Spanakopita time

Spanakopita time

water pours off her sides
as she rises tall as a giraffe
with cliffs steep
out of the azure Aegean Sea
even taller now
that molten magma
pushes her surface higher
elevates the cafe conversation
calls for more sugar in the coffee -megalo!

O Thera of dramatic heights
there is no island more
nor rugged shore
as yours!

night falls
church bells call
the flame from inside
to candle passed to light candle  
to next candle light
Orthodox priests in black
with full beards swing cauldrons of myrth incense
add smoke to the acrid air
announce Chisto Anesti (again)
the populus, her earth 51/2 inches higher than last year

service over
¼ sticks of dynamite are lit and heaved over
the town wall to explode
a thick black powder cloud
envelopes the church
children tear open plastic bags of toys
feast begins
tripe soup
krassi & nero to revive
laughter & fingers grasp
red eggs to crack together
trays of spanakopita in waiting
time to eat now
ahead of tourist hordes
& money making travails
before the donkeys have to begin their climbs
cinder vineyards of Atlantis
lay bare before May flowers

Clear Pitch

Clear Pitch

back in the pine scented forest
big site
WPA stone stove
mosquitoes not bad
water close
nature having fun with us
trees drip lots of pine sap
pants,pots,hats,hands sticky
wasps retire as crickets begin their song
clear pitch reflects silver in moonlight
musicians envy

forest service having fun with us
chain saws buzzing on Sunday!
we walked the pioneer trail
glad I am not pulling a wagon

not pitch black that night
stars, white clouds & a bright
lazy moon peaks through the trees

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

                                                                           G.K. Chesterton


Truman & Norman (for Carol)

Truman & Norman brought us reality T.V. by turning murderers & our war
into mass N.Y. Times articles of shared examination, existential case studies
sans remedies, to run again & again in episodic indulgence
in crime & punishment. Click the remote, invite surface level missives
into our hives. Truman & Norman brought us to reality T.V. Gore invented KQED.

Poem de Résistance

My spanakopita is frozen
not in poetic form but
taken now over two meals
heated precisely in two
different locations both
seemingly for the same
gastric highway although
can we step into the same
gastric highway twice?

Distaste prompts me from
suggestions to find a muse
where no muse beckons

What and who am I?
Immunity from within?

I find the smallest of spiders
traveling across my mousepad
and instantly gather this one
to a more hospitable place
an outside where larger webs
may or may not be more sure
than this virtual web where
words both run along fluffy lines
and catch on self sticky strands

"Art Witticism" in poetic form

I was recently asked,  in a piece of qualitative research, to respond to this piece of art with art criticism. I learned about concepts such as shape, form, and focal point (which seemed to mostly miss the point of feeling, passion, presence, and action). Instead of only critique, attack, and the usual rhetoric of domination,

Let's Write a poem of "art witticism" - riffing off a piece of art and where it leads us. 

You can riff on one of these pieces of art, or whatever piece of art you like. Please include an image if you go farther afield to provide us context. This is not just ekphrasis, feel welcome to wander loosely and let your neural circuits take a jaunt!

Keywords: art-wit, poem, [poet's moniker]

Above right, Don Ray, "Blue Laced Red Wyandott," 2008

Joe Magnum, Sand Painting, 2012

Or pick one of the images from the Chianciano Art Gallery Preview "Art of the Mind" 2012

Or perhaps some street art from Street Art Utopia...

Have fun, and maintain a sense of the possible!

Riverbank being at the edge of immersive be/coming

In the deepest rivulets of the summer-quietened streams, I linger. In the moist edge-rocks, pebbling the eddies of water quenching riverbank, I linger. I arise with a hunger for this sweet and tender water-touching-land wholeness, of one thing making another, becoming another, of water and stone making mud and leaf, of the deep shade below tangy scents and stream bush sweetnesses. Of water rolling over earth, aeons, becoming air and riverbed. Of cooling earth rolling around the sun, more aeons, whirling clouds and ocean.

Anatomy/Ontology

-->

—reflecting at Harbin Hot Springs

Are people how they look?

Can you see in a face

the coffee-table book

of every glow and grace

some divine sculptor took

the time to mold in place?

Appearances deceive,

some say. But who can guess

faultlessly or receive

all revelations shook

from the embodied weave

of two totalities

looking out at themselves?

As humans sensing, we

express what is our space.

They’re the same: the body,

the personality.

Pleistocene ( inverted )

the respite of souls

uncoiling from busy lifetimes

chronological becoming  /  becoming the fossil records 


the biological truth of her tusk  /  your long pointed hunger 

you and i tucked in amidst the Ferns 

Mastodon fallow and waiting


wide awake for a century or two

Mastodon running wild /  wholly immersed  

drunk with the musk of her return

a soft fury  /  a Rave

stretching her play across the drama of opening night

it's transparent silence  

it's moisture

IMUNURI Prompt: Nature

by Gary Snyder, 1968

BIOPHOTO ASSOCIATES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Color enhanced scanning electron micrograph of stomata on a rose leaf. Magnification: x1800.

Nature.
The material world.
The world as it exists without humans.
The world including humans.
Relationships between living systems.
The universe and its phenomena.


