ELECTION YEAR

A jet of mere phantom
Is a brook, as the land around
Turns rocky and hollow.
Those airplane sounds
Are the drowning of bicyclists.
Leaping, a bridesmaid leaps.
You asked for my autobiography.
Imagine the greeny clicking sound
Of hummingbirds in a dry wood,
And there you’d have it. Other birds
Pour over the walls now.
I’d never suspected: every day,
Although the nation is done for,
I find new flowers.

  — Donald Revell (b. 1954), Director of Creative Writing at the University of Utah

NEW PORNOGRAPHERS - MYRIAD HARBOUR

I took a plane, I took a train.
Ah! Who cares? You always end up in the city.
I said to Carl: “look up for once,
See just how the sun sets in the sky.”
I said to John: “do you think the girls here
Ever wonder how they got so pretty?”
- Well, I do. -

Look out upon the Myriad Harbour
Look out upon the Myriad Harbour
Look out upon the Myriad Harbour

All the boys with their homemade microphones
Have very interesting sounds.
All the girls fall into ruin
Droppin’ out of school, breakin’ Daddies’ hearts
Just to hang around.

I walked into the local record store
And asked for an American music anthology
It sounds fun.
They tore at my skirt and stuck it on the walls at PS1.

I took a plane, I took a train.
Ah! Who cares? You always end up in the city.
Stranded at Bleecker and Broadway
And looking for something to do.
Someone somewhere asked me: “is there anything in
particular I can help you with?”
All I ever wanted help with was you.

Look out upon the Myriad Harbour
Look out upon the Myriad Harbour
Look out upon the Myriad Harbour
Look out upon the Myriad Harbour

Thursday’s early morning storm provides the inspiration for this week’s edition of Poetry Friday.

Spring Snow  

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;

it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,

we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,

but mind opens to the smell of lightning.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.

  — Arthur Sze (b. 1950)

From The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, published by Copper Canyon Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998.