Anatomy of a Dress

I wish I could remember when it was her mouth fastened itself in the rictus of pure hunger she still wears. Her teeth the color of some kind of caviar or dirty marble, shining behind the waxen smear of mouth. I don’t care what happens next except to see her. I don’t want to know the end of the story.

Ariana Reines

After years on his cushion, a monk has what he believes is a breakthrough: a glimpse of nirvana, the Buddhamind, the big pay-off. Reporting the experience to his master, however, he is informed that what has happened is par for the course, nothing special, maybe even damaging to his pursuit. And then the master gives the student dismaying advice: If you meet the Buddha, he says, kill him.

The Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed he will only stand in your way.

From here

I’m Blue, the Shangri-Las

Thus let my memory be with you, friends!
Thus ever think of me!
Kindly and gently, but as of one
For whom ’tis well to be fled and gone –
as of a bird from a chain unbound,
As of a wanderer whose home is found –
So let it be.

Felicia Hemans

I went to the only bar on the hill, played “Wild Horses” on the jukebox, did my laundry or thought about doing my laundry, ate a burrito or ate a stale piroshki, drank beer. My poems were filled with personal pain. I tried to make them beautiful and interesting. That is, I tried to be artful about my limited but particular experience with pain. Eventually I would modify my goals. Instead of aiming to give beautiful expression to pain, I discharged my wrath. Then humor against the wrath. Finally form began to matter, and so to materialize. Not to a terminal pitch, but as a conveyance, an ambulance, to carry the wounded toward where we might hope to recover from whatever afflicted us, or at least toward where we might rest from the forces. So you see, for me it is not a blasphemy, at least no blasphemy intended, when I say, I look to poetry for supernatural help.

CD Wright

…Barthes, for example, has argued that the moment of writing, where private goals and plans become subect to a public language, is the moment when the writer becomes subject to a language he can neither command nor control….Alongside a text we have always the presence of “off-stage voices”, the oversound of all that has been said. These voices, the presence of the “already written”, stand in defiance of a writer’s desire for originality and determine what might be said. A writer does not write (and this is Barthes’s famous paradox) but is, himself, written by the languages available to him.

David Bartholomae

Send the shoulder to its resisting place.
Slip the key in the lock, sweep the deadbolt just like water.
Seven a.m. makes me out of chaff and wet athletic socks
With a walk like a thrown house. Creep
out of that dress.

The line from your letter was lying dormant like a spinster’s ardor but I read
Dead.
Hair pinned up for the shower, unbelievable heat, wow and flutter, one
Double-helixed tendril on the lam.

His low voice
working my ribcage like clay. Keep me wet I could crumble.

So for dormant, read dead.
Blanched muscle angel-white, a heart the size of a brain, a brain the size of a fist, a fist in the mouth,

A dis-ease—

An aperture. The blond man’s fingers veed over his mouth, issuing like an exotic bird,
Or a sports enthusiast
captured mid-couple with a demanding, a declarative
Commencement: I can’t. You are. Stay with me now—

The flicker of film as it catches
the reel, then paints the wall: fourteen dancing ladies all smiling until a little turns into a leer,
Where are you now and what would you say to me,
Greenback

The slow petalled burn, he brought his hands to his mouth
“You were only a piece”
and exhaled.

A body punctuation, a one night
sentence. There is nothing left for
doormat, so read dead.
Put your voice in your mouth.
Put your voice in your mouth and swallow it.

*

I need to go back to the shower at the end of this.

I’d tell you why but I don’t know. It’s simple and so complicated.

Many writers maintain a border between language thick with hair and twigs and the reified, rarified stuff. No matter which side of the border poets live on, they tend to act as if they were being overrun. All I want is a day to pass. I like to sleep in my own bed.

CD Wright