Stonewall to Standing Rock

BY Julian T. Brolaski

who by the time it arrived had made its plan heretofore stonewall   it had not a penny thats not true it had several pennies   can you make a sovereign nation a national park how condescending instead just tell them to honor the treaty   what can poetry do it cant not not do nothing it must undulate w/ the 2:30 pm dance music the sole patrons at stonewall   there was a shooting in ohio today the music made me feel a little anxious it was hard thumping dance music a notch upwards of 100 bpm notoriously the beat of life the optimum tempo for cpr I consider downloading a metronome real quick to test it to tap it out but I don’t want to be ‘anywhere near’ my phone meaning it’s in my bag on the stool 2 feet from me   there is an amy winehouse video on no sound at least I think it is amy winehouse she is at a funeral black and white there is a stuffed bird slightly obscuring my view of the tv it looks like a kind of tall pigeon w/ mottled brown and russet with a white ringlet necklace and black dots is it a carrier pigeon I wonder I sent a text to jocelyn at standing rock several texts   are you still on the road ariana and i r gonna go out there in december sending love to you tried calling bt yr mailbox is full send a sign when u can xoxo howdy.  thinking of u w love. hope all is well.  send smoke signal telegram carrier pigeon  send love to my twospirits at the winyan camp.   last night we prayed for her and for zephyr and l. frank & the twospirits especially at standing rock there’s no sign of that struggle here but they are selling tshirts      commemorating the other and the six days of riots led by transwomen of color they later tried to whitewash in that      terrible movie like it was all these hot angry upright downright forthright white gays       so ready for the revolution  and now people are treating standing rock like burning man   a drink called goslings videos by the pigeon misaligned with the music the smell of booze in the air made both of us recoil slightly I saw or felt it   I’m here to make a poem I was already paid for when I had less than $2 in my bank account (and I joked I would go right to the bar and buy every- body drinks ) not even enough for a subway ride and I used the 58 cents I’d gotten for busking for the first time alone in the long hallway between the library at bryant park and the orange line trains by the ovid quote ‘gutta cavat lapidem’ water (or a drop of water really) hollows out a stone.   lapidum a stone or rock ariana once described cd wright’s style      as ‘lapidary’ I loved this as a description of writing like the hieroglyphics are literally lapidary and I told my grandmother about it as we were driving from mescalero to albuquerque she knew all about the plants and the names for all the rockforms mesas or buttes or ziggurats and I said how do you know all these she said by long observation and I used to study geology in college I wanted to major in it but they wouldn’t allow women to major in the hard sciences then so she began to study religion tho she already had medicine   ricky martin on the beach or is it someone younger sexier the grand canyon splitting apart is it an ad is it a video even the sands at the beach are bouncing with the beat the tempo has stayed very similar this whole time a tick up I suspect from 100bpm

Meditatio

Ezra Pound

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs,

I am compelled to admit

That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man,

I confess, my friend, 

I am puzzled.

Summer Night riverside

Sara Teasdale

1884 –1933

In the wild soft summer darkness How many and many a night we two together Sat in the park and watched the Hudson Wearing her lights like golden spangles Glinting on black satin. The rail along the curving pathway Was low in a happy place to let us cross, And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom Sheltered us, While your kisses and the flowers, Falling, falling, Tangled in my hair.... The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky. And now, far off In the fragrant darkness The tree is tremulous again with bloom For June comes back. To-night what girl Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair This year’s blossoms, clinging to its coils?

Strawberrying

May Swenson

1913 –1989

My hands are murder-red. Many a plump head

drops on the heap in the basket. Or, ripe

to bursting, they might be hearts, matching

the blackbird’s wing-fleck. Gripped to a reed

he shrieks his ko-ka-ree in the next field.

He’s left his peck in some juicy cheeks, when

at first blush and mostly white, they showed

streaks of sweetness to the marauder.

We’re picking near the shore, the morning

sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves

our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel

the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there,

their squishy wounds . . . . Flesh was perfect

yesterday . . . . June was for gorging . . . .

sweet hearts young and firm before decay.

“Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,”

a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot

in the furrows. “Don’t step on any. Don’t

change rows. Don’t eat too many.” Mesmerized

by the largesse, the children squat and pull

and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half

for the baskets, half for avid mouths.

Soon, whole faces are stained.

A crop this thick begs for plunder. Ripeness

wants to be ravished, as udders of cows when hard,

the blue-veined bags distended, ache to be stripped.

Hunkered in mud between the rows, sun burning

the backs of our necks, we grope for, and rip loose

soft nippled heads. If they bleed—too soft—

let them stay. Let them rot in the heat.

When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy

leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes

once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty,

still attached to their dead stems—

families smothered as at Pompeii—I rise

and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped

head. Red-handed, I leave the field.

Summer Stars

Carl Sandburg

1878 –1967

Bend low again, night of summer stars.

So near you are, sky of summer stars, So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars, Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl, So near you are, summer stars, So near, strumming, strumming,                 

So lazy and hum-strumming.

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

1935 –2019

Who made the world? 

Who made the swan, and the black bear? 

Who made the grasshopper? 

This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The House on the Lake

Philip Metres 1970 

How a house is a self & else, a seeping intoof light deciding the day. A house so closeit breathes as the lake breathes. 

How a lakeis a shelf, an eye, a species of seeing,

burbling of tongues completing the shore.

How a loon is a probing, a genus of dreams,

encyclopedia of summer. Unsummable houseby the lake, generous hinge opening us. 

I loved,in folds of sleep, to hear the back door’s yawn& click. 

You gliding down toward shore& dawn, beyond all frames, reconciling yourself tobracing Long Lake. Into its ever-opening, you—