zenscribe

An open invitation to anyone who will be in Utrecht on Oct. 10: I'm reading my work in this event:

Salon des Mots - Season Premiere
Saturday October 10
20h
Atelier de Werkvloer
Brigittenstraat 7
Utrecht
free entry

More info: http://www.wordsinhere.com/

(a poem from my collection Down to the Wire)

It's the end of the world
as I know it
at

The front door in
white pellets on
the walk

The constant disappearance
of everything
I know

Stones the size of a clamor
melt the
roof

Suddenly there's this
hail of hail and
then

Suddenly this not-hail hailing the
il n'y plus rattle
of hail

In the afternoon
hailstorm of
dissipation

Everything is washed up
vertiginous
in the

One-way street
racketed
down

To not even
dribble or
hum.

Lunch with my son at a favorite Sicilian trattoria where the pasta is so fine.
The owner says she's weary, has no break. We understand and say so.
Smiling, she calls Ciao! as we leave, happy that we are going, happy that we came.

Am steeped in Walt Whitman, meanwhile (in preparation for a seminar on translating him into Turkish...)
Nobody says it better, the life of Me/You, the life of Tu es cela:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

and this, too, also from Song of Myself:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Under a bloated sky today
two birds on a wall
then four, two by two
then gone one by one
in flight.
Everything is always going
one by one
in flight
yes and
gone.

I am where the rise and fall cease
to meet, where simply morning is
spring Mexican orange tree blossoms
all told and telling of nothing
but the thicket,
sunpocked,
for all to hear.

On the corner
the building
is gone
with a figure
I can’t
remember
brushed
on its gray
shutter
an unavoidable
curve
an unrecognizable
spiral
I didn’t
know
every-
time was
a climax
looping
out of reach
toward
destruction.

How can it last,
this headline world
of shortcuts
carved daily in no
space and time?

Outside the window
beyond the kitchen sink
narcissus in yellow bloom.

(This dream-inspired prose poem is from 2001. Today, sadly, it is no longer a dream. O Pakistan! O world! O greed, anger and ignorance!)

BENAZIR BHUTTO IN THAT WITHOUT TIME TIME OF EVERNESS NOW

Tea time is a gathering of last night’s dreaming fragments of not where I have been but illuminations of where I am ever in that without time time of everness now. It is now pieces of dream as a tumultuous meeting clearly impromptu to announce a killing a murder the death of Benazir Bhutto rings of journalists concentric pressing in on an unidentifiable center to know more to know better to know inferences & implications of Miss Bhutto always Miss despite marriage she is pious with head cover she is Miss at this time dying in my pieces of dream. O Pakistan! In the outside circle by a pillar I am seeing. Across the rings yet as if nearby lethal powder I am seeing is tipped from a pencil-lead case minutely upon a cameraman’s shoulder I am seeing the act a tiny blue container a white secret otherwise gone unnoticed. For craving they are all still in a push. O information seekers! Shoving forth they to where no one stands to the empty as I fleeing at top speed run away away away afoot along a plaza vast & gray like Budapest by the Danube embankment without sun this time of October year. A college friend with baby carriage on an afternoon promenade stops me after years of no contact. No contact ignored. She is smiling she is clucking. About that girl shot that woman she calls a girl who was shot in Iowa which I had not known what was Miss Bhutto doing in Iowa? O Iowa! Running on breathless parallels grow with Commander Massoud I am seeing Commander always Commander & he is pious so clear-eyed with bearded chin I am seeing plots abound infiltrating the porous border between asleep & awake at 5:30 a.m. adrift then like refugees beyond reach.

Amy Hollowell

Without a Moment’s Notice

Here is where 
the hero falls,  
		my myth
 			tumbling from above.

Accidents will happen ---
				no one hit
				no where to run,
just the nasturtiums, wildly
& digging up the street,
			hefty men at work. 




Season to Lie Down With Nothing

A line from Basho --- 
sandals laced in blue ---
gives rise to happiness
without explanation as
no knowledge can know
sandals or blue lacing
or, say, old ice cracking
in some great sandencrusted northern winter
windswept rosy & frozen gray.

Or autumn now 
this autumn called summer & Indian
a season draped in what dies (but what?)
and what does not (but what?)
a season to lie down with nothing
but round songs,
the searing arias
of what could not be 
said or unsaid.