cold solace

When my mother died
one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer.
I couldn't bear to see it vanish,
so it waited, pardoned,
in its ice cave behind the metal trays
for two more years.

On my forty-first birthday
I chipped it out,
a rectangular resurrection,
hefted the dead weight in my palm.

Before it thawed,
I sawed, with serrated knife,
the thinnest of slices --
Jewish Eucharist.

The amber squares
with their translucent panes of walnuts
tasted -- even after I toasted them -- of freezer,
of frost,
a raisined delicacy delivered up
from a deli in the underworld.

I yearned to recall life, not death --
the still body in her pink nightgown on her bed,
how I lay in the shallow cradle of the scattered sheets
after they took it away,
inhaling her scent one last time.

I close my eyes, savor a wafer of
sacred cake on my tongue and
try to taste my mother, to discern
the message she baked in these loaves
when she was too ill to eat them:

I love you.
It will end.
Leave something of sweetness
and substance
in the mouth of the world.


Anna Belle Kaufman in the September issue of The Sun

what happens when the father of the analytical engine writes poetry?

Hint: It's not pretty.

Forget this world and all its troubles and if
possible its multitudinous Charlatans — every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

Charles Babbage's poetic tribute to Ada Lovelace, whom some have credited as the World's First Computer Programmer, due to a technical note which she appended to her translation of Luigi Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage.

Section G of the Tech Note describes (yes, forgive me, I'm citing Wikipedia:) "in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which would have run correctly had [Charles Babbage's] Analytical Engine ever been built."

Ada Lovelace was also:

• Sole legitimate heir to the poet and rake Lord Byron


• Tutored in Mathematics by Augustus de Morgan


• Countess and mother of three


• Dead at the age of 36

And she wrote things like this, which predicted the use of computers to generate music and graphics and display type:

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves. ... [It] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations.

(...)

Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

(...)

Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because the business of the engine is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly.

— From Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage

She was also apparently a disappointment to her father, Lord Byron, who had hoped for a boy.

Today just so happens to be Ada Lovelace Day, which is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science, and Ada has her very own Google Maps Mashup as a result»



p.s. As I was pulling this post together my Flickr & Twitter friend @jrnoded let me know that he has paid me Ada Honors, which I'm sure I don't deserve, but I am certainly pleased to receive. Thank you, sir.

agate passage

I lived here once.

In this small pocket of place
capped by our rental shack
at the crest
buttressed by the boathouse
at the bottom

gapped by a steep incline
where the tips of the tall grasses
heaved with spit bugs
in the Summer

large white wet loogies
that smeared and burst
against my leg as

like a capsule called to splashdown
I catapulted to the sea

here I am again. now.
the tide is high
the Sound has pulled in her skirts
and the rocky shore remains
maybe a yard wide for walking
a thin path of passage
that after half a mile (I guess)
dissolves to sand, grows wide

I was small then and knew the distance
as Suzie’s house first (the trampoline!)
and then the wide open stretch that
became the path to Richie’s place

Sealth knew it too, this place
where now the massive cedar
rest like errant detritus

soft from the saltwater
limbless from the efforts
of lumberjacks

the Longhouse was here
warmed by towering fires
the congress of commerce
consanguineous and carnal
heated conferences. confidences.

I wasn’t going to Richie’s place today.

The tide was high, just shy
of the soft silver wood of the
deck and I lay my belly
against the boards

to listen to the water drum
in that small space between it and me

the barnacled legs of the dock
(encrusted like armature, impenetrable)
wake to the waves, and then
(I came to expect it, I came to see it)
they roll back their lids
like observatories to the night sky

and then, unearthly, they
extend their tendril tongues
to lap and feed

a soft undulation
that looks all the world
like Armstrong taking his first
uncertain steps
on the Moon




p.s. The place I mean »

may i touch said he / how much said she

Illus: e.e. cummings

In honor of the holiday, The Daily Beast has compiled a large lovely pile of erotic poems and drawings by e.e. cummings »

