For Mardi Gras
the caveat onus ::: fifty-eight
I’m floating on a stardust channel
behind an eye
that starts from the sublime
then moves in the opposite direction
like the zombie I’ve become
these recent months
in a city whose latest folie de grandeur
is a blunderfuck called disaster
where the mind never stops seeing double
and the coffin flies keep landing on my sandwich
I need a new address for the things in my head
a rare mountain somewhere inside a japanese painting
because what I know no longer seems real
the caveat onus ::: sixty-one
for Minabefore the water fell
nothing kept us from a good time
it was as simple as digging up
worms in the backyard
trains going by near the playground
were big jaw-droppers
the ice cream truck adored us
“the after dinner moonlight wagon ride”
was our most recent ritual
hopgrassers smushrooms and puppy dog shoes
were newly minted vocabularies then
now the water keeps falling
it never stops
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
oh good. i met dave’s wife last summer at naropa’s SWP and had wondered if they had gotten out alright…
yeah, they are both fine, as is their place in the Quarter (though their house is heavely damaged) — & Megan just gave birth to their second child. My son, Miles (13), made a couple lovely videos based on images of Nola we took when there and a poem each by Dave and Megan, he was so impressed by them. They are there, safe — & yet, you can feel, touch, sense, hear, taste the trauma of katrina — and even more so of the aftermath & irresponsibility of the powers that be that add so much to the intial disaster.