the longest day!

MIRACLES

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of
nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs
of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me
riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness
of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light
and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior
swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—
the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

Walt Whitman

MIRACLE FAIR

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it's backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer
than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle,
as everything is additional:
the unthinkable is thinkable.

Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak

oops... almost forgot

invent the sacred dance

SATURDAY NIGHT

Music is most sovereign because more than anything
else, rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost
soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with
them and imparting grace.
—Plato, The Republic

The cranes are flying ...
—Chekhov












And here it comes: around the world,
In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo, the dancers
Hit the floor running (the communal dancefloor

Here, there, at intervals, sometimes paved,
Sometimes rotted linoleum awash in beer,
Sometimes a field across which the dancers streak

Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt
In a township of corrugated metal roofs)
And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse

Strains of
premeditated art,
is now
improvisation,
The desperately new,
where to the
sine-curved
Yelps and spasms of
police sirens outside


The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates
The death and cremation of history,
Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes,

And a girl wearing a skull
That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain,
Get up and dance together, sort of, age thirteen.

Young
allegorists,
they’ll mime
motions
Of shootouts,
of tortured ones
in basements,
Of cold
insinuations
before sex

Between enemies, the jubilance of the criminal.
The girl tosses her head and dances
The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal

For a pair of stockings, a scarf, a perfume,
The boy dances stealing the truck,
Shooting his father.

The point is to become a flying viper,
A diving vulva, the great point
Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself

Into far other habitats, or seed
That travels a migrant bird’s gut
To be shit overseas.

The creatures gamble on the whirl of life
And every adolescent body hot
Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor

Is a laboratory:
maybe this
lipstick,
these boots,
These jeans,
these earrings,
maybe if I flip
My hair and
vibrate
my pelvis

Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise
That imitates history’s catastrophe
Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive,

Maybe we’ll all survive. . . .

At the intersection of poverty and plague
The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced
Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.

Alicia Ostriker

“Saturday Night” from
The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998.
Copyright © 1998 by Alicia Ostriker.
All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, upress.pitt.edu.

dances to spring: 11:11 1.11.11

purple iris

white magnolia

blue primroses

forget-me-nots

violets

these are here now...

the rest will surely follow....

chinese dancers

i have been keeping something from you. but first... it's always wonderful to be discovered by someone with a blog that makes you, well, swoon. post after post in this woman's blog, poetic oneirism, somehow make you want to use the word utterly. then, when i came across this post, with this photo, i gasped.

for what i have been keeping from you is one of my favorite artists, elyse ashe lord. sure, her images feature all of the elements of japonisme, but, almost idiosyncratically, the people she features are chinese! sort of. from what i know, she never actually went to the orient, but there is something about her somewhat fantastical versions that delight me. and thus, when i saw that photo i thought immediately of this series of lord's.

ON THE COLD FOOD FESTIVAL,
ENTERTAINING AT THE SOUTHERN ESTATE:
the Guests Were Li Chiu-ho, Ma Nan-yeh, Wei Tung-kao, Li Hu-ch'uan, Huang K'ung-ts'un, Li Lung-t'ang, and Hu Hu-shan

Singing, dancing—handsome actors entertain;
guests have been invited to the courtyard.
The singers' mats hold the setting sun;
the dancers' sleeves flap in the east wind.

Lakeside willows—this smoky mist is hard to prohibit!
Flowering peach—a fire burning red by itself!
Village women come to ride the swing;
when they're done kicking, their hair is a mess!

Li K'ai-hsien. Translated by Jonathan Chaves

ting jen's post on dancing is so full, that i needn't come up with much
on my own.

QUIET SITTING

As I get older,
I like quiet sitting:
too many worries harm your soul.
My poems are not achieved by slaving at each word;
of all the emotions, serenity is best!

The perfumed steps are covered with flowers;
in blossoming trees: frequent songs of birds.
When the feeling comes, I dance and sing,
completely forgetting my head of white hair.

Wang Chiu-ssu. Translated by Jonathan Chaves.

ah yes.

waltz, tango, quickstep, rumba, cha-cha, mambo, samba, swing

...The only change in the creative process I've seen with the dance poems comes with the luxury of writing within a framework -- each dance has a distinct feel, an embedded cadence that will suggest a certain shape or silhouette on the page.... "Fox Trot Fridays" was the first in the group; it wrote itself rather quickly.

After that felicitous birth, I imagined writing a poem about each type of ballroom dance -- waltz, tango, quickstep, rumba, cha-cha, mambo, samba, swing, even paso doble. And then, of course, I couldn't write a word, because I was trying to write about dance, not get inside the dance.

When I began to appreciate the technical intricacies of each style -- not just the pattern "quick- quick with a / heel-ball-toe" but the rise upon tiptoe that occurs between the slow count and the first quick in fox-trot, for example, or the gradual lowering from tiptoe that one executes in the second half of the third beat in the waltz -- only then did "American Smooth" [her most recent book] start to shimmer into being.

