poems revisited: blue cafe
(Listening to cuts from Patricia Barber's CD Cafe Blue last night put me in mind of Jackson's wondrous and much too short-lived Blue Cafe and these poems again.)
An acrostic suite from 2001...
BLUE CAFE
heron meditations
good fellow: strange vision exhilarates the nest.
rarely have i known the direction of your mist. until now.
enviable, is it not, your race
across time to
this moment of mississippi, shore
bought from what
legacy of pasts only you can
utter. they come, floating, fishlike -
elegant waste of piney ocean depth
ii.
glass eye, i think from my distance, so like esche-
r’s orb, a world turned in, turned under:
eternal sleep, a pearl in wait. spillway
a mighty punctuation to our dreams:
therein lies the irony of your long comma.
bridewell, hale fellow, get my drift?
lunacy’s sunken treasure
unfurled, the gar that ate jackson mississippi -
evolution’s finest hour.
iii.
gargoyle at seaside: can death be more still?
read this palm i lay before you.
eat of it. taste if fate is
altered in the fractions we have left.
taste if time cuts as a rule,
bereft of moorings
line for line
uranographer as mighty walls crumble
epigraphist of the gathering mists.
Labels: nuit
posted by murat11 at 12:31 PM
6 Comments:
Great Scott!! a midnight blue heron!!
These are great poems. Are they yours? They seem to be from an earlier, more tightly bound era.
Love the piano...
T: Wrote these 10 years ago, three years into the poetic revolution. Had/have a thing for acrostics, which can tend to be tighter, what with the "structure," though I did write a 25-poem chapbook, all the poems 25 lines, with this left-margined message in each of the 25: stickydarkwildflowerhoney. They were wilder. "Stickydark" was the title of the collection. I'll probably be trotting it out in the next couple of years, as a Black Rose Press printing.
Sticky dark sounds good... something delicious for Black Rose Press to produce.
Stickygood, indeed.
loved this image: utter. they come, floating, fishlike -
elegant waste of piney ocean depth
furiously studying stars and inscriptions, seems the answers get muddier instead of clearer. Maybe it's that pesky fish stirring up the bottom, or the heron roiling up the smooth surface as he steps through the shallows looking for his supper. :)
Rock and roil, Ms Dee.
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