I will start with my mouth then live with antlers.

My hope was to do these quick sketch-poem-interviews more regularly, but it's summer and this year has been like a hopeful drive to somewhere you eventually realize does not exist, so can you blame me for winging it out to the ocean at every opportunity--and anyway, the sound grass is already going blond this late July.

A thing I inked rapidly after rereading 'Spark of the Sky Stag’s Great Heart'

So, maybe read this poem from Sarah Messer now but then again when you are home after many hour of salting and sunning and you have sand in your shoes, in your teeth.

Sarah first published a draft of this poem on Facebook, and I was so in love with it, I made her send it to me. I was slow to post, though, and it has by now been a featured poem on poets.org's poem-a-day, published by the Academy of American Poets. Here it is again, in case you missed it, in all its quiet-hearted majesty. 

Spark of the Sky Stag’s Great Heart

Sarah Messer

strung from a thought arrived through the keyhole grasping
the hand of another

I will begin with my mouth

then live with antlers remembering the light inside, always to breathe this unforgetting

and his body shaped like a crabapple tree

or a mother raised by a wolf looking back at the mirror

and trying not to break anvils on the bottles of blame

in another life: smell of moss, stream water, depressions of dark orange rocks which trap tiny fish

the consequence of silence: a field beneath opening clouds

on that morning I woke to the sound of the blue jay and used a small silver key

some day we will all be gone from this place

now that the live oak has thrown down all its caramel-colored leaves, thought lives in the ear-shaped idea of this only

Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Messer. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 29, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

2-Question Interview with Sarah Messer

What is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast?

  • I love a toasted everything bagel with chive cream cheese and tomato.

Something lost, stolen, or broken that you wish you could get back?

  • Broken….I had a beautiful pottery mug from Portugal that I took with me everywhere. I actually gave it to someone and then took it back secretly. This terrible grasping and selfishness is probably what caused a tree branch to fall on it a month later and break it. Because, really? A tree branch?  This was years ago and I still miss it.

 

He was never a contained storm.

About a month and a half ago, my little sister saved my life with a letter. It arrived just after I'd done something stupid, and her note, which said she needed me, made me undo the stupid thing. I reversed back into being and started going forward. But because this direction is not always easy and because life is not always an graceful fight, I've been hunting down other letters.

Happily, the best thing about my position in this world is that I've somehow careened into the orbit of some insanely gorgeous and brilliant people. And so, I wanted to share some of the work I love, and which feels epistolary to me, along with quick interviews, and my pretty terrible 30-second illustrations. I hope reading will make you want to throw a few inelegant punches.

First up is a prose poem by Eric Vithalani. It's so good, I feel a little wild when I read it. 'denim pants' unfolds in the negative, both linguistically and temporally--and in other, more complicated ways, too...

denim pants

sean david carter’s body was never claimed. after the few witnesses never left the viewing area, he was never removed from the execution chamber.  the state appointed physician never declared him dead. his heart never stopped after the last injection, potassium chloride.  the second injection never relaxed his muscles or collapsed his lungs.  there wasn’t a first injection that sedated him after the warden never gave the signal to start.  the two inch thick steel door to the chamber never slammed shut.  he was never a contained storm. an iv was not started and the saline solution did not drip, slow. it did not remind him of fishing for rainbow trout. he was never connected to a cardiac monitor or strapped to a table exactly ten minutes before he did not die.  fifty minutes before that, he was never given a new pair of denim pants and a new blue work shirt.  a couple of hours before that, he wasn’t in a bitter room with the prison chaplain and the warden, sitting at an industrial table. his thoughts never focused on what it would be like.  he never ate the last meal he requested; turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, cranberries, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and coffee, black.  his execution date never happened to fall on thanksgiving.  it was four hours before that when he was never moved off death row and into the death watch cell, continuously observed by a three man staff.  he never put up a fight.  the seventeen hours before that, the sky did not gray, snow did not begin to fall,  protesters did not arrive and his family and friends did not make visitation.  sean david carter never knew who shot the two found at the kitchen table in bathrobes.  she, slumped over like a school girl taking a nap on her desk and he with burned out cigarette between his lips.

2015-06-24 17.28.22.jpg

  1. Who will fight alongside you during the zombie apocalypse? My dog, Baxter. I've only had him for a few months now, but he is a loyal, protective little fucker.

  2. Greatest regret? Being an asshole to my parents when I was a teenager.

  3. Physical object/possession you love the most? My camera.

Here's my bio of Eric, which he had nothing to do with: As of 2015, he's been my best friend for 17 years. That camera he mentioned is a Canon 70D, and he has fancy lenses for it, like a 100-400 L series. People buy his photographs. Eric teaches English at Coastal Community College and lives in Surf City, NC. He did his MFA at UNC Wilmington.

A bit of Eric's other work available online:

 

Goodnight to James Salter, who said 'Let's get back to business, you and I.'

Lahiri said he taught her to insist upon the right words. Some of his passages had wings fluttering in my aching throat. I don't have much to add; others of my friends knew him far better. But I loved his writing, and so I loved him. And I hope if there's anything that comes after, in any form, that it is as beautiful as his sentences.

