FLINT for Penelope
The tears. Where would we be
without the brine of tears?
Tasted blurred vision,
pain relinquished, escaping slowly,
heart waste, basted,
tears wrung out, dry tears,
tear upon tear,
tears that will not fall
even in our sleep
from what well of hearts
run down cold window panes,
late November fog,
brain fog, lifted,
sweat on the cold
metal of the mind,
cobweb of relished dreams
glimmering in morning sun,
redemptive tears.
Prayer I Should Have Prayed Last Night
by Stuart Kestenbaum from Prayers & Run-on Sentences
When I wake I am still carrying the night with me,
the trembling wind we are awash in, and the wind
outside howls or does what the wind does, which is
not howl but knit trees and leaves together with clouds
and lash the sun together with the moon. I am only
imagining this because I haven’t studied my science today
and so can’t tell the truth of things, I can only tell
what I am making up at this moment when the darkness
departs like a wave receding, and the sea is absorbed
in the dense sand, which lightens as the water travels away,
the same way I lay awake in my bed last night, fear
washing over me and seeping into the mattress,
my vessel, my washed-up raft.
Since first posting this poem a bright moment occurred:
Stuart Kestenbaum’s new book Only Now had a poem Prayer for Joy, appear on American Life in Poetry, and therefore also on the Poetry Foundation — Also, find the poem Prayer for the Dead, that appeared in 2007 from Prayers & Run-on Sentences
Thanks to Ted Kooser
This morning’s favorite poem from Prayers & Run-on Sentences, (published in 2007 by Deerbrook Editions, with a number of poems read on The Writer’s Almanac, and is still popular) struck me for the sense of angst but more a reminder of a humanity-even condition faced over space and time, day, night, morning, how one sense of these is flipped over across the globe, this morning is that evening when prayers are not made for an answer but for the connection we cannot find in our fear, in our solitude and longing, to not have missed or be blotted out, to continue in the great moment.
The hopeful have it, not to be compared or limited, marginalized but joined in some silent underground that reasons away violence as a way out when truth and compassion succeed, which means us folk have chosen a spirit of light, forgiveness . . . right you say, like in your dreams, you say, if ever a dream would remove the barrier from your eye, your heart, that man might undo the violence, tooth for tooth, you say, it’s just the way it is, my friend.
On 9/11, one mad said, “How inhuman,” and his friend said, “all too human my friend, all too human.”
Another day left on keeps blinking on the brain while the Goodman riff chimes. The water is cool, the fragrance of the South East breeze down the pipes, the bottle gurgles, lips wet. If and when he’s gone, will anyone wonder, take time to look, interested in words here or anywhere, or then just pack it up and stow it? No cloud, no blog post, no auditorium of souls remembering, just an obit, the eventual shoe print in gravel rain will soak away, unrecognizable. Would the cul-de-sac recall his morning shadow as he strolls one last time, cup in hand, for the wood shed half empty, half full.
The Solomon Seal buzzed in the grey light, a bee bumbling for pollen. Maybe that is all we are, or less, like bees bumbling for purposes we imagine, even less a forager than once when digits were eager to meet berries and the Cecropia caterpillar was found.
Remember what you’d miss, were it whisked away one afternoon in the lucky time sunshine, and the anamnesis of childhood plays your sepia tone twilight. Those smoke bush leaves glow in the parting sun as a kaleidoscope through limbs and leaves descending, turning those red leaves to bright amber then back to shadow, evidence of the turning world. Breath the end of May’s evening air traded with the grateful green.
His thoughts had been cynical. He told himself he was becoming misanthropic in his sense of pointlessness but his heart lifted when he saw the bunting and the cardinal. People could be such asses and he had to be crazy, too, but then, unable to tell anyone the difficulty, at least he had not expressed his frustration with Laurie. He felt that might be nobler, delay confrontation, if the disappointment didn’t take hold, especially if he didn’t know if it was he or she. There is always equal blame to go around.
My father fell from the bed. With a loud, but cushioned thud against the carpet, that seemed to make all the walls of the room pulsate, he fell onto the floor, now hacking, and gasping.
My mother slid across and jumped off the bed, and with her feet on the floor now, too, grabbed and tried to lift my father’s arms up with her own, attempting to help bolster his entire body up.
‘Duo-duo, come help!’ she yelled.
