Relatively Unemployed, or How To Be A Poet

9th July 2009

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"A Pit, A Broken Jaw, A Fever," by Mary Walker Graham

When I say pit, I’m thinking of a peach’s. As in James and the Giant, as in: the night has many things for a girl to imagine. The way the flesh of the peach can never be extricated, but clings— the fingers follow the juice. The tongue proceeds along the groove. Dark peach: become a night cavern— an ocean’s inside us— a balloon for traveling over. When I said galleons of strong arms without heads, I meant natives, ancient. I meant it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men; I can barely get to their elbows. How a twin bed can become an anchor. How a balloon floating up the stairwell can become a person. Across the sea of the hallway then, I floated. I hung to the flourescent fixtures in the bathroom, I saw a decapitated head on the toilet. I’ll do anything to keep from going in there. I only find the magazines under the mattress, the Vaseline in the headboard cabinet. A thought so hot you can’t touch it. A pit. A broken jaw. A fever.

8th July 2009

Text with 2 notes

"There Are Trains Which Will Not Be Missed," by Denis Johnson

They tell you if you write great poems
you will be lifted into the clouds
like a leaf which did not know

this was possible, you will never
hear of your darkness
again, it will become
holy, look,

they say, at the emptiness
of train tracks and it is poetry
growing up like flowers between
the ties,  but those

who say this
are not in control of themselves
or of anything and they must

lie to you in order
that they may at night not bear witness
to such great distances cascading and such

eternities unwinding
around them as to cause even the most powerful
of beds to become silences, it

is death which continues
over these chasms and these
distances deliberately like a train.