1
you never even hear about ford anymorelock
fjord
dam (a bird just fell
lock
ford
ford
afford
afford
can't afford
can't afford to eat
little light speckled the wall
the bay
leaves in the light
logic without body
can handle this
two dollars
a day
would make it moot
moat
afloat
float
not drown

in the absurdity of starvation,
which no-one can acknowledge.

Starvation isn't hunger.
Not required.
Unrequited.
A diamond
Day
Has emerged around the nests
And sticks
To the bricks
Blinds hang
High

Somewhere there are birds
Looked to for longing
When length is a dash
then another dash, the punct

uation
of unshelter


2
A small bunny goes by in a red car
collaring any attention like a flag
then sinking in the waves

It made us laugh:
a day of invisible stars
jammed into series
by the girl whose sweaters,
flying around the room to dry,
were unemployed as she


In that uselessness
lies
turn true

or something like true
would be
were there no lies.

lies are grains cast
by tons into the sea.


3
their
boats
I
read
of
fires
dumb
flame,
name

them.



That's another improvisation, certainly in need of revision, or discarding. The point, I remind you, is to write a poem a day, and to post it in spite of embarrassment.

Today's reading: Brenda Iijima's Rabbit Lesson. It's good political poetry. Remarkable what she does, starting with the scared rabbit and the fox, wolf, bird of prey, leading from that into war scenarios and then on into strange and complex territory. The book takes animality seriously, never demoting the rabbit/predator situation to the status of metaphor for war. Each not only illuminates, but interpenetrates the other. It's about the body, with its guts, gaze, attention, response. It's not protest poetry; its compassion is in giving each thing it examines its due, trying to see clearly what it is. (This is all pretty vague--I'm in a hurry today). Iijima's use of the page is magnificent: lots of sculpted space, the density of text varied with thoughtful composition, and here and there light grey words in a much larger font floating near or behind the main text, variations on certain of its moments or beginnings of thought that would move in a different direction. It's very precise: neither the open fields of "vispo" nor the page scoring of Charles Olson or Susan Howe (where we seem to get fragments of something lost), but the movement of attention coming repeatedly into being--and an ethics of attentiveness that comes along with it.