Scott Cohen take me now.


(I may draw fanart.)

House of five fires, you never raised me.
Those nights when the throat of the furnace
wheezed and rattled its regular death,
I wanted your wide door,

your mottled air of bark and working sunlight,
wanted your smokehole with its stars,
and your roof curving its singing mouth above me.
Here are the tiers once filled with sleepers,

and their low laughter measured harmony or strife.
Here I could wake amazed at winter,
my breath in the draft a chain of violets.
The house I left as a child now seems

a shell of sobs. Each year I dream it sinister
and dig in my heels to keep out the intruder
banging at the back door. My eyes burn
from cat urine under the basement stairs

and the hall reveals a nameless hunger,
as if without a history, I should always walk
the cluttered streets of this hapless continent.
Thinking it best I be wanderer,

I rode whatever river, ignoring every zigzag,
every spin. I’ve been a fragment, less than my name,
shaking in a solitary landscape,
like the last burnt leaf on an oak.

What autumn wind told me you’d be waiting?
House of five fires, they take you for a tomb,
but I know you better. When desolation comes,
I’ll hide your ridgepole in my spine

and melt into crow call, reminding my children
that spiders near your door
joined all the reddening blades of grass
without oil, hasp, or uranium.

——

 Featured in New Voices From the Longhouse, 1989

One of my favorite poems from one of my tribesmembers (Oneida). She is incredible. I hope to be writing like this someday.

——

about the megafauna

Things grow inchoate when I close my eyes. So open them:
red dumpster and the redbud tree, how the pitcher-plant

drowns its prey, terra cotta earth, my soft nun-body—
coarse sheets, cheap underthings.

Inside the vanishing, women bump each other on the street. 
Their bags-full-of-world make a tissue paper rustling.

I’ve been thinking about the megafauna.
Take the tundra horse. Take the secretary bird.

Leaves become trash and the invasive grasses are facilitated by our hems. 
Thaw-water in clogged gutters, a fault line where I salt the steps.

The tundra horse, once real, is no longer among us.
Night says             galaxy            dryrot             distillation.

Night wobbles like a tilda.

Histology says I’m bruised but good.

—

From “Lake of Hours.” Kerri has a collection called We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone.

Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me.

Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me. 

———-

By Audre Lorde. Via the insanely talented Tamiko Beyer for the find. I want someday to be so accomplished. :)

After the affair and the moving out, 
after the destructive revivifying passion, 
we watched her life quiet

into a new one, her lover more and more 
on its periphery. She spent many nights 
alone, happy for the narcosis

of the television. When she got cancer 
she kept it to herself until she couldn’t 
keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated 
and saved her, and one day

her husband asked her to come back— 
his wife, who after all had only fallen 
in love as anyone might 
who hadn’t been in love in a while—

and he held her, so different now, 
so thin, her hair just partially 
grown back. He held her like a new woman

and what she felt 
felt almost as good as love had, 
and each of them called it love 
because precision didn’t matter anymore.

And we who’d been part of it, 
often rejoicing with one 
and consoling the other,

we who had seen her truly alive 
and then merely alive, 
what could we do but revise 
our phone book, our hearts,

offer a little toast to what goes on.

         - Stephen Dunn (Different Hours)

—
Image: redfull

There’s a word for sadness that dwells in the small 
of the back, the dell where you bury your chin. You mark 
the page where the animal comes down to drink 
from stale water. There’s a word for release born of grief, 
tempered with soapy musk in the creases. There is no 
gazelle. There’s a catalogue of frequently absent hours, 
a figure of speech for ellipsis that starts at the throat 
and sashays night continents, skirting veldt, dwelling eons 
in tundra where underbrush is just story, fabulous tinder. 
You rise several times to drink from the sink’s moony 
white, under-pipes moaning like vast mammals 
shimmying through canyons of sea ice, somewhere 
a ledger that measures the damp of the sheets, 
charts all things alluvial between first longing 
and loss, breviary of the sub-zero plains where I toss, 
insomniac, missing. There’s a phrase for absence gullied 
just short of reckoning, ghost-damaging your rise 
and falling weight inside me, there’s a verb for slow peril 
logged in a commonplace book dog-eared 
and oily—finger, finger. You mark the chapter where drowning 
mirages into understanding, the whole book stab-stitched 
or was it accordioned, a flaunt of unfolding and the pilgrim 
drinking from a dirty glass.

- Kerri Webster (from We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone)

—-

A huge inspiration to me, through her work and her teaching, Kerri Webster is just downright fantastic. She was my poetry mentor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Suddenly everyone was speaking
poetry, or something vaguely
like it. Wheel harvest if blank

I said to my wife, thinking how
did you sleep? Spinning around
eye face she balked, thinking

what the hell are you talking
about? We stared at our
reflections in the bathroom

mirror, rabid toothpaste mouths
dripping into his-and-her
sinks. The morning news

was a total disaster. A well
dressed man and well dressed
woman, makeup caked faces

sharpened straight through
the screen, took turns clucking
chipper nonsense with nonsense

captions adorning graphics. Lie
glottal sex throes chirped the perky
blonde under If books wing

therefore and a question
mark inside the shape of a human
brain. They couldn’t tell us about

the aphasia, and we were none
the wiser, doubting more
and more even what we meant

to say, our mouths still tingling.

                  - Trey Conatser (via Diagram)