Poem : Historicist

Photo of Sif taken by Julia Smith Wellner

Historicist has two meanings.

In one -- theology says that it is about how the prophecies of religious texts apply to our current times. Symbols are attached to events and people. They become sigils of proof.

In the other -- it is about how specific times in history are "important". They signify something. They mean.

Both are saying the same thing. That specific things hold more weight than others.

Out in the Antarctic a research vessel "found" a new island as the ice sheets melt away. They named this island for the Norse goddess Sif. Sif represents the earth. She is mother of all, wife to Thor. She is symbolically the root of everything. Her hair is wheat.

One could argue that an old god arriving at this moment, in this way, is a sign. A sigil. A warning.

One could call it bullshit.

Either way, Sif is there.

---

Historicist

A new island in the Antarctic — Sif — mother — holder of things like wheat

But of course — it is not new — it has been there forever — waiting
      glacier’s patience — patience that is violent

That she has come now — according to the prophecy of various religions —
      sleeping giants awake at the sound of the warning claxon — the glaciers — which
            until now — chose to be still — now bleed with speed — with iron

Slide into the water — clear with the lack of things — become
      the waiting ragnarok beneath a receding history

Violent because it is so slow you cannot see it — but of course it can be measured
      in the acts of kindness — the small gifts of vapor that
            become the fields of wheat tomorrow

Your belly Sif — let it become red in the sun — stare until you blind
      until you un-hunger —
            full with whatever world is next

Poem : Bloody Caesar

Bloody Caesar (The Theatre of Pompey)

Side streets mirror the edge of the theatre’s stage

Fragments of the old building jut out of basement walls

have become columns in buildings
old but half as old

On the spot where Caesar was killed
a cat sunbathes

Poem-A-Day #363 : 36

36

6 years pass
& you seem to remember the cake
from the party

There were faces then
instead of paper bags thinking themselves
into humanity

At the corner of bakery
& Waldorf School was the same feeling
you always have about relationships

What the fuck

& then what the fucking fuck

The impulse to speed away
is so strong that the blur lines come in packs of 100
for $.99 at Party City

They run the gamut from black
to neon anime hair
& even then they all seem too realistic

Looming near the Barclay's Center
the Nets seem to want to play water polo instead
of basketball

And the apartment you sat in
for 7 years melts
into a pool of metallic Studebaker gold

Here is a door frame
it goes to the roof
& manages to deposit you in Bed-Stuy

Don't look back
it wants you to feel fear it can blood let

Instead stare into the ocean & feel its boil

Poem-A-Day #340 : Bar

Bar

History
the steady yarned mallet
against the stretched human skin of a timpani
scythe and chaff and all of that

We discuss time
God are we boring
always burning hapless fuckers
a series of fields being made fallow

Fallow is a yellow word
stalks of corn limp
inkspots bloom across them
they salmon belly in the anemic autumn sun

Roe on the tongue fizzing like pop rocks
endless present melting at the vanishing point
leaves a lump of cooly green radioactive slag
in elephantine shapes

It isn't such a steady beat
this history
percussion as drunken bar fight
and whiskey spilled on the already sticky table

Poem-A-Day #339 : Hope Chest

Hope Chest

The box full of things - unnamed as they are -
hold the history of place in the reflection imposed surface

The sun comes from behind eclipse - it
momentarily explodes - loses itself - becomes a break in the lack of air

This is opening - a seam of paper tape - a fold
sun echoing in pulp - in dust

What are these broken lines of thought
burning a hole in the universe of a closet - they flap like broken doves

Beak cracks - the rubble of it - a light bearing
fruit - rotting and burning and searing the faces of memory

Poem-A-Day #314 : The Voices Of The Dead Only Say The Things We Make Them Say

The Voices Of The Dead Only Say The Things We Make Them Say

A book flips open
a random page
painted over and over
with the faces of your dead

An alphabet of ghosts
the words of the novel
replaced with
their eyes

Just last night
the book had been
about a woman
solving a murder
in some small
Irish town