My scaffolding was to provide a humble description of the dance technique -- what each part of the body should be doing, measured out precisely, without emotion -- in the hopes of finding the poem's true desire, to achieve flight of consciousness, a lifting of the spirit as well as of the human form. 1

THE MUSICIAN TALKS
ABOUT "PROCESS"

(after Anthony 'Spoons' Plough)

I learned the spoons from
my grandfather, who was blind.

Every day he'd go into the woods
'cause that was his thing.
He met all kinds of creatures,
birds and squirrels,
and while he was feeding them
he'd play the spoons,
and after they finished
they'd stay and listen.

When I go into Philly
on a Saturday night,
I don't need nothing but
my spoons and the music.
Laid out on my knees
they look so quiet,
but when I pick them up
I can play to anything:
a dripping faucet,
a tambourine,
fish shining in a creek.

A funny thing:
When my grandfather died,
every creature sang.
And when the men went out
to get him, they kept singing.
They sung for two days,
all the birds, all the animals.
That's when I left the South.

Rita Dove

© 1999 Rita Dove from On the Bus With Rosa Parks pub Norton

also see more combs!

fly like an eagle

Music is most sovereign
because more than anything else,
rhythm and harmony find
their way to the inmost
soul and take strongest hold
upon it, bringing with
them and imparting grace.
—Plato, The Republic

The cranes are flying ...
—Chekhov

And here it comes: around the world,
In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo,
the dancers
Hit the floor running
(the communal dancefloor

Here, there, at intervals,
sometimes paved,
Sometimes rotted linoleum
awash in beer,
Sometimes a field across which
the dancers streak

Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt
In a township of corrugated metal roofs)
And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse

Strains of premeditated art,
is now improvisation,
The desperately new, where to the sine-curved
Yelps and spasms of police sirens outside

The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates
The death and cremation of history,
Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes,

And a girl wearing a skull
That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain,
Get up and dance together, sort of,
age thirteen.

Young allegorists, they’ll mime motions
Of shootouts,
of tortured ones in basements,
Of cold insinuations before sex

Between enemies,
the jubilance of the criminal.
The girl tosses her head and dances
The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal

For a pair of stockings, a scarf,
a perfume,
The boy dances stealing the truck,
Shooting his father.

The point is to become
a flying viper,
A diving vulva, the great point
Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself

Into far other habitats, or seed
That travels a migrant bird’s gut
To be shit overseas.

The creatures gamble
on the whirl of life
And every adolescent body hot
Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor

Is a laboratory: maybe this lipstick, these boots,
These jeans, these earrings, maybe if I flip
My hair and vibrate my pelvis

Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise
That imitates history’s catastrophe
Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive,

Maybe we’ll all survive. . . .

At the intersection of poverty
and plague
The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced
Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.

Alicia Ostriker

“Saturday Night” from The Little Space:
Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998.
Copyright © 1998 by Alicia Ostriker.

more cranes

still dancing!

listen to this song while viewing

JUNE IS BUSTIN' OUT ALL OVER

March went out like a lion
Awakin' up the water in the bay;
Then April cried
and stepped aside,
And along came pretty little May!
May was full of promises
But she didn't keep 'em quick enough for some
And the crowd of doubtin' thomases
Was predictin' that the summer'd never come

But it's comin' by dawn,
We can feel it come,
You can feel it in your heart
You can see it in the ground

You can see it in the trees
You can smell it in the breeze

Look around! Look around! Look around!

June is bustin' out all over
All over the meadow and the hill!
Buds're bustin' outa bushes
And the rompin' river pushes
Ev'ry little wheel that wheels beside the mill!

June is bustin' out all over
The feelin' is gettin' so intense,
That the young Virginia creepers
Have been huggin' the bejeepers
Outa all the mornin' glories on the fence!
Because it's June...

June, June, June
Just because it's June, June, June!

Fresh and alive and gay and young
June is a love song, sweetly sung

June is bustin' out all over!
The saplin's are bustin' out with sap!
Love has found my brother, Junior,
And my sister's even loonier!
And my Ma is gettin' kittenish with Pap!
June in bustin' out all over

To ladies and men
are payin' court.
Lotsa ships are kept
at anchor
Jest because the captains
hanker
Fer the comfort they kin only get in port!

Because it's June... June, June, June
Just because it's June, June, June!

June makes the bay look bright and new
Sails gleamin' bright on sunlit blue

June is bustin' out all over
The ocean is full of
Jacks and Jills,
With the little tail a-swishing'
Ev'ry lady fish is wishin'
That a male would come
And grab 'er by the gills!

June is bustin' out all over!
The sheep aren't
sleepin' anymore!
All the rams that chase ewe-sheep
All determined there'll be
new sheep
and the ewe-sheep aren't even keepin' score!

On acounta it's June! June, June, June
Just because it's June, June, June!

Rodgers & Hammerstein