Mary Mccarthy

01:17 pm - "My Camel," Annie Dillard

A dialogue of self and soul

I snared him with a jackknife
and a four-foot length of gut
before his eyes were open

or they were shut
against me. I cut
his tongue out; I seared

his bloody tongue-root shut.
Sun in your eye,
desert-heart:

do you even know I'm here?
I chew honey-locust pods;
I spit them down his throat.

[from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel]

01:14 pm - "Posterior view of the bones of the carpus and metacarpus"

01:10 pm - "A Spring Sky Over Hirsau Abbey," Till Credner

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[from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website]

06:57 pm - "[works]", Selah Saterstrom

12:29 pm - "Dear Jenny," by Genya Turovskaya

Dear Jenny, I feel I am growing smaller,
the map on my lap is the world not the map of the world
and the steering wheel is one of those rings that are thrown
to the drowning to save them,
                                                 Jenny,
why do we need motels when we can sleep
in parking lots, your head on my lap, or mine on yours.
             It isn't rain, the windshield wipers wipe
clean the evening's insect swarms, they are invisible until they collide
with the glass.
Jenny, this is our house, the house we do not own
and this the portrait of the man who lived
here before, this is his spice rack and this
the hole he worried through the wool
blanket with his thumb, and this, Jenny, is his hunter's cap
and his one good shoe.
            Jenny, the pain is dull, it is cold,
it settles into the spine and smells of the ice cubes
that tinkle when my glass clinks with yours.
            Jenny, describe this little town
the mmm's of mountains, the aimless
dogs trotting the peripheries, sniffing at the ash and junk. I move toward you
and you move toward me, we lock together and come
apart, Jenny, how can I describe this love,
our bodies drying from the outside in. Jenny, who is the Jew
in Our Lady of Infinite Division, the imposter with the suitcase always packed
under the bed? Do you remember the yarn we spun
after we burned the kitchen chairs for heat, a variation on the line
from St. Paul, if I have not love I am but
a grinning bird in a gallows tree? Jenny, the line sometimes breaks, the church
is a book made of wood, and I feel empty as a tent
pitched in a one-horse town, and just off screen
a ruined city resurrects its water towers and television antennas,
as we tune the radio for local weather.
                                    Jenny, the letters of your name
mean something to someone other than you.
This table can be taken out from under me, and so can this chair,
then there is the part, unsayable, that no one wants, but you Jenny,
                                                             do you want it?
We went away but left our graffiti there, the initials of appreciative tourists
scratched into the fog. We lived in a house and slept in a bed and ate
                                                off of one another's plates.
Jenny, the thieves have come and gone,
they left their footprints on the sheets. When you strip, Jenny,
your body goes blunt. I can't
get inside you though I push and push, Jenny, tell me how
x becomes y, and y becomes z, but z does not


***


Dear Jenny, I feel I am growing older, and the girls,
the girls are so pretty, and I am no closer to being the boy that I was than I am
to the man I thought I would be. I'm a cross country skier, Jenny, I cross
from the livingroom into the bedroom, from the kitchen into the hall.
I turn on the television, I watch it snow, I turn off the television, and the snow
                                                                                   presses on.
                        Please Jenny, I need your attention
for the pleasure inside me to buck up like the colt
whinnying in the meadow of my slightest recollection of that day,
the one to which I am forever returning, my hand in the air, waving
down the taxis that stream past like a school of yellow fish.
And all I can think is: Jenny, we're getting this wrong!
           Just look around you i? the marionettes
are tangled in their strings, the lovers are putting on their clothes,
the blondes have taken their blondeness away, the brunettes
have taken their dark, wet eyes, and where are the troubadours,
                         those torchlight crooners, where have they taken
their quivering lutes?
                                     When I close my eyes, Jenny, I see everything
and everyone I have ever known falling at once, and I see the wind
                                                              which is made of fine blue wires
and clouds marching like animal armies across the sky: they are elephants
linked tail to trunk, and they fall too. If I could
have back but one small part of my diminishing mind, but one of the two
halves of my engorged heart I know I could fall asleep
in one place and wake up in another and it wouldn't matter how I got there,
                                                 but Jenny, the trees
are green as dollars, and still there is doubt. The boys race their scooters
down the sidewalks and still there is doubt.
The girls are so pretty, and still there is doubt. There is a woman
holding a child, and still there is doubt.
                        I mean nothing
more than this: we move
from one into another into a third room,
and only there do we live casually in false etcetera.


***


Dear Jenny, I think I am growing colder. It is cold today
                         and it will be cold tomorrow.
It rains today and it will rain tomorrow. It rained yesterday and the day before, and it will
          rain the day after. The newsprint bleeds and disintegrates
state secrets, red alerts, yellow, the moon, happiness, the molecular
structures of pulp,
                                  and still it persists.
I didn't want to keep going, Jenny, but the organism persists. It is feeding time again
        and the troths are filled.
I want to say that I have made something stop
moving: the sweeping machines, the weeping machines. I was ready
to commit acts of folly and great danger: Jenny, I have slipped
my books into your library, I've dog-eared the important passages, I've hidden
notes between the pages. They all say:
this letter was for her, then it was for no one, now it is for you.
                                   Jenny, I didn't want to live
but for the pocketful of seed in my coat, the packet of seed in the pocket of my greatcoat.
The lock of hair in the locket. There is rain in my shoes and there are flocks
                       of sparrows in the subway, and if ever
there was a call to love, this is it, Jenny. You came and then you fell, not like water
            but like concrete,
and all the trees are uprooted, waving their tentacles in the air,
and Jenny, it is much too quiet.

[First published in Chicago Review (2006)]

11:45 am - "Startrails of Orion in Grand Champ, FR," by Koen van Gorp

12:14 pm - "Borrowed Love Poems," John Yau

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 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 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 to neither 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 the 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 this page is wet
now that this pen is empty

5.

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 that a 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 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 worms

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, having argued with the obedient world
that language will infiltrate its walls

What can I do, now that I have sent you
a necklace 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

02:31 pm - from "Debbie: An Epic," Lisa Robertson

03:01 pm - "On the Wing (1)," Octavio Paz

     ORANGE

Little sun
silent on the table,
permanent noon.
It lacks something:
                             night.



           DAWN

On the sand,
bird-writing:
the memoirs of the wind.



 STARS AND CRICKET

The sky's big.
Up there, worlds scatter.
Persistent,
unfazed by so much night,
a cricket: brace and bit.



     NON-VISION

Barren hour, reservoir
where my thoughts
drink themselves.

For one enormous moment
I forgot my name.
Little by little I was unborn,
diaphanous arrival.



       CALM

Sand-clock moon:
the night empties out,
the hour is lit.

07:12 pm - from A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid

Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives - most natives in the world - cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go - so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.