But they left a few out. Among them:

it is so long since my heart has been with yours

shut by our mingling arms through
a darkness where new lights begin and
increase,
since your mind has walked into
my kiss as a stranger
into the streets and colours of a town--

that i have perhaps forgotten
how,always(from
these hurrying crudities
of blood and flesh)Love
coins His most gradual gesture,

and whittles life to eternity

--after which our separating selves become museums
filled with skilfully stuffed memories

-- e.e. cummings

Many thanks to @scrivenings for the heads up.

p.s. and here's the poem of this post's title »

who says poets aren't sexy?

Marilyn Monroe hanging sexy with the poet Carl Sandburg. One of a series of new Marilyn photos released today by photographer Len Steckler.

Available for purchase via http://www.thevisitseries.com/ »

the dark socket of the year

The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:

then hawkfaced pain seized you
threw you so you fell with a sharp
cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.
My father heard the crash but paid
no mind, napping after lunch

yet fifteen hundred miles north
I heard and dropped a dish.
Your pain sunk talons in my skull
and crouched there cawing, heavy
as a great vessel filled with water,

oil or blood, till suddenly next day
the weight lifted and I knew your mind
had guttered out like the Chanukah
candles that burn so fast, weeping
veils of wax down the chanukiya.

Those candles were laid out,
friends invited, ingredients bought
for latkes and apple pancakes,
that holiday for liberation
and the winter solstice

when tops turn like little planets.
Shall you have all or nothing
take half or pass by untouched?
Nothing you got, Nun said the dreydl
as the room stopped spinning.

The angel folded you up like laundry
your body thin as an empty dress.
Your clothes were curtains
hanging on the window of what had
been your flesh and now was glass.

Outside in Florida shopping plazas
loudspeakers blared Christmas carols
and palm trees were decked with blinking
lights. Except by the tourist
hotels, the beaches were empty.

Pelicans with pregnant pouches
flapped overhead like pterodactyls.
In my mind I felt you die.
First the pain lifted and then
you flickered and went out.

Part the first of a lovely poem by Marge Piercy called My Mother's Body which I found at the Poetry Foundation.



Happy Hanukkah.

on the road to Michigan

Cattail
Originally uploaded by Eric M Martin

pointed North I come upon
the road stained red
from edge to edge

and then
the deer undone

like a cattail on an autumn day
when it bursts its casing

and casts to the wind

tuck & roll

it comes with age, I guess: learning to tuck and roll into loss

slow tide rising Tsunami-like flooding the dusty corners where memories are stored and old grudges ferment, forgotten

tender forevers paddle to stay afloat; gulp salt-water and cough for air

for a long time after this, after we've slogged through the mud and debris and set tumbled things upright

for a long time, I've learned, my heart will live below the water table, pooling at the first mention of rain


Posting by cameraphone from Chicago O'Hare, outbound to Seattle

where there's more of singing and less of sighing

Where the West Begins

Out where the skies are a trifle bluer,
Out where friendship's a little truer,
That's where the West begins:
Out where a fresher breeze is blowing,
Where there's laughter in every streamlet flowing,
Where there's more of reaping and less of sowing
That's where the West begins.

Out where the world is in the making,
Where fewer hearts in despair are aching,
That's where the West begins;
Where there's more of singing and less of sighing,
Where there's more of giving and less of buying,
And a mana makes friends without half trying,
That's where the West begins.

Picked this up at the Arts & Crafts Chicago show this morning at Concordia University in River Forest: it's a 1920s print with a piece by a fellow named Arthur Chapman -- whom Google tells me is a classic cowboy poet -- in the original frame. It's a lovely spot printing job -- although I'm not convinced the bristle cone pine and the mesas make a whole lot of sense together.

Still. Makes me lonesome for the American West.

