Roofline

"...A man places with inexhaustible precision
one tile after the another on the roof of the house. ..."

From "From Aurora" by Pura López-Colomé
Translated by Forrest Gander

Offering

"...thirsty, thirsty
by their fountains but I cannot drink
their mud and sunlight to be whole. ..."

From "On Looking for Models" by Alan Dugan

Between raindrops

"...Take in
so much sun that you feel a cold absence,
as if you’ve sipped a hole into the world."

From "Q and A: Do you have any tips? Answer #2" by Julianna Baggott

Piranesiac

"...I keep forgetting

the rules, a Ptolemaniac with stars & suns circling me; I keep
missing my cues, can't arrange the particles moments are made of..."

From "Satellite Convulsions" by Ben Doyle

*****

For whatever it's worth, I've posted a tiny short story here.

(I especially hope the insomniacs among y'all enjoy it.)

A little turbulent

"...We didn't stop either, which is how
We vanished, too, parting like spray..."

From "The Supremes" by Mark Jarman

Wreckoning

"...Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written. ..."

From "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz

*****

Traveling for a few days to see family, so posts may be sporadic until Sunday.
Then again, posts may be as regular as fancy clockwork.
We shall see.

*****

Later.
FUBAR.
Unless I get myself to a Starb****, no picture posting. I am unable to connect my own laptop to my parents' internet connection and have it work. Why? Darned if I know. But I'll keep tryin' -- I have pixel goodness on my laptop that merits sharing.

*****

More pixel goodness will resume shortly.

In the Phoenix airport, running my battery down...posts will resume tomorrow (Sunday) once I've caught up on a little rest. Thanks for your kind and supportive comments while I've been cussing at the !@#$%! connectivity.

The missing charter members

"...Members of the Committee on the Ineffable,
Let me illustrate this with a story..."

From "Anastasia & Sandman" by Larry Levis

For a limited time

"...For everything
which begins in limit
(where else might our work

begin?) and ends in grace..."

From "Favrile" by Mark Doty

Cyan/ochre/white

"...this is the angel of light, who can paint
himself as dark mnemosyne Apollo..."

From "I, Up they soar" by Inger Christensen
Translated by Susanna Nied

Surface tension

"...out of the box, uncapping the bottle..."

From "Jet" by Tony Hoagland

Vitreous

"...if solidity is the basic state

that matters, it’s obvious what happens..."

From "The Culture of Glass" by Thylias Moss

Windy, Lat. 30.36, Long. -99.89

"...The fact was that
I could not follow the map..."

From "Thus, Speak the Chromograph" by Eleni Sikelianos

Vertigo, vertigoing...

...vertigone.

*****

"If the slightly wet air in the skin is the hillside
is wherever I have to forgive what I have forgotten..."

From "A Memory of Her Lodged in Wet Air and Skin" by Martha Ronk

Cracked lintel

"...still they leaned, comfortably

perhaps, one against the other,

an aggregate of disturbances..."


From "Wherein space is constructed that matter may reside in..." by Michele Glazer

Concrete poetry

"Their lives
held in the arms
of the waves."

From Archilochos' fragments, translated by Guy Davenport

Archy

"...insects have
their own point
of view about
civilization..."

From "certain maxims of archy" by archy (with help from Don Marquis)

Yelladusty

"...the road turning to gravel, the gravel turning to dust,
the ditches sang with frogs, the ditches were silent,
a pair of yellow eyes waited for him
to pass..."

From "Slow Waltz Through Inflatable Landscape" by Christian Hawkey

Unmoored

"My old body:
a ladder of sunlight,
mercury dust floating through..."

From "My old body" by Jean Valentine

*****

Today: my old body, unmoored by ongoing dental-work...

Veneer

"Who would have thought the afterlife would
look so much like Ohio? ..."

From "Beyond Even This" by Maggie Anderson

Slick rocks

"...It is not the premise that reality
Is solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade. ..."

