Notebook: Lullaby of Birdland
Nothing new can be said about grief
Best to converse with walls
In a low gibberish
Then up and put Erroll Garner on hi-fi
Scratchy old record
Excellent staircase
Piano cold drink
**
Automatic writing
What you do at home is who you are abroad
Summer was short
We retraced our steps
Beside sweet grass
A black river took it away
We stopped walking
Prayed for the trees still green
–Niilo Rauhala, translated from the Finnish by SK
Immanence and impermanence–my brothers. I think hard about you. Two crickets outside my window. Water falls on my wrist bone; I’ve life inside a life.
Sometimes I talk to myself.
Other times I say nothing,
Drink tea from a glass,
Move books from one table to another.
**
Poor poet, has to write, trees turning green
Leaves like yellow smoke
Nostalgia in the very eyes
Doesn’t matter, he or she poet
Wistful dizzy wants to wrap the old arms
Around a certain oak
My friend, I’ll be back…
**
I kid you not, I kid you not…
**
After reading Wallace Stevens
Its time for a palette cleanser…
**
The ardent period of life
Just now.
**
Dear mother, if I could conjure you
I’d take you fishing again
Sink the rowboat again
Sit in the shallows with you again
Laughing as perch we’d caught
Swam away….
**
A game I play picturing business men
As birds—whippoorwills, grackles,
Magpies eating everything…
**
An old shell am I, O Lady of Zephyrium…
Planet of the Blind 