The Page Turner

shoulder to shoulder
on the piano seat,

you scan quarter
notes together,

reading as he flips
over the leaves of

this composition

two childhood friends
grown into adulthood

under your father’s tutelage,
he defers to you, though

you’d rather it were
his hands stretched over

ivory keys, reaching
across to turn

in to you

Bus Uncle

an unemployed fruit-
carver cuts into

a sleep-deprived youth
aboard the Kowloon

Motor Bus for breaking
up his connection to

the local suicide line,
Samaritans, Uncles &

Aunties, the yellow age
of filial piety is dead

you have pressure I have pressure

pressure cooker stress mark stress test
press pass noise raping news viral mantra

this crisis not resolved

While sick with a sinus infection this weekend and in between viewing The Sea Inside and Born into Brothels, I finished reading the definitive biography on Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomon. It is a terrific snapshot of the NY art scene from the Surrealists up to the Ab Ex-ers and New York School, and chronicles Cornell's collaborations with filmmakers.

Things I have in common with Joseph I Cornell:

-love cake and cherry soda
-like to cut things up and reappropriate them
-fascination with Hollywood stars
-imaginary travel
-a deep mother wound
-deeply suspicious of the art establishment
-inspired by other art mediums
-a love for the whimsical
-a tendency towards depression
-faithful correspondents
-daily journalers

Tinfish 17: June, 2007: The Bowling Score-card Issue

Tinfish 17 includes work by R. Zamora Linmark, Shin Yu Pai, Kaia Sand, Sage U`ilani Takehiro, Tiare Picard, Afaa Michael Weaver, Ryan Oishi, Deborah Meadows, Kimo Armitage, Ann Inoshita, Jules Boykoff, Craig Perez, Clint Frakes, Jane Sprague, Paolo Javier, Truong Tran, Normie Salvador, and others.

What are some things you will find in this issue?

--definitions to words
--American epics (undone)
--13 ways and 14 lines
--poems of exile and estrangement, a prayer
--politics and love, together and apart

Covers by Jean Pitman, Centerfold by N. Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Graphic Design by Yoko Hattori.

Order from tinfishpress.com

Worth waiting for...

Works on Paper was printed letterpress on a Vandercook 4 Proof Press in an edition of 125 copies. The poems are printed on kozo paper, with sections bound in Moriki endsheets. Boards were wrapped in Kumoi paper, brushed with persimmon dye, and printed with beeswax. The concertina structure is of Fabriano Roma, and the types are Perpetua. This book was designed, printed, and bound by John Cutrone and Seth Thompson.

Chokes

I watch him brush
aside thin inedible

fibers, florets from
a thistle blossom

before tasting of
the flower’s meat
how I wish I knew

how to handle
the heart of another

firm beneath the tender
pads of tongue &

fingertip, past
rows of thorned

petals piercing
touch the rewards

of digging below choke
to the disc-like glass

of a clean heart

Bamiyan

in the pink sandstone cliffs
of the Koh-e Baba Mountains,

spent rocket casings,
steel support rods &

shrapnel surround a pair
of yawning outlines

carved from rock, cave
murals coated in dust &

soot, a spray-painted phrase
from the sacred Koran:

the just replaces the unjust

assailed by artillery
& heavy canon fire,

faces hacked off,
then dynamited under

Talib rule &
yet it remains:

nothing can’t be blown up

Origin

The third issue of Origin is now online. Dig it.

Sugar Daddy

        after Tom Friedman

refined & white
a man made of artificial

sweetener sugar
cubed the diabetic’s

nightmare, a young girl’s
longing for something

other than Equal

every kiss, jawbreaker
brittle lolli-pop – love that rots

teeth, leaves you
w/ diabetes, obesity

the sticky residue
of what the body

can’t resist
craving –

a saccharine mouthfeel

My co-conspirator for Haiku Not Bombs, Tom Gilroy, is having an exciting event next month at the BAM.

