Haar

 


This poem began after I came across the word haar in a Tomas Tranströmer poem (I think). When I looked up this word I'd never seen, I found that it's a cold sea fog and also an object-detection algorithm relating to pixel intensities in adjacent rectangular regions. The poem brings together images that surfaced as I thought about these two different haars in connection with the rowanberries growing on the mountain ash in our back yard.

_____________________________________________________________________


Haar


Now is the time of rowanberries.
What a cascade of recog--
when I eat rowanberries raw
my lips pucker warm
and crabs ignite my dreams

after a long steep in a fogged ship.
Break the surface--big sea exhales 
the cold beginning of time.

A single berry
pixelates in the dark sky.

The constellations of every civilization
surge at once--turn together
a singular ceiling, an infinity of skulls.

Crabs have ten legs and all these nights
haunt the sky over my bed.

Myth overlaps myth
in a cross-stitch depicting
why we are here
and not there
before the time of rowanberries.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fool Parade

Image
This poem is a sort of experiment, playing with an excerpt from William Wordsworth's The Prelude , Book 12, the book that lays out spots of time, a concept that noodles deep into my brain-heart. Several lines at the beginning of stanzas place the reader in a certain aspect of time. I did something similar here, letting an aspect of time organize each stanza. And I let sound and recent events guide the word choice. I like the images that appeared, but am not certain how I feel about the poem on the whole, although I do like the end. It conjures for me an image in which I look at a photo of my grandma (who died in 2008), and she--in the photo--turns her head to look back at me--outside the photo. Were that scenario to happen, I would become everything. I miss her. ___________ Fool Parade And midnight came. Bottle rockets exploded behind our bedroom window. The bear tore through our badminton net. Chipmunks burrowed the seeds out of the pansy pot. Inside the house the hardwood creaked...
Read more

Hail the Size of Birth

Image
  ____________________________________________________ Hail the Size of Birth Also, hope there is no god, as you've been declaring since the hailstorm of 1979, because that would be an irreconcilable error in judgment, a dispurgatory twist. Without punishment for the ants you've killed, the times you've been late to pap smears, blew off an email, misremembered a name, disparaged accountants, you would never reemerge from the loch. That hailstorm was writ into history, blood to lit screen, by a bead-eyed miscreant. The people in town are still pissed about damage to cars they never owned. What kind of god damages cars? What kind of god creates chipmunks? What kind doesn't wear scrubs and a mask, carry water across the Kalahari to you from the magic fountain?
Read more

Mint Leaves Burn Wild

Image
This poem has seen many shapes. I like this shape it's in right now, although I'm still wrestling with what I mean by 'wrangling time' and what I think the relationship between time and language is. Maybe I just thought it all sounded interesting at the time, but I'd like more precision. Nevertheless, I'm leaving this poem as it is, as an anchor to think about what I mean by 'wrangling time' and, then, how to wrangle it with language . _____________________________________________________________________________________ Mint Leaves Burn Wild When a leg is breaking, when a record skips. Time expands sometimes, and sometimes shrinks. Confined to the couch with cast and Boléro, a lengthy om, a call for toast. In slow motion, a desperate request flattens into noise. Some sounds a mouth  won't do. How make my pharynx do anything ? Somebody, god, make my uvula trill and my memory spit up the gold. I want to speak the language of the soil, perturb the sinus...
Read more