Wild ride Renga by Jilly and me. Hold on to your hats, and enjoy the creative process in the comments!
Category: Jilly
Ezrasure
On Finding Ezra Pound, insane, locked outdoors in a cage in Italy after WWII
John Berryman, The Cage
This much is known: A bee winging it
at the resonance of quantum verse,
subatomic buzz weaponized
into stanzas, words in flight,
les mots juiced like wine –
can ride the fog of war from Idaho
to Pisa, then jackknife
out of the smoke into a cage
where he stings and swings
the cold bar blues.
Flying into rage, insults flying
like rain and sleet flying in the face
of reason, he’s St. Francis of the wasps
and hornets, nectar held tight between his knees,
praying in the sun to piss.
Unknown: how to equate
the velocity of scribbling, scrabbling
at the speed of unsound mind,
with reaching past sanity and breaking off combs
until detritus of poems run sticky in your hands.
For Jillys Where’s Ezra?
Portofino, 3AM
The rubber bullets of night have ceased their thrumming against the window
Dreams that wanted to run riot, dispersed to the outskirts of the city
Christ of the Abyss underwater in the Genoese harbor, but not you, not in Orlando
The two cities turning on the axis of old and new prayers
Where you write in skeins of rust, eyes heavy as iron poor blood
All that the Guardia and mall cops have have left to you for the Night Watch
The passwords dissolving in ink and wine
Blind Sight
“It is life’s work to recognize the mystery of the obvious”
– Jim Harrison
Your laugh a blurry yawn –
I’m so nearsighted you are always
your beautiful best each morning
as you push me out of bed
Yet my eyes have the gift of
near sight –
Husbandry the myopia
of close study and closer calls
That look, too close
for comfort
Such when I roll back towards you
within a whisper of your lips
A semiquaver of your eyes’
plainsong light
I see how love and the world
collapse
Haibun – 白夜 (“Midnight Sun”)
“At four in the morning my body bumped against the ceiling”
– Jim Harrison
Svenn taught me how to get coffee ready for when we were pulling on our boots to go milk the cows. First, start water boiling in the kettle, then tear open a bag of grounds and dump them in the rolling water. Wait a bit and pour, grounds and all, into a cup. “Kokekaffe” or cooked coffee is what he called it, as best as I could make out. We’d drink it hot and black along with a thick slice of bread spread with butter and salmon roe.
On the islands of Lofoton Norway, like anywhere above the Arctic circle, light is a season, not a daily thump and bump of day into night into day again. The summer sun rolls around the horizon like an infinitely slow roulette marble. Or the electron of a halo, shutter stopped.
At first, I thought I was forever done with night, that darkness was something I could shed and never regret. But after a bit, the constant light started making the cows and the dogs and even the humans a bit crazy. I had to tie a rag around my eyes to try and sleep, since light leaked in through the window blinds despite my best efforts. Eventually, even just knowing it was light outside was enough to keep me awake, sanity slowly leaching out the corners of my eyes. In the end, the only handhold to full blackout was to drink more and more of the Everclear we made in a still behind the barn. Svenn taught me how to do that too.
Who knew how much we crave darkness? How necessary for our shadows to lengthen, dissolve, and fill the sky.
Calls for light season
Hints of crazy spices gin –
Distilled summer sun
Sanguine
“A violent windstorm the night before the solstice.”
– Jim Harrison
Not all the sun of yesterday’s solstice
could cauterize my dreaming
The longest day not long enough,
its rays not strong and twined enough
To bind and wind and stanch
night’s happy wound
Daze 23
“His mind’s all black thickets and blood.”
– Jim Harrison
Blood is thicker than madness,
but it is love that clots our hair
Haiku – Run Amok
“The world that used to nurse us
now keeps shouting insane instructions.
That’s why I ran to the woods.”
– Jim Harrison
Man, trees are crazy
Roots play taps, madness of light –
Know woe synthesis
Over Easy
“I see today that everyone on earth
wants the answer to the same question
but none has the language to ask it.”
– Jim Harrison
What’s for breakfast?
Superbug
“Love is raw as freshly cut meat,
mean as a beetle on the track of dung.”
– Jim Harrison
Did I bug you enough today –
leave you a trail of crumbs
from the toast I burnt with my joy
Like a pest I brought you sugar crystals
in my mouth and kissed you
while trying to say “mandibles”
Mine is the love of chiggers and mites –
you can swat at me but I’m under your skin
and you know it
qbit 