I wish it would rain
every morning
while we have coffee.
There the dog waits
in cool shadow, there
the fountains rise and fall.
Heavy gray drops
the size of grapes.
Pray for blue skies
each afternoon
with the birds singing,
eating seeds as the rain
moves away. And a following
wind on the sea.
J. Kyle Kimberlin
September 17, 2014
It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
a new poem
Nothing and More
Now I see, we are flesh and reason,
bone and fear.
I see that we are wind and feather,
stone and love,
and dust on the tired furniture.
Now I hear that we are symphony and snarl,
the buzz of bees
and the growl of the highway.
I hear that we are
mockingbird and newborn scream.
Now I know, we are blade at the throat
and a bed
of blue flowers. We are hawk’s flight
and mass grave,
starlight and gunfire.
We are nothing and more
than we have ever believed.
J. Kyle Kimberlin
September 15, 2014
After more than two weeks of radio silence, blogger Dylan Tafferty has finally issued a public apology for not posting in a while. Link.
I was walking our dog today and decided to listen to an episode of the New Yorker Poetry Podcast, in which a poem called What Did I Love, by Ellen Bass, is read by the great poet Philip Levine.
Levine, former Poet Laureate of the US and winner of the Pulitzer, said he was envious of this poem. Yes, me too.
You hear him read it here.
https://soundcloud.com/newyorker/the-poetry-podcast-philip
You can read the poem here.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/04/what-did-i-love
And I wish you would. Listen and read along. I can tell you about power and beauty, about a surpassing specificity and blade-sharp precision of writing.
But let me get out of your way. … I’ll just be over here, plucking feathers.
“It’s easier to understand the idea of death than the reality of life, and so we make an industry of waiting, imagining our end lumbering toward our vain and cubicled selves, inventing the selfish moral blank spots we suspect ourselves of being.”
Michael Thomsen on the vanity of the zombie apocalypse. (Paris Review)
Thomsen was writing about apocalyptic games, but that sure looks like I should be able to relate. Death is the greatest common denominator and poets – and artists in general – have never been able to take their eyes off it for long.
Around this old wooden house,
branches moved by wind
and rain sound like voices.
There is as much absence
as presence in the sound,
as much pain as peace.
It is the unsteady rhythm
of solitude.
I don’t want to be alone.
Never truly alone in this world.
Before you leave, just tell me
who will care in thirty
years or forty to lift my chin
and tell me look — a bird.
Tonight, the wind is up,
the small dog barks and whines.
The old house is nervous
and whispering. We recognize
the dead, the call to supper
and the fervent prayer. We are
summoned but remain in bed
waiting for the breeze to die.
Kyle Kimberlin
August 28, 2014
Notes
This quote arrived in my e-mail recently and served to inspire:
For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.
– Rita Dove, poet
In the second stanza, there’s a clue which proves that part was deposited in my notebook several years ago. Can you guess what that clue is?
I like the new editor, https://wordpress.com/post/. It’s simple and clean, but not minimalist to the point of stupidity, like some of Google’s newer tools. I don’t like the little composition box in Google+.
I think I can finally give up using Windows Live Writer now.
What do you think?
They’re saying that Robin Williams was known for being funny – a comic – and I suppose that’s true. But I will remember him most for his role in the film What Dreams May Come, which was powerful, intense, beautiful, and not even remotely amusing. In fact, the irony of it makes me sad tonight.
It is the story of a man whose wife commits suicide, and when he reaches his Heaven he cannot find her there. She is in Hell because she took her life. Unable to accept this, he sets out to find her among the lost and bring her back. I won’t spoil the outcome for you.
I pray that someday humans will evolve to become beings with the power – born of willingness and compassion – to redeem the suffering among us, while life still holds that hope.
“…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.”
– Robin Williams, as Richard Matheson in What Dreams May Come
The passing of a life from everything
to something, to nothing we can see
or understand, is a work of art
that each of us paints, carves, writes, sings.
If we could run out onto the waves
west into the setting sun, beyond
the islands and the edge of space,
maybe the day would live on.
Still I sit here, where I have been quiet
for years, and I wait for you to pass.
It has always been you that I wait for.
Will you see me in the corner of your eye?
I hope you will remember I was here
when I am forgotten and you are gone.
Kyle Kimberlin
July 28, 2014
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
– Marcel Proust, novelist
No. Sorry, Marcel, but I’m not buying it. I don’t believe that it’s himself that the reader finds in a book; it’s not a mystical selfie. The best writing is a sort of tribal drum that calls us out of our isolation and into the firelight of the commonalities of humanity. Art helps us understand the suffering and hope that we share, not the machinations of the ego.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns … instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
– George Orwell, whose birthday is today.
I use the quote above to shoehorn my thoughts onto blog topic, but my favorite quote from Orwell is this passage from 1984:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
I sit here tonight look at those words again, amazed at how much Truth there is in them, and wondering if we have finally come to live in that age of doublethink.
Slavery is freedom. The climate is not changing. Guns keep us safe. Rich people create jobs. War is Peace. Immigration is hurting the economy. Iraq is Obama’s fault. Ignorance is strength.
I’ve been watching World War Z. It’s interesting to see what that silly zombie fad looks like with a big budget. …It is a metaphor of American politics, right?
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” So for us, a zombie apocalypse is more likely than attaining government or, by, or for the people.
Metaphor 
