Clean Like My Bones

Golden Madonna waits by the links in the shade.
Tea time was at 3pm, and dusk is falling late.
And golden Madonna stands there still 
and waiting.
How long has she had to wait?
How many hours of yearning will fill the vase?
The viscous liquid laps at my lips. 
I drink it all but it always fills again.

The wind tore at me
when she looked at me. 
That seeping desire
to be always at the height of my powers.
Like a snake always devours.
And time and time again,
what else am I only left 
but the blood on my lips.

But her –
she was immune to snake venom,
going up and down the driveway 
counting the anthills and plotting 
their wars, romance, and infamies.
And in the ant pews, the clergy
looked up praying to a tawny Madonna. 

Distance by Ken Friedman

The distance from the sentence to your eye is
my sculpture.

Much of What Happens to Us in Life is Nameless Because Our Vocabulary is Too Poor
edited from John Berger’s “Some Notes on Song”


I cup the air with both my hands and close my eyes.
And this gesture announces that the muzzle of the song
is nestling in the palm of my hand.
Putting its arms around me in historical time,
like I have not been held before.
When the song smiled, which it often did,
it was the smile that comes after the tragic has been assimilated.
Hopelessness leads to wordlessness.
It’s difficult today to express or sum up in prose
the experience of Being Alive and Becoming.
The living flesh is needed to interpret and
raise its contours above the precise present,
and then…

like a river the song –
following its own course,
yet always flowing to the sea, from which everything came.
The fact that in many languages the place where
a river enters the sea
is called the river’s mouth emphasizes the comparison.
The waters that flow out of a river’s mouth
have come from an immense elsewhere.
And something similar happens with
what comes out of the mouth of a song.
And something whole out of the empty…

All I know is that these arms wrap around nothing.
Only empty space interlaced by the circle my arms make.
In other words, songs are sung to an absence.
Absence is what inspired them, and it’s what they address.
In the sharing of the song the absence is also shared –
Listen and become possessed, inhabited,
by a force or compulsion coming from outside.
A ghost from an elsewhere past.
The memory of the singing.
I cling to song and make it my own.
I put my arms around linear time without being utopian
and sing

On Twilight by Mary Ruefle

I read the poem of a student and in the poem God
wandered through the room picking up random
objects – a pear, a vase, a shoe – and in bewilderment
said, “I made this?”. Apparently God had forgotten
making anything at all. I awarded this poem a prize,
because I was a judge of such matters. I was not really
awarding the student, I was awarding God;
I knew someday the student would pick up his old
poem and say in bewilderment, “I made this?”, and at
that moment his whole world would be lost in the
twilight, and when you are finally lost in the twilight,
you cannot judge anything.