My friend Lisa, a poet who also speaks fluent visual, sent me a book, By Common Salt, a collection of poems by Killarney Clary. “She’s a quiet poet, but one of my favorites,” L wrote on the card inside the package. I sat down immediately and read the entire book cover to cover. Clary is […]
Poetry
Cosmic Swat
God’s Acrostic What if the universe is God’s acrostic? He’s sneaking bits of proverbs into seismic variations; Abbreviating psalms in flecks of snow. Try to read them, says a comet, If you dare. Fine print. What you’ve been waiting for. Twisted in the DNA of marmosets: Hermetic feedback to your tight-lipped prayer. Examine indentations left […]
The Single Body Alone in the Universe
Still image from the film Pillow Book Sex Without Love How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, Gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth, whose mothers are going […]
Stitched Together Woman
The Feejee Mermaid August, 1842. She never lived separated. Orangutan torso and fish tail cut in half and sewn together to make one. The crowd saw only the ghosts of her pendulous breasts; they dried in the terrible manner of flesh. For long hair, a baboon head became necessary. The singular perfection of craft rendered […]
Floating in a Moon-Green Pool
I Am in Need of Music I am in need of music that would flow Over my fretful, feeling fingertips, Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips, With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow. Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low, Of some song sung to rest the tired dead, A song to fall like water on […]
No Other Way
so you want to be a writer? if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or […]
The Quiet Joy of Breathing and Living
A Body Was Given To Me A body was given to me – what to do with it, So unique and so much my own? For the quiet joy of breathing and living, Who is it, tell me, that I must thank? I am the gardener, I am the flower as well, In the dungeon […]
Philip Schultz
Failure To pay for my father’s funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can’t remember a nobody’s name, that’s why they’re called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable. The rabbi who read a stock eulogy about a man who didn’t […]
Lewis Hyde, Poet
Desert “We have to be in a desert, for he whom we must love is absent.” –Simone Weil Early morning and the mist, saturated with light, obscures the disappearing powerlines. A damp obscurity but a desert nonetheless: birds that fly into it lose their bodies and survive as the songs of birds, the tallest locust […]
Dorothea Tanning: With Our Souls in Our Laps
Dorothea Tanning, painter and poet Evening He told us, with the years, you will come To love the world. And we sat there with our souls in our laps, And comforted them. –Dorothea Tanning Tanning is that rare being who embodies gifts in the poetic domain as well as the visual. A woman with a […]