A note from Stan
Daniel García Ordáz, aka The Poet Mariachi, appeared on Channel 23 News to promote his reading series this weekend in McAllen. Take a look.

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KÚZA-NÁMA

LIX
Listen again. One Evening at the Close
Of Ramazán, ere the better Moon arose,
In that old Potter’s Shop I stood alone
With the clay Population round in Rows.
LX
And, strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot
Some could articulate, while others not:
And suddenly one more impatient cried-
‘Who is the Potter, pray, and who is the Pot?’
LXI
Then said another-‘Surely not [...]

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A thought from Stan Raines
I was standing in line at HEB yesterday and the man in front of me, someplace in his fifties, mustachioed and trim asked me how I was and I gave him my usual non-commital “Doin’ fine” and returned a “How you doin’?”

“Ah, you know,” he said, “another beautiful day in Brownsville.” [...]

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From Gene’s Notebook

…smoky, smoky enough for choking, the grills, the barbecue grills, some with charcoal, some with wood, some with gas …
…always men, little boys to old men, circling the smoke, women away, unless one comes by to ask an unwelcomed question …
…the smoke, so thick, the men, shadows in the smoke, the fires dim, [...]

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- Y -

It may be all movements through time are like dance
steps, but sometimes the tempi,
The patterns seem random, seem to us frantic,
confuse us and lose us
In rhythms that stutter and stumble, carry us off
of our footing.
Fitting that you, then, pentultimate letter, occasion
reflection.
Slow down the score to molto adagio, make the mood
pensive.
X in proximity’s like [...]

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A poem by Michael Stewart

Fling me around if you like. You’ll find that I’m able
To land on two feet, like a bipedal cat.
I’m steadier than you are, more stable,
But you can count on little more than that.
For I am not a cat, at least I’m often not.
I’m like the headless, tailless quadruped
That even thoughtful Dr. [...]

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A poem by Michael Stewart
- T -
I for one do not appreciate the joke
Of those who say that Tau is just a bull.
Note how the horizontal stroke
Runs parallel to earth, arrests the upward pull.
Of aspiration, drags us down. What son of man
Among us dares to cast this frightful yoke?
I think the letter T
Leaves little room [...]

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A poem by Michael Stewart
— S —

S is more or less what C would be
When c is not in Church
Or not being k.
Ever since its sinuosity
Slithered through the garden,
Man has leaned to speak
In conspiratorial whispers.

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Wherein the Poet Relates a Visitation and Elucidates His Theme
XL
You know, my Friends, how long since in my House
For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
XLI

For ‘Is’ and ‘Is-not’ though with Rule and Line,
And ‘Up-and-down’ without, I could define,
I yet in [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

BUBBLES THE HIPPOPOTAMUS, led
to believe her concrete block demesne
surrounded by barker and cagéd cat
was of her natural habitat
unchanging and forever green,
is dead.  Beloved, she fell asleep,
o.d.’ed like a teen-ager in the park
she slipped into the surrounding darkness
deaf to the midway midgets’ weeping,
the sorrow of keepers who [...]

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A Poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(for Joseph Satterwhite)

I

If at the whole year’s nooning and the noon
Of days, at the still daylight hour I am begot
Of fleshéd bones, death, darknesses, of doom
The which I pray Thou sparest me, what-not:
If at the whole day’s nooning and the year’s
Day, and the bright hour [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(For Carol and Jerry Kasparek)

Amasis was in Egypt king
(Whose dwelling ran a measured mile)
The upper and the lower Nile
Long ago
Whose women when he bade them sang:
The desert boogied, heaven rang,
The painted women and their men
Congoed kickshaws then and ran
In circles to the throne again
(An awesome sight
All [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

A winter thaw opens the children’s coats
And bursts the locks on schoolyard fences,
Disturbs the sluggish chucks; the stoats
Pursuing the nights on their private fancies
Are vicious with laggards, fond of a chance,
Like our children in their baffle, kiting
In dives, the wind-hovered swallows chirking
Over your crossed churchyard. Sighting
Down the [...]

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A poem by Rudy H. García

I listen to the River,
Because my body is molded with its fertile clay
My blood mingles with its rejuvenating water,
Cleansing my spirit free.
I listen to the river
Because I hear over and over from the Eagle and the Jaguar
That the name is El Rio Bravo…The Brave River
I too am brave.

I listen to [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(for Merrill Rippy)
Yonder three nuns come trailing their tattered Latin,
And there a lady blue nimbussed, High Priestess of Grammar,
The freshmen are lost in autumnal quads of confusion,
The drunken Greeks lowing like cattle at bay,
False tallies are taken and totaled, vespers et matins,
The wrong books are ordered, the computer [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

The manhole circled in the sidewalk,
In front of North Hall Barracks which
Was in my day a dorm (the talking
Girls grown fatter, older, bitchy,
The leggy sophomores we boosted
To books, to bedrooms afterhoured,
Past time, past youth, past guards who glowered
Toward the boondocks where we boasted),
Is struck with [...]

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A project
Here is the second installment of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation. We are retaining the accents and spelling conventions of Fitgerald’s text in the hope that readers will adapt their reading to an older pronunciation.
If the first nine quatrains amount to introduction, then these eleven quatrains might be considered the [...]

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More commentary from What’s His Name
We begin to prepare for yet another major poetry project at NunnaYerBizness Today, re-visiting The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and bringing the language up to date (or past the present day–who knows?–a printout of NunnaYerBizness Today could very well be the sole surviving fragment in the next medieval revival of [...]

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A comment from Stan
The clerihewvian experiment was quite a blast for us–such an outpouring of creativity and good humor and excitement. We could hardly wait to check email to see what new thing someone had created or to be prompted to a new burst of creativity ourselves. There were forty-two entries, all told, and even [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
(for Robert Evans)
Sunburned and blonde the fresh insouciance,
That quarter of the solar year comes round
When some will keep and some will quit this ground.
Your leaving reaves us,
Leaves us less a lance.
Go where you will, you go with Fergus now,
Far from the deans, where minutes are not kept
Where sleep [...]

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- A -
In the Orient they say there was a tortoise
Swimming in the incoherent deep,
The world inscribed in runes upon his back.
The first of mankind watched it churning there
And read, they say, and knew it for a tortoise,
Knew himself for a man. Or else, they say,
Alef, sacred ox it was, first cause, uncaused,
Who bore [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
When Matthew Paris wrought to write
The Lives of all the early abbots,
He rove by rush and tallow light.
By his scriptorium mailed feet
And tumbrels knocking in the street
Worked further wrongs; the herded night
Advanced on sandal and sabot.
That men should sing in praise of kings
To set them on some middle [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(for Wade Jennings)

1

There is a kind of sweet distress
In children dancing out of time;
Attendant on that awkwardness
A mute unsureness, a duress
Whose only succor is finesse;
It is as though
They know,
Sensing the aisles’ restlessness,
Though it stand only for a time
And though
It be blameless
It be nameless,
Still
They count it as [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
Crosswalked in winter where your dream was riven
Into red fragments on a city street,
We pause today as curbed and unforgiven,
As jayed and ticketed and incomplete.
Clio had wooed and won you long before us,
Whose dress is draggled in such ancient blood
That, had you lived, were you quite sure this [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

Who has not read of mankilling Achilles?
Him of the mighty thews, myrmidon mannered one
In whose red such ichor ran the ships where he dallied
Sail in our sayings, the heads that he hammered;
As hilted as language is, the bloodsayings backing us,
Screwing our courage, it is his name tracks us.
Who [...]

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