Today

"Daisuke des ne?

Yannai.

I gave my friend

the dog

surimi

he

ate

eight.

 

I am a minimalist,

delighted by the lucid yellow of a new toothbrush

placed just so

on the cream Corian, near chrome,

a small round mirror above.

Love the spare square box

in balso, black

That line of sun out the window.

No bilge, no bulge -

refulgence.

 

for Damon

all the minutes in a year

here you're

one among them

or a star

so far we cannot see you

marias

 "For myself I want nothing from you."

"You are wise in that. I never grant favors."

-Ozma of Oz by Frank Baum

"asked for nothing, expected nothing

no reason for coming except curiosity."

Walking out in the mind,

into the woods of Vermont 

reminded me things have stood 

longer than necessary,

past expiration.

In Lournhã

a window seat in the sun

stunned me

into emailing a stranger.

Is there danger in that, reaching out into the unknown?

I sink my heart

into an airborne stone,

find a bedstead below the Fatima Lady,

and Sadie in Vermont,

sleeping,

her old dog bones

glucosamined.

Up the road from your Cabot home

I met a farmstead shrine to Maria.

Is it still there?

I heard curses

Flamenco of one brother, three.

One broke his heel

two threw off their shoes,

all spun round

a box drum.

Outside the dance,

the street tamps down 

brown men.

Should something happen, 

someone always cleans up the mess.

The cormorant's frills made of rabbit tufts

enough white around the eyes to shoot

and kill.

The blue gulf inside the bill,

now rich with

fish and blood.

Flood colonies with oil, spoil nests.

The smell!

Tell the birds. 

Should something happen, 

someone always cleans up the mess.

Without helmets

they stood

under metal rain.

Broken bones,

lost fingers, 

so much pain. 

are we at war again?

Should something happen, 

someone always cleans up the mess.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

nurse and cactus

 

night flight

At night
Cormorant
Flying
Under the ice

夜に
鵜
飛行
氷の下で

Yoru ni u hikō kōri no shita de

 

un cuenco roto

 

 un cuenco roto

mi cuñado murió hoy

algo se ha derramado

alguien ha desaparecido

______________________

壊れたボウル

私の義理の兄は今日亡くなりました

何かがこぼれた

誰かが空になりました

Kowareta bōru watashi no giri no ani wa kyō nakunarimashita nanika ga koboreta darekaga sora ni narimashita

__________________________

Broken bowl

My brother-in-law died today

Something spilled

Someone is empty 

winter food

                                                                           

In winter,

to anchor health, 

eat beetroot,

soak groats.

Some thaw meat.

Her father did,

gave us

venison.

sign base, upper paleolithic

https://www.signbase.org/

 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00704-x

sounds

birds before light

winter wren

then

a bus in snow, slow

hammer

shift

drift of

first

finds -

a footprint.

snow (morning)

Falling now,

great flakes,

wind slant, 

sidelong

swoon.

 

A room,

a window,

slightly ajar.

Where you are -

in a cold place,

in a warm room,

under your skin.

Thrombocytopenia

 Can you live without him?

remnants, waterfall 2020

 

if

if I read the numbers

if I plead with gods

if I take pills to sleep

if I despair

if I don't understand why this disease

furiously fights for him

if I cannot speak

if he grows weaker, then rebounds

if he lives through this

if he dies

if again and again

we'll have more

weeks up and down 

if the grandchildren look at their great uncle

eyes wide and cry  

Papa? Papa? 

as if their word for you, 

worried,

homeless,  

might find him instead

if I cannot say dead

if I cannot say cured

if I have too many words

but never enough

 

 

Cicada

 

蝉 Semi  Cigarra  الزيز alziz         매미 maemi  cikade  greier  zikadak 

蝉 Chán               సికాడా Sikāḍā सिकाडा sikaada ሲካዳ sīkada

1. cicada disaaweshiinh+yag 2. cicada meminaabawijiisi+wag 3. cicada meminaabawijiisii+g

https://cicada.world/partners/indigenous-groups/anishinaabe/

http://www.fonozoo.com/quartau/index_eng.php

https://www.cicadamania.com/cicadas/category/locations/europe-continent/

https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/scientists-ask-for-help-to-record-cicada-song/50846#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20most%20recent,central%2C%20Alentejo%20and%20Algarve%20regions.&text=Experts%20estimate%20that%20there%20are,mainly%20in%20the%20subtropical%20regions.

https://www.japan-experience.com/to-know/understanding-japan/cicadas

lie

Dark roast, no milk. 

Careful. Sorrow distracts, causes overfill, spillage.

This wake's within. We knew you knew not to come, cried alone,

but wouldn't hide what died among the stones.

Conversations after funerals, measured by mug size. Black water reflects another lie:

one who championed gender-neutral rules of law

because she hates the use of the word mother

Thank you so much for your support. Beat me with your flag.  

Call me nigger fifteen times. 

I am black, and I am blue. My life, to you, doesn't matter.

 

I hadn't slept much the night before, anxiously waiting for Georgia's results - little time to celebrate.

 

Found a priest to give Last Rites. She died last night, my mother, mother, mother.

 

    Εν μόνον αγαθόν είναι, την επιστήμην, και εν μόνον κακόν, την αμαθίαν. 

        There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance. 

                                                                                          (Socrates)

What we have learned! Many, many people in this country will kill for a lie.

 

Ropes aren't tropes.

 

Liars leave gallows to break things, then take flight. What falls from the sky as they flee?

 

I tend to small truths, wounded, bleeding.

 

Liars have dropped them, tweeting, on stones. 

 

Ousted liars call their wives, then disappear, clear out, travel south. 

 

Drink your coffee in silence.

 

portrait

Red ink and spilt milk

on a shirt of blue.

Coups are a bit like death. They wipe out everything.

The tree in the wood

should fall

but did it?

All we know is supposed.

On a warm day, the birds sing, bring in ten o'clock,

summoned, assembled, inflamed .

Precipitation is humidity, wind, mixes 

with skin, and water,

alters lives.

Are we to remain silent?

The Connellsville Seam is exhausted.

Nearly pure soft coal,

stolen from the earth,

births steel, watched water 

wash away Johnstown.

Frick's Tintoretto 

Procurator of San Marco, 

the second most prestigious life appointment in the Republic of Venice,

gazes into a dark interior, away from the blue sky above a blue sea.

Johnstown's brown drowning,

near dark miners digging shoals of coal.  

Save the town, if we can keep it. No.

Lake's gone, along with the fish. 

Sense of debt to the dead?

Frick bought Tintoretto instead.

Dreaming of blue faces underwater,

her brothers drowning,

Karolina Olsson of Oknö

slept for 32 years and 42 days,

drank daily 2 glasses of sweetened milk.

In America, she might have been found drowned too.

The sea here eats us,

those who've crossed from one country to another,

in slave ships, steerage.

Sometimes, it spits us out, 

shares us with fish.

Not so rare a dish for fish,

before or after arrival,

the slave, the immigrant.

The noon siren sounds.

Warm flats smell of cooking.

From the window, rough waves

and a tree, split in two.

Beyond the breakwater,

something's blinking

red, death-pale,

and blue.

 

 

 

 

poems

1

unega means white in Cherokee

birch snow

sugar water

Blue Ridge

white

river forest 

Lake Lure

2

who works around the corner

lurks among the elderberry

ornery old bat

that catamount

3

illness has a face

small and delicate

but a tall body

thin shadowed

at first

but then it lurches 

forward,

finds you

bloats

until you float inside

dark and afraid

4

The Uffizi is free online.

So too the Tate.

Isn't that great?

From the Arno, Thames

I've buckles plucked from the muck.

Skill and luck -

My people -

painters, mudlarks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the sutra in denmark

 Fish paste and planes are temporal; I've found them in the

Satipatthāna Sutta: under Impermanence,

with expiration dates.

This refrain arises 13 different times in the sutra -

and now

contemplate the arising

the passing away

and both the arising and the passing away.

The sound of

the sutra is a passenger plane, drowsy,

(nearly empty, masked, full rows for each solitary)

nodding asleep,

 crossing lakes, mountains, rivers, fens, 

then ballenas, blind creeks, karst and kettles,

settling into descent, touching salt water.

It's there,

where Kastrup and Chek Lap Kok are building islands,

reclaiming strands - new Doggerlands.

Land arising doesn't last.

Nothing does, and not even that!

So don't pass, in either place, on fish paste.

 It ought to be bought

duty free, in 

Kastrup and Chek Lap Kok.

Then settle in, clock arrivals, departures.

Who here, there, will start a new life, flee?

The sutra seas are full of jellyfish, not whales.

