by Catherine Pierce
Did you ever make it to Taos, the Badlands, the Isle
of Skye, all the places you thought you'd locate yourself,
as if you might have been hiding in a whisky cask
or buried by earthquake rubble? I suspect, Self
I Might Have Been, that you didn't. I suspect
that you spent the long highway days of your twenties
surrounded by photographs and harmonica songs, the future
a galaxy hurtling above you, infinite and too far
to touch, and your body always alive with nerves and hope,
your hunger for Next pushing that other hunger
to the side until you became thin as a plunging star's trail,
your eyes larger and larger until they could take in
all the sky's dome at once. And I suspect that you loved
so much this launch phase -- the roar, the flames the fear --
that the cubicle at your filing job, the elm-lined streets
of your hometown became lit with a heat
Stronger than the desert, with vistas more awful
than the Badlands, with desolation greater and greener
than that Scottish isle, and once you saw your world
in its true vastness, you knew you'd never leave it.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Fire
by Joy Harjo
a woman can't survive
by her own breath
alone
she must know
the voices of mountains
she must recognize
the foreverness of blue sky
she must flow
with the elusive
bodies
of night wind women
who will take her into
her own self
look at me
i am not a separate woman
i am a continuance
of blue sky
i am the throat
of the sandia mountains
a night wind woman
who burns
with every breath
she takes
a woman can't survive
by her own breath
alone
she must know
the voices of mountains
she must recognize
the foreverness of blue sky
she must flow
with the elusive
bodies
of night wind women
who will take her into
her own self
look at me
i am not a separate woman
i am a continuance
of blue sky
i am the throat
of the sandia mountains
a night wind woman
who burns
with every breath
she takes
Thursday, March 8, 2012
The Zoo
by Gilbert Sorrentino
Goliathus goliathus, the one banana
peeling beetle in the U S A, brighter
than a comicstrip, is dead.
"Wrapped in his native grasses," left
on the doorstep of the museum
and a favorite of the visitors,
4 and 1 half inches long with an
8 inch wingspread, bigger than
Skeezix, with a life more full,
peeling his bananas for survival,
unlike Mamie Mullins, unlike Moon,
who would be Skeezix but for
the environment, ah! Who cares
or believes in them at all, at all,
goliathus was better and he
not a native.
Goliathus goliathus, the one banana
peeling beetle in the U S A, brighter
than a comicstrip, is dead.
"Wrapped in his native grasses," left
on the doorstep of the museum
and a favorite of the visitors,
4 and 1 half inches long with an
8 inch wingspread, bigger than
Skeezix, with a life more full,
peeling his bananas for survival,
unlike Mamie Mullins, unlike Moon,
who would be Skeezix but for
the environment, ah! Who cares
or believes in them at all, at all,
goliathus was better and he
not a native.
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