Notes from the Valley of Ashes
"But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground."
Monday, August 08, 2016
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Paintings and Poems
Here's some recent oil paintings and poems:

SoHo

Furling

Cafe

Old World

Row Boat, Morning

Martha's Vineyard
Monument
Pink granite moment—
what we went to,
my dog, my God and me
yesterday, yes, today, too,
chasing sticks, sticking
to the road, the south,
and where it went
through Mount Saint Mary’s
so as not to desecrate
so as to stay in shade.
Graveyards have
lease laws, not
leash laws,
and besides
I carry a little body bag.
But hold it, the moment—
granite, pink,
when I saw my grandparents’ stone,
my dog and me
no longer alone
because my mother
had driven there
—my mother, the survivor,
breast and bladder,
rather not talk about that—
to check on the flowers she’d left,
to touch the last name,
to—I don’t know?—show me
the names on the slab’s other side,
hers and my father’s,
chiseled already,
just the dates
waiting.
Ovens
“I see the killer in him
and he turns on an oven,
an oven, an oven, an oven….”
—Anne Sexton
Hot boxes, wire-tiered
and dark, slow-glow
electric or four blue
cities of flames on top,
and names like Amana
and Sharp. Most of them
windowed thick, Cyclopic,
mastermind with a master
plot, and something always
a little off of ON or OFF
—the dial nudged, the hiss
of gas, a clock that forgets
to speak up. Mostly the jaw
drops with a breath of heat
to deliver the leg of lamb,
the roast of beef—all juicy
and hot. But sometimes
it does not. A crock cracks,
a casserole bleeds out,
Easy-Off poisons the house.
A cockroach cooks. Or a mouse.
There was Plath in her flat
on Primrose Hill with her poems
and her pills and her doubt.
And years before that, all over
Poland the strange smell
and the cough. God, God,
God, turn the dial to Off.
Friday, July 28, 2006
The absent blogger
Have I really been uninspired since mid-May? No. Just enjoying life too much to have time to post about it, I guess. But since I'm going to be on the Cape for a week writing and WiFi-ing, it's probably a good time to resume.
Haven't written much this summer -- two poems, only one of which is even worth posting. I plan to workshop it in Provincetown next week. Get it ship-shape. Here's the draft:
Conch
Between the rolling sheets of low-tide foam
I find it—this prize I’ve tried for
all week.
No crab claw, as first I thought, but a bone-
white tube, like paper curled,
and when I pull
it’s as though the sand pulls back. I pluck it,
a giant tooth from the mouth
of the beach,
tip it like an urn and a drab grout weeps
from the orange spout.
Now it’s a trumpet
clogged with a flat black foot, rough as fine-grit,
and gray meat which when I touch it
puckers, vaguely erotic.
I know she’ll love it, will smile when I take it
from behind my back, this living
offering.
I know I will have to kill it, too. Already
I’m imagining the clickclickclick,
the blue tongues,
the pot and the water and the silent scream
that is part of the taking
requisite to giving.
Don’t we each wrench the wild out of the other,
if only to hold up to the light
our own base origins?
When I pry out the animal it will drop in the sink
with a sloppy thud, and we’ll have
the empty shell,
the potential music. Later, we’ll soak it in a bucket
of bleach, scrub it clean for the bookcase
or the mantelpiece.
Tomorrow I’ll wade in the surf searching
for another. To make a pair.
One for each of us.
I've also been painting -- spill-over from my oil painting class at the 92nd Street Y. Very amateur, but something:




Next post from P-town.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
My new chapbook

After the Drowning, my latest poetry chapbook, is coming out this summer from Finishing Line Press, and currently accepting pre-publication orders. Support your local poet! Buy a copy!
www.finishinglinepress.com
Click on "2006 New Releases"