Pierre Reverdy

Pier

Pierre Reverdy text, Pablo Picasso artwork, 1948

The Struggles of Words”, 1928

Torment wanders into the light beyond the roof. At midday, without sunlight. The walls are covered with snow, against a gray background. The eye stops and vainly seeks a better path.

They’ve rubbed away the designs that gave life to the crumbling walls. Some words raise themselves affirmatively. And the flood, too high, carries off the shore where the grass smooths the bank into well-combed hair. And while across the bluish rays turbulences whirl and slowly rise, silence falls heavily on the ground, without breaking.

trans. Michael Benedikt

Pierre Reverdy

 

portrait by Alberto Giacometti, 1962

the taste of reality

May 27, 2011 § Leave a comment

He took one step at a time, not knowing where he should place the next. Turning the corner, the wind swept up the dust and its greedy mouth engulfed all of space.

He began to run, hoping to take flight from one moment to the next, but along the gutter the cobblestones were slippery and his flailing arms couldn’t hold him. As he fell he understood that he was heavier than his dream and he loved, then, the weight that brought him down.

Translated by Michael Tweed

Pierre Reverdy

 

    portrait by Brassai, 1932

from painted stars (Étoiles peintes, 1921)

Movement on the horizon

The horsemen keep to the road, and in profile. One cannot tell any more how many. Against the night that blocks the way, between the river and the bridge, a weeping spring, a tree that follows you. You could watch the passing crowd and it wouldn’t see you. It’s a veritable army on the march, or else a dream, a background of a painting on a cloud. The child cries or sleeps. It watches or dreams. All these armies obstruct the sky. The earth shakes. The horses glide along the water; the cortège glides, too, in the water that washes away all these colors, all these tears.

Translation by Dan Bellm

Dale Smith

DECEMBER 10, 1999                      (for Ed Dorn) Socratic bullets brain the narrow witted Charmers and snake oil technicians who Inherit a new order of human Progress gripping a bull by the balls The rambler takes new course among a band Of star forms stitched in a Far West sky Above the banks Embarrass to Hugh's Town Brokers Dellianaires and other dis- Possessed post-industry clerks eyes blurred On pixeled screens' obital pages Ashes spread high in rocky mountains Fuck it, it feels like a hole in the sky Yellow pages selling Amazons Dot com confident triumphant win-win

Franz Wright

The  Medicine Cabinet

It seemed to take half the day to reach the bathroom, dragging this skull like unto a kite, too, behind me, and I was about a quarter to dead. That little twinge I’d started out with? Off the smiley/frowny pain chart, children, my garden of scars. Now my whole body felt as if someone had been going at it with a baseball bat as I struggled to awaken this morning long ago. From having mastered and, I have this great fear, memorized the new manual of gender-correct English usage and just good old plain personal experience I can tell you the avoidance of mirrors represents one of humankind’s major ordeals among the stars, and I approached this medicine cabinet determined that there should be no eye contact, no full frontal glimpse of myself whatsoever. I knew that I looked like death getting ready to eat a cracker! Were you aware, incidentally, that heroin was invented by Bayer, the familiar aspirin company (thanks, Friedrich)? Or that it remained, in liquid form, an effective over-the-counter cough suppressant until its disappearance from the shelves of American pharmacies in 1910? One day I am going to start to cry and never stop until I die. So what. An hour later I could still be found there gnawing my way through the first gray pill, which was about the size of a pie and must have weighed ten pounds.

Claudia Rankine

 

from CITIZEN

A woman you do not know wants to join you for lunch. You are visiting her campus. In the café you both order the Caesar salad. This overlap is not the beginning of anything because she immediately points out that she, her father, her grandfather, and you, all attended the same college. She wanted her son to go there as well, but because of affirmative action or minority something—she is not sure what they are calling it these days and weren't they supposed to get rid of it?—her son wasn't accepted. You are not sure if you are meant to apologize for this failure of your alma mater's legacy program; instead you ask where he ended up. The prestigious school she mentions doesn't seem to assuage her irritation. This exchange, in effect, ends your lunch. The salads arrive. 



A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant. 

