Jackson MacLow

Twenties 26

Jackson Mac Low - 1922-2004

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Undergone swamp ticket   relative 
whist natural sweep   innate bicker 
flight notion  reach out tinsel reckoning 
bit  straddle  iniquitous ramble stung


Famous furniture instant paschal 
passionate Runnymede licorice 
feature departure   frequency gnash 
lance    sweat lodge rampart crow


Neck Bedlam philosophaster rain drape 
lack fragile limitation   bitartrate 
fence lenghen tinge impinge  classed 
Fenster   planetary knocked market


Glass killjoy vanity  infanta part song 
king  cleanse vast chromium watch it 
neat      intense yellow cholera 
ornithology insistence     pantry


Torque normal fax center globe host 
yammer ratchet     zinc memory 
yield  texture  tenure   Penelope 
reed liter   risible stashed incomprehension



             11 February 1990
          Kennedy Airport. New York  en route to San Diego 

Clayton. Eshleman

CHROMATIC LESIONS

Wind swept impermanence of this endless winch.

Myriad mouths of beings multiplied, dulcified, zithered through history.

Wingless butterflies less lost than I am
under the caterpillar treads redesigning my face pilgrimage.

                                                        Yet this autumn is beautiful,
and beautiful the loss underscored by sunlight and safe night sleep.

I have sealed my own destructiveness, cauterized its principle feelers.

Why can’t I accept that Hitler one way or another is stirring much of
the unseen porridge, not cunning Adoph
but the crocodile levity in men—
laugh-in howl-out against which I sniffle
fixed in my high chair
listening to grandpa read a letter from the ex-Russian renter
writing the Eshleman family about the horrors of the siege of Leningrad.

Everything is and has never been a milling, amorphous terribilita
searching for desire in which to curl.

I have learned to see
in the faces of the dead

a jug of rose-white chickadee explodes 

J. Jennifer Espinosa

To the Queer Woman Who Asked Me if I Have a Dick

 Do you have a soul?

Can you entrust your own desires to it?

Why do you need me
to spell things out for your comfort?

I grew up beneath the same boot as you
only I was lodged in its crevices

and you thought this made me a part of it.
I was never rubber, never pressing,

just womanly flesh all gummed up and full of pavement.
I don’t want to talk about the violence anymore.

I don’t owe you an explanation.
No one owes anyone their body.

When I meet another human being, I ask
What do you give yourself to and why?

I fall in love with people who know we don’t know shit.
Everything I adore about women cannot be spoken

because the words have not yet been invented.
I imagine another life, a possibility of healing, of knowing, of listening.

It could appear the day we stop relying upon the materials of this one.
So ask me whatever you wish—I have no desire to police you

James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara

 

 328 East 48th Street

New York, New York

Jan 15, 1954

Pearl Without Price,

First the worst: your five dollar check bounced. N’import. I made it good, and you can pay me back when . . . the primroses come back to 49th Street.

Everybody is sick. The boys [Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale] from air travel, me with a bug in the gut that keeps me lolling in the can. And the streets are swimming in swill, like the opening of Bleak House.

Arthur thumbs-downed the apt. on 21st Street, and we’re going to live in the Chelsea. My favorite hotel; and I’ve always dreamt of living in a hotel, with its parade of maids bringing fresh linens, and a switchboard to call you in the morning. The apt. will be quite nice with a big, big room for the pianos & sitting, and a good-sized one (completely cut off from the piano practice) for sleeping and me. I know I’ll like it.

What are you writing? What are Larry [Rivers] and Fairfield [Porter] painting? What are you painting? What are they writing?

Arthur and I saw In the Summer House Wednesday night—more laughter & tears, and no diminution of satisfaction.

I told John to give me the five…and he said you want to go to the opening (Feb. 2) of Nutcracker with him, and he’s going to buy your ticket out of the five. So you can leave it so, or write him different.

The enclosed is a pin-money present for my Sweet Singer from County Cork. Spend it in good health.

My love to Larry and Fairfield and their respective households.

Remember me to our mother the sea.

Tourjours ton bête,

Jimmy

George Oppen

A Spectre in Every Street: George Oppen and the Poetics of Communism

Dominick Knowles August 15, 2018

PDF

Duncan, Reznikoff, Oppen, Rakoski

The Forms of Love

Parked in the fields

All night

So many years ago,

We saw

A lake beside us

When the moon rose.

I remember

Leaving that ancient car

Together. I remember

Standing in the white grass

Beside it. We groped

Our way together

Downhill in the bright

Incredible light

Beginning to wonder

Whether it could be lake

Or fog We saw, our heads

Ringing under the stars we walked

To where it would have wet our feet

Had it been water

Tracy K. Smith

 

Nathan Perkel

Sci-Fi

There will be no edges, but curves.

Clean lines pointing only forward.

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,

Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.

Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,

Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.

For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.

The oldest among us will recognize that glow—
But the word sun will have been re-assigned

To a Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.

And yes, we'll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,

Eons from even our own moon, we'll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once

And for all, scrutable and safe.

Amy Lowell

The Weather-Cock points South

I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves; 
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves. 
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind.

White flower,
Flower of wax, of jade, of unstreaked agate;
Flower with surfaces of ice,
With shadows faintly crimson.
Where in all the garden is there such a flower?
The stars crowd through the lilac leaves
To look at you. 
The low moon brightens you with silver.

The bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no colour, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight, 
Thrust upon a softly-swinging wind.

J. Jennifer Espinoza

My first love was silence. I built myself from scratch

and no one listened.
This was the best time of my life.
I used to carry the clothes
to the laundry room
and pray for all the fog
in the world to surround me.
I’d let my thoughts 
catch rides
with passing airplanes.
All that womanhood
caught in the roof 
of my mouth
was like honey.
I knew it would never
go bad
so I never said a word 
         about it.

