This Is Just To Say I’m a Zombie

I have eaten      your scrumptious face, through
the plums      of cheeks, juicy recollections
that were in      your hippocampus. Remember Kool-Aid in
the icebox      and how they rubied your lips? Of course you don’t

and which      of us always will is, well, obvious. I’m guessing
you were probably      thinking you were
saving      time by crossing the graveyard to meet your mother
for breakfast      at Marty’s Diner. She’s still waiting.

Forgive me      if I devour her brain too. Those I’ve had already:
they were delicious      and ripe with memories. I was
so sweet      when I was human, way on the shy side,
and so cold       to adventure. Look at me now: ravenous for experience.

—David Hernandez, (via)

First Hour

Cleaning my desktop today (slow workweek much?) I found this screengrab of a poem I still love. Where did I find this? A website I follow? A random Google search? Your Facebook feed? Hints would be helpful. In either case, here's a thoughtful, detached poem from the newly-born Sharon Olds.

Well this is terrifying

From the Arctic to the equator and on to the Antarctic, jellyfish plagues (or blooms, as they’re technically known) are on the increase. Even sober scientists are now talking of the jellification of the oceans. And the term is more than a mere turn of phrase. Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field,” as Gershwin puts it, that covers over 30,000 square miles.

-Tim Flannery's review of Lisa-ann Gershwin's new book, 'Stung!'. Things are happening in the ocean to change life as we know it. Sigh.

On Housesitting

Commensalism or mutual benefit is a constitutive premise of housesitting, or maybe an enabling fiction. The housesitter is apt to recognize the opportunity as a private windfall, and the pleasure is tandem: first in his own dis-habituation, and then in the adoption of a new readymade home, a vacated life to try on. With the extra keys on his chain, the housesitter leaves work on a different train or by a new road, becomes a local in the café or dogpark, creates or stars in fantasies grown out of his new neighbors’ notice. In the new routines, a film has been removed from his self-understanding; he is available to experience. Initially, everything about housesitting is citational, as though in each activity in the house one carries quotation marks above his shoulder blades, like campy angel wings. Here I am “drawing the blinds”; now I think I’ll “separate” these “twist ties”; who am I exactly “taking” a “bath”? 

-Poet Brian Blanchfield on the queer desire aroused by housesitting

From the Mixed-Up Files

“I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.” — E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

It's impossible to overstate how much this woman's books meant to me as a child. She taught me that it's okay to be a know-it-all, but that it's better to have curiosity and a big heart. From her I learned of the mysterious allure of Tallulah Bankhead, the ferocity of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and how friendships can have a power over you almost like witchcraft. Kongisburg died this weekend, but in a slightly cheesy, very real way, her words will live in me for a long time.

The Care and Keeping of Your Books

University of Chicago's Special Collections Department has some advice on how to care for your home library. Fantastic ideas, truly, but a bit unrealistic. They ask you not to drink tea while reading, or really to eat any food at all. But literature and hot liquid things are one of nature's greatest pairings! I mean, honestly!

'Tis National Poetry Month!

This amazing fact was revealed when I opened my email this morning and found the first of April's many delightful poems sent by pretty-word purveyor 'april is', which i will exhort you, for the third year in a row, to subscribe to.

Unconvinced? Here's what we're starting off with this year:

Nan Hardwicke Turns Into a Hare

I will tell you how it was. I slipped
into the hare like a nude foot
into a glorious slipper. Pushing her bones
to one side to make room for my shape
so I could settle myself like a child within her.
In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing
it apart across my fingers to web across my palm.
Here is where our separation ends:
I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm
down the stepping-stones of spine. An odd feeling this,
to hold another’s soul in the mouth like an egg;
the aching jaw around her delicate self. Her mind
was simple, full of open space and weather.
I warmed myself on her frantic pulse and felt the draw
of gorse and grass, the distant slate line
at the edge of the moor. The air span diamonds
our of sea fret to catch across my tawny coat
as I began to fold the earth beneath my feet
and fly across the heath, the heather. 

-Wendy Pratt

You guys. Animorph poetry FTW.

Living Tree

It’s said they planted trees by graves
to soak up spirits of the dead
through roots into the growing wood.
The favorite in the burial yards
I knew was common juniper.
One could do worse than pass into
such a species. I like to think
that when I’m gone the chemicals
and yes the spirit that was me
might be searched out by subtle roots
and raised with sap through capillaries
into an upright, fragrant trunk,
and aromatic twigs and bark,
through needles bright as hoarfrost to
the sunlight for a century
or more, in wood repelling rot
and standing tall with monuments
and statues there on the far hill,
erect as truth, a testimony,
in ground that’s dignified by loss,
around a melancholy tree
that’s pointing toward infinity.

