wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew

Take me back to the woods, please. (But actually, I took two pretty nice walks today; could be worse.)

I like my body when I'm in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,

that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
I like when I evergreen, current and berry.

I like when I mushroom, avalanche, cliff.
And everything is yes then, and everything
new: wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, "Yes, That's When," from hush (Middle Creek Publishing, 2020).

but yet the body is his book

It's my birthday! We went to NASA (Space Center Houston!) because I am 41 and still a space kid at heart. I was thinking about space poems to post (or moon poems, or poems about planets), and that got me to a not-super-surprising metaphysical place and then I thought, "I miss inflicting John Donne on people my birthday." So here is a deeply weird Donne poem that I have not posted before. (I posted "The Sun Rising" in 2008, otherwise you'd obviously be getting that one.) But what is this bonkers poem about, you may ask. The body? Sex? Death? Plato? Soul bonds? Being drift compatible with a possibly dead person while sharing a grave? All of the above, probably. It also has one of my favorite and most quintessentially "this is disgusting, bro, what are you doing" Donne couplets, which is the one about the eye-stalks.

Where, like a pillow on a bed
A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best;
Our hands were firmly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;
So to'intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
As 'twixt two equal armies, fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls (which to advance their state
Were gone out) hung 'twixt her and me.
And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.
If any, so by love refin'd
That he soul's language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,
He (though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same)
Might thence a new concoction take
And part far purer than he came.
This ecstasy doth unperplex,
We said, and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex,
We see we saw not what did move;
But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again
And makes both one, each this and that.
A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size,
(All which before was poor and scant)
Redoubles still, and multiplies.
When love with one another so
Interinanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.
We then, who are this new soul, know
Of what we are compos'd and made,
For th' atomies of which we grow
Are souls, whom no change can invade.
But oh alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we; we are
The intelligences, they the spheres.
We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their senses' force to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.
On man heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air;
So soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.
As our blood labors to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot which makes us man,
So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
To'our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change, when we'are to bodies gone.

—John Donne (1572-1631), "The Ecstasy" (or "The Extasie"), from Songs and Sonnets, originally published in print in 1633, although it certainly circulated in manuscript before then. This is obviously neither a song nor a sonnet.

the narrative burden of events

Fady Joudah is a Houston-based poet (and doctor) who I first learned about through his translations of Mahmoud Darwish—one of which I may post later in the month—and then because Brazos Bookstore, one of our favorite independent bookstores in town, always tries to highlight local authors. I picked up a copy of Joudah's 2024 poetry collection last year and was thinking about posting a couple of different poems, but then I read this earlier one on Poetry Foundation and couldn't stop thinking about it, so here we are. Still on the subject of the moon, sort of.

1.
Here, shooting stars linger
They give out
A sparkling trail like a cauterized incision

Silver, or amber
If the moon is low and rising red


2.
And the rain melts the roads
And the roads
Can rupture a spleen
Or oust a kidney stone

As for the heart
It needs a beginning
The narrative
Burden of events


3.
“Mize, zey eat mize”
The Frenchman exclaimed with a smile
“Rraized and shipped from za States”

We raise rats! I thought
That’s a lot of protein!

“Maize maize!” it was, after our chickens
Have had their fill


4.
She was the only nurse in town before the war
She spoke seven languages and died suddenly
He was a merchant
He’s a doorman now and buys us cigarettes


5.
Here we are with love pouring out of every orifice
Here they are dancing
Around the funeral pyre, the corpse in absentia


6.
One of the drivers ran over the neighbor’s ducks
The neighbor demanded compensation
For the post-traumatic stress disorder he accurately anticipates

Do you know what it’s like
To drive on roads occupied
By animal farms: you cannot tell
Who killed who or how
Many ducks were there to begin with


7.
In the morning, elephant grass moves the way
Mist is visible in the breeze but doesn’t dampen the skin


8.
Today, I yelled at three old women
Who wouldn’t stop bargaining for pills they didn’t need
One wanted extra
For her grandson who came along for the ride


9.
Like lip sores
The asphalt blisters in the rain

And the boys
Fill the holes with dirt and gravel
And broken green branches
Then wait:

No windex. No flowers or newspapers
And gratuity is appreciated


10.
“I have ants in my leg”
And “My leg went to sleep”
Are not the same thing!