Brenda Hillman

 

The Elements are Mixed in Childhood

for MK

(an essay in rhyme)

      Our mother was baptized on a kerosene box, our father was baptized in a creek, & we were baptized in a plaster pool while turquoise ripples played around our feet & desert air poofed up to make the long black robe a nylon buffalo. It makes your underpants wet, said our brother. It’s strange to be on fire with sins. This is how the past begins: it is the year of the missile crisis; it is the year of Barbie & Ken. Mama studies ridges in her gloves, the congregation sings a hymn while out in the desert, the worm grows tall & nature is a mixed-up miracle.
                        We strain to see the cross behind our head: not only no penis on Jesus, no Jesus at all. That’s how Baptists like it: the invisible is physical. That’s the way it is, says Walter Concrete in the news. Talking flames get rid of hell. In college we’ll read Emerson; in college we’ll meet Robert Duncan dressed like a bat but we don’t know that. Go ahead, says curlicue, the mind is what you need to make up & why should a child be dressed like a bat, wings flapping up to her sides like that? Bat-at-at-at. 
                                          The congregation sings a hymn, they hold the stanzas up-up-up. Mama studies ridges in her gloves; she is our eternal love. Childhood certainly is odd: everything is everything, earth air beauty fire wood water love blood, time is what you need to mix up & what is anything not god. The choir circles the circles; they’re singing to rehearse for glory, fiery stanzas fill our head. That’s why words are round in every story; that’s why we love music and talk to the dead—

Brenda Hillman

 

In High Desert Under the Drones

We are western creatures; we can stand for hours in the sun. We read poetry near an Air Force base. Is poetry pointless? Maybe its points are moving, as in a fire. The enlisted men can’t hear. Practice drones fly over-head to photograph our signs; they look like hornets [Vespula] with dangly legs dipping in rose circles with life grains. They photograph shadows of the hills where coyotes’ eyes have stars. They could make clouds of white writing, cilia, knitting, soul weaving, spine without nerves, dentures of the west, volcano experiments, geometry weather breath & salt. Young airmen entering the base stare from their Hondas; they are lucky to have a job in an economy like this. The letters of this poem are also lucky to have a job for they are insects & addicts & thieves. Volcanic basalt recalls its rock star father. Creosote & sage, stubby taupe leaves greet the rain. We hold our signs up. We’re all doing our jobs. Trucks bring concrete for the landing strip they’ve just begun.

A cliff stands out in winter
Twin ravens drop fire from its eyes
My inner life is not so inner & maintains the vascular system of a desert plant. I’m grateful to Samuel Beckett & to my high school boyfriend whose drunk father yelled when we closed the door & read The Unnamable during the Tet offensive. They prepared me for this. Outside the base we see borax mines in the distance – the colors of flesh, brown, black, peach, pink, bronze. We stand there as the young airmen settle into their routine. The Gnostics noted is is difficult to travel between spheres, you’ve had to memorize the secret names & the unnamable haunts every aspect of your routine. The names grown heavier as you carry them between the spheres.

From Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

Andrew Sean Greer with D.A. Powell

Andrew Sean Greer 

Sipping Tea with the Poetry of D.A. Powell

into every life some possible lover should come.    you don’t quite catch his name the first time through.     call him bryan or ryan
you met him at the antelope petting zoo.     or on the steps of city hall at the yearly die-in: he was a body among so many other bodies

some furry and with horns, some able.     some glistering in sweat, some you heaved upon like amphibious d-day craft quitting the ocean
some unable to stand erect, their soft boyparts pressed against you, the way lunchmeat feels when it falls from the sandwich onto your legs

all the untouchable figures outspread upon the asphalt, as if it’s natural to recline this way, playing possum, flashing the word vacancy
glowing snuff-colored against the motel background of a pornographic magazine carelessly tossed against the curb.     recognize one face
among the twenty-three airbrushed faces, slightly withdrawn, obviously stoned, nimbused in a union of illapsing smoke and incandescence

isn’t he the one who looked upward into your gawp as if a deathbed held him against you.     he was living, then.     you both were living
and the vessel protruded, your hull dragging up onto the beach, his carcass already a carcass on the sand, no, he was a darling critter

a feral thing, but he struck you, he bit you, and you broke inside and the condom broke, shoddy piece, princeling, posturer, dirty dirty beast 

Theresa Hak Kyung. Cha

“I have the documents. Documents, proof, evidence, photograph, signature. One day you raise your right hand and you are American. They give you an American Pass port. The United States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it with their photograph. The other one. Their signature their seals. Their own image. And you learn the executive branch the legislative branch and the third. Justice. Judicial branch. It makes the difference The rest is past.” 

excerpt― Dictee

Esteban Rodriguez

 

