Cedar Sigo

 The Material Field

And here 

I thought polishing

knives alone

in the dark

was enough

a man that is a stone

holding open a thick

lined book,

        Samurais

blown back 

on their horses 

forever

the one eye

pops

a single auburn

strand is found

and the fiddles weep

as dreamers often do

drop them down 

one hundred stories

into pits of fire

for rumors of 

love-making

and printing

their own queer book

pickling 

end papers

                        

        the inscription in

Love Poems,

cursive blurred

by bloody tissue

                       

        highly sought after 

house fires 

puddled bronze

queerish, episodic

         locked in over

a rainy weekend

instances of exposure

that amounted to dreams

        I subjected dementia

To my forthright

willingness

                       

        locked hands

showing out 

to the spirit, still

on moving sidewalks

                        

         can you

get back

in?

                        

         I’ve already been

sucked back

exiled to empty halls

        where several

solid 

signs emerge

                       

        the phantom flings me

all around the ballroom

just beyond

and with longing

        we ride away

the stars pull out

                       

        I’m almost

in your

arms

 First Love

                  for Kevin Opstedal

I’ve never lived in New York

but I died there once while

visiting. Those empty river bed, organ 

                         blues (whose chords I never knew)

if the poems are dated surely

she is charting a breakthrough, “large

                         black butterflies like birds” and “the 

sun is a star” a form of trust plus

reintroduction to the act, dead heat

and playing it off, killing time

                         in Isle de Mujeres…of quickly

drawn and dispelled passage, the shadow 

of the board behind the door

                         I signed once as Miss Crane,

once as Miss Valdez, jerked awake

the Atlantic Ocean had died and 

                         folded headlong - disappeared 

Cedar Sigo 

                        8-27-16 10:38 pm PST

 “It is no longer supernatural, the gods are states of mind” – Robert Duncan

It’s been about six years since the element of poetry has bled over into every aspect of my life. 

I am periodically asked to re-describe how poetry appears, why do you think it continues to appear? has your reception to it changed? It is always fun to attempt to answer. It feels like hauling off through a field with a butterfly net seeking fleeting, tremulous bits of proof. 

For myself I can tell you that the architectures I uncover continue to be sounded out. Writing about poetics and art (the new spirit) should also be sealed in belief, not an absolute system of thinking necessarily but an attempt to offer a literal instance of the architecture fitting together, a free standing ruin that continues to glow.

I keep returning to a 1967 interview with the poet Robert Duncan in which he speaks of his unwavering courtship of poetry and the form it takes in his series, The Structure of Rime:

“I would let rhyme tell me certain things about itself, instead of the other way around. At the same time, I wanted to do an open series – one that does not have a beginning or end, but simply takes place. It refers to a very real realm that exists. I go to it. I don’t make it up.”

I try and find new ways of brooking the rush until it begins to flow. The lines in the tides brush up against one another, they pinpoint the intrigue like a soundtrack for film, releasing of trap doors, the cutting of strings, no beginning or end in a realm that exists….I can’t deny this sensation nor ever totally grasp it. The poem has its own existence.

Cedar Sigo 12-31-16     

RIP David Meltzer 1937-2016