Last Bender

Thomas Hardy
These are perfect sonnets by the master. His thought is crabbed, his metre a little eccentric at times, so that he reminds me of Emily Dickinson, but also of Sydney and Shakespeare, who contorted themselves to fit the little sonnet, and of Yeats, especially the first of the She, to Him poems, which I [...]

Tim Congdon
Tim sent me this in February of 2008. I will miss him. He ‘tore through the iron gates of time’. My love to Zach, who lost a father. The rest of us lost a poet and a sort of human wolverine who refused to concede to disease or reality one quark more than they [...]

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
          Every time I shut my eyes to sleep I saw exploding glass. Or felt the man’s blood rush down my fingers. I shook and chattered my teeth and soaked the sheets in sweat. At last I fell into a deep senseless sleep.
          So senseless I failed to notice the alarm, the garbage [...]

This is a quixotic post, more personal than I usually do, and really, it’s just a signal sent out into the void, hoping for contact with anyone who lived at 3 Berry Place in Darwin, Australia in 1983. I lived in a tent in the back yard for 3 months, I forget which three but [...]

A Midnight Thirst
 
A midnight thirst comes upon me.
The air between us burns.
We bend to the moon. 
Nocturnal shifting in the shadows,
Hiding from the high hoots of owls,
Patient steps of panther feet.
Faces pressed against the moss
Hearts like bats in circles. 

Studs Terkel used to describe himself as a radical conservative. Radical, in the sense of ‘root’, and conservative, in the sense of preserving this root. I am certain that the root or radical he wanted to conserve was a radical notion of freedom, and that he saw radical freedom as the core value of America, [...]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
          Wet wind blew against the windshield. We got out and walked, hands deep in P coats, through the smell of boat fuel and tar and the distressed cries of cattle punched to their knees in the abattoirs. Then more machinery, then the bells and horns of freighters cutting the rain and fog.    [...]

Over at Cahiers de Corey Josh has a post about poetry that just depresses the hell out of me, though maybe it’s just the jolly season that has me so down. He seems to suggest that a poetry stripped of beautiful language, that is aesthetically distrustful of the poetic itself, is more honest, or at [...]

This is one of the very few ‘9-11′ poems I wrote that survived the garbage can. Since the recession of those years never ended but just became more general, this poem’s occasion still exists, for what it’s worth (maybe a turnip?).
Jug Wine
 
Hot sun on the stoop
no shade given or needed.
We talked in our bare feet
felt for [...]

Track 28
 
the eroded faces of men
sinking into smoke and martinis,
replenished lips kissing the dented
pillow and the ink of their mouths
wasted in streams
the water that feeds
dead rivers, the wind
that whittles rocks
and the rough shadow
of whiskered faces
on the five twenty
out of grand central
boarded up buildings of
childhood flashing like
billboards in the Bronx
now I am suddenly [...]