Who signifies 'A'
and who got the 'X'
is perhaps a sort of
shade thrown wildly
in several directions

Is this psychology
a clever trick
of the dire mind

You sit in the chair
and by oranging light
you attempt to see
a thing in these lines

Graves are closed mouths
books in theory are
the vessels of dead who
cannot help but speak

Yet
these faces only want
to recount how
this woman discovered
whodunnit

They only stand for letters
they sentence plot
metaphor fails them
but they have emotional climax
and denounment for you

An ending that in some sense
could satisfy all that came before

Poem-A-Day #296 : Baking

Baking

Small ring encased in egg whites
and those silver ball bearings
that pop in your mouth

Leave the butter in the sun

Collect sprinkles like change

There are bottles of anise and violet
and bergamot
they are interchangeable

A sense that none of this really matters
that Christmas is inside the oven

That heads can rest on racks

A grandmother made these
even invented them
this has all happened before

Poem-A-Day #286 : Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation

Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation

The process is the thing

To see the car in the tree - the wood nails and glue

The idea of oil crisis - a sort of fracking
cracking the shell of the idea of a country

We want to see the yellow box on wheels as savior - we
want it to drive us to a future we cannot imagine


I pump the gas into the car that was bought as an afterthought

It is cold dark out and the station is bright

The truck across from me is empty - the door open - there is no one around

I hear the sound of the pump fulfilling itself


Saint Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael

Our lady of broken promises of lemons and car making

Industry science and technology - I want to talk about
the abandoned - the people who held their money out
and felt the rain coming


Light the candles - there is the repetition
                    desire need poverty and fear

It is a sort of cycle

And then the promise of freedom that cannot be

The mind convinces itself of its cagedness

And she stands up and points to the horizon - and the horizon responds
with light and with lines of dollars

A moment arises - it becomes prophetic - cool to the touch

The process is the thing
at the end of it there is no result - the hollow space
of new event and new horizon

Ad for the 1975 Dale

Poem-A-Day #283 : Sir Bedivere Waits For Dawn

Sir Bedivere Waits For Dawn

I could run

The sword
                    in my hand
                                        heavy - cold - stones inlaid feel on my palm
across the bridge of the fingers - calloused numb

It is cold on these rocks

The mail is heavy

He wants me to throw it to the lake - it's written on the blade
                    cast it away

Could I be king

Raise this to heaven and sit at the table

I see the crown - lowered to my scalp - it sits
                    everyone falls to their knees - the coin show my face

It is night

The rock is slick with green

Sigh the thought

Would I could throw the might away
                                        I shall sit and contemplate the shoes needed
                    to outrun myself

Winchester Round Table

Poem-A-Day #280 : Dilly Boy

Dilly Boy

Bitch you're meese

Nanti pots in the oven
shite ecaf but bona drag bona ends full basket

Bitch you so ?

Zhoosh yourself
hang the cards

Switch the ring on your fambles you look married

I'll let you doss me get down on my lallies
show the dish and all that in the cottage

Have you the measures to trade ?

Poem-A-Day #279 : History

History

The world as gold object
spins in a heavy space
it flakes - gives off green
rubs itself against your leg

Poem-A-Day #277 : At The Illegal Bar in Spanish Harlem I Really Tried to Sleep with You

At The Illegal Bar in Spanish Harlem I Really Tried to Sleep with You

There was a lean-to against the building : Spanish Harlem : it was night dark there were shots of tequila rumors of the place being shut down : literally a dude serving liquor from his kitchen window into a shed : there were lights of all colors and I think I threw up on the Brooklyn Bridge :::

Did I sleep on the floor of the bathroom : did the night open and close : I am pretty sure I worked the next day : pretty sure I wanted in your bed : you had built yourself a loft it was warm looking and the lights on the ceiling were endlessly nebula-ing :::

Recalling the moment I stepped into the sun : how noisy New York could stop being sometimes : the street was blank with 7 AM light : the trash of the night before across the fronts of us : how did we get from lean-to to lean-to :::

