Kwasny
The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.
Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.
Then, the brutal intervention of sound.
All that we experience is a message, he wrote.
I would like to know what it means
if first one bird swims the channel
across the classic V, the line flutters, and the formation dissolves.
In the end, the modernists must have meant,
it is the human world we are weary of,
our arms heavy with love, its ancient failings.
But that was before the world wars, in 1800,
when a young German poet could pick at the truth
and collect the fragments in an encyclopedia of knowledge.
There is a V, then an L, each letter
forming so slowly that the next appears before it is complete.
The true philosophical act is the slaying of one's self,
Novalis wrote, and died, like Keats, before he was thirty.
They have left me behind like one of their lost,
scratching at the gravel in the fields. Where are they
once the sky has enveloped them?
I stand in the narrow cut of a frozen road leading into mountains,
the morning newspaper gripped under my arm.
But to give up on things precludes everything.
I am not-I, Novalis wrote. I am you.
If, as the gnostics say, the world was a mistake
created by an evil demiurge, and I am trapped
in my body, abandoned by a god whom I long for as one of my own,
why not follow the tundra geese into their storm?
Why stay while my great sails flap the ice
as if my voice were needed to call them back
in the spring, as if I were the lost dwelling place for the flocks?
I like the title of this poem, and the pairing of a poet against a western state known for cowboys and its endless blue sky. I suppose each of us could pen similar titles. Of late, mine would be Reading Plato in Utah, or Deciphering Tolle in a Small, Small Town.
Like the poem's speaker, I too look to the geese and know that they beckon me to join them. Earthbound, I call to them to make of me their home. And if I can't have god of the gnostics, orany god, then the wild geese have permission to settle in my heart. Until they do, I will make do with them landing in the fields behind my home.
Melissa Kwasny
The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.
Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.
Then, the brutal intervention of sound.
All that we experience is a message, he wrote.
I would like to know what it means
if first one bird swims the channel
across the classic V, the line flutters, and the formation dissolves.
In the end, the modernists must have meant,
it is the human world we are weary of,
our arms heavy with love, its ancient failings.
But that was before the world wars, in 1800,
when a young German poet could pick at the truth
and collect the fragments in an encyclopedia of knowledge.
There is a V, then an L, each letter
forming so slowly that the next appears before it is complete.
The true philosophical act is the slaying of one's self,
Novalis wrote, and died, like Keats, before he was thirty.
They have left me behind like one of their lost,
scratching at the gravel in the fields. Where are they
once the sky has enveloped them?
I stand in the narrow cut of a frozen road leading into mountains,
the morning newspaper gripped under my arm.
But to give up on things precludes everything.
I am not-I, Novalis wrote. I am you.
If, as the gnostics say, the world was a mistake
created by an evil demiurge, and I am trapped
in my body, abandoned by a god whom I long for as one of my own,
why not follow the tundra geese into their storm?
Why stay while my great sails flap the ice
as if my voice were needed to call them back
in the spring, as if I were the lost dwelling place for the flocks?
I like the title of this poem, and the pairing of a poet against a western state known for cowboys and its endless blue sky. I suppose each of us could pen similar titles. Of late, mine would be Reading Plato in Utah, or Deciphering Tolle in a Small, Small Town.
Like the poem's speaker, I too look to the geese and know that they beckon me to join them. Earthbound, I call to them to make of me their home. And if I can't have god of the gnostics, orany god, then the wild geese have permission to settle in my heart. Until they do, I will make do with them landing in the fields behind my home.
This Moment - November 13, 2010 8:06 A.M.
A small plane is buzzing the sky like a fly trapped in a window well, its drone an unceasing white noise until its small death silences it. The trees have yet to relent and release their frost-limned leaves. Their stubbornness against the inevitable is a dark mirror. My daughter's cat is protesting in the kitchen, its yowls making note of some unforgivable infraction. Morning silence again. The air is dense with the knowledge of the ending of light. The sun is in retreat. An oyster-colored cloud is visible through the tangle of branches. It slowly diffuses into a faded denim. A crow caw-caws a greeting and I feel hopefulness unfurl its long wing under my ribs. Perhaps the coming season of darkness will not be so heavy. A train is summoning its arrival and it too causes another fluttering, the small bird inside me stirring. My dog growls at the world outside the window. A small bird flits from fence to tree.
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