The Blackbird: A Diptych

An experimental collaboration with Wordlings, using the Half and Half method with the same seed text.

-

you proud men of mercury

Wordlings

idyllic filled the long window
and glosses loaded
on long mercury walks
inflections of innuendos
shadow of the umbrage
the rage of the blackbird
the painted pantomime
of whirled mercy, and god,
a flow of gold, and good
and lucid, inseparable rhythms
oh you proud men of Mercury
and the thin men of Haddam
I know the blackbird is involved
glosses loaded
with thin inseparable sheets
long rod of barbaric glass
one of seven circles crowded with loaded glass
seasons of engines change
blackbirds of euphony must be flying

-

Three Minds

Uut

Jesuits are part of three minds
wearing evening all afternoon
not tampons. But I know too
a fear sleek as a kite
whirled in the restaurant—
the one that orphic pull-ups
dutifully drowned
by the eye
increasing on its own weight
among twenty snowy mountains.
All of us are catalysts
traced in the shadow,
a satin couch
amazed by barbaric glass.

Sing freely with tortoise breath,
oh bawds of euphony,
snag your goads
on the little rhythms
you do not see.

seed text: “Thirteen Ways of a Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens
art by Eugenia Loli

A Hand Reaching

A hand reaching to my cigarette—
a condensational Ball in the Head
under one star
and individually sized
in its vast old oaken wine barrel.

I face myself like
waiver forms and cheetahs that move the sky,
sunshine somehow belting out simple contours
invested in the damps of the eye
repenting forever in the best way

because Lakers taste like
ices glassed without heat
and the awards are lumps of a tasteless
chorizo tripwired for geese-mating.

Sylvester’s swords, vug of brilliants,
correctly fucks a graduate
of world enough and tongue.

seed text: Solution Passage, by Clark Coolidge
art by franz falckenhaus

The Works of Love are Nevertheless Not the Works of Love

He engineered a strange loneliness
from the waist up,
part of the order of pure sound
that should plunge into temptation
but tenses the bourgeoisie and
holds up the huge doors.
Instantly the paintings all around you
knock my sad theme
in several ways
cinching to the marvelously altered night
like your cake, saved for them
but intrinsically a warmth,
which inflects a kind of death
with a hundred tongues.

seed text: Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
art by El gaio

The Book

The exciting past tense
of opening a book

whose consciousness is a fluke
of a team of rock stars.

All the disastrous left over cake
in the fridge!

Mailmen are sitting in the pond
awaiting resurrection.

art by recombiner

How Rarely the Eternal Gets Enough Control over a Man

For the first time a small brain
has settled over Toronto.
Layers and layers of crustaceans are
sleeping with women.

Oh doors of eternity!
The image burned in my mind remains:
a sesquipedalian
from Tangier
repeating the infinite gentleness
while we drink the coffee.

Living with one’s grandparents
rates poorly according to YYYY,
the magazine that analyzes handstands
and the fresh currents of doubt.

One merely has not to love
to be a totem pole in the dreams
of the orchids of Xochimilco.

Toronto’s tale of woe
sustained the Frogonian evening—
the intellectuals’ minds are moving around
in a strainer of eternity
as we sit together on the camel.

Love is a transaction
of the general and ephemeral.
I see heaven, full of receipts,
and the foreleg is blue.

art by EϟH
seed text: The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch

One should not Love in Word and with Devices of Speech

The sentences could swear
or agitate beside the fences
as vanished suburbs
re-appropriate the wind.

Simple circumstances
like a magnesium flare,
a continual telling yourself
what to do and not do.

This constricted atmosphere
timidly approaches
on the chance that angular music
could steal the aftermath of sunny days.

All possible worlds
are in blossom.
All possible worlds
are somehow impossible.

The earring pierced her
and I was a deranged afternoon,
an imaginary world of transportation.

Love is an interior
and popular marchenbilder
on these transparent walls.

art by cardboardcities
part seed text: John Ashbery, Collected Poems 1956-87

The Atavist

In a fantasized language
the channels are far gone
and merely Davis 1956—

which altered empty space,
lazy with figures
all wet and lazy and vauge.

But the phonemics of belief
have eaten into her breasts
a salsa Verde
of cubano yells.

The temple is full of splashes;
the atavist is stronger
than bears.

I eat my Hopperesque walls.

art by Die blauen Reiter

This was half automatism, half Instagram minimalism technique, seed text: Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry

So Love Flows, However Still It Is in Its Hiddenness

January 30, 2008

Somewhere along the way we lost the world’s breadth.
But God still gave bread, and we starved slowly
trying on amazing patterns.
We did not slip across the ice without reasons.

We strangled ourselves in our sacred temples,
ran rabid and naked in our sweetly haunted castles
brandishing our disconnected histories at sunrise.
The physics of love are altogether weak and raving.

But clinging to that airy cup of grace
we built another city, and again the nothing of the new
turned our tongues to delicious ghostly nets
and we ran deranged in the night, proud and cheated.

We simply thought we did not understand.
We have thrown the stone into the tarn
and watched the ripples scrape like violet night.
The sticks of time bob now through currents
like matrices returning to the Levant.

A thousand years of ascending empty stairways,
broken mazes whistling in the wind.
We did not slip across the ice without reasons.
The physics of love are altogether weak and raving.

art by Yohji Yamamoto

The English Department

It is the end of consciousness.
We have seen the fish
sealed in the bed.

art by baumundaffe

A Language Poem

We have changed the way
the sign works.

It keeps placing itself back
onto the buffet.

The way Christ changed water
into wine.

We had antipathy toward any subject,
such as promises.
And compromises.

Even IPA could be a salve
in such a place.

She thinks they’re done—she’s
just giving them
another minute.

The man on the radio
that is not a radio
just said “flicker.”

art by Andrew Hem

head

in my head
the wise hen

required
for me to peck
the earth

as if I
only recently was
where I shouldn’t be

screeching…
with searchlights,
wiping the grime
instead of daisies—

this late
low observance
that cuts a dream in half

unraveling
in the night-school textbook

seed text: Early Selected Poems, by Charles Simic
art by Tony Hammond

Never start a poem
with pain.

Especially your own.
Start with “the world.”

“The world” is where
dream insists

as background cosmic radiation
charismatically parsed

into the ceremony
of grief.

It is deeply lunar:
a torrent cell

supine as geography,
resentful as

a large hadron collider
ceded to dust.

_________________
art by alexcollages

Poetry

It resembles music.
Music resembles madness—the flow of thought
in the course of history and unsuccessful psychology.
The self as an ellipse
fussing about the neat pretzels
of radiation.

We are vehicles of seeing
the basic aging of earth.
The earth, like a useless lamp,
moving across the deep.

Poetry is not a flowing but
a list of items our ancestors kept
of the things they saw
in the museum of consciousness.

art by cerebral lust

A Whale

a passionate, accented voice, partly misheard

A whale
is a snorous lung
from the outside

that builds an immunity
to wondering,

child of
the continual seal.

He came in
out of a fly
pleased with the personal isotope.

We have a binder
of every kind of Norseman.

art by captain deepthoughts

Read “The Illusion”