The French argue
There is no sleep in a tingling numbness
The symptom of sluggish blood:

I agree. Me too my leg has been anted
And we are learning to reconcile
The dark with the electric


11.
Four days the river runs to the border
Nine days to learn it wasn’t the shape
Of your nose that gave you away
And debts are paid off in a-shelter-for-a-day

A pile of wood plus change in your pocket
Is a sack of potatoes and change in another’s


12.
No more running long or short distance
The old women
Snicker at me when I pass them by


13.
She was comatose post-partum
And the beekeeper
Bathed her in love everyday

When she recovered I gave up
What he’d promised me for the woman
Who took up nursing their newborn
Since as coincidence would have it
Her name was Om Assel — Mother of Honey


14.
The translation of a medical interview
Is not a poem to be written

Come recite a verse from childhood with me
I see you’re unable to weep, does love
Have no command over you?

The sea’s like the desert
Neither quenches the thirst


15.
Here, dry grass burns the moon
Here, a clearing of grass is a clearing of snakes


16.
And the rain has already been cleansed from the sky
The clinic is empty, soon
The earth will unseal like a jar
Harvest is the season that fills the belly


17.
Here, I ride my bicycle invisible
Except for a crescent shadow and the Milky Way
Is already past


18.
And a mirror gives the moon back to the moon
Home is an epilogue:

Which came first
Memory or words?

—Fady Joudah, "Moon Grass Rain" from The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008).

cathedrals

And for today, a poem I've been thinking about, quite possibly constantly, since the first time I read it:

There's this cathedral in my head I keep
making from cricket song and
dying but rogue-in-spirit, still,
bamboo. Not making. I keep
imagining it, as if that were the same
thing as making, and as if making might
bring it back, somehow, the real
cathedral. In anger, as in desire, it was
everything, that cathedral. As if my body
itself cathedral. I conduct my body
with a cathedral's steadiness, I
try to. I cathedral. In desire. In anger.
Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body.
Light enters a cathedral, the way persuasion fills a body.

—Carl Phillips, "And If I Fall," from Star Map with Action Figures, 2018. Between "I cathedral" and the work that comma does in the last line, I am just—this poem, my god. I guess the thing these two poems have in common is that they are both masterpieces of enjambment.

one small hand

Is it perhaps a little early in the month to be throwing down Naomi Shihab Nye? Maybe. On the other hand, I sure am feeling some type of way about the world, these days, and she's an incredible poet for those feelings—including that time I accidentally went viral on tumblr with Gate A-4. So here's another Nye poem that fucks me up.

        We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
                                                                                —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, "Making a Fist" from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (University of Utah Press, 1988).

splendid body

This was today's Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, which I get delivered to my inbox daily and which sometimes punches me in the gut and makes me revise my whole plan for the last few days of the month. I was going to post a completely different poem today, but here we are. No regrets.

The splendid body is meat, flexor
and flesh pumping, pulling, anti-
gravity maverick just standing
upright all over museums and
in line for the bus and in the laundry
aisle where it's just standing there
smelling all the detergent like
it's no big deal. So what if a couple
of its squishy parts are suspended
within, like beach-bungled jellyfish
in a shelved jar, not doing anything?
Nothing on this side of the quantum
tunnel is perfect. The splendid body,
though, is splendid in the way
it keeps its steamy blood in, no matter
how bad it blushes. And splendid
in how it opens its mouth and
these invisible vibrations come
rippling out—if you put your wrist
right up to it when that happens
it feels somewhat like the feet
of many bees. The splendid body
loves the juniper smell of gin, loves
the warmth of printer-fresh paper,
and the sound fallen leaves make
under the wheel of a turning car.
If you touch it between the legs,
the splendid body will quicken
like bubbles in a just-on teakettle.
It knows it can't exist forever, so
it's collecting as many flavors as it can—
saffron, rainwater, fish-skin, chive.
Do not distract it from its purpose,
which is to feel everything it can find.

—Rebecca Lindenberg, "The Splendid Body," originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 27, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

practice my art

I took a couple of years off from posting John Donne, both because I have already posted many of my top Donne poems and because sometimes you need a break from your favorite poets. In the years since I left grad school in 2016, I've also moved away—in some ways—from my early modernist roots. But I will always love the metaphysical poets for their absolutely bonkers weirdness as much as for the occasionally sublime, so here's a deeply weird poem about oral sex.

