Writing Letters by Thunderstorm

Here is an utterly random Kerouac haiku:

Drunk as a hoot owl,
writing letters
by thunderstorm.

I Love You More Than All the Windows in New York City

The day turned into the city
and the city turned into the mind
and the moving trucks trumbled along
like loud worries speaking over
the bicycle’s idea
which wove between
the more armored vehicles of expression
and over planks left by the construction workers
on a holiday morning when no work was being done
because no matter the day, we tend towards
remaking parts of it—what we said
or did, or how we looked—
and the buildings were like faces
lining the banks of a parade
obstructing and highlighting each other
defining height and width for each other
offsetting grace and function
like Audrey Hepburn from
Jesse Owens, and the hearty pigeons collaborate
with wrought iron fences
and become recurring choruses of memory
reassembling around benches
we sat in once, while seagulls wheel
like immigrating thoughts, and never-leaving
chickadees hop bared hedges and low trees
like commas and semicolons, landing
where needed, separating
subjects from adjectives, stringing along
the long ideas, showing how the cage
has no door, and the lights changed
so the tide of sound ebbed and returned
like our own breath
and when I knew everything
was going to look the same as the mind
I stopped at a lively corner
where the signs themselves were like
perpendicular dialects in conversation and
I put both my feet on the ground
took the bag from the basket
so pleased it had not been crushed
by the mightiness of all else
that goes on and gave you the sentence inside.

- Jessica Greenbaum

A Blessing

Sometimes I wonder why I bother reading other poets... 

Hovering light embraces

the yellowing poplars, four spires

evenly spaced, a dozen clustered

apart, all of them backed by foresty dark,

a curtain of conifers.

Waking and sleeping, there was grace, reassurance,

during the hours of darkness:

a change in perception, such as we read of

in 19^th-century stories, when someone in fever

visibly passed from danger into a calm lagoon

of slumber, promising health.

The light on the trees a nimbus now

of downy yellow, embrace without pressure of weight,

compassionate light.

- Denise Levertov, “A Blessing”

For You Today

For You Today

Jessica Greenbaum

Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper,

but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily

herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come: thwash,

the next day another, an example of everything that gets done

in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow

that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case,

the strange October weather warming them. There were the

conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was

pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my

ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged

to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive

at the turn of the twenty-first century, here’s how they ring out

against each other, here’s how one brings out the sense of

another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.

Fun fact: I ate grasshoppers this weekend.

Virginia Woolf in Mexico

“Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.” 

- Virginia Woolf from “Montaigne”.

Anecdote of the day: I've been desperate for good coffee every morning, and I found a place a couple days ago that's pretty good... I made a fool out of myself on Tuesday when I didn't understand the word for cinnamon, and then gave them the wrong change. Today, I went to the same place, confident that I would do it right this time - which I did, but as soon as they gave me my coffee, I spilled it all over everything. So to the people at La Charamusca Cafe, I will always be a clumsy, stupid American. There's no escaping it.

somewhere i have never traveled

Tonight, I'll be flying to Queretaro, Mexico, where I'll be living for the next two months. Yesterday, I moved to a new apartment in downtown Bellingham.
Currently, my life is......
Full.
Full of "blunders and absurdities", joy, stress, poetry, beauty, insanity, adventure, and love.
So I leave you with this poem:

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

The Prayer of the Traveler Mr. Cogito

(by Zbigniew Herbert)

Lord
       I thank you for creating the world beautiful and various

       and for allowing me in Your fathomless goodness to visit places which
were not the sites of my daily torments
     
       - that at night in Tarquinia I lay in the square by the well and a gunmetal
pendulum rang out from the tower Your wrath or forgiveness

       and that a little donkey on the island Corkyra sang to me from the
unfathomable bellows of its lungs the melancholy of the landscape

       and that in the ugly city of Manchester I discovered kindhearted and
sensible people

       nature repeated its wise tautologies: the forest was a forest the sea the
sea a cliff a cliff

       stars revolved and it was as it ought to be  - Iovis omnia plena


       - forgive me - that I thought only of myself while the lives of others
cruel and inexorable turned around me like the great astrological clock of
St Pierre in Beauvais

       that I was lazy distracted too timid in labyrinths and caves

       and forgive me also that I did not fight like Lord Byron for the happiness
of oppressed peoples and studied only the rising moon and museums

       - I thank you that works created for Your greater glory yielded to me
particles of their mystery and that with great presumption I thought that
Duccio Vaan Eyck and Bellini painted for me also

       and also that the Acropolis which I never fully understood patiently
revealed to me its mutilated body

       - I ask You to reward the gray old woman who unbidden brought me
fruit from her garden on the sunburned native island of the son of Laertes

       and Miss Helen of the foggy island of Mull in the Hebrides for offering
Greek hospitality and asking me to leave a lamp lit at night in the window
facing Holy Iona so that the lights of earth would greet each other

       and also all those who gave me directions and said kato kyrie kato

       and take under Your protection Mama from Spoleto Spiridion from
Paxos the good student from Berlin who saved me from oppression and
then when met unexpectedly in Arizona drove me to the Grand Canyon
which is like a hundred thousand cathedrals standing on their heads

       - Lord let me not think of my moist-eyed gray deluded persecutors
when the sun sets on the truly indescribable Ionian Sea

       let me understand other people other languages other sufferings
       and above all let me be humble that is to say one who longs for the
             source

       I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this
is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness