for ali's website...

...wander here.

.

for (& after) Lorine Niedecker

dear lorine,

after reading you so, i've decided some things. you have won my love with your lily mud, your muskrats and birdstart, your weight of lake water. the granite pail grace of words you tumble down the page like stone-skipping, outflow flood, or like pouring your eyes out into folded, and i am cranberry bush, cupped paper palms waiting.

your pressure-pump is water-bird and i drew a small heart near that. and your father's trees and your mother's ropes and the road are what you know. you talk about the plumbing. about the oven. fishpole & leafbloom. that beautiful poem last (about louis?) that dwindles in everything~  down and down until it's nothing or mine.

    red mars / rising

.

i'm writing this in a letter because how can i not. it's the only rightly quiet thing to do, me & you.

what to do, watching the birds.

i was in the grass with the book and i kept writing things like alliteration. and slant-rhyme. and "sound"."sound"."sound". there was sun and a swirl of film-thin clouds and writing those sorts of things makes me tired. my toes sifting pine needles i wanted to write about "she who knew boats and ropes". i want to write "you have been on my mind / between my toes / agate" or "leafing towards you / in this dark / deciduous hall". i could write "Rock = Blood / Nature = Body / Body = Compost?" i could write, "sound. pace." or "image & sound." but i want to write everything else, your "sweet cedar pink", the "July, waxwings" and "the little / thin things / paul". i want to write "spoon-tapped water glass", a "strawberry letter" and "you weed / you pea-blossom weed / in a folk / field". i want to write that your heart was flooded and you measured it out in thimblefuls, careful, spelling out in pinches, dashes, delicate as to not spill any excess on the page. that you were wedded to the worms and the water in the ground.

maybe you held the papers there by their trees, in the light. maybe you were content or lonesome. maybe you saw yourself only as a reflection in a lake. silver minnows, sharp and swallows darting in your eyes.

.

onomatopoeia

noun

the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named

(e.g., cuckoo, sizzle).

• the use of such words for rhetorical effect

.

onomatopoetic, ey, i don't know how to say that. do you? the pronunciation doesn't translate fonts. it's written in the right font of Gertrude or Marisa, the wrong font of everyone knows this strange word and you can't remember it what's the matter with you, but i'm pasting it for us into my crumpled scrap paper-bit basket in the small font of pearl-flowered, your maples to swing from / pewee glissando / sublime / slime / song. you can hold me at the distance of an arm, or a pond, or a thick winter window patterned with frost, keep me there evenly, even with your I but the sound smoothes out the reaches, pull us together like a bent green branch. a pine bough. the handle for a basket. "Get a load / of April's / fabulous / / frog rattle / lowland freight cars / in the night".

wandering in your head, wondering your island, your blood-heart rustles like leaves.

    "descending scale / tear-drop-tittle / did she giggle / as a girl?"

 (  took a lifetime

 to weep 

                               a deep

                                          trickle  )

.

as a girl, i found a picture of you dressed up like Pocahontas. you had two thick blonde braids with ends jagged as horse-tails, shimmery twisted like the surface of a lake from underwater. you stood there, timeless on your island, laughing in black and white with the big grey sky behind you. caught in that catching a moment, like a fish. "if in danger, run," you say in silence of smiling, "to the woods."

.

Pound's definition of the image was "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Pound defined the tenets of Imagist poetry as:

    I.    Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.

    II.   To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

    III.  As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not

 in sequence of the  metronome.

pale and sharp, my pencil in the margin. your reflections reflected in musings down the page.

a glossy blade of grass, split.

my life by water

                                    i've wasted my life in water, you said

                                                      i've spent my life on nothing

                                                      my life is hung up / in the flood

                                                                                         

.

( "the solitary plover / a pencil / for a wing-bone" )

.

quiet in isolation. quiet because some seasons shift in silence. quiet like island are quiet. like the mud and collected fallen-things at the bottom of a lake are quiet. quiet like an old faded painting of yourself with bare trees and water behind you. quiet in lines dangled in space, like watching fish faint submarine back & forth between the murk and surface of the pond,  "lilacs, vacant lots," your white the gulls / in grey weather, your pouring wine over cabbage. lakewater lap and leaf rustle. hold your pencil like a reed, a wand. wait for letters, weather, hush.

.

Sleep on horseback,

The far moon in a continuing dream,

Steam of roasting tea.

                                                                        -Basho Matsuo

.

the publisher turned your volume up. i know about the low levels of sound, round-about way of whispering when no one's around. here i write you small how you belong. down in the good dirt and the hiding with him in the cupboard. the language of a lake and a forest. the language of the brown and golden underbrush. the language of long division between sun and shadowing branches. twig-piled nests folded into the elbows of your father's trees. these things we carry. here i quote your small and quiet, your mousing through a crack in the wall with "the you / ah you / of mourning doves".

.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

.

"I learned / to sit at desk / and condense" you said. condensing moments to their essentials, push your pencil at the essence of a moment – like a secret – taking a moment and unlocking it like the flat door of a box – looking to see the particular shape of its heart. letting out a little, the breath of it. breathing. the breath of birds filling in the white space that surrounds you. an antique looking-glass on the dresser. a lunar moth hidden in plain sight on a doorframe.

.

autobiography of voice  or  stitched together like:

my mother, thorn apple bush

my father catalpa tree

I rose from marsh mud

I'm swamp / as against a large pine-spread

              I 

raped by the dry 

weed stalk

a weedy speech / a marshy retainer

                                                                        a wave-blurred portrait

sit for two months on six lines / of poetry

I was job-certified / to rake leaves

something in the water

like a flower

                   in blood the minerals

                  of the rock

                                                                       

                                                        Fish

                                                                                                                                    fowl

                                                                                                                                            flood

                                                                                                                                     Water lily mud

                                                                                                                              My life

what's interesting

"...deciding what's interesting is about as subjective as things get...Here, for me, is the last word on interesting, from a short story by Abigail Thomas:
My mother's first criterion for a man is that he be interesting. What this really means is that he be able to appreciate my mother, whose jokes hinge on some grammatical subtlety or a working knowledge of higher mathematics. You get the picture. Robbie is about as interesting as a pair of red high-top Converse sneakers. But Robbie points to the mattress on the floor. He grins, slowly unbuckling his belt, drops his jeans. "Lie down," says Robbie.
     This is interesting enough for me."

- from Bird by Bird ("Character" chapter), by the inimitable Anne Lamott

.