Also brought home a couple of oak pieces to fill out the floor plan. Because that's the rule: there's no leaving an Arts & Crafts show without a little oak.

the slip

these first hours of grief
fire hot like a kiln

hardening this soft thing
we’ve turned
between us over time

you have told me your stories
and I have told you mine


savor it was his advice

when like a poker
pulled from the fire
the grief is still
too hot to look at

savor it now
because it grows dim

as time exerts its
cold distance

tell the stories
recall the smile
replay his voice
while you can still
hear its music

play Sweet Caroline and cry

fire these memories
in this brief insufferable
heat

bake them into pottery
fierce enough to hold
what remains
once you lower him into
the clay

the hollow men

Illus: Howard Penning

There's a horrible hollow that fills the belly when you wake to the morning and recall the world has changed.

I felt it when my dad was in a coma, each morning wondering fresh if he would survive the day.

Felt it when I learned my husband of 10 years had lied to me most of that decade.

Felt it after death took my friends. My family.

Feel it when I open the paper to read the latest wrestling over what to do, how to confront the horrible things we have done; committed in the name of Freedom, the principle we claim to have built our country on. Felt it when I read this morning's piece by Frank Rich, who also alludes to Hannah Arendt, on The Banality of Bush White House Evil.

The truth about those hollows? They take much time to fill, and they're never entirely whole again.

The Hollow Men

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us ‑‑ if at all ‑‑ not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

-- T.S. Eliot

here's my proposal

let's not pretend about these things.

where there are bruises let us blow on them softly
cup our palms across them sheltering without touching
the tender corpuscular bloom

where the blood breaks through the thin skin
pressure first then cool clear water
soap

where bones have cracked
let's set them with a grimace
and a groan

let's lay down the bandages
while murmuring sympathies

let's know that honey
on a shallow wound will help it heal

but let's not expect
that we can bind them on our own

let's not pretend about these things.

twinning

Meet my wet dream (every girl should have one): Twin poets from Portland. One “hard edged and tough,” “something of the pugilist”; the other “lush”, “Nureyev--each movement articulated”.

Matthew and Michael Dickman, profiled by Rebecca Mead in Couplet: A tale of twin poets in the 6 April 2009 issue of the New Yorker.

I’ve dated a twin and I’ve dated poets, but never all at once.

My twin was the taller of the two, the muscled one, as much as muscle shows itself in the second grade. We were “going steady” which meant at that raw age a few shy glances, a note passed between friends (“check ‘yes’.” I did.), and then nothing.

Did we hold hands? I can’t recall. Eat lunch together? Unlikely. Sit together in class? Impossible.

But his stamp was on me and I was his -- the whole class knew it. My parents did not. Second grade is not an age for going steady. Steve, I think his name was.

There must have been some fond exchange of affection however, because what I remember most was its absence. After a long summer of nothing to do with one another I expected we would pick up where we left off.

We didn’t.

Of our whole history I remember only the way he looked at me when I asked him why, and the disdain in his eyes when he explained: “You used to wear dresses.”


There were several poets, including one who failed in his promise to “teach the wind” my name, but it was only the first who transcended sentiment and burrowed into the hard nut of contention that bound us in perpetual heat. Arguing hours of philosophy and resolving argument in a rough tumble of perfect compatibility (I remember kisses of unique sympathy and thought maybe I imagined it until years -- years -- after we split and he mentioned the same, like mentioning a map lost and with it a whole continent).

We were ultimately undone by his Catholic conscience.

He immortalized the heat and argument into pitch perfect verse, delivered poems to me on carefully copied pages, and then took confession.

An act that wiped him clean, he told me, of our delicious immorality. I remained soiled; still damp from our coupling.

Too soon the burden of my sin got to be too much for him, and it undid us -- along with a larger assortment of complicated conditions.

Years later there would be a sudden brief clumsy moment in the dark when he pulled me close after much waiting and I pulled away from the shock of it. When I said nothing more and left the room. He stayed awhile, until it was entirely clear I wasn’t coming back, and then let himself out silently, closing the door behind him.

