Summer not Summer

I don't know why this year the bees are coming to us to die. Every morning there is one or two or three motionless on the screen. Tomorrow they will lie curled on the porch, and we'll sweep them away, and one or two or three silent replacements will be on the screen. They've been doing this for days.

Does one go back to the hive, each time, to dance “this is a good place to die”? And do the ones that plan to come tomorrow watch him, gravely, attentively, studying for tomorrow's recital?

Once on the screen they never move, never murmur: protesters holding a silent vigil.

---

The 18th of July, and we have had two summer days. Cold and cloudy this morning. Lovely for me – I do not much like hot days – but eerie.

---

A cluster of bubbles on the surface of my coffee deceives me: I think a pale spider is floating there, its legs curled inward.

---

Either I was early, or my friend was late: I had twenty minutes in her quiet evening office to meditate, perched on the edge of a chair, my eye idly making flowers out of patterns in the carpet, feeling the sky wheeling slowly over my head, my inbreaths and outbreaths barely noticed, coming and going like hospital nurses in a sleeping patient's room.

---

Strange how nervous it still makes me, to stand up in front of people and say things, even my written-down poems. I would say it means nothing to me, I have nothing invested in it, but my shaky hands and quavering voice give me the lie. What do my hands and voice think? That strangers are really listening to me, really trying to see into my heart? Or that if I was good enough I could make them do so despite themselves?

But I did enjoy reading a couple of Sage's poems. It would be fun to do a reading in which you all read each other's poems. I would enjoy that much more than reading my own, both the reading and the listening. I'll never forget Beth in Teju's Brooklyn apartment, reading my poem “Santiago” aloud. – Now that did feel like someone seeing into my heart.

They're wonderful readers: Tiel, Carolee, and Deb. Sage couldn't come, so Tiel and I read some of her poems. And Deb read one of Jill Crammond Wickham's poems, so that all the Big Tent Ringmasters were represented. This is what modern poetry is, to me. Not “fame, that all seek after in their lives,” but rather, a way for friends to slow down and understand each other deeply. No doubt my hands and voice would get all excited about the prospect of being in the Norton Anthology of English Literature in 2046, but I don't. I get excited about hearing Carolee read “Jalopy.”

Reading Saturday Noon at St Johns Booksellers

St Johns Booksellers
8622 N. Lombard St., Portland, OR 97203

I'll be reading, and so will Tiel Aisha Ansari, Sage Cohen, Deb Scott, and Carolee Sherwood. About ten minutes apiece: no heroic feats of listening endurance required.

These are some of the poets I most admire. They got me started writing poetry and keep me writing poetry. (They can't help that, mind, so don't hold it against them.)

Tiel Aisha Ansari
Sage Cohen
Deb Scott
Carolee Sherwood

Trying

Just try, says a patient voice. Daddy?
My eyes won't open. Maybe I'm too young.
I root in a mysterious world of warmth,
sweet milk; I dangle in the air on giant hands.

the sky runs rapidly over my head;
pizza-dough clouds twist, stretch, vanish:
I want your skin. I reach, and miss.

---

Tracts arise, fully formed, to spring from my forehead
like contemptuous daughters, full of wisdom, full
of spite: painfully counting on my fingers I compare
their numbers to the points of leaves,

can't make it come to five. I am broken,
a half-smashed creature too primitive
to understand it's dead; the legs on my right keep working,
but I only spin in place, circling my ruin;

I have become the hand of a clock,
the measure of my minutes.

---

There is no try, said that miserable green thing,
and I tended to agree, but in that case
What is this? Melville knew a different trying;
maybe that's what we have here.

Cut the skin in careful strips; boil the fat
until the milk-oil rises, opalescent, full of grace --
curded sperm, light bearer, Lucifer: the whiteness
of the whale.

---

Or of course
you can by tried for treason,
you can be tried for fun,
you can be tried by fire,
you can be tried and true.

---

Everyone stops – pedestrian, car,
bike, truck, bus: the bridge is opening.
We wait. We look for the vessel. Straight down
through the steel grating we can see the water
gray ruffled by the wind, laced white.
The center of the bridge lifts high: we all float
suspended on abandoned outthrust tongues.
A bridge no longer: an impediment. Below us
something huge, unseen, urgently
needs passage. Just try.

---

Big Tent Poetry

Ermine

Big Tent Poetry: Persona

"The glory of it stings," she says, and I picture her, fifty years younger, on a motorcycle, helmetless, that wonderful hair lashing her face, her arms wrapped around some Frenchman.

"God comes like that" -- her arthritic fingers won't snap, but she can make the gesture of snapping them -- "and then he goes away again. Easy for you to say he's coming back. But what if he doesn't?"

She taps my chest with her fingertips, all ten of them. "You don't say what you think, do you?" She nods. "You want to be taken for a nice man, that's right, that's the right thing to do. You go home and tell your wife I'm crazy with God, tell some jokes about me, about old maids and spaces under the bed. But to me you nod just like I'm making sense. Is it time for my medicine yet?

She drifts across the kitchen, a tiny pink wisp, and fills a glass with water. Her hair floats around her, white laced with black: a mink turning to ermine. "But you're not the medical one, are you. I was forgetting. You're the masseur. What Linda calls the 'masseuse.'" She chuckles, her voice low and raspy. "You look manlike enough to me. Of all the times, they get a man to touch me when I'm too sick to appreciate it. Isn't that just like the world, isn't it though? That's why the crazy with God stuff.

"Oh, God," she adds, "he knows that. No secrets between us. He says he doesn't mind, he's got worse things to worry about."

She climbs onto the table and shrugs out of her robe, snuggles under the blankets, and blinks at me. "So touch me already."