I had propped myself up on the bed on my left elbow, staring at them. I froze for a second. Just then, my head seemed completely empty of all thought and emotion. I was certain, I am certain, that for a second, or even for just a split-second of a second, it was as if someone, outside the window of our hotel room, had pointed a remote control directly at our room, at my father, my mother, and me, at the beds, still quavering from our movements, at the sheets dangling off the corner of the beds, at the palpitating walls, at the dust whirling through the ray of light of the lamp, and hit pause . . .
by HC Hsu from Middle of the Night
Celebrate literature and independent presses. This blog is new and a work in progress. Be patient as we learn the widgets etc. This post is a follow-up to recent likes and follows, and to put up front what is more or less on the ABOUT page.
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It finally rained a little yesterday. It’s strange, I never seem to see the rain. It becomes something else. I usually see only wet sidewalks, streets, the moistened-over gravel, only a dab of a shade darker than when it is dry, it seems like. A cloudy gray puddle fills up a pothole. The sky is the same color of gray. My sand tinted car is parked outside, in my driveway, ensconced under tiny, sparkling droplets of dew, and when I open the driver’s side door and try to get in, my right leg always steps in the grass in the lawn next to the concrete driveway, the cold, rough, wet blades of the sea green St Augustine grass pawing at my calf. Then I know it had rained. From these traces, signs, keepsakes of the storm.
In Central Texas, it seems the rain falls only in the middle of the night. My curtains are drawn over my window by the bed, and I would often be woken up during the night by the rain, in fits, one wave after another, splashing against the laminated glass, like the click-clacking of beads on an abacus. Erratic, and abstract. Just sound, no picture. In the morning, I would have forgotten all of this. It’s not until I go out of the house, and see the scattered odds and ends the storm left behind all about my house, that I’ll fit together these two pieces of phenomena.
I watched Blade Runner for the first time late last night. One of the androids said as he was dying: ‘All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears, in the rain.’ Los Angeles in 2019 seems to be eternally drenched in rain. Torrential rain, unrelenting—real window washers, sheets and sheets and sheets. I couldn’t help wondering what their budget for water was. As it was raining outside, it was also raining on television.
by HC Hsu
from Middle of the Night, a book in the works to appear from Deerbrook Editions sometime in 2015
also author of Love is Sweeter, http://lethepressbooks.com/
You get on.
You don’t see me.
You take the seat two rows in front of me.
I see your backside, the back of your head, your dark brown, somewhat frizzed and wavy hair. For some reason, I don’t tap you on the back, or your shoulder (I see you turn around—surprised, smiling, your eyes sparkling, an underwater cavernous limestone blue—‘Hey, when did you get on?’ you ask, and try to stand up as you jolt forward, your body leaving your seat, as you find a way to balance yourself and move toward me)—but I stay still, and we remain where we are.
I watch you. I don’t see your face. It’s a strange feeling, as if I were no longer me, or were somewhere else completely, or I had simply disappeared, evaporated, from here and now. It occurs to me I had never up until then, seen you. In your completeness.
In your solitude.
I wonder what you are like without me.
Yourself plus the world minus me.
by HC Hsu
from Middle of the Night, a book in the works to appear from Deerbrook Editions sometime in 2015
also author of Love is Sweeter, http://lethepressbooks.com/
He also has a translation of Chinese dissident and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo’s official biography coming out in 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield.
Ducky
Borrowed time. Lucky, in other
words, beaten the odds, gotten
an extension on any manner of
conditions. Artificial time.
We pay the ultimate percentage
for borrowed time but there is
no better imitation.
As with many clichés, the meaning
has been eroded, we don’t think
of meaning with such sound bites
as they exist to avoid actual
complexity, emotion; like a password
for agreement on cynicism, on
unmentionable death or some
life changing financial outcome,
about to take us off grid.
The life of the persimmon could be literary. Persimmons are the edible fruit of a number of species of trees in the genus Diospyros. The word Diospyros comes from the ancient Greek words “Dios” (διός) and “pyros” (πυρος). In context, this means more or less “divine fruit”, though its literal meaning is closer to “Wheat of Zeus”.[2][3] It is, however, sufficiently confusing to have given rise to some curious interpretations, such as “God’s pear” and “Jove’s fire”. The Modern Greek name for the fruit is λωτός (lotos) which leads modern Greeks to the assumption that this is the lotus referred to in Homer‘sOdyssey.
Persimmons ripen over time.
This blog was set up to carry literature, selected poetry and prose, from submissions to Deerbrook Editions, (http://www.deerbrookeditions.com and https://deerbrookeditions.wordpress.com) an independent literary press publishing deserving authors in well designed trade books. Author’s work will be selected and permitted by the author or in the case of a selection having been published, posting would give whatever promotion and credit to the published work as such a blog might offer. WordPress.com blogs seem to offer somewhat greater exposure through the use of tags.
persimmon 