Orange Moons, Purple Sparrows

Carolyn Steinhoff

BOTTLES OF MY SECRETS 
—Carlyn Steinhoff, Brooklyn, NY

My own desires

and everyone’s for me

mixed up together seem

to constitute the very world,

a trackless sea

subject to so much whipping up.

I’m so tired of heaving in it

that I’m bottling mine up

right now in pretend glass

of uniform size in every color

and shape—blue fish, brown mermaids,

yellow trees, green bathtubs,

orange moons, purple sparrows—

and arranging them

on my dresser, in space, or in my ribs.

Instead of leaving my efforts

splintered like timbers,

that hurricane of words someone said

will make no more wreckage

of second guesses tossing in me

all wrong and pointless.

My purple sparrow-shaped

Deadly Night Terrors

might temporarily dissolve,

the orange moon labeled

My Unbearable Losses,

but I will form them again,

no one can stop me. I love all of them,

but my favorites are the red one,

Forgetting All About Time,

shaped like a clock with no hands,

and the clear one labeled

Overwhelmingly Intense

Desperate Love, shaped like me.

____________________

  

THE BODY OF OUR DAY 
—Carolyn Steinhoff

…the  prehistoric Baltic Cormorant,

spanning a time period of perhaps 8000 years…

has remained constant [since] the Holocene .

—P.G.P. Ericcson & F. H. Carrasquilla

Many animals, including human beings,

are…running…an incredibly archaic neural

operating system.

–Dean Buonomano

There, while we’re force-feeding lakes,

rivers and seas to the sky until it’s so swollen

with clouds,

so out of sorts and sullen

that it pins us to an equally sullen, fed-up earth,

the body swims through the silence

that absorbs its offerings, its wants,

its press against space,

as primitive in the air of our time

as a waterbird under a river.

Words by the thousands are held in it,

like breath. The art of a life—to bear invisibility—

is a lost art. The new big thing is to be seen.

While the ear strains for meanings

only the dead remember how to convey,

while the body, trespasser at edges—

of seas, of photographs, of other people’s families—

burns to give speeches directly to someone,

is parched in water, drowned in space,

taking to wandering theme park cities

looking for a home, while the art of today

—a primordial art—is to be alive,

it’s considered most stylish to have.

Though the art of our time

is to get cut and bleed, though the body

is a lovely holder of ashes,

there in their little room,

appearing like a cormorant on the surface,

or like a drift-mine, in an instant,

out of nowhere,

between two who exist for each other:

world without end. 

_____________________

DAY OF THE GARDEN, NIGHT OF THE MOON

—Carolyn Steinhoff

With all the people dazed to find that time

is only a carpet of moonlight on waves,

I put into the wide sea of your body;

I should keep my eye on our one star,

because your smile is as close to me

as mist,

your looking at my looking at

you the most enthralling song,

our sex our element; I’m taken by this

New York we kiss in, this backdrop

for the sweet-faced moon, Irish,

showing herself to us feeling too

the sorrow

for the men, the days America

squanders,

the ghosts of failed loves saying

“Don’t you want us back”

into our ears,

our minds like birds in grass,

us standing upright under buds

light, dark pink, white

frothing faith-filled into the aching blue

in the garden on the one life-long

day of its flowering.

 

___________________

DON'T FORGET THE INFRASTRUCTURE
—Carolyn Steinhoff

One day months ago,

at the corner in front of the bank

at Church and McDonald Avenues,

a dirtpit apeared. 

Around and between corroded pipes

big enough for someone to live in,

men in orange hard-hats and neon vests

were busy working. 

A fence of orange plastic netting

stapled to plywood posts,

draped with CAUTION tape,

was all that protected them

from the public’s gaze. 

Today the fence has vanished. 

The sidewalk is as it was,

except the cement is grey and raw,

not darkened with spit,

urine, blood, vomit, bags,

leaflets or footprints. 

The new white PVC pipe sections

we saw the men installing

are gone from our minds. 

The new surface’s only opening

is one perfectly circular manhole.

Its cover lies next to it

shiny as a huge dime. 

The last hard-hatted men

stand around it, looking down into it.  

__________________

EASTERN QUAKE 5.8, 8/23/11 

—Carolyn Steinhoff

Among rocks, dirt and plants

instead of buildings, crowds and traffic,

through cold shade and hot sun,

past ferns velvet and young

spreading like hands

over a lichen patch,

left halves mirroring right

like another kind of bronchi

giving us air ours soak in,

taking air ours are sending,

we climb Vroman’s Nose

to a jutting shelf of stone

from where we see

that the whole Scoharie Valley

is given to Monsanto

corn. Green-blond rows

stretch up slopes and around

bends and barns and towns

in and out of our sight.

The last dark tall wild

trees allowed to stand

are uneven along the black

looping river, right bank

mirroring left, like a band

of fur trim on a private

lonely wet cut. I

with my privacy, boyfriend,

and you with your loneliness

are happy because we’re touching,

and don’t feel the earth shuddering.

__________________

Thanks to Carolyn Steinhoff of New York for sending us some poems. Carolyn has published poems, articles and some stories in various magazines and journals over the years, most recently in Dark Matter, And Then, and Liiliput Review. Always good to hear from people on the Other Coast! Carolyn can be found on Facebook.

We have a new Facebook album; check the Medusa's Kitchen page for Hot Poetry in the Park by Michelle Kunert. And thanks to Carl Schwartz (Caschwa) for riffing on my comments yesterday about fuchsia—did he spell it right? I've added more poets to the Sounds for Sore Ears page in our FUCHSIA LINKS at the top of the post. Such a joy to hear and see all our friends! 

________________ 

Today's LittleNip:

FUSCHIA

—Caschwa, Sacramento

I will never afford a

New hybrid Lexus

So I’ll just make the most of

My old solar plexus.

Malibu lights

Rainbows all day

Neapolitan ice cream

Fuschia hair spray

New hybrid Lexus

Malibu lights

I will never afford a

Fuschia hair spray

My old solar plexus

Rainbows all day

So I’ll just make the most of

Neapolitan ice cream

________________

—Medusa

 

 Michelle Kunert of Sacramento reads

at SPC's Hot Poetry in the Park 

Monday, July 2.

Check out her new photo album on

Medusa's Facebook page!