Adam Ottavi Schiesl

a poem by Ben Johnson

adamottavi — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:02:01 +0000

Though

I Am Young

and Cannot

Tell

BY BEN JONSON

Though I am young, and cannot tell

Either what Death or Love is well,

Yet I have heard they both bear darts,

And both do aim at human hearts.

And then again, I have been told

Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold;

So that I fear they do but bring

Extremes to touch, and mean one thing.

As in a ruin we it call

One thing to be blown up, or fall;

Or to our end like way may have

By a flash of lightning, or a wave;

So Love’s inflamèd shaft or brand

May kill as soon as Death’s cold hand;

Except Love’s fires the virtue have

To fight the frost out of the grave.

a poem by Jorie Graham

adamottavi — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:20:50 +0000

The Visible

World

BY JORIE GRAHAM

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface

breaks

into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.

If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,

I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender

maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.

Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . .

Frames of reference moving . . .

The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:

bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged

and rippling

mosses. What heat is this in me

that would thaw time, making bits of instance

overlap

shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through

this culture

slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,

opportunities

taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I

break it apart without

crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled

airy loambits,

and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot

in . . .

Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.

Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now

as on this patch

of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out

sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what

would it

take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will

insist on

making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this

shovelful

and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single

clots

in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un-

hinge it

from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can

eventually

abstract it. Do you wish to?

Disentangled, it grows very very clear.

Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay

hardens and then yields, crumbs.

I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed

hallucination,

mating, forgetting, speckling, inter-

locking,

will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous

veil of

echoes and muddy nostalgias will

be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me

how large I

am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press

their slowest

electricity. . . . What speed is it at?

What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now

and just begins

to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the

dark oaks,

are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for

a moment

on them alone in the small wood.

White hands in the black-green glade,

opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots

of the moss

apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white

in these greens—

make your revolution in the invisible temple,

make your temple in the invisible

revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming

for this instant longer

like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall

whispering oaks . . .

Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse

has not four

legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence

because there is no time”—and since

at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands

serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated

fates

—mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds—

my hands are living in myriad manifestations

of light. . . .

“All forms of imitation are to be despised.”

“All subjects previously used must be discarded.”

“At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . .

Oh enslavement, will you take these hands

and hold them in

for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny

golden hands

pushed, up to the wrists,

into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light

and airy star—

I put the seed in. The beam moves on.

a poem by Walt Whitman

adamottavi — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:30:41 +0000

Whoever

You Are

Holding Me

Now in

Hand

BY WALT WHITMAN

Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.

Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,
Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon’d,
Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,
Put me down and depart on your way.

Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
Or back of a rock in the open air,
(For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.

Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

But these leaves conning you con at peril,
For these leaves and me you will not understand,
They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you,
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,
Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;
Therefore release me and depart on your way.

a poem by Audre Lorde

adamottavi — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:41:14 +0000

Movement

Song

BY AUDRE LORDE

I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck

moving away from me

beyond anger or failure

your face in the evening schools of longing

through mornings of wish and ripen

we were always saying goodbye

in the blood in the bone over coffee

before dashing for elevators going

in opposite directions

without goodbyes.

Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof

as the maker of legends

nor as a trap

door to that world

where black and white clericals

hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators

twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh

and now

there is someone to speak for them

moving away from me into tomorrows

morning of wish and ripen

your goodbye is a promise of lightning

in the last angels hand

unwelcome and warning

the sands have run out against us

we were rewarded by journeys

away from each other

into desire

into mornings alone

where excuse and endurance mingle

conceiving decision.

Do not remember me

as disaster

nor as the keeper of secrets

I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars

watching

you move slowly out of my bed

saying we cannot waste time

only ourselves.

a poem by Jorie Graham

adamottavi — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:19:47 +0000

San

Sepolcro

BY JORIE GRAHAM

In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to. This

is my house,my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor’s
lemontrees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory.
A rooster

crows all day from mist
outside the walls.
There’s milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean
the mind is,

holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into

labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the birth of god. No one
has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line–bodies

and wings–to the open air
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity

to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button

coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.

a poem by John Haines

adamottavi — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:36:10 +0000

The

Billboards

in Exile

BY JOHN HAINES

The truth was finally written,

law came to the billboards.

They were stripped of their promises,

uprooted, and made to walk —

a shabby band of discards

driven as domestic scrap

into the wastes of soap and tin.

I will be a weathervane, said one.

And I a water-tower.

And I a mirror.

And I will be a window.

And I a tree . . .

The big boards creaked in memory.

Each of them looked back

to see again the vanished colors

of their country;

the rich and coppery gleam

of the fortunate,

the charm, the easy pastoral

of manhood and smoke.

III

The prayer of the billboards:

Let some hand restore us,

to be in this world

memorial and gesture.

Great artifice of the sun,

give us back our slogans,

our islands of thirst.

Whoever comes this way

with matchbox and flint

to light his bonfire,

let him read in us

of the paradise defaulted

and the vision tamed.

(1977)

one more poem by Peggy Shumaker

adamottavi — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:28:31 +0000

Long Before

We Got

Here,

Long After

We’re Gone

In the season blue-white sun

barely lifts above the ridge,

limps along the horizon

then dives out of sight,

we’re changed each day by light.

Someone who’s gone before

broke trail, set tracks.

With the right kick wax,

we make our way among birch

breathing hard rare frosted light.

We make of light arpeggio crystals,

caribou dance fans, shush

of bristles. One moment made

alive, human, unafraid.

All that’s lost not gone.

a poem by the lovely and talented Peggy Shumaker

adamottavi — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:39:58 +0000

Lapse

What happened to us?

I watch him draw in
a deep breath.

I know then I’ve asked and asked

many times. And he has answered.

He gathers himself, trying hard.

What could he say that would stay heard?

a poem by Benjamin S. Grossberg

adamottavi — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:02:26 +0000

The Space

Traveler

&

Starlight

When I see starlight I marvel
the thousands of years it traveled
to meet me, before I was even
conceived, and think myself
a sort of time vector–in the midst of lines
that stretch along farther than I
can imagine. Behind me are things
evolving which that star’s light
is on its way toward, and each will
know itself the final destination–
though the light threads itself
through them like a needlepoint:
stitches them and me together
in contemplation of an image
of the past. Tell me, human,
what does that make you think
of time? That light from a star
no longer existent on its way
to a creature not yet evolved
can thread you up; that you, pearl,
string along with creatures altogether
like and unlike you? If you were
a space traveler, it would sing
to you of comfort. If you were
a space traveler, you’d call it love.

a poem by Catherine Wing

adamottavi — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:38:37 +0000

The Darker

Sooner

BY CATHERINE WING

Then came the darker sooner,

came the later lower.

We were no longer a sweeter-here

happily-ever-after. We were after ever.

We were farther and further.

More was the word we used for harder.

Lost was our standard-bearer.

Our gods were fallen faster,

and fallen larger.

The day was duller, duller

was disaster. Our charge was error.

Instead of leader we had louder,

instead of lover, never. And over this river

broke the winter’s black weather.