'We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, they disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for the winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.' --from the opening to Light Years, and to which I know I will return my whole life

the sea birds hang above it

Some notes on pain

I was born with a predisposition, maybe. The recipe for it carried like a stowaway in the secret, destructive chemistry of my brain. When I was sick, I beat a retreat from the world. Coming back, even partway, has been hard. It's been easier to live in the body's pain than the mind's--than the world's.

How much should a person walk their interior or travel society's prism of triggers. Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory says we lay down proteins every time we revisit a memory, building it and making it stronger. So with each new remembered and revisited thought, a different future emerges based on how, in the present, we remember the past.

Anyhow, below is some of what struck a deep chord within me today, what I revisited, and what is becoming now part of my physiology:

  • I watched Montage of Heck twice. I took notes. Novoselic talking about Cobain's sensitivity to humiliation. Love modifying, in terms of romance, how sensitive he was to betrayal. I took notes on Morgen's interviews and talks. On the reviews and comment threads.

  • 'And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.' (from Sylvia Plath's  unabridged diaries)

  • 'If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world as one is driven by loneliness and and silence from the habitable world.' (from Virginia Woolf's diary)

  • ' [. . .] it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination, learning [ . . . ] its skies and space, its own planetary system, without thinking that one may become homeless in the world, and bankrupt, abandoned [ . . .]' (from Janet Frame's 3-part autobiography)

I took a call from my father earlier. He said: 'Plumb the depths of your despondency and despair. There's a floor; you just haven't found it yet. You're elastic. When you do, you'll come back.'

I'm afraid there's no floor. ('One thing they don't tell you about the blues when you got 'em is there ain't no bottom, there ain't no end,' sings Emmylou Harris.) It's a vast and bottomless sea. And no amount of elasticity, of pull or determination, can get you back when you've gone too far.

There's one more, from David Foster Wallace, below.

What destinies we could have, if everyone were kinder to one another, to themselves.

 

  • The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” (DFW)

Up late with John Yau's Borrowed Love Poems

My mind is restless and sluggish as this slow-moving storm. I've been trying to edit an essay, turning over and over a line Woolf jotted down in her diary. Pacing inside that one sentence for over a week, I realized I had misunderstood it. But I need time to fix my mistake, so I'm sleepless, listening to the rain, the tree limbs fall, the transformers blow, and smashing myself against these lines. Read them yourself and feel the flutter of your fragile heart.

Borrowed Love Poems

1.

What can I do, I have dreamed of you so much

What can I do, lost as I am in the sky

 

What can I do, now that all

the doors and windows are open

 

I will whisper this in your ear

as if it were a rough draft

 

something I have scribbled on a napkin

I have dreamed of you so much

 

there is no time left to write

no time left on the sundial

 

for my shadow to fall back to the earth

lost as I am in the sky

 

2.

What can I do all the years that we talked

and I was afraid to want more

 

What can I do, now that these hours

belong neither to you nor me

 

Lost as I am in the sky

What can I do, now that I cannot find

 

the words I need

when your hair is mine

 

now that there is no time to sleep

now that your name is not enough

 

3.

What can I do, if a red meteor wakes the earth

and the color of robbery is in the air

 

Now that I dream of you so much

my lips are like clouds

 

drifting above the shadow of one who is asleep

Now that the moon is enthralled with a wall

 

What can I do, if one of us is lying on earth

and the other is lost in the sky

 

4.

What can I do, lost as I am in the wind

and lightning that surrounds you

 

What can I do, now that my tears

are rising toward the sky

 

only to fall back

into the sea again

 

What can I do, now that the sky

has shut its iron door

 

and bolted clouds

to the back of the moon

 

now that the wind

has diverted the ocean's attention

 

now thata red meteor

has plunged into the lake

 

now that I am awake

now that you have closed the book

 

6.

Now that the sky is green

and the air is red with rain

 

I never stood in

the shadow of the pyramids

 

I never walked from village to village

in search of fragments

 

that had fallen to earth in another age

What can I do, now that we have collided

 

on a cloudless night

and sparks rise

 

from the bottom of a thousand lakes

 

7.

To some, the winter sky is a blue peach

teeming with words

 

and the clouds are growing thick

with sour milk

 

What can I do, now that the fat black sea

is seething

 

Now that I have refused to return

my borrowed dust to the butterflies

 

their wings full of yellow flour

 

8.

What can I do, I never believed happiness

could be premeditated

 

What can I do, now that I have sent you

a necklace full of dead dried bees

 

and now that I want to

be like the necklace

 

and turn flowers into red candles

pouring from the sun

 

9.

What can I do, now that I have spent my life

studying the physics of good-bye

 

every velocity and particle in all the waves

undulating through the relapse of a moment's fission

 

now that I must surrender this violin

to the sea's foaming black tongue

 

now that January is almost here

and I have started celebrating a completely different life

 

10.

Now that the seven wonders of the night

have been stolen by history

 

Now that the sky is lost and the stars

have slipped into a book

 

Now that the moon is boiling

like the blood where it swims

 

Now that there are no blossoms left

to glue to the sky

 

What can I do,

I who never invented anything

 

and who dreamed of you so much

I was amazed to discover

 

the claw marks of those

who preceded us across this burning floor

 

*John Yau's collection by the same name (Borrowed Love Poems) can and should be purchased. We are all found in every line.