Andrés Cerpa

dear Colin

we do so much to hurt ourselves

when we left the Blue & Gold with the simple turn

of your back & mine away from each other

the city took over

I could not hear your voice & soon its body

a succession of so many lives we do not see

birds at midnight two rivers

chaos blurred & seamed

this dilated language somehow got connected to all that we do

but truly what do I know about my own life

& why now

more light

more fucking light

remember

how since Homer

since fire

everything old in everything flocks to another sunlit tree

it only recently became spring & already the shattered glass that lines this by-the-water road

where only teenagers & addicts & fishermen drink

has disappeared

it's a damn good place to die

Carl did

where the thigh-high weeds gut fish in the wind

& laughter rises like blood through the texture of a sock

the trail is sun-dyed overgrown & old

it is the rot we attempt to dispel

strengthened by oil

& the black sand of a thousand chemistry sets

but everything comes back

alive & in the process of mystery

another heron drives below the water to eat
from the book THE VAULT / Alice James Books
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These fragments are walking from the depths of my labyrinth, the city, to the shore. From the Blue & Gold Tavern on E 7th to the docks near Snug Harbor. 
 
Paul Muldoon Unlocking Paul McCartney's Musical Genius

"That Sir Paul McCartney turns out to be such a brilliant mimic shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Like almost all great writers, he'd apprenticed himself to the masters of the trade: Dickens, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll. All apprenticeships are characterised by caricature and impersonation."

via THE GUARDIAN
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What Sparks Poetry:
Alyse Knorr On John Keats' "Bright Star"


"I loved picturing the star in the poem watching the waves clean the shores and the snow graze the mountaintops. I loved how the first half of the poem painted a picture by negation, like a puzzle, and how it wrenched me from the cold, lonely reaches of outer space down to the grounded, intimate moment of laying one's head on a lover's breast and hearing the quiet of her breathing: all made equally sacred in the poem's grand equation."
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