Cal Bedient
This is the Dutch door with six glass saucer windows on the upper
panel
This is the international orange Dutch door in the house by the sea
This the spectacle of waves bashing the rocks below the house
This the velocity of the spray tons of vaporized lilies
And this is the third bell of the Dutch ship in the 23rd psalm of the
sea
Correction: this is the HMS Indomitable and this is Billy Budd
sweetest of sailors on the wide sloppy water
Oh Billy fragile Billy you must be wary my friend for even in a
crow’s nest gazing at the copper sunset over the lachrymose sea
you are still among men
These are the copper pans I shine each day in the chalk white house
by the sea
I await you whoever you are on this chair made of minerals cooked
in the hottest suns before galaxies formed to flash goodbye we die
in every direction
This is my welcome my friend trusting you to mean me no harm
for no one prepares a table before me and sets out the clear glass
dishes for the wine
Can you see the rain pissing on the widow panes?
Outside is the furious blunder of creation some call hell
Here there is nothing to fear sit still be comforted all will be well
for thou art with me
My friends if I have any friends may tell you I’m snappish
I have done yoga I now breathe easy
among most quanta of the animal kind
Yes, even among folk who walk around with a sly coyote air and
tricks to entrap their prey
Well I understand them their particles too have been cooked into
meanness
But you are a dear one feeling quite at home in my creaking house
by the blowing sea
Sit by this table of skyblue glass molecules a lovely crystallization
from universal madness
Scientists theorize that the center of the Milky Way smells of rum
and raspberry they want you to feel at home that’s so sweet
I really can’t have all this fidgeting when I’m talking to you
I have never been so happy to be with anyone as I am with you in
this well defended house by the sea
You are as beckoning to me as the windows set like the six eyes of
the sand spider in my orange door
Thank you for being with me as was permitted when the world
was first sucked through the straw of forms and made to claw
and fornicate and sail by the standoffish stars and hang a boy for
being charming guileless and pretty
So it is that billions of folk can just sit and talk as you and I do here
where uninvited the world has come
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The poem’s house on a cliff over the sea is removed from a ship’s danger. To stay safe, the protagonist wants a commanding position and a captive audience. He’s no angelic, vulnerable boy in a crow’s nest looking out for the dangers presented by men and space. On the other hand, terrifyingly vast space has always already been banged out, the long lines have been stepped on by it, and for all its beauty, it has a potentially igniting effect on an embattled ego, a ship’s crew, a secretly fragile host. Which points not just to the cultural moment, but to the continual ills of history.

Cal Bedient on "The Breathing Place"
Black-and-white head-and-shoulders photograph of D. H. Lawrence
Burning Man: A New Biography of D. H. Lawrence

"Lawrence, Wilson writes, is a figure 'composed of mysteries rather than certainties': in this astonishing tale, rife with jealousy, messianism and blood, she meets Lawrence on his own terms, offering readers a mythology of his deeply wild and complex spirit."

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of Jill Osier's book, The Solace is Not the Lullaby
What Sparks Poetry:
Eric Pankey on Jill Osier’s The Solace Is Not the Lullaby

"Osier is a poet I have never met and about whom I know very little, but her poems are mysterious, rich in their clarity, uncanniness, and clairvoyance. Her work feels at once familiar and strange, and that quality has haunted me."
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