Nature is your subject this week.
Consider tapping into stories that have a charge for you.
Consider these offerings as sparking points among a great many.

It's a wide open space...


keywords: nature, poem, your name

Analemma of the sun

Five Tails

Steady ground of multitudinous paws

with limitless capacity to reflect

I gaze through dog windows seeing

laying  there aspects of my self

true and false  whole as well as partial

muddied then still and clear

what a day of five tails telling

what might not otherwise be seen

a) Attentive

foundling shaped coddled softened

from the inside out Mystic Eye of

the Beholder tender and fierce

at times rapidly interchanging

hesitant yet braised in a longing

contained by eons of shadowing

supplicant of the human heart

when opened  vastly free

b) Bounding

naked nighttime new moon confab

juxtaposes playful boundless reverie

extremes of pursuit and contentment

don’t tie me down but keep me close

tender toothed kisses unfettered affection

I see my own innocence here glowing

even with misunderstandings speculation

and day rises again the bright clear sun

c) Chivalrous

the heart that opens deeply softly

eyes eyes eyes seeing watching tasting

putting all aside ready to desire delight

transparency confluence of many worlds

easy traveler buoyant riding over surface

and depth his role clear certain allowing

leave it in his hands but paws and nose

return again and again ever welcoming

d) Dear

unsettled bashfully brazen welcoming

committee of one of anything needing

alerting exuberantly caught in her own skin

and grace melting icebergs in her sleep

where all previous proclivities disperse

just give me something soft to curl onto

something to gaze into calm me full

in these simple yet abiding nourishings

w) Exceptionally

no other steps in here in This Way

fraught with complexity and oh so

vulnerable would it could it be seen

only only only ready ready steady

bound within an unspoken allegiance

being everything and plus some to His

and yet what has been asked is more

than some could bear this bare note

• • •

And five tails told but only wagging

can tell what more is to be seen

dog windows to the soul of so many

internal worlds open space off leash

Mirror, Mirror

Mirror, Mirror

I go to bed with Snow White.  Her skin is a field of lilies, but

she sings in her sleep about someday; I want to yell, “I’m here right now.”

Why didn’t I marry the one who took fairy Ambien, or the one who can’t talk?

When dawn breaks, Snow offers me coffee & juice and oatmeal, breakfast in bed.

I think things are looking up, until she says, “It’s fresh!  Apple-cinnamon!

The nice old lady selling produce gave me a free sample.”

I compost the oats and agree to a party to cheer her; she misses days gone by.

But her small hairy friends bring pick axes to the fest; they also sing too much,

except the one who scowls in the corner.  I get it; I’m grumpy, too.

The next morn as Snow slumbers, I rise and look where I musn’t—

in her diary, marked private, i’s dotted with hearts, she’s written,

“I wish he were a frog, or at least a little more charming. Le sigh.”

Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Who’s the least content of all?

alignments / cupping moonflower as she flies

every nightmorning the apple branch (for a moment) holds the moon.

today at 6:04am she grasps the mighty light:

a waning saucer, cup-up.

the birds in the shape of bone

in my back don't click with rib discs just so.

how to make a nest that fits?

disk of moon, ribs, discus of delight

align me wholly, inner sight.

gyre and reach, palm of bone

click with wings and come on home.

align me whole like lego spine

unbend the ribs as fork and tine.

forge me a nest of wings for flight

so i reach up and hold moonlight. 

become the apple tree

pink with sunrise.

reach to cup the

moon as she flies.

[spanakopita form]

One hundredth of a half step

I reach along an arm of awareness
(this one into seeming empty sheer empty)

not writing but what writing feigns wonders
days go by physicalities ponder their own

can it be conveyed all is held right there
without unnecessarily fabricating something else

primacy  sometimes sleep speaks of this
sometimes music or space between notes

I've been given what I have emptiness of
words seeing hearing and something elusive

slowly without pace or time what is empty
finally remains so even as flowing over

what sleeps on sleeping when that wakes
re-crystalizes itself with aikido likeness

Bedbug

Dreams bubble out your lips—

a-hunting you go—

            plip, plip, plip…

I pull blankets, groan and itch,

scrawny bitch.

In dream, what your tongue gets at,

strong as your breath

Scrat, scrat, scrat…

Your powdered self makes me wheeze.

There’ve been fleas.

Dreaming, you begin to bark,

fearsome, feral—

            quark, quark, quark…

You are midnight’s burping duck—

I wake—the fuck?

You stir, feeling sticky,

give an earthquake:

            ricky, ricky, ricky…

Next time, our bug will have her crate.

This time, too late.

If only (Jung & Freud)...

If only (Jung & Freud)...

I sleep with pigeons
   on the concrete building ledge
      dream drowning.

Too many aliens appear/robed in white coveralls
sport bubblehead noggins
 move in too close
     to my self skin
      silently menace
          scare me into a new dream drowning.

A lion on the floor above
leaps on another lion
 two big beast cats
   come crashing down below
     onto my ledge of pigeons
       & we all free tumble downward.

- if only Jung & Freud had seen us
so they could play chess with these dream drownings
of mine & maybe I could glimpse what was what
& who was who under the buzzing lights.