Reading update:

Friday, May 18, 9 p.m. at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of the Museum's Late Night series. I'll be reading in the galleries from my poem commission for "A Pantry Ballet for Jacques Offenbach" and from Equivalence which is almost sold out - down to its last 75 copies.

The new Four Square features one of my photos for cover art. Order from Jessica's Etsy page.

Completion

Winter Renga with Andrew Schelling

torn cloud and snow
blown across high glacial rock--
then note of a lone horn

in winter bands of ewes
roaming alpine valleys

even in cities
their tender hooves soothe me
past taxis, frozen slush, hard moon

a cab driver returns a sack of
diamonds left in a trunk

in my heart
love's bright facets, though rain's
washed out the love poem

tired sonnets & lackluster odes fall
short of summer showers' beauty

the road of poetry
is dark, bitter, & solitary --
Hah-hah!

prizing a shared connection
tidings sent across the currents

this morning I see
"the person you were born"
in your left eye tears, sing to me

bird songs on waking, the body takes
in its first glass of distilled water

drinking the air
of North America after
a long journey East

he recalls October apricots
sun-dried near the army cantonment

in the valley of Cashmere
Turkish lokum poured from
the autumn harvest

we call it Full Corn Moon
respite from a nation at war

keeping an ear to
earth, the truth of global
warming, polar caps & bears

wild fire, bark beetle
from here to Alaska's tundra

at a roadside lumberyard
piles of cut logs squared
stacks of two-by-fours

ah, ancestors—
the Siouxland cottonwood’s tiny buds

on NCAR mesa
by a flowering prickly pear
she laughs & weeps for her father

the drum of a woodland flame-
back hammering out its heart

Revisions

Adamantine

In Yehlio, a jagged scar
runs across the neck

of Queen’s Head Rock,
a vandal’s foiled plot

to fence an ancient land-
mark on the art market

scarred stone hardly bears
her royal profile,

years from now to fall like

Franconia’s Great Stone
Face, the Old Man

collapsing, overnight
in a slip of rock

*

At 82, Luciano Mares remembers
the night his house burned to the ground
and wonders:

DOES A MOUSE HAVE BUDDHA NATURE?

I had some leaves
burning outside,
so I threw it in
the fire, mouse
trap – the heat
loosened the glue

incensed,
the creature ran
back towards the house
where flames lit
the curtains &
spread up from there
destroying everything

*

From the remains
of his cremation,
the monks recovered

the seat of Thich Quang Duc’s
consciousness –

a bloodless protest
to awaken the heart
of the oppressor

offered
at the crossing of
Phanh Dinh Phung
& Le Van Duyet

doused in gasoline &
immolated by 4-meter
flames the orange-robed

arhat folded in
the stillness
of full lotus

his body withering
his crown blackening
his flesh charring
his corpse collapsing

his heart refusing to burn
his heart refusing to burn
his heart refusing to burn

*

the aging antiquities dealer
drops the value on his idol

of the Nataraja after twenty
years, sold to the lowest

bidder for 2.4 million
insuring the collector’s

early retirement – Chola bronze
buried deep within a well

bears the scars of rope
used to lower the god

down a tunnel to safety
evading all problems

of patrimony, in other
incarnations Shiva as

lingam, father of yoga
balanced in ananda tandava

one leg raised in cosmic dance
the other stamping illusion

*

the sledge-hammered crown
of Akshobya stolen

from Shentong Monastery’s
Four Gate Pagoda,

his throat slit with saw

(if you meet the Buddha
on the path, kill him)

bought on the black market

by devotees, donated to
the head of the Dharma Drum

order Master Sheng Yen
sees past the icon, a non-

attachment to form:
animal skin stretched over

hollow shell, a head
broken away from its body

remembering how the holy
prince was once pictured

in ancient art –
by his footprint alone

the grounding of
the transcendent

where the Buddha touched
earth, villages he visited

the dharma flowering to
distant places Sheng Yen

retraces the path, taking
the Buddha back to his origins

from a plane to a bus
escorted from Beijing
to Shandong Province

a ceremony that makes
headlines on both sides

of the Taiwan Strait

Nha Magazine has just put up the feature piece that I wrote on Mong Lan's work here.

