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.

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.