(Here is where I feel regret like a slow swelling Tsunami.)

If he wrote a poem about that moment, about the loss that accompanied it, the history that preceded it, the future that never followed; if he wrote a poem I have yet to read it.


Some poems by Matthew Dickman »
Some more by his brother Michael »

both the same

The Old Plantation

Dark and stormy may come the weather;
I join this he-male and this she-male together.
Let none but Him that makes the thunder,
Put this he-male and she-male asunder.
I therefore pronounce you both the same.
Be good, go along, and keep up your name.
The broomstick's jumped, the world's not wide.
She's now your own. Salute your bride!

"Slave Marriage Ceremony Supplement" from Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing, which I pulled off the shelf this morning when I learned the historian John Hope Williams, author of From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, had passed.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

—Ezra Pound

my brothers

My Brothers.

Delayed in Detroit just now
I called you

First Denver, then Philly.

We shared details
Made plans
Deferred others

And I thought how I wanted
to capture this
full feeling I have
in my heart
when I hear your smiles

How I worry through your stress
your projects
your children
how I beam presumptuously
when it all goes well

Thought maybe I could
trace out the memories
that make us kin

Football tackles
and Fisher Price little people

Dying to the count of ten
(one thousand one, one thousand two)
in neighborhood battles of war

Big wheels and bikes

Your slight frames riding my knees
as I revved and roared speedway sounds
and leaned into the turns
your tiny hands grinding my balled fist
like a stick shift
your feet on my shoulders
(the gas and the brake)

The electric proximity of play

Thought maybe there would
be a way to sketch out
those years when everything
went to hell and we fled the house
each as we could
to find firm earth
to forage for comfort like we’d known
once
when that house was home

But there’s no way, my brothers,
to ink out the ache that remains
when I cut the line and end the call

The fractured terror of missing you always
The rich round way I love you

There’s no way to explain what I mean
when I call you My Brothers.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

By Elizabeth Alexander, who was selected to write and deliver the inaugural poem at Barack Obama's presidential inauguration, as reported in this morning's New York Times.

Want amazing? Read Alexander's Neonantology »

Also highly recommended: Poetry interviews Alexander on Obamapoetics »

lucid.

LUCID. What a lovely word. A word that forms a firm shape with the tongue right behind it – but feels full of light and expansion even as one speaks it – or writes it. Its meaning is multifarious – shining, bright, clear, transparent, rational, sane, leading to perception and understanding. For me it is also means a kind of carefully, even lovingly, chosen language where the light shines through – and in. An illumination . . .

Lucidity does not mean the reams of docile looking-out-the-window poetry that seems to be a staple of the Australian poetry diet. The “I am a poet and I will write a poem today” school. Lucidity can write with a tongue of fire. Often it’s a sense of urgency, a sense of dire times that can make a poem searingly lucid.

The poet Dorothy Porter as cited on the International Poetry Web.

I learned of Dorothy Porter just today from virginia on Twitter. Regrettably, I also learned that Dorothy Porter just died.

I suspect that my failure to know nothing about this, by all accounts, exceptional Australian poet until today has something to do with being excessively American, for which I apologize.

(I'm working on it.)

side streets & closed doors

along side streets and behind closed doors

this is where it first unwraps itself
still wet from the chrysalis

this is where
the eyes of the rough edged idea
adjust to the light

dear NY Review of Books: the poet's name is Cavafy, not Cafavy

dear NY Review of Books: the poet's name is Cavafy,
not Cafavy (yep. front cover.)
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

(They got it right inside.)

Only reason I would even know is because Cavafy is one of my favorite Greeks, and it looks like Daniel Mendelsohn agrees. His piece is called: Constantine Cavafy: 'As Good As Poetry Gets'.

Or maybe he does -- those quotation marks are suspect.

Posting by cameraphone.