flahute

An interim post just so that there is something between my last Quote of the Day, and my next Poetry Friday … there’s been a lot going on in my head lately that I’m still trying to wrap my brain around so I can put it in words. Should be able to write more this weekend.

WORDS AND THE DIMINUTION OF ALL THINGS

The brief secrets are still here,
                             and the light has come back.
The word remember touches my hand,
But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel
Against the occluded sky.
All of the little names sink down,
                             weighted with what is invisible,
But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair.

All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us
                                   out of the
       Blue Ridge.
All afternoon the leaves have scuttled
Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws.
And now the evening is over us,
Small slices of silence
                   running under a dark rain,
Wrapped in a larger.

  — Charles Wright (b. 1935), American poet.

Anyone who knows me well knows not only that I have a fascination with words, but also love to debate … I can argue semantics for hours, much to the dismay of people around me at times.

I’m pretty sure that’s why a friend of mine gave me a book this past summer; because I was driving her crazy with my insistence on using the right words … but I wonder if she knows how much I’m actually enjoying reading it?

Sol Steinmetz’s Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, published by Random House, “shines a light on the often complex evolution of the meaning of words” according to Jesse Sheidlower, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

For example:

AWKWARD

Before 1400 there was a word in English, awk, meaning “the wrong way, backhanded,” that was of Scandinavian origin, probably old Norse afug. Though the word had fallen out of use in English by the 1600s, it survived as part of the compound word awkward, meaning “turned in the wrong direction, upside down,” literally, “toward the wrong way.” From the idea of doing things the wrong way, a new meaning, “ungraceful, uncouth,” developed, as in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1616), where Ulysses says: “And with ridiculous and awkward action … He pageants us.” From this sense came the current meaning, “lacking dexterity, clumsy, bumbling,” applied to persons and things, as in an awkward gesture, an awkward situation. “I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people.” (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels)

Of course, when I whip out this newfound knowledge, people look at me like I’m crazy … which leaves me feeling, well, awkward.

Oh well, what’s a guy to do?

SAGE FRANCIS – GOT UP THIS MORNING

It’s not that what we’re doing is wrong
But let’s try to keep this a secret
Between me, you, and the song
A menage a trois that sings to me
Sinfully
When god plays along

     What you want with a woman who won’t do what you say?

I was sweet on her
She was sweet on Jesus
We slept with a blanket barrier between us
Master of her craft, I had her laughin’ like hyenas
When I asked her if she’d marry an elitist
Staggering genius in lace
With the grace of a drunken monk
The mask isn’t seamless cause her face says something’s up
But I don’t dare ask her I just listen
Switchin’ to my good ear and adjusting my position
As she discusses Ginsberg I listened and learned
As she dispersed his words I just resisted the urge to do like he would
Whatever he wanted, if she allowed me to
She dangled that carrot then asked me:
“What would Bukowski do?”
Oh don’t go there
He’d make you his mom and then completely lie about it in a book later on

     Got up this morning
     Didn’t know right from wrong

Spirits were lifted when she whispered something French in my ear
Tension was there
When I responded in English it sounded less sincere
The sex in the air couldn’t be left alone
So welcome to the Terrordome
A bedroom full of pheromones
Where nothing that we say is set in stone
If I thought it was for posterity I’d already be writing better poems
But I’m talking in extremes
Best this and best that
Best not regret anything that ever gets said to this hell cat
Creepin on all fours
Ready for combat
With secretive wars sneaking her claws in our contract
Bending every which way but loose with no proof that anything that we’ve suggested to this day is the whole truth

     Got up this morning
     Didn’t know right from wrong

I heard her chemical romance was a medical slow dance
Said my advance was sexual
Held my genitals with cold hands
Set up the Coke cans
Broke out the Red Ryder
Then one by one I tried to knock down everything that’s dead inside her
She used to treat street dividers like a balance beam
Arms spread wider than the legs in her dad’s magazine
Re-enacting the pages that she got trapped between
I used it for kindling and then spilled the gasoline
Now I’m your water boy
I fetch it from your cheeks just like tennis balls
Smell the stench of your weakness on the bedroom walls
Somebody careless let em vaporize
“Who let these fall to the floor from your poor vacant eyes?”
Disintegrate
This ain’t a great first impression
But I work better on pages, they say words are my profession
Let me spell it out in simple language
Plain English
I want your suicide to be a book of mine that I never finish

     Got up this morning
     Didn’t know right from wrong

     What you want with a woman who won’t do what you say?

Joe Parkin, over at 6 Years in a Rain Cape has a nice little essay contest going on right now. The winner’s prize is a Cervelo Test Team kit (bibshorts, jersey, gloves) in either black or white (depending on size and inventory availability). Suggested length is 500-1000 words, but Joe says he isn’t really counting.

Here’s my entry, but not even close to 500 words. If it can’t be told in haiku and yet still capture the essence of the race, then it’s not worth telling. That’s not really true, but it let’s me feel superior for a few seconds. And since it is Poetry Friday, what’s another little bit of verse gonna hurt?

I call it “Roubaix Memories”

Andrei Tchmil solo
   Muddy Roubaix, ninety-four,
      Bunny hopping curbs.

If that isn’t the essence of a true Flahute, then I don’t know what is …

TO MYSELF

Even when I forget you
I go on looking for you
I believe I would know you
I keep remembering you
sometimes long ago but then
other times I am sure you
were here a moment before
and the air is still alive
around where you were and I
think then I can recognize
you who are always the same
who pretend to be time but
you are not time and who speak
in the words but you are not
what they say you who are not
lost when I do not find you.

TO THE HAPPY FEW

Do you know who you are

O you forever listed
under some other heading
when you are listed at all

you whose addresses
when you have them
are never sold except
for another reason
something else that is
supposed to identify you

who carry no card
stating that you are —
what would it say you were
to someone turning it over
looking perhaps for
a date or for
anything to go buy

you with no secret handshake
no proof of membership
o way to prove such a thing
even to yourselves

you without a word
of explanation
and only yourselves
as evidence.

  — W.S. Merwin (b. 1927), American poet and translator.

JUNE

Wind at the ear says June
June a blacklist I slipped
in time

note this way to say goodbye
the sighs within these words

note these annotations:
unending plastic flowers
on the dead left bank
the cement square extending
from writing to

now
I run from writing
as dawn is hammered out
a flag covers the sea

and loudspeakers loyal to the sea’s
deep bass say June

  — Bei Dao (b. 1949), Chinese poet, exiled since the Tiananmen Square massacres