08 Pride Post #24: Quotable Pride— “it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence”

“I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood…. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you…. and [...]

Pride 08 Post #9: Frank O’Hara and “the ecstasy of always bursting forth!”

For most of his life, Frank O’Hara thought today’s date, June 27, was his birthday. Turns out he was wrong. He was actually born March 27, 1926. His proper, strict parents had lied to him because they didn’t want him to know he was conceived before they were married.
I became aware of O’Hara’s [...]

Poetry blogging: The Searchers

Yesterday’s Search Terms, a narrative in verse

alfalfa

free blackberry radio

sailor tattoos

blackberry radio free

van cat

she got the money

she’s got the honey

she’s got the money

i got the money and she’s got the honey

blackberry free radio

Poetry blogging: if light had not transformed that day

Effort at Speech between two people
Muriel Rukeyser
: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair :
a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, [...]

Poetry blogging: I should make use of water

Water
by Philip Larkin
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly

Poetry blogging: “which is love assuming the consciousness of itself”

from
In Favor Of One’s Time
Frank O’Hara
an angel flying slowly, curiously singes its wings
and you diminish for a moment out of respect
for beauty then flare up after all that’s the angel
that wrestled with Jacob and loves conflict
as an athlete loves the tape, and we’re off into
an immortal contest of actuality and pride
which is love assuming [...]

Poetry blogging: anywhere I went I could sleep

Stars Inn
B Northcut
holiest
of fragile potential
for the word
for the law
for the lawn mower repair
on this afternoon’s carport
they come here to die a little
greasy sacrament
incense of stale exhalations
stare at the pool outside
“a view of the ocean”
he chuckles,
elbows,
intimate
she stirs her coffee
and takes herself
out the narrow window
musing,
“us in it for as much as this we are a fucked-up buncha [...]

Poetry blogging: how well they understood its human position

Musée des Beaux Arts
W H Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want [...]

inside my bones the distance

Borderlands
B. Northcut
I know
inside my bones
the distance,
an arm’s length.
You need not
measure it out
for me
with one-sentence
responses.
Your glances
at what I once
gave you
also measure,
speak longer.
What before
you tasted,
now only your
eyes know.
© all rights reserved

I don’t want to remember you as that

Nearly a Valediction
Marilyn Hacker
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I’ve ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and [...]