Working On It

So I'm writing a poem every day since I got here. Here are two that Brette said were alright.

August 9, 2009

What Is Still Literal

“…[T]his vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric—and vaporous—metaphor: the cloud.” – The New York Times Magazine

“Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems.” – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The cloud doesn’t hold a character,
a bit or byte of memory, a digital image.

The cloud is an animal, a cetacean
that grieves and the sky

its own whale-road, full of forgiveness.
The cloud is a Ford Fairlane

with a long hood and fins.
The cloud is also a loon, loud

wings flapping against the water.
The cloud isn’t a metaphor

but a shape that doesn’t hold
like the loss of joint memory, a place

where we held externally our interiors.
The cloud is not a place

to store data or one to decide
who remembers what. It is a cloud.


August 10, 2009

The Tipping Point

Skitter is too cacophonous a word
to transmit the sound
of a mouse sliding down the plastic
trash bin’s side. S doesn’t
soften the k to reflect the futility
of four paws up and then back,
the hasty upshot and heavy
return to bottom. If gravity is
relative to size, then we can all know
how the mouse feels coming down.
We can all understand
the convergence of some dozen ants
that creep in, defying gravity,
to take out the mouse.

So Instead

Yes, I have again taken to posting to this many-times-dead blog. Have done much here and yet I am still waiting for the productive season of separation from this hole. Time for lodging.

The Summer of the Bike

This is the summer of the bike. Let me clarify: the bike I never ride. Figuratively, the baby blue Ross Europa that stands precariously in the hallway of my building is a symbol. When I think of symbolism, I now think of reading my friend's AP students' essays about The Heart of Darkness and how they don't really understand symbolism. Symbolism is, in some ways, too easy. The bike, it seems, is a place for me to project my other should haves. Because it's there in my hallway. Every time I come into my building. Every time I go to smoke a cigarette in the back patio. I moved it a little the other day. Just because I felt like it must be in the way of my neighbor, the guy who watches out for the building and takes out the trash. I imagine if he had a problem with it, he'd say so. But the guilt I felt thinking about that is only a symptom of the guilt I feel for only riding my bike twice. It had cobwebs between the handlebars when I moved it.

Is it a coincidence that symptom and symbol sound so similar? I can't truly sum up the season with this bike. But as each day passes where I haven't done what I intended to do, it gets easier to identify the malaise with this bike or to allow the bike to stand for what the weeks could have been. It could have been the summer where Brooklyn was shrinking. On my bike, things could have gotten smaller. Yet things seem to have gotten bigger. Clouds have begun looming more heavily. Another rainy day without taking a ride.

Summer Reading

The list so far...

The Screwtape Letters
The Stranger
A Long Way Gone
Ishmael
The Alchemist
The Whole Five Feet
The Known World
Evil in Modern Thought
The Girl With The Pearl Earring

Gainesville Chapter Book: Chapter 13: In which our heroine...

I had a really wonderful afternoon in Gainesville last week. I wandered and drove around to a lot of places by myself. Spent about three hours just stomping out ghosts and reading poetry in the park near where I used to live.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with that necessarily. And if I were taking Robert Bly's advice (I'm finally reading the entirety of Leaping Poetry) and running on wild association instead of sluggish association...

"I had a really wonderful afternoon in Gainesville last week. I wandered and drove around to a lot of places by myself. Spent about three hours just stomping out ghosts and reading poetry in the park near where I used to live.

Last summer I wrote some poetry that I'm not too embarrassed to post here, even though I haven't touched it since then."

Letting the Fish

“Feel the backbone with the knife,”
he says to you, as if a knife could feel.

The eye looks upon its entrails
And you cringe at the after-fight:
its disguise gone, he reveals
the filet beneath the skin.

The lake laps, not to question
But to affirm this ritual
And the eventual return
Of Y-bones, scales and broken might

To its sun-starved depths, an ersatz pike
Set free again unto the Earth.


Palimpsest

Deceiver of the body, reflexive pain
Pulses in the place between

What is felt and what is spoken.
We call the shore dry land opposed

To water, but mean the two
Must meet. Your parents in a photo,

Younger than you, exist there, bright,
Having not imagined your life

As the throbbing spreads to your hand
Just as the sea rewrites the sand.


We Have Become Antique in Our Beliefs

Space between buildings carves a city of inverses
As the skyline cuts shapes in the horizon
Like miniature headstones of another universe
Where the sun forgets to do its rising.

The city in relief is the toad entwined in the hare
And when you see the young girl’s fur in the old
Woman’s bonnet, the illusion is laid bare.
Then the transparent air grows

Solid to our eyes and matter
Is pushed into silhouette. Our figures seem
Not like plodding things but better.
When robbed of crosses, golden rings,

Intentions like sharpened knives with no handles,
Cuff links and brooches, everything new,
We look less like innocent animals
And more as criminals just before death do.

Summer Redux

This is going to be a miraculous year for school holidays. With Yom Kippor, Columbus Day, and Veteran's Day on the horizon, I'm feeling so relaxed. Right now we are off (in the middle of the week, yes!) for Rosh Hashanah.

It feels to me like summer revisited, so I thought I'd post some pictures from our trip to Canada in August.

Good thing we're pescatarians

Eric and my dad tearing up the old slip dock to build a new one

The rubble pile before new construction

The fishing boat as a barge

The completed project

From this angle it looks like a catwalk

Our view