Last post loves Johnstown the most

[lexiconic]

The Strength of Fields

... a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power and a life-enhancing return ...
Van Gennep: Rites de Passage


Moth-force a small town always has,

          Given the night.

                                           What field-forms can be,
         Outlying the small civic light-decisions over
               A man walking near home?
                                                         Men are not where he is
      Exactly now, but they are around him    around him like the strength

Of fields.    The solar system floats on
    Above him in town-moths.
                                             Tell me, train-sound,
    With all your long-lost grief,
                                             what I can give.
    Dear Lord of all the fields
                                             what am I going to do?
                                        Street-lights, blue-force and frail
As the homes of men, tell me how to do it    how
    To withdraw    how to penetrate and find the source
      Of the power you always had
                                             light as a moth, and rising
       With the level and moonlit expansion
    Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.

       You?    I?    What difference is there?    We can all be saved

       By a secret blooming. Now as I walk
The night    and you walk with me    we know simplicity
   Is close to the source that sleeping men
       Search for in their home-deep beds.
       We know that the sun is away    we know that the sun can be conquered
   By moths, in blue home-town air.
          The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under
The pastures.    They look on and help.    Tell me, freight-train,
                            When there is no one else
   To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea
         Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,
          Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar
               Like the profound, unstoppable craving
            Of nations for their wish.
                                                      Hunger, time and the moon:

         The moon lying on the brain
                                                    as on the excited sea    as on
          The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake
         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring
         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.
            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord
Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:
         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
             Than save every sleeping one
             And night-walking one

         Of us.
                   My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.


- James L. Dickey

[Wiener]

On top of spaghetti
all covered in cheese

[CadillacMatt]

I found my poor meatball
with some peppers please

[lexiconic]

From the notebooks of Anne Verveine

   VII

   Distance was the house in which I welcomed you.
   But it was in the river
   that we became cadence, there where the current braided

   together again, after the stone bridge stanchion parted the
   stream.
   It was to last only as long as the beauty lasted.
   Do you believe in the soul?

   Words torn from the void, wet and mewling.
   Where we walked on the mountain, water
   poured around us, surged up from springs, seethed

   down in rivulets, rocky streams, and one long blinding
   cascade:
   your kisses were an eau-de-vie and as bitter.
   I am poured out like water.

   Distance is feminine in French.
   I held a knife to a man's throat and let him bleed quietly
   into a cup.
   What does "us" mean?

   Coiled serpentine headdress of Leonardo's woman:
   you wanted her. I wanted you.
   Chill sunlight flexing itself on the city river

   gave me the emptiness I needed
   to write these instructions: Sorrow
   is a liqueur. Drink deep. We will all be consumed.

- Rosanna Warren

[lexiconic]

Balance


He couldn’t help himself;
there was too much laughter in the garden,
too much lightness. And didn’t everything
need a contrary, a counterweight?
He’d come up with gravity so the birds
couldn’t return to heaven, created
hairless skin so the feathered and soft-furred
wouldn’t feel envy for the man he made.
Sorrow, God said, sorrow.
He started small, a sparrow with a broken beak,
flapping at the woman’s feet. Not knowing
this was something new,
she sat beside it, waited for it to rise and sing.
A mole came next. Then from the lion
a coughing that wouldn’t stop. He thought
he’d gone too far with the dog and pulled back
a little, concentrated on one more way to make a beetle.
Finally Adam blamed her for all that happened next
and turned from her touch in their nest of yellow grasses.
God knew if he weighed their hearts at rest, they’d be
heavier than before. Sorrow, he said, thinking.
The lily pond grew fetid, the air smelled of rotting fur.
For a year Adam wouldn’t say her name.


- Lorna Crozier

[RobinQuillonsHair]

 

[WDVE]

  "You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the
wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working
for, another person must work for without receiving. The government
cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take
from somebody else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do
not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them,
and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work
because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear
friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply
wealth by dividing it."*

Adrian Rogers, 1931

[lexiconic]

A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son


I have this son who assembled inside me
during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,
in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.
Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.
Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.
Sixteen years and not a bone broken,
nor single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small.
He’s a slouching six-foot three,
with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
with profound belligerence.
A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go brr,
or an Afro'd boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell--
creatures strange to me as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel
arcane as any oracle’s. Rodney claims school
is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman
willing to do stuff she’ll regret.
They’ve come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral.
Someday soon, the tether
will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed
the car fender then rode home
in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

and Dad screw up so much?
He’d let me tuck him in,
my grandmother’s wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t
blame us, I said. You’re your own
idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy
took it hard. He’d found my son
awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he’d draped his own coat
over her shaking shoulders. My fault,
he’d confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.


- Mary Karr

[RobinQuillonsHair]

    

[oldster]

 

[WDVE]

The Rest Of The Story...

I lost my poor meatball,
When somebody sneezed.

It rolled off the table,
And on to the floor,
And then my poor meatball,
Rolled out of the door.

It rolled in the garden,
And under a bush,
And then my poor meatball,
Was nothing but mush.

The mush was as tasty
As tasty could be,
And then the next summer,
It grew into a tree.

The tree was all covered,
All covered with moss,
And on it grew meatballs,
And tomato sauce.

So if you eat spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
Hold on to your meatball,
Whenever you sneeze.

[lexiconic]

For a Man Who Wrote CUÑT on a Motel Bathroom Mirror

You thought she was asleep. You were afraid
To hear what she'd call you
If you said it out loud as a parting shot at the door,
So you took the sneaky way out
And used her own lipstick against her, against the mirror
Where you felt certain she'd look no later than dawn,
But would find, instead of herself
In there again behind the glass, your blunt reflection,
Your last word on the subject.

But I'm here to tell you she was wide-awake.
Behind her eyelids she followed every move
Of yours, the jingle of small change
When you finally found your pants, the smallest squeak
Of your run-down heels in the bathroom,
The soft click of the latch.

She let out the breath she'd been holding and keeping
To herself, took a quick shower, considered
The small end of your vocabulary,
And taxied home. She didn't bother
Erasing your word, but passed it on
As a kind of tip to the maid, who wouldn't clean up
After you either, but left it to the imagination
Of another transient facing a cold morning,
Thinking of you and passing the word along.


- David Wagonner

[RobinQuillonsHair]

        

[JessikaLynne]

 

[RobinQuillonsHair]

Do you have something in your eye//