Song of a Reformed Headhunter

GH started an Easter tradition: host brunch for a group of friends and then go for a walk in Central Park. These walks encourage intimacies. On the very first walk, which is the substance of my poem "Easter," two friends shared personal stories of an isolated childhood and a health problem. The stories became emblematic in my mind of the dying body, which will not be resurrected, unlike Jesus'. Threaded through these stories in my poem is a strong unease that came from the early days of living with GH. It's hard to join two separate lives into one. The surreal feeling of that attempt informs the strange atmosphere of the poem. I was writing differently. The epigraph - "your body an arrival / you know is false but can't outrun" - is taken from the poem " "The Geese" by Jorie Graham. In the poem she compares the goal-directed movement of migrating geese to the texture-thickening work of spiders. She concludes that we live in between th...

Easter your body an arrival you know is false but can’t outrun —Jorie Graham, “The Geese” The manufacturers have dropped the on button from their machines, or else have made the on button also the off button. Every day is full of indignities. Light wash, normal wash. Back to front. Push to turn. The beautiful spring day in the park proves the forecast wrong. It is worrying. The perambulator threads the submerged rocks. The tulips dazzle their beds. They leave tomorrow, they wave. Normal wash, heavy wash. The woman who grew up with her grandmother in Florida played alone. The other children visited with the winter, when there was no flooding. The woman with breast cancer announces that her medication has made her menopausal. She is the one who is pushing the pram and needs the bathroom. There are only ever two women. Heavy wash, light wash. You remove the dirty dishes from the broken cycles. You look up the flights to San Francisco. You check all the che...

Too tired to say much about the reading, but just want to note it on the blog. Hosted by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, at the newish Battery City Park Ferry Terminal, the event commemorated the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery of the river that now carries his name. The poems were written for the occasion, and read by the poets: Eavan Boland's "The Port of New York, 1956," John Ashbery's "In One Afternoon," Toon Tellegen's "A Poem for Henry Hudson," Jorie Graham's "No Bearing and Disproportion" (an extract), Paul Muldoon's "Lines for the Quartercentenary of the Voyage of the Halve Maen ," and John Koethe's "The Great Gatsby." Michael Schmidt introduced each poet. The ferry engine, coming by at regular intervals, competed with and accompanied the voices.