TC: Drifting

.

A trumpet vine
a bright green
tree fern -- the
violet light
of early evening
fog enshrouds
pink big
city clouds

Translucent wave cloud (Stratocumulus lenticularis): photo by El C, 2005

TC: Under the Fortune Palms

.

Some people think meanings are hard to find
In the 1980’s decade of great emptiness
Among the bungalows of Samarkand
I stood under the fortune palms
And watched for a sign to blow by
In the throbbing Santa Ana
But all that came my way
Was the remote echo of a woman’s voice
From down around Xanadu Street
Calling for her dog to stay

The Flamingoes: Henri Rousseau, 1907 (private collection)

TC: Sunflowers

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A clear night sky steeped in blue and green starlight
Hollow and deep as a huge sea shell flushed from within
And reddening as the rising god once again commands
The drowsy sunflowers to lift their heads and open their black eyes

Teaches us how the world begins all over the earth
How to greet one another in language beyond words
To depart unconcerned with any idea of return and perhaps
To at last begin to speak without not thinking

Sonnenblumen: Egon Schiele, 1911

TC: Up the Creek

.

Had been trying to find its course for years

sans mechanical intervention

toward some thought somebody had had about something

but on the way kept getting lost in the tall weeds

and forgetting its purpose must have been

to arrive somewhere not to stay to splash

Wildbach (brook): Egon Schiele, 1918
Der Lyriker (The Poet): Egon Schiele, 1911 (Sammlung Leopold, Wien)

Madison Avenue Portal Stopped Realities

Last night was a pure poetry night. It ended with Ted Greenwald and Kit Robinson tag-team reading at the Poetry Project. This is a truly inspiring and fun-filled barrage of verbiage, and the turn-taking insured the voice was always fresh. Earlier, it had been Hettie Jones and Tony Towle, hosted by Charles North at the Schimmel Theater at Pace University, in a night of poetry and reminiscences of Frank O'Hara. It was the perfect prelude to a night of language. Tony commented he thinks it's a sin "Second Avenue" is not in the new Selected and recommended people look up the old Selected with its terrific Larry Rivers portrait of the nude O'Hara on the cover. Hettie agreed and reminded us that she and LeRoi Jones had first published "Second Avenue" as a chapbook. Tony then mentioned the episode of Mad Men that includes a Frank O'Hara poem. I had never seen Mad Men, though I did read the January Jones article in GQ. I had to look up the clip. I think it's genius. Here's my comment on YouTube: "I love this reading of Frank O'Hara's poem — it brings out the darker, more depressive quality that underpins the buoyant optimism most people comment on in his work. It is the final section of the final poem in his first book. The book is MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY, and the poem is 'Mayakovsky.'" Here's the clip: Frank O'Hara on Mad Men I think Frank would have loved it too.

TC: A Glimpse of Hope

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for Charlie Vermont

The bloom is short lived
evanescent spring
and fall after all -- C.V.

Charlie,
Yes it's odd
how short the spring
how long the fall
and another thing
a poem
found in the lining
of an old winter coat

TC: The Blue Dress

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I close my eyes

and see you at the age of 30

beyond the mist of affect

in your blue dress

so slim and Viennese

in the Sharons’ picture gallery

at Tissa’s party

a stormy night in 1974

with the ocean roaring

against the breakwater

I find you there with

all my projections

withdrawn at last

and what appears is

you in your blue dress

in this bewildering recurrent

intensified mind garden

I call creation

because you created it for me

Girl with blue pillow: Egon Schiele, 1913
Standing girl with blue dress and green stockings: Egon Schiele, 1913

TC: Hope

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The happiness promised in names like Lord's
Valley and Wind Gap recedes like the fading
Of a rainbow, yet hope walks in anyway,
Where there's life she's there--nature's utopian
Possibility remains part of the scheme
As long as there's a breeze to blow the past away.

Study of Sorrel, Cow Parsley and Willow Saplings: Peter De Wint, 1805-1810 (Whitworth Art Gallery)
Rainbow (taken from helicopter): photo by Mila Zinkova, 2007

TC: Birds

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Sky full of blue nothing toward which the Magi
Move, like dream people who are Walt Fraziers of the air…
Sometimes the moves they make amaze them
For they will never happen again, until the end of time; but there they are.

So shall I be like them? I don’t think so… and yet to float
Above the rolling H2O
On wings that express the mechanics of heaven
Like a beautiful golden monkey wrench
Expresses mechanics of earth… t’would be bueno.






Sanderlings (calidris alba) flying in formation: photo by Ianaré Sévi, 2009

TC: The Light of the World at 9000 Feet

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A big
bossy-crested
blue jay
with electric black
wings
and a simonized
gorgeousness
about him
flashes into
the aspens
like sheet
lightning

Steller's Jay: photo by Alan D. Wilson, 2006

Aspens changing color in mid fall: photo by Zephyr Glass, 2007