The Lessing Table

I received a note this morning from a woman named Allison asking for a copy of this poem. Allison, it's in my first book Lucky Wreck. (You'd be a dear to buy it if you'd like, but just in case that's out of your price range..and because I understand the need for a specific poem at a specific time..here you go!). This one is very near to my heart. I wrote in 2001 while at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. The last tercet is in italics, but for some reason I can't make that happen here.



The Lessing Table

The dinner table was too small
and that was obvious.
We had to buy smaller forks,
smaller chairs, stop talking.

You took the saltshakers
off. I decided I’d only make
soft foods so we wouldn’t have
to use knives anymore.

It kept on shrinking for days,
the butter taking over the dinner
plates, the green beans looking
longer and mean,

until it was just a thin slip
passed between us, a note
on blue-lined binder paper
in number two pencil:

Make the train wheels lock.
Make the mobile stop.
Do something, do something.

Happy Valentine's Day & Happy 60th Birthday Momma!

Here is one of my mother's favorite poems:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

Here is on of my favorite love poems:

Drunk As Drunk
Pablo Neruda


Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

Here is one of my favorite Valentine's:

Look (or rather listen), I'm a podsnack! Thanks Gist Street.

Obsession

Some notes on AWP

O.V.E.R. S.T.I.M.U.L.A.T.E.D


and loving it......

Went to so many wonderful readings, so many great panels. Said yes to a lot of new projects. Now, it's time to be quiet and I don't know..write.

POETRY=ROCK AND ROLL.

Barrelhouse at KGB reading was awesome.

Illegal reading in the Chelsea Hotel was awesome.

Bloof, Coconut, & No Tell Motel Reading was awesome.

New word=awesome.

I got to tell you people, I'm excited with how things are going. You're all looking real good to me.