Fernando Pessoa

  

Everything that a human being expounds or expresses is a note in the margin, of a text that has been totally erased.
From the meaning of the note, we, more or less, discern the meaning the text may have contained;
but there is always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

From, 'O livro de desassossego'

Fernando Pessoa

If They Want Me to Be a Mystic, Fine

If they want me to be a mystic, fine. So I’m a mystic.

I’m a mystic, but only of the body.

My soul is simple; it doesn’t think.

 

My mysticism consists in not desiring to know,

In living without thinking about it.

 

I don’t know what Nature is; I sing it.

I live on a hilltop

In a solitary cabin.

And that’s what it’s all about.

(Translated by Edwin Honig) 

Frank O'Hara

Ode to Joy 

 

We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying

on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs

for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter

over an insatiable sexual appetite

and the streets will be filled with racing forms

and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars

will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms

to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably

as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin

and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg

and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith

that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness

near the grave of love

No more dying

 

A. E. Stallings

 

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther

 

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, 

The booze and the neon and Saturday night, 

The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons? 

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes? 

Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons 

And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite? 

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, 

The booze and the neon and Saturday night? 

Michael Palmer

Notes for Echo Lake

Who did he talk to

Did she trust what she saw

Who does the talking

Whose words formed awkward curves

Did the lion finally talk

Did the sleeping lion talk

Did you trust a north window

What made the dog bark

What causes a grey dog to bark

What does the juggler tell us

What does the juggler’s redness tell us

Is she standing in an image

Were they lost in the forest

Were they walking through a forest

Has anything been forgotten

Did you find it in the dark

Is that one of them new atomic-powered wristwatches

Was it called a talking song

Is that an oblong poem

Was poetry the object

Was there once a road here ending at a door

Thus from bridge to bridge we came along

Did the machine seem to talk

Did he read from an empty book

Did the book grow empty in the dark, grey felt hat blowing down the

street, arms pumping back and forth, legs slightly bowed

Are there fewer ears than songs

Did he trust a broken window

Did he wake beneath a tree in the recent snow

Whose words formed difficult curves

Have the exaggerations quieted down

The light is lovely on trees which are not large

My logic is all in the melting-pot

My life now is very economical

I can say nothing of my feeling about space

Nothing could be clearer than what you see on this wall

Must we give each one a name

Is it true they all have names

Would it not have been simpler

Would it not have been simpler to begin

Were there ever such buildings

I must remember to mention the trees

I must remember to invent some trees

Who told you these things

Who taught you how to speak

Who taught you not to speak

Whose is the voice that empties

Denis Johnson

 

Sway

 

Since I find you will no longer love,

from bar to bar in terror I shall move

past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth

and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,

their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,

suffer the light from the wrestling arena

to fall all over them. And what they say

blends in the tarantellasmic sway

of all of us between the two of these:

harmony and divergence,

their sad story of harmony and divergence,

the story that begins

I did not know who she was

and ends I did not know who she was.

  

Andrew Zawacki

OTHEREARTHLY SONNET

Sashes open, a blouse flutters white

Diffraction artifacts



Morning in the Place des Vosges—perlite

Sunlight baccarats the garden’s 10-blade diaphragm—, you

Tipple through the blanched arcades a

Banshee beauty

Parlor curler

Left plugged in too long



Starlet or harlot, faux Arletty

Harlow with your furloughed halo (chemin de verre is

Some thing wrong



Lens flare carries the outscape, an aura of the Aura



Blow on it with your breath



Then, aircraft

 

Andrew Zawacki

 

Dixie Pixie Sonnet

Solar panel, a Fresnel lens,
5 lb bag of M&Ms; & we could 3-D print a clone of you

Pell mell all hell & ill will will break loose
If you don’t wear your cheap synthetic, frilly fuchsia princess dress,
Faux glass high heel sequin slippers clacking on the tile

In your lifetime, the Arctic will have been

You’re a frog no you’re a frog

To conjugate in a future imperfect : will have been ongoing, once

Daughter you’re borderline pixilated, perhaps from the Swedish dialect pyske — 
“fairy,” ca. 1630 — or Cornwall Celtic for “pixie-led” : confused, bewildered,
unbalanced, astray ; or an actress as stop-motion marionette, in animated films,
altering her posture — like a flick book — frame by frame

Sound speed :
They are drilling it out of the ground to blacken the sun

Tom Clark

Tom Clark, three Padgetts. Photo. by Joe Brainard,  1966.

Blown Away

ephemeral as tinkerbell 
unmoored yet not unmoved 
tossed cloudward, flipped 

sans volition 

into the flow 

going but not wanting to go 
without the other flotsam

Tom Clark

 

Tom Clark in Bolinas, California in 1972. He was a prized student of the poet Donald Hall and the poetry editor for George Plimpton’s Paris Review.Credit...Gerard Malang

Oct. 28

The day of the dead when 
the veil between us and them 
is thinnest eyelash 
kitty breath umbrella flutter 
psychic butterfly - 

A whole procession of them coming 
pushing through the thin 
mesh of the net - the sugar candy 
shedding of the skin and how 
it lets the wind blow through the veins 
the dance of the skulls and when 
the spinning of the little mechanic 
inside the toy clock stops 
the dark man carrying two suitcases 
steps from the now no longer 
moving train - 

That's the day when 
I know someone will be 
no longer waiting, 
the unborn child said. 
I invented what I wanted to say 
in case anybody out there, 
on a cold grey day in autumn, 
wanted to hear the thoughts 
of the dead -� 

I opened the door and 
in flew a moth, thinking 
twilight came early