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.

The Incremental Violence of a Passing Hour 

Singing in circles 
with no building 
and no falling.
The hill doesn’t stay so for long, really.
As the generations pass, pieces crumbling 
taken by wind and stream. 
Little flourishes of melody 
playing out ‘cross the land,
travel to big river and then reach the sea.

Tales of woe and disbelief.
Tales of love and sun snatching.
All are washed away as the waves come to beach.
The salt makes all clear.

And that Spring,
starry voids ring out before my eyes 
cause one day my chest rings out for the last time,
ice cracking.
And one days these bones will bleed,
glacial stream.

And the stream starts in the Spring melt.
And the stream starts, watering the hairy meadow which hugs my form.
A spring of being excused by the simple things.
A spring of always return always desire always need
Always wash away always wipe clean.
None attach but everything 
little keyrings of the time I been adorning 
every step a vacation on unknown beach.
No need to feel diseased.
Can’t stop the tide from coming in.

Venus Flytrap Search for the Missing Puzzle 

On their state-issued iPhone’s,
counterfeiting the work of God.

As when a treatise on corpses 
washes out of a cemetery 
and interrupts the section 
I’m reading on soils.

The passage read –
I came upon a dark vault 
within the depths of the earth, 
filled with blowing winds.
The bureaucracy was still there,
you could hear it whisper thin.

They told me that the technique 
for restoring a spring which is running dry 
is to have a beautiful woman 
play music and sing near the spring.

They told me that the drought ended when a farmer
woke up on a moonlit night and started singing,
accompanying himself on the lute.

I tried both, but 
still the land stays dry.

They told me that broad beans are capable of curing “agonizing love,” 
while ten bucks of ground saffron mixed with wine 
will cause anyone who drinks it to laugh until they die.

And so I drink,
chronicling my decay,
like the opposite of height marks on the door frame.