-Robert Morgan

The Last Line of The Great Gatsby

The last line of The Great Gatsby only makes sense if you’re over 30, or better yet, even older than that. Being “une femme d’un certain age” has few benefits, but here’s one of them: books with complex plots revolving around obsession, and drinking, and self-delusion, and accidents make more sense. You have to be old enough to have a past, and to have tried to do things that did not pan out. You have to know in your bones from experience that uncontrollable shit happens.

-Elizabeth Bastos

Up Against It

It’s the way they cannot understand the window
they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take
a wrong turn at my door and end up thus
in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity,
cruising the room until they find themselves
smack up against it and they cannot fathom how
the air has hardened and the world they know
with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there
with all they want just in front of them, they must
fling their bodies against the one unalterable law
of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on
making the sound that tethers their electric
fury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting in it.

-Eamon Grennan

Never a Lovely So Real

“If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anyone in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either.”

-The Believer profile on Nelson Algren. The story of Algren living in New Orleans, surviving on chicory coffee and bananas while making a living printing counterfeit gift certificates is especially worthwhile.

Poems for Winter, Now That It's Come

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow

When their bleating clouds the air

Meet a vast unwelcome, know

Nothing but a sunless glare.

Newly stumbling to and fro

All they find, outside the fold,

Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,

Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies

Hidden round them, waiting too,

Earth's immeasureable surprise.

They could not grasp it if they knew,

What so soon will wake and grow

Utterly unlike the snow.

-Philip Larkin

East Coker

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

-T. S. Eliot, from the near-perfect 'Four Quartets'

Frank O'Hara Reads 'Having a Coke With You'

Frank O'Hara reads 'Having a Coke With You,' holding his cigarette floppily in one hand, sounding nothing like a poet reading but instead like a real person, in one long rolling sentence with no periods, and only gentle pauses for line breaks.

Shakespeare, Explained

As You Like It

King Lear

Much Ado About Nothing

Othello

Titus Andronicus

-via Better Book Titles

Everything is Fiction

And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me.

-Keith Ridgway, The New Yorker

Limits

There is a line of Verlaine I will never remember
There is another street I can no longer walk down
There is a face in the mirror I have seen for the very last time
There is a door that is closed until the end of the world.
Among the books of my library (I am seeing them now)
There are some that will never be read.
This summer I will be fifty:
Death consumes me, constantly. 

 ---Jorge Luis Borges 

translation of Borges' 'Limites' by Rebecca Walker

Not Getting Closer

Walking in the dark streets of Seoul
under the almost full moon.
Lost for the last two hours.
Finishing a loaf of bread
and worried about the curfew.
I have not spoken for three days
and I am thinking, "Why not just
settle for love? Why not just
settle for love instead?"

-Jack Gilbert, via

Related link: Two years as a lesbian ex-pat in South Korea

Image: wind map

Road Trip

The new road runs along the old road. I can see it
still imprinted on the earth, not twenty feet away
as I drive west past silos and farmsteads, fruit stands and hogs.
Once in Kansas, I stood in a field and watched
the stars on the horizon revolve around my ankles.
People are always moving, even those standing still
because the world keeps changing around them, changing them.
When will the cities meet? When will they spread until
there is a single city—avenue to avenue, coast to coast?
What we call "the country" is an undeveloped area
by the side of the road. There is no "country," there is no "road."
It's one big National Park, no longer the wilderness it was.
But the old world exists under the present world
the way an original painting exists under a newer one.
The animals know: their ancient, invisible trails cross
and re-cross our own like scars that have healed long ago.
Their country is not our country but another place altogether.
Anything of importance there comes out of the sky.
In Amarillo the wind tries to erase everything, even the future.
It swoops down to scrape the desert clean as a scapula.
Here among bones and bleached arroyos the sun leans
through my window at dawn to let me know
I'm not going anywhere. There's no more anywhere to go.

-Kurt Brown

Just a reminder, April is National Poetry Month (as well as being the cruellest). Just a reminder: this girl's still got the poetry game on lock.

A Girl Is Standing Roadside Selling Live Grenades Painted as Apples

When I was young I called a rock
a kiss and planted it on the temple
of a friend, hard. And while he was lying
unconscious, bleeding, I said he was
only in love. Sartre told us that
all objects are space we chose to name.
The weight and shape of a sleeping baby
is the thirsty silhouette of a hawk’s beak.
A handful of sand is a stranger
at the far end of the bar. Sartre himself
was the cutout of a bat in the pitch
nights of hell, like us, calibrated
by what we bump against in the dark,
nothing on nothing, a chalk outline
at the crime scene. And this
that you are reading is a silent sketch
of spite or better, abandonment,
an open door, a deep black forest
bristling in the core of the earth.

-Matthew Zingg, via