This Blue : Poems (9781466875074)
Read This Blue : Poems (9781466875074) Online
Authors: Maureen N. McLane
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Contents
ANOTHER DAY IN THIS HERE COSMOS
SUMMER BEER WITH ENDANGERED GLACIER
TELL US WHAT HAPPENED AFTER WE LEFT
THEY WERE NOT KIDDING IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
DRINK WITH MOUNTAIN, REMEMBERED, ANDALUCÃAN
Â
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos â¦
WALLACE STEVENS
“July Mountain”
Species means guilt.
BRUCE ANDREWS
I
A SITUATION
Everything bending
elsewhere, summer
longer, winter mud &
the maples escaping
for norther zones â¦
Take it up Old Adamâ
every day the world exists
to be named.
Here's a chair,
a table, grass.
A cricket hums
my Japanese name.
Skyscrapers
are stars. Rocks.
Those were swell,
seasons. So strange,
that heaven, that hell.
WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR
What I'm looking for
is an unmarked door
we'll walk through
and there: whatever
we'd wished for
beyond the door.
What I'm looking for
is a golden bowl
carefully repaired
a complete world sealed
along cracked lines.
What I'm looking for
may not be there.
What you're looking for
may not be me.
I'm listening for
the return of that sound
I heard in the woods
just now, that silvery sound
that seemed to call
not only to me.
AVIARY
Curmudgeon
pigeon,
iridescence
glinting unlike
granite,
what common
gullet did you peck
that crumb down now
you jerking thing
some call a flying
rat? Rats will inherit
the earth's garbage
dump and you
may also flash
on that trashheap
called the future
untransformed.
Yet to the dove
you're kin.
If my love
could sing
like a mourning
dove,
could ring
the wrongs
away in the wind â¦
Kind bird,
do what's yours
to do with every
scrap forgotâ
the nightingale's
not more precious
than your idiot
insistence to stick
around and peck and look.
OK FERN
OK fern
I'm your apprentice
I can now tell you
apart from your
darker sister ferns
whose intricate ridges
overlay your more
regular triangled fans.
Tell me what to do
with my life.
BEST LAID
it's clear
the wind
won't let up
and a swim's outâ
what you planned
is scotched.
forget the calls,
errands at the mallâ
yr resolve's
superfluous
as a clitoris.
how miraculous
the gratuitousâ
spandrels,
cathedrals.
on a sea
of necessity
let's float
wholly
unnecessary
& call
that free
LATE HOUR
isn't it time
to say the garden
is wasted
on us? untended
roses the japanese
beetles gone
apeshit the labor
theory of value
will not redeem
the labor required
to reclaim
this. do I recommend
nothing?
I don't know
what to say
and go on
saying it
ALL GOOD
a “beautiful day”
nothing happened
and nothing was going to happen
the wind shook leaves
that did not fall
the moored boat did not sail
& the rain fell
on casual grass
everything was full
including the empty glass
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
a “beautiful rose”
no sign of a woman
but a boy's succulent anus
in a Persian lyric
call it ranunculus
or camellia
are they not more enfolded
than the folded rose
whose folds your nose
now probes
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
the mountain's
promiscuous
any cloud can take him
any sun have him
it's all good
today's assent
and tomorrow's
ANOTHER DAY IN THIS HERE COSMOS
Stormthreat. Clouddarkened
mountain, computer
unplugged. Commuters
to nature on a plain
of grass the sheep
munch clear of clover.
A park's a way to keep
what's gone enclosed forever.
Rhyme is cheap.
So is pop.
Easy to be obese
in a land fat with rape.
Now the sun burns
unprotected skin.
Now the sheep dream
of lanolin.
To everything alive
we're kin.
Eat or be eatenâ
what the vegan
spurns and the Jain.
I saved a fly
I baptized William Blake
and released to the sky.
Of course he'll die.
The new grasses
a brighter green
than the older spears
make this a scene
of summer starring
black butterflies. The Faerie
Queene alights from her magic car
a red convertible
and she a glam tranny.
The sheep don't care.
The sheep don't mind.
In three months the wind
will blow these trees bare
but for the tall pines
littering the forest floor
with browning needles
gone soft in the slow trample
of small creatures and long rain.
A park's a way to keep
what's gone enclosed forever.
SUMMER BEER WITH ENDANGERED GLACIER
My one eye
does not match
the other
Corrective
lenses regulate
whatever
needs require.
Seeing?
I was being
being seen.
Let be
be finale.
Let our virtues
tally
up against
the obvious.
If we
don't believe
ourselves
custodial
why all
the hoobla-
hoo, hulla-
balloo?
Passivist
mon semblable
ma soeur
soi-même
blow through
this blue
II
WHAT'S THE MATTER
Why the low mood,
the picking at food?
Maybe it's the weather.
Maybe it's hormones.
Explanation's cheap
but sometimes hits the mark.
I am the target
of mysterious arrows
I myself let sling.
O that's your fantasy
of omnipotence.
You make everything
your thing.
All day I stayed in bed.
It seemed someone else
must have been alive
have done what I did.
Failed to do
what I failed to.
It's still in my head
those things I did
and said and cared for
doing but it's all gone
white like green hills
in certain light
as Dante says the hillsides
can go white
in the middle of a new life.
INCARNATION
Some are gay
in an old way.
It has its charms.
The kids are like
hey ⦠wassup â¦
except they don't say
wassup. Hey.
The women with children
who are nonetheless
virgins. Mrs Dalloway.
The body a nest
of sockets
and unplugged cords.
The body without
organs has finally arrived
its wireless folds
almost tangible.
Years ago
I wanted to die
when you made me feel
we were fungible,
everything repeatable.
Later I floated
like a spirit
in a spirit photograph
above my life.
I shared a skin
with my skin.
I was in
my life not of.
I hovered above.
Then I descended
a millennial reincarnation
surprising myself
out of that ghost.
Carnations grow
in sandy soil.
You can touch
them. Hey.
TELL US WHAT HAPPENED AFTER WE LEFT
Ferns here ferns there
I dream of my newest friends
who will soon subside
into near strangers
âpeculiar the sudden
intimacies evanesced
without a kiss â¦
Who went home
with whom after the dance
party's what we want
to know. What century
did seduction
end in? Libertines
linger in the corridors
of the purely sexual.
I pulled you up
by my bootstraps
& liked it. I licked
you up & down
& up. I poached
eggs on your breasts
and combed yr curls.
There was nothing
I wouldn't do
with you & to.
Let's go down
to the river none
returns from. O yes
you swift diver
you plunge good.
THAT MAN
That man over there