At least I woke up alone : the clothes on my body : the keys to my things in my pocket wallet moneyed and unmoneyed : how longing of me to think that getting drunk above 120th would somehow make you love me :::

Memories stack like beads on a necklace : my mother had one that I would slide beads back and forth across and imagine I was counting myself into something : out of : think about the strings coming off of things marionetting every single one of us :::

What are you up to today : images flash across divides we live in such perilous times : how can we forget these things when Facebook reminds us every few months : here's a picture of your failures and of your wins : eat them :::

Poem-A-Day #276 : SoH je brutus

SoH je brutus

Remember that line from Star Trek:

                    Time is the fire in which we burn

Christopher Plummer says it in bald cap
Klingon ridges making Alps across its surface

wab QoQ ghor HuvHa' chaH rur HIvje'

That's Klingon for "the sound of music breaks on them like glass"

It's funny
because it's about a different Christopher Plummer movie

                    At least we don't live in Ancient Rome:

276 was a leap year
that started itself on a Saturday

In June
               and again in September

                                        an Emperor died

It was all about money
Tacitus devalued the currency
Florianus is assassinated by his own men
Probus returns everything to how it was

But even Probus gets only 6 years before he dies in an October by blades he supposedly leads

SoH je brutus

The Alps on Plummer's face
                    on all of our faces
                                        time draws topography on all of us

The sound of breathing rushes them like canyon walls
it crests and causes weather good and evil

makes us light ourselves on fire and lash outward at the ticking seconds around us

Poem-A-Day #270 : The James Ossuary

The James Ossuary

1
Draw a circle on the blackboard :

Circles are more difficult than you think - they deceive
                    find ways to flatten under your hand :

Make an ouroboros line of salt eating itself :

Lot's wife turns her head to look back at the burning bed of Gomorrah - it is the moment in the movie where the score drops out and the silence hangs there like wool drying in the sun :

If you could step into the chalkboard - into the circle with the flat side you have drawn -
                    you would be standing on a chalkboard in a classroom -
          looking insane -
defying gravity :


2
Chalk is the compressed shell of history :

The ocean's dream of itself :

Darkness bleached of its inky crush :

How does the weightlessness feel in your hand - I remember
               slapping the felt erasers
     against each other

                         until the cloud of dead things welled around me - there
is a feeling of erasing the self a sort of tossing of a smoke bomb - you are Batman
making your escape

     in their blindness
bullets will not find soft places to press :

It was a reward - the erasing :


3
The chalk box had James in it :

And I don't know what that means - he is not here now :

You find a box in a field and it is stained with the brown of dirt and the red of iron and the holes along its surface are oddly beautiful :

Inside the box are the bones :

I dreamt about removing my skeleton again
                    this time we refused to go grocery shopping
          it was Black Friday it was Boxing Day it was the 4th of July -

          we sat in our -
                                   my
                                          - pajamas - we watched episodes of The Simpsons

                     and then I woke up :

4
The box that James was in - sits in front of you - it has been litigated
declared fake - the very idea - !

The issue is that is is historic evidence for Jesus - the inscription :
                    Ya'akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua
                    James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus :

It is another scene in a movie where the sound drops out - unless
          it's that kind of movie
                              where heavy strings rise up out of the darkness around us

          telling us that this is now :

This
is now :

5
How goes the circle - the standing against it
          the pausing of physics :

The box is compressed history - your hand
compressing itself - is also a history

You realize that blackboard chalk hasn't been made from chalk for decades - the piece in your hand is made of gypsum -
                                        from the Greek - gypsos
                                        when burnt and rehydrated it can be used as plaster
                    it can build - it is drywall :

The room around you is a box of chalk :

The James Ossuary

Poem-A-Day #260 : Fellfield

Fellfield

We erode -

                    The computer was no longer working - it was big - it was out of date - we threw it into the dumpster after trying for a week to find somewhere to donate it to

          for parts - education - whatever

                              the sound of the screen breaking was the sound of ice cracking in  glass of scotch - sharp - you could picture the crack across the thick gray surface - could feel the crack with your fingernail