Calling All Houstonians

I would like to read in Houston before we leave TX in August and I have a gallery venue lined up. If you are a Houston-based poet, know my work and our work would read well together, please backchannel me. Preferred reading date would be June or July.

Another anthology....

This one from Grub Street in Boston where I used to teach. The organization has gone through more executive directors in the past few years than I have gone through apartments and moves. Good to see that the nonprofit has managed to stay afloat and expand into the greater Boston area and new creative projects. The anthology is prose heavy but includes some poetry as well....Contributors include Christopher Castellani, Jenna Blum, Jill McDonough, Steve Almond, Rishi Reddi, Kathleen Rooney, Allison Adair, and yours truly, among others.

All Gallery podcast

The ALL Gallery in New Haven which hosted my friend Rick and me in late April has podcasts of our readings here and here.

Soon....

Some things are worth waiting for....

I received an email on Thursday from the production manager at Tupelo Press that Nutritional Feed is finally in production. The book will publish this fall with full color images of David Lukowski's paintings and my accompanying texts. Three years in the making, something good to look forward to this fall....

Oh, what a long time I've been away from Dallas! Seattle was terrific, I am in love with the place, etc. The Pacific Northwest is a fine place to be a writer. I arrived on April 22, just in time for the Seattle Poetry Festival. Then the next weekend, took a boat out to Whidbey Island and the Burning Word poetry fest at Greenbanks Farms, an energetic event with enthusiastic audiences, akin to a very scaled back Dodge Poetry Fest. Later during my stay, I went up to Evergreen for a reading and finished off my tour with a reading at the Richard Hugo House. Here are some pics:


As a poet, George Bowering really likes his sports - his basic life essentials include poetry, beer, and baseball. Coach House produced a really whimsical chapbook of his poems, made to look like a pennant of green astro turf. George's wife didn't accompany him on this reading trip, so he read several tender poems dedicated to his partner Jean.


Charlie Potts from Walla Walla has been writing poetry since the 1960s. At the pre-festival dinner, he sang to the audience and read terrific poems.


These are my Naropa classmates Chris Luna and Marcus Mennes. They look exactly as they did 10 years ago. Burning Word was set up with tents on the lawn, reminiscent of our Naropa days.

Other notable readers at Burning Word included Oliver De la Paz (all my photos of Oliver turned out blurred), who read a terrific poem on migrant strawberry pickers and a series of aubades. Anna Maria Hong read some playful sonnets and the "Fisher Poets" read some strong work about maritime living. I didn't stay for the headliners, George and Naomi Shihab Nye - hung out instead with Randy Walker and Jennifer Shainin, two Mount Vernon-based filmmakers who made the indie movie Apart From That. Randy and I went to highschool together, and I hadn't seen him since then. We cruised out to Mount Vernon and to Edison to check out a show at the Lucky Dumpster.


The day after the fest, Paul, Chris, George and I took a ferry to Port Townsend to meet Sam Hamill. George and Sam talked poetry, while the youngsters listened to their stories. (Sometimes when I am taking photos, I feel like Joanne Kyger.)


Glenn Mott and Charles Alexander graciously offered to let me read with them at Evergreen College in Olympia. We had a good time reading for Leonard Schwartz's poetry and puppetry team-taught program. Charles read from his new book Certain Slants from his "Pushing Water" series - a gorgeous suite of meditative poems.


My last night in Seattle, Marcus and I read at the Richard Hugo House on Capitol Hill. This is Marcus with John, another Naropa classmate who now lives on Mercer Island and teaches in Bellevue. John helps to edit Xelas which is open for poetry submissions.

That concludes our tour of the Pacific Northwest poetry scene.