beside our daily lives concrete rituals enrapture love desires like so many Lego bricks erected we finish building our growing collection of voodoo figurines hapless hopeless held up by an ignorant God without jokers in the tarot deck kept semi-comatose in the lock up behind the mini-mart nobody can say who opened the gates or who pinned back yesterday’s quandary right now today surrender to the surgeon who will take us under the ruinous river to verify our wraith full Xanadu our ghosts who yearn to be eaten while the zoetrope flickers
(From Loose Change - Ghost City Press, 2023) Published on The Laundry Line, Tuesday Jan. 28, 2025
I carry a lifetime’s worth of nights in my throat. But only one at a time will fit into the coin pocket of my jeans. The crows keep stealing my dreams. They pawn the grubby rags for a couple of cents a pound. When the burrowing owls pull down the moon and fling it at my heart, they intend to maim but miss and spill marmalade moon shine on the floor. I cannot stop to wait for you to breathe. I cannot stop pointing out the disappearing stars.
My worship of you ends in dismay as my wound becomes a dispatch full of sweet licorice lies.
Adultery becomes advantage. Motels morph into mother-cells. My cheap dress becomes an even cheaper dressing gown. My shoes with their stiletto heels, now walk on stilts, unable to carry our heft. A fetish for pain is transformed; remakes itself into fetters for the painted lady’s transistor.
Was your mastery of me, a mastodon’s bondage to bone?
Did lust overcome fear as a lute overcomes feathers? Or is memory just a whisper, a mendacity, a whistling swan?
I want to kiss the moon
sometimes
the way I used to want a smoke
to have its light fill my throat
and steady my
thudding heart
I want to feel the moon’s
cold breath
in my ear
as it whispers all my secrets back to me
and to hear the stars mutter
their threats
and sing of terror
and nightmares
those horses of my dreams
running blind in the desert
I want the dry kiss of the moon
on the back of my neck
as it calls the predators in from the woods
wolves who raise the dead from the earth
and set them to following me
I want to kiss the moon
the way the moon kisses the sun
to cover it with my darkness
until only a halo shows
a gold glow through
the smoke-hazed clouds
I want to kiss the moon,
will the moon kiss me back?
Originally published on The Laundry Line. Subscribe to get more poetry weekly.
“ I love the notion of performed spontaneity, in that it gets at the fact that what seems natural, or improvisational, is still a product of decision making, and still leads to a consciously made thing—a mechanical nightingale rather than the real bird that happens to fly in the window.”
Diane Seuss interview with Jesse Nathan in McSweeney’s https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/diane-seuss
1) The mechanical bird performs. Poets perform—mostly on the page. But there is something about hearing the music of the poem out loud that will always bring me more than the written word on the page.
2) Only the unpaired male nightingale sings at night. Though so often in poetry it is the female bird who is invoked. A misattribution that confounds the usual (mis)assignment of female voices to their male counterparts.
3) Have you ever seen a real nightingale? It is a dull brown, middle sized bird whose only outstanding asset is its song. When the males sing at night, it’s a macho thing: calling all the girls. “Come fuck me, come fuck me.” In the fairy tale when the servant girl takes the court to see the actual nightingale they are disappointed to see the dull little bird. One of the servants opines that surely seeing all of the wonderful, powerful people of the court must have frightened all the color out of the actual bird. Because, don’t we all get frightened out of our colors sometimes?
4) I sing my wildness like that little mechanical nightingale. It is lovely performance. But every moment of it is calculated with an eye towards safety. A mechanical nightingale will give a perfect performance. As long as you don’t ask it to fly.
5) machine (n.) “an apparatus that works without the strength or skill of the workman.” Which can’t be said of poetry? Or can it? Is poetry a machine? If it is, what is it a machine for? Does a machine have to have a purpose? Are machines without purpose art? What does this machine do for me? This machine makes… meaning? But does it make sense? How can the machine of poem makes sense? What does it make sense of? Why is this fragment all questions? And no answers? Or meaning? If there is any meaning? I guess.
6) A machine allows you to replicate a thing. A screw, a table leg, a bird’s song. But a replication is never a new thing. Not entirely.
7) Bird songs are hard to represent in text. Various field guides use various methods to depict the songs. Some use descriptives, some use mnemonics, some use a vaguely representative spectrograms. The Sibley Guides use descriptive words like: trill, buzz, upslur, downslur, musical, rich, thin, full, and squeaky. The Audubon website likes onomatopoeia: “soft thwacks,” “cooing,” “zip-zabbling,” and “channeling car alarms and baby babbles” and mnemonics: “who cooks for you” and “wichity-witchy-woo.” Though they are increasingly just putting up audio files and you can listen for yourself with out the intermediary of the attempt to signify in text.
8) I wonder about the impossibility of spontaneity in a machine. Does this imply an impossibility of spontaneity in poetry? In art in general? If we are making machines to make meaning, or convey emotion, or state facts even, can we be spontaneous? I don’t think so. We may use artifice to make it look spontaneous but it is never past the first draft spontaneous. Is even a first draft spontaneous? We are, from the outset, arranging the words and their meanings in conscious patterns, even at our most free form. We are mechanics. Our tools are syntax and arrangement, our materials are words. We build a machine with hope. Though what we hope for is not always clear.
9) The last fragment that I meant to write was about the wonders of the mechanical, the lack of a soul in the wonderful mechanical, and how easy this makes it to see the whole of the works. I’d only imply the converse: how difficult it is to understand the living (souled) when so much is hidden from us. But I was too busy wondering about the possibility of a mechanical bird that sings as well as the real thing. ————
End Note: Hans Christian Andersen wrote a fairy tale called The Nightingale (In Danish the less lovely sounding “Nattergalen”) About an emperor and the song of the nightingale… about a real bird and a mechanical bird.
The Emperor of China learns that one of the most beautiful things in his empire is the song of the nightingale. When he orders the nightingale brought to him, a kitchen maid (the only one at court who knows of its whereabouts) leads the court to a nearby forest, where the nightingale agrees to appear at court; it remains as the Emperor’s favorite. When the Emperor is given a bejeweled mechanical bird he loses interest in the real nightingale, who returns to the forest. The mechanical bird eventually breaks down; and the Emperor is taken deathly ill a few years later. The real nightingale learns of the Emperor’s condition and returns to the palace; whereupon Death is so moved by the nightingale’s song that he allows the Emperor to live.
You can read the whole of the story with lovely pictures by Edmund Dulac here.