Dancing Around the Four Sides

This was Rabih Alameddine's poem of the day today.

Gathering at the River


Is it
crossing over Jordan
to a city of light, archangels
ceaselessly trumpeting over
the heavenly choirs: perpetual Vivaldi,
jasper and endless topaz and amethyst,
the Sistine ceiling seven days a week,
the everlasting smirk
of perfection?

Is it
the river Styx,
darkness made visible, fire
that never stops: endless murder
too merciless to kill,
massacres on an endless loop,
the same old victims always
coming back for more?

Or is it the silky muck
of Wabash and Maumee, the skirr
and skim of blackbirds,
fields of Queen Anne’s lace
and bumblebees? Well,
go out once more, and feel
the crumble of dry loam,
fingers and soil slowly becoming
the same truth: there in the hand
is our kinship with oak, our bloodline
to cattle. Imagine,
not eons of boredom or pain,
but honest earth-to-earth;
and when our bodies rise again,
they will be wildflowers, then rabbits,
then wolves, singing a perfect love
to the beautiful, meaningless moon.


~ Philip Appleman
Source

Ah, we are well into summer now. :-P

Have been reading Nathan Ballingrud's collection of short stories, North American Lake Monsters, and holy shit. If you like Stephen King, Clive Barker, Shirley Jackson, Joe Hill, or other horror fic-writers I can't think of, you will love this volume. Oh my god. And these are not nice horror stories. Bad things happen -- really bad things, but these tales are so well written and so deeply layered, they are a pleasure to read even as these terrible, terrible things are taking place. So. Want some full-body chills? Read this book.

AND A POEM. I saw this poem making the rounds yesterday on Twitter, and today I learned it had taken on a life of its own. So here it is.

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Have not been sleeping well, so omg so blah. :-P

The sick_wilson folks are sponsoring a three-sentence story challenge, which people should read because there are some great entries! ( This was my contribution ...  )

So. I think it could be expanded a bit beyond those three lines, so we'll see. :-)

Also, here is a poem from the July 20th issue of The New Yorker that I really liked -- I Have a Time Machine, by Brenda Shaughnessy.

New issue of The New Yorker came today, so here's a poem from it.

How I Didn't Get Myself To A Nunnery

That girl they found ensconced in mud and loam,
she wasn't me. Small wonder, though, they jumped.
To a conclusion. Water puffs you up,
and we pale Slavic girls looked much alike --
back then. Deprivation smooths you out.
Yes, that was the season of self-drowned maids,
heart-to-hearts with skulls, great minds overthrown.
And minds that could be great if they could just
come up for air. Not in that town. Something stank.

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Creation of Éa

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.

- Ursula K. LeGuin, from A Wizard of Earthsea

Someone posted this somewhere else tonight. I read A Wizard of Earthsea when I was about ten years old, in 1968, and it was among the number of books that I can count on one hand that I remember from that era (Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is another).

And ... that's it.

New issue of The New Yorker came today, so here's a poem from it.

Almost February

Timbuktu is no longer a faraway place from childhood.
Nor is Mongolia, where people steal dinosaur bones from the ground.
It's not possible to stay intact forever.

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From American writer Joel Brouwer, a poem about problems, possibly mental, possibly not, and how perhaps things are not always as they seem.

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Today's poem is from one of my favorite writers, Bob Hicok, and yep, it's about riding the bus.

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Here's a poem from the American writer David Baker, with an absolutely awesome last line.

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Last poem for the week is from Tony Hoagland and is about the recursive power of memory.

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