Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
Engaging Culture with Culture Through Acts of Creative Excellence
Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike
Lapis Lazuli by William Butler Yeats
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat. Continue reading “Lapis Lazuli by William Butler Yeats” »
Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot
I.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn Continue reading “Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot” »
Dropbox Poetry
The poets of the Continuum have just started what amounts to a perpetual poetry workshop, which utilizes the online storage server Dropbox to facilitate sharing and critique. The “workshop” is hosted by published poets Cindy Beebe, Jim Allman and Gardner Mounce and is open to anyone who wishes nurturing criticism of their work, but most especially local, Memphis poets.
Remember Love Lives Only in the Mind
On St. Valentine’s Day it is good to remember that:
“Contrary to the anatomy referenced in all our favorite love songs, love (as with every other emotion we feel) is not rooted in the heart, but in the brain.”
The Illusions of Love, Stepen L. Macknik
We are nothing more than minds on a stick; so, why are you here, on an arts’ site, dummy. Well, here’s a Scott Cairns’ poem to help you, perhaps, remember why.
Cloudless Snowfall by Franz Wright
Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody’s put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone—
Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.
Poetry as Play: Kay Ryan’s Elephant Rocks
In talking about poetry with people, inevitably I hear, “I don’t get it.” For sure, poetry can be resistant to immediate interpretation, but isn’t this true of all art? T. S. Eliot once wrote, “If I understand a play the very first time, then I know that it isn’t a very good play.” Is this because art is elitist? No, but understanding cannot be bought with a credit card; it must be purchased with hard work. And haven’t we all performed activities with our bodies that demonstrated the presence (and ache) of heretofore unknown muscles? Such is the case with engaging art; it utilizes portions of one’s being that maybe were not known to exist: especially the often atrophied muscles of imagination. But I digress, for this article is about one specific artist, poet Kay Ryan—the current poet laureate—and her book Elephant Rocks, and the one simple reason why her poetry should entreat a first then closer look—it is fun.
Continue reading “Poetry as Play: Kay Ryan’s <em>Elephant Rocks</em>” »
Déjà vu
Cicada evening on the lake.
A stand of children throw rocks from a cliff
at a three-legged dog that is too dumb to flee.
The dog looks fished: fashioned of sludge or stolen rib.
Hopping as rocks clotting the water
staccato its would-be-wounds.
Shouting as rocks shatter its image.
A rock pats its skull.
The lake top wavers. Words.
Inconsequential details.
Night falls and who is to blame?
Cicada buzzsaw oscillating
every atom in space.
After Eden, it says,
nature was given to nature,
animal to man to cancer.
Cicada sunrise.
The flies are a function.
The dog is processed by the sun.
Theology of Fitness by Jim Allman
…there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence.
—Charles Darwin
A nursling’s so unlike living fossils
like rhinoceroses or elephants dressed up in grey granite
armor or crocodiles in cardigan gravel:
who’ve a record against extinction,
can take an honest-to-God punch,
and don’t have glass jaws—weak chins—glass
skin. Finds itself ill-equipped for this life of bare-knuckle boxing;
rather, in successive snivels is the nursling—suffering
Yahweh with tiny pleas in every whine and wail,
yearning for solace—the slough
of granite plaits from mastodons, throwaway
calluses to patch the porcelain of pummeled
calfskin—unfit for the world. Observe the newborn thinness
of its buttresses, the baby soft
of its skin. God knows its no frame for igneous,
and I suppose cherubs to model a more durable
material. But didn’t Darwin distrust immutable
things; observing the frequent struggle for existence, he preached
a vatic if not natural sanctification
ringing though with scripture: “made fit through suffering.”
First published April 06 in Splash of Red (2010)
{Italicized phrases taken from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and/or the book of Hebrews.}
Antikythera Machine by Jim Allman
Count them: 32 gears turning an apparatus with the clockwork
of Archimedes,
as if arms and legs
weren’t first made of marrow
or the cut of spurs and teeth
engendered no withdraw.
Clank-clank—the epicyclicclank
of drive pin and fence,
wheel flies and drive cam spindling.
A locksmith listens intent on combinations—
a supplicant
drunkard
whose pints of gibberish
before the barkeep translate each genuflection
of elbow and forearm into an out-and-out addiction with alignment;
Summons with a bit of wrist torque,
then click-clack restages the moon:
Mercury, Saturn,
Venus, Jupiter, & Mars soon
track.
As above, so below.
Marks the ascendant
star as an artifact
of some luminary tattletale;
who recalls the Greek before
(not after) its salt bath as little more than axioms:
oracle minus cog,
anti-utilitarian,
foster-child of Silence and slow Time;
now with a portent more
like fluid—like fish shifting on an always deepening diurnal tide.
First published in the November issue of decomP (2010)