Birds land on shale beaches to fish estuaries.

I eat fish paste and watch,

from a room with a sutra in Amager, looking north -

flatlands, flat skies, birches,

perches for cormorants and crows.

Chóu sāan's sutra is rising like a low star,

faraway, over books and buildings

and broken lives. 

I've saved nothing but poems.

So many jellyfish!

Near Amager, sinks an old carcass of a whale,

stale stink when the wind blows right.

The fish paste I like comes in a tube, 

squeezes out

star-shaped trails of roe.

I've no bread for it, or for the prisoners of

politics and ventilators.

Even Kastrup's caught it, that feeling of 

intubation, where both the arising and the passing away take 

sounds, slake 

arising and passing away

into one distance, together.

    

Grassy Hill (Chinese: 草山; Cantonese Yale: Chóu sāan) is the fourteenth highest mountain in Hong Kong.

small water

Un poco y no bien, you said.

So why go, I asked,

when you know

the quarry killed Alan,

stunned him with a stone,

ate him whole.

And what about that other one,

river snags snatched him,

dog-paddling in

swift currents. 

C'mon, you said.

And I said No.

Mother's brother

taught us terror,

pulling us under

in pools and small lakes.

We knew muck slipped, leechy

criks, carried sticks and

matches, pockets of salt.

Come early spring, we knew not to wade streams.

Quarry, river, pool, slick streams, these waters we knew, were wary of.

We hadn't yet met immensity.

Riptides, vortices, sudden rogues?

Folk tales.

Flash floods, tidal surges, tsunamis?

Dreams.

Waters scaled larger were too far away to fear.

Some took chances in the waters here,

gave little thought to cost.

Odds with small water, a few always lost.

.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 https://glsrp.org/statistics/

 https://www.milwaukeemag.com/this-ambitious-plan-to-clean-milwaukees-rivers-could-make-them-swimmable/

  https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/03/14/the-legend-of-the-martyred-st-escrava-anastacia-the-beautiful-slave-girl-who-was-forced-to-wear-a-face-mask/

Resusci Annie

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/a-racial-history-of-drowning/276748/

 

Swim: Why We Love the Water

Why We Swim 

L’Inconnue de la Seine

 

 

https://www.atelierlorenzi.com/

 https://www.facebook.com/lorenzimoulage/?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf

 

 

 

 

To You in ICU with Covid19

One breath, two. I cannot see you, 

alone, prone,

sloughed soles, blood clots.

Knots in trees, these,

your exhalations, and irregular.

Ventilator hum 

becomes soughing

boughs, the branches of your fruit trees.

Your garden's lemons, crushed.

Sweet-sour runnels from them

tunnel, funnel, 

spill into, fill us.

Troughs inside our hearts 

trench, pool into you.

Fourteen

masked family members

vigil in the parking lot

outside your room.

I can't be there to pray with them

so I play hymns to Mary.

Listen! 

Oh, Mother of Stars!

How yellow bright our love for him!

things 2

 things with wings

voices stolen from turtles

(long-tailed grackle)

brackish water of park puddles

muddied feet

the coot

shooting pigeons

poor vectors of disease

pleased with ourselves

with our shelves, cases, drawers

stuffed with feathers

we've pillowed

pilloried

potshot

not what they are

but we -

lack of pluck

our

imaginative geography

things 1

 things

occur to me

like

wings

of crested cormorants

box turtles

and salamanders

crossing roads

toads

none seen this year

though one

I hear was found in the arugula

sturgeon

and

nanaimo fisheries

and

above,

higher, colder than the lakes

an ulu of a moon

white

rain

again

inches of it

and the black river

not as black as

this room

a shadow

flying

at the edges of this lamp

 

 1

ghost dogs

2

under ice

3

puppy pearls

4

more ghosts

5

retired ainu

Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi (童絵解万国噺)1861 writer Kanagaki Robun and artist Utagawa Yoshitora

 

"Together, John Adams and the eagle kill the enormous snake that ate his Mom. The power of teamwork!!!”

 

https://www.openculture.com/2018/11/a-japanese-illustrated-history-of-america.html

 

 Εν μόνον αγαθόν είναι, την επιστήμην, και εν μόνον κακόν, την αμαθίαν. 

En mónon agathón eínai, tin epistímin, kai en mónon kakón, tin amathían.

The only good is science (knowledge), and the only evil is ignorance. 

 Σωκράτης Sokrátis