Cats

CATS

Belly blacker than asphalt, than fresh tire marks and the silhouette of mesquite against a filmstrip sky, I squat down as if to pay tribute, an amateur in animal deaths, in stray cats I feed dinner-scraps against my mother’s will. These are the driveway scavengers, solicitors of sympathy rubbing against my leg, and this one is the dead one that veered off its map, tested traffic, briefly became brave. I study the lump of feral bone and flesh, how the miscellany of its stomach spreads out like scree, red, rotten, rumpled like morning bed sheets, and there is a sense that if I believe in fate, this is the only end the cat could have endured, that my being here is a kind of funeral, and my silence a roadside elegy for all the lives this stretch of road has ever killed. I feel I should toss it back in the yard, prepare a more human ritual, but my hands are too young to dig a proper burial, work through dusk and watch the suburban moon rise into our country air, as it becomes a witness to the after-act of death again, and I scrape my shovel beneath its head instead, dump it in a nearby bush, turn back home with the hum of 281 singing in my ears.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

 

Field Guide to the Spectral Wilderness  When you arrive, it must be morning. The light must blue over triangles of treeline. There must be fields of corn and there must be coroners mistaking elbow joints for knee bones. There must be a trail through the woods at Possum Hollow and there must be the skull of a possum still lodged inside the trunk of a tree. There must be a tree. There must be the slightest hint of danger. There must be corners neatly tucked. There must be red the color of a puppy’s tongue there must be pleasure whether strapped or stolen and there must be ice there must always always always always be ice. There must be a way to feel our way toward the water and light from this darkness. There must be a fire. There must be a little candle thing that makes the bells go round. There must be a girl, there has always been a girl. There must be a boy, there has always been a boy. There must be a sharps container. There has never been a man but there must now be a man, not because one is needed but because one isn’t. There must be a ghost. They must be hungry. There must be a tiny meal and then there must be the best kind of love. There must be pine needles. There must be papercuts. A punchline. A burial. There must be a way to fall asleep beside the dead coyote and not wake up wearing its fur. There must be a horseman. There must be someone around here who remembers the voice of the girl. It isn’t me but it must be me. There must be daylight. There must be a yellow house. There must be a window. A ladder. A compass. We must have new names. There must be a boy and a girl and we must have new names. There must be a boy and there must be a girl. There must be. There must be. There must be someone looking for us by now. They must wonder where we are.

James Tate

The List of Famous Hats

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pinhead at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something. 

Francis Ponge

The Pleasures of the Door

      Kings never touch doors. 

      They’re not familiar with this happiness: to push, gently or roughly before you one of these great, friendly panels, to turn towards it to put it back in place—to hold a door in your arms. 

      The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; this quick hand-to-hand, during which your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment. 

     With a friendly hand you hold on a bit longer, before firmly pushing it back and shutting yourself in—of which you are agreeably assured by the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.

–Francis Ponge (translated by C.K. Williams)

Francis Ponge

The Trees Delete Themselves Inside a Fog-Sphere

In the fog which surrounds the trees, the leaves are stripped—leaves defaced already by slow oxidation, deadened by the sap's out-seeping for flowers' and fruits' gain, since the harsh heats of August made of them a less.

In the bark, vertical furrows crease and slit where dampness drains to the earth's base, indifferent to the living citizens of the trunk.

Flowers scattered, fruit conferred. Since youth, this relinquishing of breathing attributes and body parts has become for the trees a standard practice.

TRANSLATED BY KAREN VOLKMAN

 

Danez Smith

 

dear white america 

i’ve left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system revolving too near a black hole. i’ve left in search of a new God. i do not trust the God you have given us. my grandmother’s hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir. take your God back. though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent. i want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha, want Chucky, Bo, Meech, Trayvon, Sean & Jonylah risen three days after their entombing, their ghost re-gifted flesh & blood, their flesh & blood re-gifted their children. i’ve left Earth, i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don’t see race. neither did the poplar tree. we did not build your boats (though we did leave a trail of kin to guide us home). we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). we did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not America? her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). i can’t stand your ground. i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law. each night, i count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave. i reach for black folks & touch only air. your master magic trick, America. now he’s breathing, now he don’t. abra-cadaver. white bread voodoo. sorcery you claim not to practice, hand my cousin a pistol to do your work. i tried, white people. i tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones. you took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after girl after sweet boi & ask why does it always have to be about race? because you made it that way! because you put an asterisk on my sister’s gorgeous face! call her pretty (for a black girl)! because black girls go missing without so much as a whisper of where?! because there are no amber alerts for amber-skinned girls! because Jordan boomed. because Emmett whistled. because Huey P. spoke. because Martin preached. because black boys can always be too loud to live. because it’s taken my papa’s & my grandma’s time, my father’s time, my mother’s time, my aunt’s time, my uncle’s time, my brother’s & my sister’s time . . . how much time do you want for your progress? i’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until then i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more. i’ve left Earth & i am touching everything you beg your telescopes to show you. i’m giving the stars their right names. & this life, this new story & history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard or hang or beat or drown or own or redline or shackle or silence or cheat or choke or cover up or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or ruin

this, if only this one, is ours.