From "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" by Wallace Stevens

Portal

"...Certain nights only the rain will have
its say, troubling the downspout. ..."

From "On a Night Like This" by Michael Teig

Looking up

"...a single touch, the living, a lantern
swinging above the door..."

From "The Invention of Streetlights" by Cole Swensen

Pink Desot...

"...Pink was pink all the way through, like any organ might be..."

From "Beneath Speech" by Mary Ann Samyn

*****

Pedro Cabral's friend Claude Ho is very deeply involved in a project that will bring books to Africa. You can learn more here.

Thanks to Pedro for sharing the info about others who are helping feed the hunger for books in Africa.

Poem written for a tooth-ache

Fixed apatite

Like the land around here, I carry an inverse tangle
of roots close by. Nourishment, speech, tooth-grit anger
born in this calcium cavern until something rots through
and pain begins. And in the deep places we walk together,
my pain and I, torch in hand we walk to where gratitude lives
and draw the blurry outline of self-awareness, my jawbone
slaying clarity and sense. Transformed, chewed up, laid out
in the endodontist’s chair, new healers meet old healers in
the deep places and bless my branching stalagmite’s root.

*****

Back from the dentist. Whew.

*****

And on a tenuously related note, the new Festival of the Trees is up at Lorianne's blog. Go see what's rooted there!

Sandbaggery

"...The first
day here, there was nobody..."

From "A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach" by Fleda Brown

*****

Rethabile Masilo posted some thoughtful remarks on my notion of getting books to Africa. He is from Lesotho, so has some first-hand knowledge of the issue.

Here's what Rethabile wrote.

And here's how you can do something now, today, this very moment, to help people fill their hunger for books.

Thanks, by the way, to Smiler, and Lee, and am for giving. And thanks to all those, known and unknown, who chose to help in other ways.

Pinkish

"...the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine..."

From "Poetry" by Marianne Moore

Cross-hatch

"...that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave..."

From "Variation on the Word Sleep" by Margaret Atwood

*****

More joy and books-for-Africans meme-links can be found on Old Girl's blog and Lee's River blog. Learn more here!

And read what Rethabile Masilo had to say in response to my question about whether Ms. Lessing was correct -- written from a Lesotho point of view.

Raked shadow

"...the one-dimensional
belief of enamel in itself,
the furious autonomy
of luster..."

From "Surfaces" by Kay Ryan

*****

For those of you who may have wandered by courtesy of Smiler's, Ernesto's, or Granny J.'s gracious posts, welcome! You can read more about the meme they mentioned here.

One thing becoming another

"...The typographer who sets this page well
though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets
of a certain canto. ..."

From "The Just" by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alastair Reid

Books will fly through the air for children (Tag, you're it!)

In honor of all those folks who've tagged me with memes (or are memes now all called "hooplas"?) this year and had to listen to me grumble, I've got a twist on the theme of meme.

I read Doris Lessing's Nobel speech through TIV's blog -- the speech where Ms. Lessing discussed the hunger for books in Africa -- and it left me feeling weak.

Rather than get trapped by inertia, or by the noise the speech kicked off -- some bloggers and commentators thought it racist and naive -- or by the awful game of "but if I help those and not the others, what sort of person am I?," I decided to find one simple way to get books to more people who want books.

Here's what I found.

There is a reputable (so far as I can tell) charity that gathers donated books and ships them to schools and communities in Africa.

I've set up this easy-to-use donation site, and hope all you literate, lovely, and compassionate blog wanderers -- especially those who play tag with memes and hooplas -- will consider donating a small amount and leaving a haiku.

Is it the best thing we can do?
Probably not.
But a good thing done now beats wrangling over what the best thing might be.
"If not now...when?"

And, in the spirit of memes past, I double-dog-dare everyone reading this to put a link to the donation site on their blog, and spread the book love.



"Books will fly through the air for children."
Happy New Year, all y'all!