Friday, August 15, 2014

Here's to Rebecca Seiferle, poetry at the stops of the Tucson Streetcar, and sweet monsoon rain!



Jatropha cardiophylla
Limberbush

I must have passed by a hundred times and not noticed
these spindly twigs, drought and cold deciduous,
among the desert's scraggle… so what
if I know baskets were made by the Seri people
the splints sewn into a star
the blood color of these branches
or that Jatropha cardiophylla lives in colonies
spread by underground runners and that its sap
stains the fingers red or that it bears a single female flower,
a three seeded fruit? Knowledge
is not the encounter with the thing itself,
so at the margins of the the monsoon season,
caught in a basket of words,
I am stuck on the limberbush, searching
for its white to pale yellow blooms, to see
knowingly this one small life
like all the nondescript small creatures,
including human beings
that the eyes have to open to find, so
I can bow to it and acknowledge
its small loves opening the shining
heart-shaped leaves with their crenellated margins
and red petioles . . .how radiant
is the ordinary, overlooked, the never-seen
when branches that seem dead or stricken
leaf and flower in the rain.


Friday, August 1, 2014

After the lovely morning rain in the Sonoran desert - this blue-gray day calls for some Noelle Kocot ~




The Blue

How often we say things we don't mean
Fully, with our full selves.  But this is
All right, since we cannot make sense of
The growing weeds, the things that go
Where only blue travels.  A hymn rings
Out.  The wavery wind blows.  I don't
Want to sound coy or even ridiculous,
But after all, the azure of a face drawn
In sand at the edge of a sea is my own
Two deaths.  The first one happened 7
Years ago.  I've grown all new cells since
Then.  The next will happen at some point,
But I'm not worried, not hardly.  Is this a
Message?  A message to whom?  Is it
To you, who polishes me like a pearl?
Humanity is more than that, I think, and
Now the light has spoken.  It's time
To carry the weight of the day, and wait
For sleep to come again, as it does,
Flat and ridiculous over the whole blue land.  

Noelle Kocot



***



Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

       Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?
              —Elizabeth Bishop

A paper hat transmutes so easily into a paper boat,
But this doesn't mean that the boat is somehow inferior.
I was a child once.
I saw into the deep, blue interior

Of the number four, which is the Holy Spirit who makes
All things possible and all things matter.
All things I thought of then,
Even the letter

Q without the U behind it. And things just settled.
There was no need to hope
For any more, except maybe a cigarette, and the thing about cigarettes
Is that one after another, they're the same. Meanwhile, soap

Dissolves much more quickly than it did in 1970,
The year that embarrasses me most with its promise of tall,
Musky, balding Gordons and Dons, with orange, palm-tree expressions,
And women in short, pregnant dresses and ash-black falls.

It will take a freighter
Of Coppertone to tan them all. Somewhere a library
still swells with bean-
Bag chairs and barefoot, dozing hippies too hooked
On Marx and Keynes to notice that Miss Breen

Has in fact been able to write her roommate (friend, I presume)
Into her will with little fuss from the family. Anyway, I hope I've seen
The last of those backwards
Fools, except of course for kind-eyed Miss Breen

And her companion, who are coming
This Thursday for a good, strong cup of German tea. Hopefully, that rag
Of a newspaper will give us something to talk about before
We sip. Wait a minute! I must buy some Black Flag

So that the roaches spare our Lorna Doones! O world,
In all my years of comprehension
I will never understand their synchronous, immediate
Flocking in bright formation, then halting suspension

Beneath the sink when I turn on the fluorescent, kitchen, warehouse-
Like, blaring light just before sun-up. The blue
Spirit that I once saw radiating out from everything, like a tourist
In a too-young country, has gone home. And yes, I love you,

Yes, if to love implies more guilt than one alone can harbor.
So come, the scenery
Is fine here. The wild blue light still crosses the mountains
Now and then, somewhere a number four sprouts through the
          rough greenery.