Te Deum by Charles Reznikoff

Happy Thanksgiving. And please take a moment to remember all of our military, especially those deployed and away from their families this holiday.

Te Deum
by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day’s work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

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For the Executive Director of the Fallen

For the Executive Director of the Fallen
by Tom Sleigh

In memoriam Liam Rector

The little boy crying out
Weenie Weenie
in self-panicking delight,
waving his little cock
under the banner

of the sun, seemed pure Blake,
all anarchy and energy,
an innocence unfrightened
of itself that shook the lake’s
waters and unsettled

the strained composures
and appointed certainties
of whatever Absolute Speaker
had been ranting in my brain:
Peace Through Strength

Justice Must Be Ours–
so many demon faces
in the glass city.
Each pubic triangle
seemed, under the bathing suits,

to grow electrical and crackle
with a sexual shock
that made me turn my face away:
and who should be there
but you, my dear Lord of Misrule,

blowing smoke in all our faces,
the clean bullet hole in your forehead
above your self-ironic smile:
Don’t let the monkeys
stop typing–

and after I swam
and I was sitting on the bank,
after the boy and his parents
had picked up and gone home,
I played the Noh play over for you

in the tape loop of the void
where your voice and laughter
so casually reside:
how the mother
gone searching for her

missing son finds him dancing
by the lake, and as she tries
to hold him he slips through
her arms just as she slips
through his arms–

and as she cries out
in perfect pitch in perfect time
to the shrieking bamboo flute
that her boy has drowned
she understands that she too

has drowned, that she too
is a ghost returning
to dance as they
dance together in a tighter
and tighter round.

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Poor Boy Long Way From Home–In Memory of Liam Rector

Liam Rector 1949-2007

(Painting by Curt Pilgrim)

Cheers, Big Dog. As always, in awe…………

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The Hour and What is Dead Li Young Lee

The Hour and What is Dead
by Li Young Lee

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.

At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.

At this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.

Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.

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“Father of that silence”–Larry Levis

From “Linnets” by Larry Levis

This is a good page.
It is blank,
and getting blanker.
My mother and father
are falling asleep over it.
My brother is finishing a cigarette;
he looks at the blank moon.
My sisters walk gravely in circles.
My wife sees through it, through blankness.
My friends stop laughing, they listen
to the wind in a room in Fresno, to the wind
of this page, which is theirs,
which is blank.

They are all tired of reading,
they want to go home,
they won’t be saying goodbye.

When they are gone,
the page will be crumpled,
thrown into the street.
Around it, sparrows will be feeding
on bits of garbage.
The linnets will be singing.
A man will awaken on his deathbed,
not yet cured.

I will not have written these words,
I will be that silence slipping around the bend
in the river, where it curves out of sight among weeds,
the silence in which a car backfires and drives away,
and the father of that silence.

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Nothing Twice by Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing Twice
by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,
I can’t help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to say
Today is always gone tomorrow

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we’re different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

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Still so much to conquer: E. Ethelbert Miller

Wisdom from an interview with my friend, the poet E. Ethelbert Miller:
Just when I needed reminding…
Thanks, E, and much love, much gratitude.

“But where’s the apprenticeship? And that’s the word to use: apprenticeship. Not model, not workshop, apprenticeship. The difference between an apprenticeship and a workshop is that I will sit here and take only one person. You may watch me do something and then we would do something together. And every time I would correct it, but we would do it together. We might be making a wall together. You’re standing and I’m standing and we’re talking and stuff like that. I don’t see anybody workshopping their poems that way. Now you have people claiming, “That’s my student,” “That’s my teacher,” but that’s from a workshop. That’s not an apprenticeship. So if we put that word in, we have a different type of relationship. In the future, for us to produce these new type of writers, they will have to come out of a situation where there’s an apprenticeship that’s taken place.

