I awake possessed by God by Catherine Wagner

The language is fractured but, I think, not meaningless. How is a person to know the grandiose and darting mind of God in the midst of dishtowels and pieces of laundry fuzzing out of each other? What is the great throbbing beating? I don't know, but the whole thing says domestic life in a new way.


I awake possessed by God
and annex the darting mind
to replace it and make it know
flung up in a dishtowel
with a sweater fuzzing out of my skirt

But what should I obey or own
if I swallow my sense and my sword
in a great throbbing beating in my face?



Hello, hello, hello....

Skate

Another one of my own. For Spencer when he was little and long of limb.


Skate

Fling of elbow,
spree of wheee,
festivity
of nerve and knee,
love,
you jubilate,
you clop toward grace
but smack into,
collapse onto,
askew,
the curb.

My specimen,
my bony bird.
You’ve hit perdition
gravel gray.
You flap, you flay,
you feather, flop,
you loud squawk up
and scatter sky.
You beak, you bok,
you rage, I rock
you, spew, I coo to
you, the my

whose lashes clump.
Whose chin fits in my palm.
Whose tear slides
toward my fingertip.
Whose ruin I’ll wrap
in ever arm
until you chirp.
Until you fly.

2007?

Blessing Song by Claire Bateman

Good voice here. Like a professor. But what professor would talk about a history of the blessing? And what is the blessing? The poem moves from thing to thing with energy and something like reverent joy. A long poem worth getting to the end of.



Blessing Song

After, despite, because & through it all
I believe in the blessing, & here transcribe
for my listening audience a brief version
of its history in local planes
& habitations, beginning
not with the evolution
of angels, of which we know nothing,
though we see their failured adaptations roosting
slack-jawed on high-tension wires,
but with the Israelites in the Bible picture
where they forever stoop, reaching
for manna the illustrators must have struggled to imagine
as they sketched something halfway between
cobwebs & wafers: lace doilies, perhaps, or children’s
snowflakes cut from paper just this side
of transparency, easily torn, yet not torn, held
briefly between thumb & finger. From this early
still comparatively crude version we learn
the lightness of blessing as it descends
like an indolence of feathers,
an insulation of down, or the dew
spangling Gideon’s fleece for a sign
in those days when signs are still meaningful
(having not yet exceeded their quota
in the visible world, & thereafter moving
their headquarters into the heart,
a red-letter date perhaps still to come
in the biography of consciousness).
This lightness Brueghel beholds, being the first
of his nation to portray with flecks of paint
a fall of snow so weightless it seems
to lift off from the manger’s circumambient glow.
Even ethically questionable Frank Capra
dreams it & is awarded
“a Class III Citation of technical excellence
for the development of movie snow, a mixture
of foamite, soap & water blown
through a wind machine.” This is also why
you, listeners, taste
of salt, even if it has been
a long time since your tongue has known
yourself or the world that way.
So fine-grained now, the blessing, as if
pulverized, sifting from the pneumatic
chisel of the cathedral’s
stone carver as she shapes hydrocephalic
bubble-headed monsters with thick
protruding tongues, slit ears, &
bony feathered claws to grip
buttress & balustrade where
mother & infant sit enthroned
in dim clouds of prayer.
Note also its ineluctable motility,
as in spring, veils of gold
pollen float on the air, bridal,
sheer as the fragrance
of the sensimilla stalk placed burning
in Bob Marley’s casket. Nothing
exerts more force
than motion of drift through
crack or cranny,
than powder, ash so white it’s
blue, the fall
from the body into the
the body where there is a glory
around each blossom,
there is a nimbus
around the throne, made up of
dust, foam, smoke, all residue born by
the heart’s varied winds:
periodic, constant, local, &
cyclonic. Either the little stories
are coalescing, or the one big story
is breaking down into song so silent
it won’t leave you alone, & starts
like this.


1997

Bless this blog.

Galileo Galilei by William Jay Smith

From the 20th c., here's a mysterious thing. What is the writer thinking? Is it just that the name Galileo and his awakening, changing, robe-draped world bring to the writer's mind these strange, almost apocalyptic, images? Or is Galileo the scientist knocking as a voice of reason against the chaos? Chaos it is, confined to form: a steady beat of trochees, creating a haunting but controlled sound.



Galileo Galilei
Comes to knock and knock again
At a small secluded doorway
In the ordinary brain.

Into light the world is turning,
And the clocks are set for six;
And the chimney pots are smoking,
And the golden candlesticks.

Apple trees are bent and breaking,
And the heat is not the sun’s,
And the Minotaur is waking,
And the streets are cattle runs.

Galileo Galilei,
In the flowing, scarlet robe,
While the stars go down the river
With the turning, turning globe.

Kneels before a black Madonna
And the angels cluster round
With their grave, uplifted faces
Which reflect the shaken ground

And the orchard which is burning,
And the hills which take the light;
And the candles which have melted
On the altars of the night.

Galileo Galilei
Comes to knock and knock again
At a small secluded doorway
In the ordinary brain.

(Thanks to my friend Mary H. for telling me about this poem.)

Please knock.

Dear Eagles by Gabe Gudding

Gabe Gudding again. Here in letter form, a sort of riff on the eagle as a symbol of the U.S. The same craziness and fun and wild use of language. I don't share his sentiment here, but I love the way he writes. He could revive poetry, if people read poetry.

Dear Eagles

I am bored by beagles those happy dogs
so indelibly at gates. They’re unlike
the nation’s eagles who bang on gelid gusts
above our fields and shining logs. I am
not, thus, bored by yóu—all
your pleasures gentried, such epaulets
and fuss—and never over are the clawed towings
of fish with your angled feathers, no: Dó call me
an eagle lover, then. You are possibles.

Yet too you that once that were some symbols
of this nation that dealt some blows: you are not now
—nor are you ever always will be again—
ethicals,

your country’s over. And though you’re here still,
you will surely go.

For I have seen few snowmen outlast the snows.

Sincerely,

Gabriel Gudding


(First appeared in The Canary)


Speak.

The Book of Life by Laura Kasischke

This one starts out using internal and off rhyme well but largely drops that until the end, with the near rhyming "coat" and "hope," creating a nice finality. But the end confuses me. Is it the body that is skipping along? If so, how, given that it is a bedraggled thing? Anyway, a fun poem with a lightness.


The Book of Life

Pale and naked without their bodies, the souls
examine the book
in which they hope to find
their names inscribed.

Made of soap. Now. Made
of smoke. Now
made of dew
and hairlessness. And how

primitive, I realize, seeing them, it's been:
The body. Its

silly limbs transporting, through the world, our
windblownness. Our
cloud wherever it went.

Teeth, old-fashioned and enameled, so
easily chipped.
The nose, often
runny, sometimes broken.
Heavy eyelids. Ankle twisted. How

did we bear it as it bore us, all
stuttering and limping, clomping, hungry,
shaggy, horny, and diseased. All

that meat—grossly, morosely—weighted
around a soul:

A simple soul!
Exhausting coat!
Skipping along like hope.



Speak,soul.