We're dancing to poetry (and money) at our wedding in October 2005. Send your contributions to michelleandrhett at gmail dot com

Friday, September 30, 2005

Radiance

RADIANCE (Footnote # 72)


Tell me more of the unending radiance
your eyes discovered when pressed

against the hole into a honeycomb.
Say turquoise. Say my uncut hair

coiling around your eyes. Say berry.
Say your finger circled hard around

my toe. Tell me more of the unending
radiance erupting when eyes pressed

against honeyed wombs. Say my name.
You don't know my name? Make it

up. Then say my name. Tell me more
of the unending radiance of honeyed eyes.


------
from Eileen Tabios' I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED (Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2005)

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

The Cinnamon Peeler and the Pope

Two poems contributed by Bec. Thanks, Bec! Keep sending those poems in, I've got 30 plus tables to fill, plus reading poetry at this late stage in the game is comforting and relieves me of my fret and stress I feel sometimes creeping into my body.

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michale Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bard dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you would never walk through markets
with the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
through you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.


Abyss by Karol Wojtyla
Abyssus abyssum invocat (Deep calleth on deep - Psalm 41)

You always see it as space
filled with cascades of air
where glass splinters reflect and glitter
like seeds planted in distant stones.

Now observe the abyss that glitters
in the eye's reflection.
We all bear it in us.
When men are gathered together
they shift the abyss like a boat
on their shoulder.

Nothing to bypass in this commotion.
Take a ray from the eye and write
your sign.
Though you see no abyss in the mind
don't imagine that it is not there.
Light may not reach your sight, but the boat
shifts on to your shoulders;
the abyss is clothed in flesh,
become Fact
in all men.

Friday, September 16, 2005

Carbonator Cash

Nick is sending Carbonator Cash for the money/poetry dance! yay!

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Release the Wheel by Wei-Ming Dariotis

Release the Wheel

Confessions of longing are inappropriate between friends
When, within reach is a diagonal,
a Market Street,
a slicing between things north and south.
Contours used to delineate the boundaries I’ve crossed:
I’ve left my own neighborhood
to get here.

Which is a moment of yielding, so I beg you,
“Gesture, something, anything; suggest
something.” Regret everything and forget
the directions
I gave you.

There are too many
one ways
with you strapped
in over there
and me in the driver seat
over here.

On the one side, there is a downtown
on the other, an
inability
to breathe.
I feel each cell
in my body like seeing stars
shimmer in cold air.
I concentrate on the Pleiades.

They are my heart, my Noe Valley,
Just concentrate;
One breath in, one breath
Out.

Don’t make any mistakes.

On one side is what
must be said. On the other
everything
I wish could be communicated.

Just let me drive you through
the City; let’s cruise the China
Basin, hit
Twin Peaks in a snowstorm
and we would find ourselves. One
breath in, one out,
and my hand, slowly
releasing

Sunday, September 11, 2005

two haikus by Tina Bartolome

Love
Lifts some scar in us
put there by someone we don’t
even remember

Kiss Muna
Our lips pull the tide
Into a full moon kiss then
Push back out to sea

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Trill & Mordent

From Luisa Igloria's soon to be released, "Trill & Mordent" WordTech Editions, September 2005; 2004 Editions Poetry Prize Runner-up.

IF THE POEM WERE GLASS

Kung kristal ang tula, manginginig akong hawakan.
(If the poem were glass, I would tremble from merely holding, from being held.)
- Rebecca Añonuevo



Who was it said each thing that meets
the other meets itself ? Meeting what quickens
though is tinged with regret, I am the face
that floats beneath the water of itself,
that counts the passing stars and branches
overhead, wanting to attend to their beauty
before their waning, wanting to forestall
the eventual farewell for as long as the world
grants pardon. If I close my eyes the faraway
mountains return: their outlines of pine, each
outcropping of rock etched against the silence
which holds what cannot unburden its heart
completely to language, to falling leaves,
to water. Thin flute of crystal—If nothing else,
at least the gift of being seen, especially before
the pour of amber. Taste of the fermented
grape, preserved, transformed: extracted wealth
that might have never been, that slides from one
scale now to the other— from glass to tipped-back
throat so only warmth remains, as in that rim
that flushes at the border of night and day. Before
the world is flooded with plainness, before the vines
return to their patient work among the trellises.
Before the careful hand rinses the glass and returns it to
the paneled cabinet, where other fragile vessels
rest in attention— aware of how the slightest motion
could set the whole transparent shelf to ringing.



BRAID

Bound like a double helix, two strands embrace
a life of thirds. What separates, what brings together?

I'm bound to the summons of everyday: each graveled surface, its
raised letters. Slivers escape between windows shuttered together,

unable to hold back a spill of light. Closer to their source, could I
not want for more. Shards picked from the beach, singly or together—

pages of sand, dense novels with tiny print. Even the bottle's discarded cork,
sliced thin, reveals hives and cellular structures, complex ties alive together

with already disintegrating matter. In the end, a simple picture: shadow of a curve,
gray diffraction photograph where strands have overlapped and together,

form an x. I read there are atoms which like to sit next to each
other. Only a life, narrow as a grosgrain ribbon; its moments together

answering another. Surely a generosity absolves;
evidence grows richer by the hour, the crystallized forms together

with undiscovered parts of more mysterious nature. New
knowledge supplants old, in science and history together

with all the arts which hollow out this space— How it enfolds
all that's been given, how it revises. What design? Together

in the same crucible, the heat beneath the glass; quick melting
mercury. The iron ball and feather dropped from a tower, together

gathering speed— O, but I recognize that careening, the equal effects of
the heart's turning toward the same gravity, that spiraling and marvelous together.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Then the suffeRING

From Leny:

FOR MICHELLE AND RHETT ---

First the engagement ring,
Then the wedding ring,
Then the suffer-ing.

This is Lolo’s blessing.

Wise and sentient,
He reminds the couple:
Ecstasy will pass.

Life is suffering.
May your wedding
Provide the core,

Heart and soul
Making Suffering
Sweet and bearable.

The Diamond Trading Company - Just Glittering with Feminism

THE DIAMOND TRADING COMPANY-
JUST GLITTERING WITH FEMINISM!!


YOUR LEFT HAND SAYS YOU'RE TAKEN. YOUR
RIGHT HAND SAYS YOU CAN TAKE OVER.
YOUR LEFT HAND CELEBRATES THE DAY
YOU WERE MARRIED. YOUR RIGHT HAND
CELEBRATES THE DAY YOU WERE BORN. WOMEN
OF THE WORLD, RAISE YOUR RIGHT HAND.


__________________
Poem is written with the text of an advertisement by the Diamond Trading Company.
First published in Eileen Tabios' poetry collection POST BLING BLING (Moria Books, Chicago, 2005)