The mentor could lock you in the room with the “cube.” You go back to the Samurai Trilogy, I think in the second, no maybe the end of the first Samurai when the monk traps the guy. He traps him in a room. The guy had all the physical strength. He was a brute. The monk looked at him and said, “Once you have mastered everything in that room, I’ll let you out.” And you look around, there was nothing but books….Now what’s the catch? In the next episode, the door opens, he comes out and he is clean. What’s the catch? Now you gotta put it into practice! He walks out, he’s walking around, walking through the woods, you know, and all of a sudden a bunny or something comes out and he jumps, OK? And then the monk appears and says, ‘See, you still have not conquered.'”

The interview can be read in full at Post No Ills
Visit Ethelbert’s blog

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A Blessing by James Wright

A Blessing
by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

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“Yet the collective life, which is also us, shimmers on.” Mark Doty

“All attempts to console ourselves, I believe, are doomed, because the world is more complicated than we are. Our explanations will fail, but it is our human work to make them.”
from “Souls on Ice” by Mark Doty

I just completed an essay, about my father. It is a draft, so incredibly far from finished, more incredibly difficult to write. If you’ve been here before, you’ve glimpsed its beginnings, the recurrent dream. The essay doesn’t attempt to interpret the dream, as one reader of the draft suggested (a suggestion I may still, sometime in revision, take, but can’t yet), and as he said, the dream as it stands is unsatisfying. So many questions left, and I stand on the dream deck watching my young beautiful dream daddy driving away. I always wake from the dream caught in some web of confusion, strands of sorrow and joy catching at my eyelashes and in my hair. I don’t know why I don’t dream of our time together back home, or relive the joy he showed at the births of my children or my first publication, or more likely, of the recurring talks we had about how he wanted us to love and respect our mother, the woman about whom he often said, “She saved my life.”

I don’t know so much.

But isn’t that how the death of someone we love leaves us? Standing, looking to the horizon as if the departed might appear, trying to figure out how we’ll go on without them, how it is that that he or she is really gone? In the years since my daddy quietly slipped away in his sleep, I can’t count the number of times I’ve lifted the phone to call him–to ask the etymology of a word, to share a funny story, to ask him to remind me again what the French verb is for to search: Pour rechercher.

I’m exhausted. And apparently, still searching.

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My Father Is a Retired Magician

My Father Is a Retired Magician
by Ntozake Shange
(for ifa, p.t., & bisa)

my father is a retired magician

which accounts for my irregular behavior

everythin comes outta magic hats

or bottles wit no bottoms & parakeets

are as easy to get as a couple a rabbits

or 3 fifty cent pieces/ 1958

my daddy retired from magic & took

up another trade cuz this friend of mine

from the 3rd grade asked to be made white

on the spot

what cd any self-respectin colored american magician

do wit such a outlandish request/ cept

put all them razzamatazz hocus pocus zippity-do-dah

thingamajigs away cuz

colored chirren believin in magic

waz becomin politically dangerous for the race

& waznt nobody gonna be made white

on the spot just

from a clap of my daddy’s hands

& the reason i’m so peculiar’s

cuz i been studyin up on my daddy’s technique

& everythin i do is magic these days

& it’s very colored

very now you see it/ now you

dont mess wit me

i come from a family of retired

sorcerers/ active houngans & pennyante fortune tellers

wit 41 million spirits critturs & celestial bodies

on our side

i’ll listen to yr problems

help wit yr career yr lover yr wanderin spouse

make yr grandma’s stay in heaven more gratifyin

ease yr mother thru menopause & show yr son

how to clean his room

YES YES YES 3 wishes is all you get

scarlet ribbons for yr hair

benwa balls via hong kong

a miniature of machu picchu

all things are possible

but aint no colored magician in her right mind

gonna make you white

i mean

this is blk magic

you lookin at

& i’m fixin you up good/ fixin you up good n colored

& you gonna be colored all yr life

& you gonna love it/ bein colored/ all yr life/ colored & love it

love it/ bein colored/

Spell #7 from Upnorth-Outwest Geechee Jibara Quik Magic Trance Manual for Technologically Stressed Third World People

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