Who ever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
Love is a bear-whelp born: if we o'er lick
Our love, and force it new strange shapes to take,
We err, and of a lump a monster make.
Were not a calf a monster that were grown
Faced like a man, though better than his own?
Perfection is in unity: prefer
One woman first, and then one thing in her.
I, when I value gold, may think upon
The ductileness, the application,
The wholesomeness, the ingenuity,
From rust, from soil, from fire ever free;
But if I love it, 'tis because 'tis made
By our new nature (Use) the soul of trade.
    All these in women we might think upon
(If women had them) and yet love but one.
Can men more injure women than to say
They love them for that, by which they're not they?
Makes virtue woman? Must I cool my blood
Till I both be, and find one, wise and good?
May barren angels love so! But if we
Make love to woman, virtue is not she,
As beauty's not, nor wealth. He that strays thus
From her to hers, is more adulterous,
Then if he took her maid. Search every sphere
And firmament, our Cupid is not there;
He's an infernal god, and under ground
With Pluto dwells, where gold and fire abound;
Men to such gods their sacrificing coals
Did not in altars lay, but pits and holes.
Although we see celestial bodies move
Above the earth, the earth we till and love:
So we her airs contemplate, words and heart
And virtues, but we love the centrique part.
    Nor is the soul more worthy, or more fit,
For love, then this, as infinite as it.
But in attaining this desired place
How much they err, that set out at the face.
The hair a forest is of ambushes,
Of springs, snares, fetters and manacles;
The brow becalms us when 'tis smooth and plain,
And when 'tis wrinkled shipwrecks us again—
Smooth, 'tis a paradise, where we would have
Immortal stay, and wrinkled 'tis our grave.
The nose (like to the first meridian) runs
Not 'twixt an East and West, but 'twixt two suns;
It leaves a cheek, a rosy hemisphere,
On either side, and then directs us where
Upon the islands fortunate we fall,
(Not faint Canaries, but Ambrosial),
Her swelling lips; to which when we are come,
We anchor there, and think ourselves at home,
For they seem all: there Sirens' songs, and there
Wise Delphic Oracles do fill the ear;
There in a creek where chosen pearls do swell,
The remora, her cleaving tongue doth dwell.
These, and the glorious promontory, her chin,
O'erpassed, and the straight Hellespont between
The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts,
(Not of two lovers, but two loves the nests)
Succeeds a boundless sea, but yet thine eye
Some island moles may scattered there descry;
And sailing towards her India, in that way
Shall at her fair Atlantic navel stay;
Though thence the current be thy pilot made,
Yet ere thou be where thou wouldst be embayed
Thou shalt upon another forest set,
Where many shipwreck and no further get.
When thou art there, consider what this chase
Misspent by thy beginning at the face.
    Rather set out below; practice my art,
Some symmetry the foot hath with that part
Which thou dost seek, and is thy map for that,
Lovely enough to stop, but not stay at;
Least subject to disguise and change it is—
Men say the Devil never can change his.
It is the emblem that hath figured
Firmness; 'tis the first part that comes to bed.
Civility we see refined; the kiss
Which at the face began, transplanted is,
Since to the hand, since to the imperial knee,
Now at the papal foot delights to be:
If kings think that the nearer way, and do
Rise from the foot, lovers may do so too;
For as free spheres move faster far than can
Birds, whom the air resists, so may that man
Which goes this empty and ethereal way,
Then if at beauty's elements he stay.
Rich nature hath in women wisely made
Two purses, and their mouths aversely laid:
They then, which to the lower tribute owe
That way which that exchequer looks, must go:
He which doth not, his error is as great
As who by clyster gave the stomach meat.

—John Donne (1572-1631), "Elegy XVIII: Love's Progress," although there is, as is often the case with Donne, some dispute about the title; it could be "An Elegie on Loves Progress" or "Loves Progress" or "On Loves Progress." I made a bunch of choices about the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation that are not really consistent with anything except how I think it should read, so it's a good thing I'm not actually a textual editor. This poem ends with the truly incredible metaphor of a meat enema (that is what clyster means, I am sorry), which sure is a choice.

on this night

I did a mini-seder with friends tonight—we didn't do an actual seder, but we did have homemade matzo ball soup and matzo brei and other classic Passover delicacies (so many macaroons), and we briefly recited the ten plagues for N, our (beloved) token goy. So in the spirit of my evening, here is a poem for Passover.

On this night
            I remember Nachshon
            who was not Moses who
                        walked into the Red Sea
                        and called for God
                                                    to meet him there
On this night
            I am only a body and you
                                                    are only a body
On this night
                        nothing is hidden
                        only the afikomen
On this night
                        God was here and I
                                                                I knew it

—Bev Yockelson, "The Trans Haggadah Companion," originally published in Poetry, February 2019.