Chapbook launch party. June 24th at 6 pm at Keats Restaurant (842 2nd Ave, New York, NY).
I’m reading on June 24th, at 6 pm, with Emily Alta Hockaday and Alina Gregorian at Keats Restaurant (842 Second Ave, New York, NY). Emily’s chapbook Starting a Life is available for preorder from Finishing Line Press.
Nearly a Valediction
because no rainy day is complete without some Marilyn Hacker.
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I’ve ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.I don’t want to remember you as that
four o’clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days’ routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She’ll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn’t know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgiveyou, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.-Marilyn Hacker, from Winter Numbers
How come no one wants to publish my Gowanus canal poem? Sigh.
Tumblr is my favorite not-cure for insomnia. Beach tomorrow, if I can get through tonight. (Insomnica?) Maybe I should start sleeping on the roof. Here’s a poem about Rick Santorum.
Florence in my dream was tan and pink.
We drank Coronas on a roof and passed around a pipe, its smoke clear but there. My old house wasn’t cold enough for me to see my breath in, but it was too cold for cockroaches. The mice cried at night, ran during the day to stay warm. One, scared, skirted my foot when I ate lunch. Malcolm brought in the cat then, and the beast delivered seven corpses lined up before my door, flawless save for blood in their tiny mouths & ears.
(Source: amazon.com)
Hey Long Islanders! I’m reading poems at Bellmore Memorial Library on 5/29. 7:30 pm. Facebook invite here.
Margaret was copying a recipe for “saints roasted with onions” from an old cook book. The ten thousand sounds of the world were hushed so we could hear the scratching of her pen. The saint was asleep in the bedroom with a wet cloth over his eyes. Outside the window, the author of the book sat in a flowering apple tree killing lice between his fingernails.
—Charles Simic from The World Doesn’t End (via starvingforthesun)
I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses.
No one ever made that mistake with me.
—Charles Simic
(Source: nybooks.com)
