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