Harryette Mullen

 

Elliptical

They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . They ought to be more . . . We all wish they weren’t so . . . They never . . . They always . . . Sometimes they . . . Once in a while they . . . However it is obvious that they . . . Their overall tendency has been . . . The consequences of which have been . . . They don’t appear to understand that . . . If only they would make an effort to . . . But we know how difficult it is for them to . . . Many of them remain unaware of . . . Some who should know better simply refuse to . . . Of course, their perspective has been limited by . . . On the other hand, they obviously feel entitled to . . . Certainly we can’t forget that they . . . Nor can it be denied that they . . . We know that this has had an enormous impact on their . . . Nevertheless their behavior strikes us as . . . Our interactions unfortunately have been . . .

Kenneth Irby

 

At dawn, visitors from the farthest stars enter the open door from the balcony, silently, stand, muse, stare down at the sleepers, and weave about the bed entwining figures in the air with spruce boughs, in one hand, and in the other, rattles, making no sound, only stirring the air, rattling the walnut's leaves beyond the door. Slowly one foot is lifted and brought down heavily, then the other, the thunder from the stars to earth heard only in the dreamers' caverns. Footsteps and restlessness. In the slow confusion of waking up, the visitors fade from the room. The vestige of a memory of some great presence returns suddenly, fleetingly, later, during the day, the next, or another, the unintended, primordial, ever-recurring presence of Disturbance.

Haki R. Mahdubati

 

Poet: Whatever Happened to Luther?

he was strange weather, this luther, he read books, mainly 
poetry and sometimes long books about people in foreign 
places. for a young man he was too serious, he never did smile, 
and the family still don’t know if he had good teeth. he liked 
music too, even tried to play the trumpet until he heard the 
young miles davis. he then said that he’d try writing. the family 
didn’t believe him because there ain’t never been no writers in 
this family, and everybody knows that whatever you end up 
doing, it’s gotta be in your blood. it’s like loving women, it’s in 
the blood, arteries and brains. this family don’t even write let-
ters, they call everybody. thats why the phone is off 6 months 
out of a year. then again, his brother willie t. use to write long, 
long letters from prison about the books he was reading by
malcolm x, frantz fanon, george jackson, richard wright and oth-
ers. luther, unlike his brother, didn’t smoke or drink and he’d
always be doing odd jobs to get money. even his closest friends 
clyde and t. bone didn’t fully understand him. while they be par-
tying all weekend, luther would be traveling. he would take his 
little money with a bag full of food, mainly fruit, and a change of
underwear and get on the greyhound bus and go. he said he be 
visiting cities. yet, the real funny thing about luther was his 
ideas. he was always talking about afrika and black people. he 
was into that black stuff and he was light skin as a piece 
of golden corn on the cob. he’d be calling himself black and 
afrikan and upsetting everybody, especially white people. they 
be calling him crazy but not to his face. anyway the family, 
mainly the educated side, just left him alone. they would just be 
polite to him, and every child of god knows that when family
members act polite, that means that they don’t want to be
around you. it didn’t matter much because after his mother died
he left the city and went into the army. the last time we heard 
from him was 1963. he got put out of the army for rioting. he 
disappeared somewhere between mississippi and chicago. a 
third cousin, who family was also polite to, appeared one day
and said that luther had grown a beard, changed his name and 
stopped eating meat. she said that he had been to afrika and 
now lived in chicago doing what he wanted to do, writing books, 
she also said that he smiles a lot and kinda got good teeth.

Henry Dumas

 

Kef 21

First there was the earth in my mouth. It was there like a running stream, the July fever sweating the delirium of August, and the green buckling under the sun. The taste of sick dust ran in the currents of saliva which I heaved up and tried to picture when all the people would curse their own stinking guts and die. No. I am not wishing that everyone should die. Nor am I wishing that everyone should be still. Only I am squeezing out the steam in me.