my dear store stump-ians,

the time has come for some housecleaning, and I will be closing this chapter of blog history and moving over tumblr.

Please come visit me at my new address: storestump.tumblr.com

There are lots of new poems up and I hope to be posting a lot more writing from now on.
Thank you for the faithful following of this old blog - I have loved it dearly.

I hope to see you all at my new home,
yours,
z

i've caught the butterfly wings of this day in my gut
skies washed with sun and smiles caught by their hair in between these teeth
everywhere chests are opened, voices unleashed
on my hips I carry these flutterings and swayings
the weight of a hundred windy tendrils of spring

your eyes are grayed and chasms open where you tread
I'd almost like to climb up away where your teeth, lips and crinkled eyes are huddled
in a cave under the floorboards of a house
somewhere inside

we climbed here once before and called this place Japan
"look how the rooftops shift and lean" you said
we had daisies in our hair then and only violins
in our young hands – catch me up now, your arms

they strain with a new awakening, we've held lakes in our fingers
leaked out them all, our guts
our fears, watering our feet; we've leaked out our hearts
and torn eachother into ribs and bones

now on sweet slopes we tunnel, soles warm with dirt
hold new light in our palms and break into this hilltopthe beeswax on your lips burning mine, bright hummingstrung between our collarbones.

Ryan with scissors

the view  from here is of a cut-up sky and semi trucks that ply the roads beneath, in the inner workings, the heart, the jungle, of this city. Here there are only comings and going and makings, warehouses upon warehouses with craft hidden behind crusted glass. On this second floor after three flight of dank carpet and cold walls, there is a white door from which strains notes, shy and foreign notes, like the forbidden door in each grimm's tale I was read at three. Here white walls, white celing, white  white floor, one white chair, one mirror, and the tallest girl I know with trimmings on her fingers. Ryan with scissors is the kind of magician you love on sight and feel shy to ever burst upon again, with her white hair casting itself towards the floor in rivered lengths and her girafe legs so long they twin themselves incessantly unsure of themselves. Her father's career in 1960s with the As, her sister's habit of picking up street poets, they are mythologies under white iron fixtures and white lights. She only cuts in shapes that take my jawbone from its caves. A sudden torque of a wrist, flash of her knives, and the tickle of fallen hair on my arm.

I’ve awoken from a late night with fearful tenderings, dead ache bones fishing to take hard medicine outside the cricket moon still crowing. We talked on the phone he asked am I Narcissus? I said if we’re going to talk Greeks, can I be Icarus? Only partly for the wings, but mostly for the red heart Matisse gave him in the falling. The dawn is bold and lionous, my bathroom tiled floor white and cold on bare feet and slumped limbs, a world of shakings, tremblings, to be in a body with gutted bones. The chickadee is calling outside the way it did when I was six and I hunted it in the back of our blue Nissan truck with binoculars. I hunted that sound, the chickadee dee dee, like Cherokee, because of the liquorish feel it left on my tongue. My limbs are stones in the early morning air the cold softness of the honed weight against the floor, Egyptian fossils, encased, alien. I’ll keep crouching here to belong to the bird’s legends, to adorn the tongue with home. To make mating calls. To watch that phone turn into beanstalks and bear its long green fruit. To give my faulty ticker with its animal beats to the red belly of the sun.

completely mesmerized by the photography of mariam sitchinava

longings for the old short hair come back when I see these pics

plans for paris are underway & these days are all writing and furrowed brows

Low Anthem - Ghost Woman Blues from Live & Breathing on Vimeo.

When I first began to love God I thought I'd fallen in the ocean,

but I was only on the beach.

then i entered the water and was thrown back on shore 

and then washed again by the waves.

God, why did i want this love?

and

what is this back and forth?

- Hafiz

Low Anthem - Matter of Time from Live & Breathing on Vimeo.

THIS.

                                                                          III

                                      Buffalo Bill's

                                      defunct

                                                   who used to

                                                   ride a watersmooth-silver

                                                                                           stallion

                                      and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

                                                                                                                      Jesus

             

                                     he was a handsome man

                                                                          and what i want to know is

                                      how do you like your blueeyed boy

                                     Mister Death

                                                                                       - e e cummings

sounds of the day: here

 Don't surrender your loneliness 
so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.


Let it ferment and season you
as few human
Or even divine ingrediants can.
- Hafiz

a special treat for you all: a wonderful new EP for the spring growings:

Civil War by The Shepherds

back to the rainy streets and the classes! For all my reluctance, I am actually very excited about this next quarter: John Stuart Mills, Romantic Poets, French, Linguistics...

Missing: drawing, writing, and printing

other sounds: Fleet Foxes

above: spring break

for your souls:

  this

to do: Anis Mojgani at Powells at 8pm Monday the 28th!
I would recommend getting there really early because last time Jonathan Franzen was there, I was stuck on the floor beneath the talk in a huge line.

to watch: this

the sky was lavender the last few days of class

its bewildering to find myself in fresh air with hours to do things like laundry and dishwashing

and how much i wish the coast weren't so tempestuous these days,

i need a good gust of wind in my hair

and this:

 

sounds of today: here
vast skies, ponderings, and solo nights
this semester has been murder

 Is it like this

In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone

 T.S.E.

I'm supposed to be writing a paper - two in fact. But nothing doing. Too much schoolwork and my brain turns off and decides to read T.S.E. instead.  My cherished humans, how are we still in January? I find myself longing for sky sky sky, birdsound, and spring growings.
I'm supposedly reading Pound right now, but how can you really enter into him, when the first lines you read are: "say this to the Possum: a bang, not a wimper/with a bang, not a wimper". especially as he goes onto talk politics and Mussolini hanging by his heels....its impossible to find him compelling, with this still echoing in your ears. As very young writer of ten years old, I used to take those words of T.S.E. and hold them in my mouth, shape them, whisper them to myself - all with little idea of their meaning in a fuller sense than the sounds they were. All I could feel is that they were sound with meaning, shade with color, and that they talked. talked wildly! Half my age ago I already knew that to make sound talk was all I could ever want.


pic of Jeff Gun art

shudders of winter's fog, butterflies, and eternity today
to this sound

Saw a train catch the night on FIRE.

its snowing

listening to this

and dreaming about such luxeries as appartments and summer;

summer now means figure drawing, photography, printing and music...everything that keeps me alive...

the one consolation is that we're studying printing rights and typography in 17th century england in ENG 430 this term. 

pic from here

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

 - G. M. H.

A close family friend, a figure who stood on the front porch of my childhood memories, forever rolling a cigarette in his hands and laughing with my dad, has passed away this last week. I spent much of my time growing up in his house, curled on the couch watching the adults open bottles of wine, tell stories, and weave the life and faith I would take into my soul and make my own. And now watching him return to the earth, surrounded by candles and singing and tears and so much love, I feel that a bright flickering gift has been placed in my hands; they have wept and hugged me and let me be with them through all of life, the laughter and the death intermingled.

listen

 We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
...
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive.
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

- Czeslaw Milosz 

 

HERE.

When he is king, they will clothe him in grave-sheets

Myrrh for embalming and wood for a crown

-Bethlehem Down

 all things winter

listen

& delve here (thank you to a dear friend for this) & here

I am so very tired. And the earth itself is so very dark and dimmed.