letter to katherine
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
katherine,
been thinking about you lately
wondering what kind of poetry
or what kind of thinking
or tenderness
you are up to
in these roller coaster times…
sorry i have been out of touch. it has been some ups and downs here but mostly on the up and up. every once in a while i pull out the poems you sent me and shuffle through them. i am busy as hell, and it turns out that poems can be better than a smoke break. I just remembered i never sent you back your robert hass book. does that make me a mildly neglectful once-lover, or just a friend bad at returning books. i hope the latter. anyway, upon closer examination it is not after all signed by the author as i think you had suspected. still want it back?
anyway, i am back on vashon. all told, there is a lot of energy right now. cuba rejuvenated me and then i fell right back into the middle of a local campaign. nick had been living in a little yurt organizing a storm, like he has never done. i moved in with him and we helped spearhead some pretty good direct action against a proposed local strip mine. you can see some of our work at the half baked website, mosquitofleet.org.
other than that we are working and trying to survive the cold damp. can’t imagine how cold it must be where you are. got out on horses last week in the mud and feared for my life, but it felt good to have the assurance of another beast, one that doesn’t give a damn about the economy, or our crazy wars… just is. that is my new existential theme. It’s about finding happiness I guess — all the old compasses are broken. My horoscope paraphrased Sartre; “we know everything but how to live.”
ill leave it there i guess. give me a holler. or a howl.
logan
No. 1 — March 7th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Human Wishes
I have given you the book of poems.
In which there are notable lovers,
Gnostic more than once,
Humans that belong to the plant level.
But we are here, on air,
where the weather is a rollercoaster, is mimicking
Our global emotions and we are in free-fall
Within a rickety-rot infrastructure.
And worse, the wars are a house
of horrors, and we live in this house.
And yes, my horse, I am cold,
am quiet accretions of ice.
Under the snow there is a crust,
under the heart: A filling: a feeling:
Mud! And mud, I am told
Is where the poem comes from.
It is about to be unleashed, an animal.
Experience organizes the poem in waiting,
And so we must live, like Rimbaud
Who, I am told, gave up Hope for Happiness:
No more words! I bury the dead in my belly!
And signed a renunciation of poetry.
Did he remember how to live, then,
disavowing the truth in penning?
He worked as a circus cashier and in Cyprus’
quarries. He deserted the Dutch army in Java,
having enjoyed the free ship ride east. Later,
he was a trader of coffee, cloth, and skins in Harrar
and Arabia, running guns in Tadjourah.
Yet Rimbaud never refused the letter form-
Do you suppose he still believed
Even after his lover Verlaine shot him,
that words have the power to create?
Or are words just wishes just want
just seeds in the excretion
that the poor dig through in search
of something to eat? Here, I think,
is where the lovers would answer
that they are the planet, in eurhythmy
in and about those pages. Reading
them turns into a touching.
A thumbprint is ours, is a switch on a torch.
The hands perform the wish, exacting faith in shaping.
Lovers remove their layers,
release the occasion from the universe,
unlock from natural law radiant in
each other, ensuring there is earth
left in the aftermath.
No, no worries, my wolf
It is not the book I need back.