Eventually all mountains turn into scree -

                    The pile of weathered glass looks like marbles - it feels like marbles - like an oddly smooth skin

          colorful skin - breaking skin - the remnants of oceans

                              why do we come here - why do we roll around in these piles of glass what good does it do to stare into the compactor - the dump is not a place for us we are attempting to not be trash

The rubble will hold -

                    The broken computer still houses the memories of what it was - if there were a way to turn it on it would still window itself would probably even bring up the last file

          like a basement in flood - the molding folder would open with a resounding crack

                              inside a map of what once was - topographical and emotional - green and fading and barely legible - it would smell like moths - you could plant it in the ground and it would grow another mountain

Poem-A-Day #257 : November

November

Burnt skin          is tight across fingers
the prints are shallow          there is whiteness everywhere

At some point your self was erased and why didn't you notice it

The red in the wagon was a warning          you could sit in it
pretend that you could steer it downhill          how does chin feel on pavement

One morning you woke up and the birds wheeling in the sky didn't recognize the land

The two children hit each other with rebar          it is November
the land is in the midst of its throes          the mountain snows in

There are ravens in New Mexico they croak in the treetops they are alarm bells

John J. Audubon - Birds of America (1827-1838)

Poem-A-Day #252 : Vision vs. Sight

Vision vs. Sight

Tesla stands at the edge of the canyon - a glacial scar -
                              he imagines a hollow earth - he imagines taking the stones and setting them upright in a circle - he imagines mining his own salt - he imagines breeding pigeons - he imagines the lizards standing on their hind legs and talking to him -

You island you - Tesla finds a smooth stone and tosses it into the space between edges - a gulf of air that swallows endlessly and never exhales -

The stone skips across the surface - it does - seven times -

And it ripples the sunset just so - the colors merging into a matte brown - an orange cat sits at Tesla's feet - there is a breeze -

Poem-A-Day #251 : A Series of Quakes

A Series of Quakes

The arboreal script pulls across the trunk of the tree

glacial - a sigh in the hills of Scotland - one lone rock in a rut

Out in the ocean - a puffin gives egg to rock

Weight is heat - press and brush fire - the movement of warming

a finger lick up the lip of canyon

Scotland is experiencing a cold snap - a few thousand years

The loneliest rock will dance - glacial kph is one per year -

human expansion clocks the same

We seek the bloodstones in the hazelnuts - burn them to paste

Poem-A-Day #250 : Re-See

Re-See

Above - the moon - endlessly talked photographed landed upon - known to the point of boredom - even its rabbit has cleaned itself from the discussion

How does the change occur - the sudden shift in views - the magic of fire leading to space travel - how does the child mind say 'FUCK THAT'S AMAZING' in its current mood

It hovers - like a balloon - jaundiced and slow to blink - it mythologizes itself - collects the news clipping and will have to go to therapy to get its hoarding under control - the dark side of the moon is covered in cats and abandoned satellites

How does one re-see for the first time - the things in your hand - in a changing light they may become strangers - your own fingers are sausages in an overcast moment

One of the first photographs of the moon
Taken by John William Draper in 1840

Poem-A-Day #248 : Mute

Mute

Angela Davis is talking about Palestine - again - still - forever
she is the dynamo at the end of the universe
spinning wildly free of man - and she is talking about Palestine

That word - Palestine - it renders us incapable
it drops into the already formed puddle and only renders itself mute
part of the unknowable whole - but we clap and nod in agreement with it

It is Tibet - Putin - hunger in Africa - it is the inescapable
destruction of cancer - it mutates with the passage of time
it is hard not to hear all human voices as records helplessly in groove

History is nothing if not unclean - at best
perhaps the broken turntable is a metaphor - the stupid cycle is stupid
the needle dull - the speakers are geese demanding your sandwich

The water in the pool of Palestine is unclear - still - reflections numerous
there are endless ampersands - their barbs catch in the back of the throat
they render everything as ellipses