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Bike Porn Round II

Remember this this?

Remember this:

Can't Put it Down

This is so, so beautiful.  She made it in southwest Portugal.  Crickets and the microwave, too.

"ABSOLUTELY"

there and back

Prayer Yen

Only
when the wind rattles the tree
do seeds fall
hair tumbles, shoulders;
leaves, the road--
roll, catch, and they break like
glass underfoot.  It is fall.  I say to myself
that it is okay to wait
for what to do with the rest of today
indoors, watch bread in the oven womb
swelling and sunflower seeds pop
from the crust
I only wanted to see
if I could do it,
face it.

The streets are fairly tales only when
roving their nipping air; I
see their too many breaths
sticking against the windows that I
peer into--
their afternoons and the hot water
for tea or coffee with
animal frequency, shriveled
orange peels curling
into themselves like
frightened worms and
"the cake has been served
and did you like it?"
Trying to fit in but the key
in the door always in the door a
sore tooth turning and turning and
from in there the rain runs itself
sideways into the mouth of an
earth one would never see.
The leaves might as well be licked
down for good.

In Navajo mythology,
rain is the sun's sperm.
These days, there's no dance
for birth, regeneration, death,
until there's true fear under our feet--
the snake in the dream bites
two eagles making love in free fall
don't make it
maybe
our wind couldn't
catch them.

They used to look at the sky
and see Gods.

What do we see?

What it Takes to Build a Car

he doesn't eat breakfast and
he is losing his hair,
he bets on soccer matches during the breaks and
he became terrified of having children and death at age twelve,
he wears a t-shirt that reads "blaze kush" and
he has 14 siblings,
he wants to become chief and
he likes his beer cold,
he wakes up at 3:30 every morning to get here on time and
he laughs deep from within his big belly,
he spent four years in prison for brutalizing a police officer and
he promises her that she is the girl of his dreams on the phone,
he still lives at his parents place and
he stopped drinking but not smoking,
he walks with a bit of a limp and
he has a tongue piercing,
he lowers his head and does the work all while he is learning
to fit in.

September

they have been

naming this

season after

the man i see

picking the apples

at the crown of my

family tree; naming

it with the

quivering hand

of those who have

spent whole

afternoons of their

childhood staring

into the sun,

and now see

a small black hole

boring into

everything they

hold in their

sight (those who know

there is no going

back).  that man bites

into the crisp

apples of this my

tree and crunches

them deliberately like

rocks--- they were

made for him and him

only.  That man

wears slacks with a

tear along the

left leg from a dog

that caught him

stealing apples from

another tree.

the waters are churning. 

the waters are coiling as if

someone had just

left them so
how to enter them?  
and

because they didnt ask for
names when we

applied for this

world, how to

go about introducing oneself

to the lights falling

and fading all around,

those burning

out to a certain

stillness i see

in the black dots on

the eyes of those leaving

the water right

in front of me

Peaks

Let what I've been seeing go lucid, go day out of night.  Develop, as they say.  But it's more than just plastic and chemicals, I say.  North Sea, Ireland, Paris, farm, heide, her--- a few.  The rest are still little mysteries in a box somewhere in the new spot.

In the meantime, been reading a bit... here's how they've been talking:

East Coker V  (excerpt)

Home is where one starts. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot ~

A Rainy Morning

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

~ Ted Kooser ~

Sunset

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs -

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~