Song
A sudden lack of desire
strips the night from the waist up -
Bare-breasted night,
Lime-leaf Night,
Night of a thousand catfish
feeding on the surface
of a city pond in spate -
the sky’s discarnate twin
disturbed by their blind hunger.
This is the night
mother would sing of
from the bottom of the well,
the one that remains
insatiable even though we cup our hands
and drink and drink.
Oh never-ending night
of awe
whose hunger is everyone’s hunger.
A Dance
Two acacia nuts, sovereign and unkempt
buried in the milk-white flesh of my palm
apprentice me not to thee but to the dance before
water, mineral, salt. No answer
for an inquisitor except breaking twice
the space between earth and sky
so effortlessly courting then forgetting
all the things we’ve loved and lost
never to come again.
Go on.
As if there was a choice.
A small talisman: A long grey bird
in the elder part of January sculls the estuary and
each pussy willow turns serpentine inside the fold
of image upon image, water then the world.
At the caesura, what happens there?
To foliate: the having of leaves.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Liz // Jul 3, 2008 at 12:30 am
Man I dont know why the formatting is all screwy. It should be regular line spacing and a stanza break b/w “never to come again” and “go on” and between “go on” and “as if there was a choice”
2 mackenzie // Jul 4, 2008 at 5:37 am
If you’re typing in Wordpress it can fuck up the formatting. Usually if you copy and paste the formatting comes through pretty well with the exception of tabs. Comments soon!
3 mackenzie // Jul 25, 2008 at 5:34 am
Sorry it took me so long to comment, been busy, oddly enough.
I really like the changes you’ve made with song. The couplets move the poem along well and everything works for me, carries me. I like the movement from lack of desire to an unquenchable thirst by meditating on night, it just seems true. The only thing that falls flat for me is the last line, “whose hunger is everyone’s hunger.” I think it’s just in the wording, maybe something more like “whose hunger is all of our hunger.” Not that but something where the speaker is involved in the hunger.
I also like these two poems coupled together, a song and dance. I like the changes you’ve made from valse, but I think there’s still something missing in the poem. I get most involved with the movement, and I was wondering since it’s a dance, if you might try and focus more on the movement of the acacia nuts in your palm, the branching out of the trees they will be (that’s what you’re talking about in the line “breaking twice the space between the earth and the sky” right?). Of the water dragging up the minerals, the salt. Also if you pair the two, it might be interesting to put them both into couplets, having one as the song, the other as the dance to that song. They seem linked thematically to me as well, so i think that could really work.
how soon till you come back from Nam?
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