You do it every day.
Waking too early, driving to work, working and returning.
Reading poems of great beauty and crying at the movies.
— Steve Scafidi, from “The Sublime”
684 notes
·
View notes
Steve Scafidi – Para o último búfalo americano
"Para o último búfalo americano", um poema de Steve Scafidi
Porque as palavras fascinam sob a luz vertiginosa das coisase a alma é como um animal – caçada e lenta –este búfalo passeia por mim todas as noites como se eu fossealgum tipo de pradaria e se agacha contra a escuridão fria,bufando sob as estrelas enquanto a névoa de sua respiraçãoeleva-se no ar, e é a sensação mais solitária que eu conheçoaproximar-se lentamente com a mão estendidapara ternamente…
View On WordPress
0 notes
"and if you think the very beginnings / of a hornet's nest hanging on the eaves just behind / my ear threaten the twilight's sense of security—no." Steve Scafidi — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/HGfZsLt
0 notes
are there any poems that absolutely consumed you when you first read them?
hi anon! i'm sorry it's taken me a while to get to your request. i've been dealing with a lot in my personal life so this project has taken a bit of a backseat. here are some poems that really struck me right upon my first read, and below are a few more. enjoy reading, & congrats on being the 100th post!
Megan O'Rourke, "Unforced Errors" | Heidegger: “Every man is born as many men / and dies as a single one.” / The bones in us still marrowful. / The moon up there, too, an arctic sorrow.
Kaveh Akbar, "Do You Speak Persian?" | I don’t remember how to say home / in my first language, or lonely, or light. / I remember only / delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, / and shab bekheir, goodnight.
Steve Scafidi, "For the Last American Buffalo" | Because words dazzle in the dizzy light of things / and the soul is like an animal–hunted and slow– / this buffalo walks through me every night as if I was / some kind of prairie and hunkers against the cold dark
K-Ming Chang, "Closet Space" | Here / is my lung’s list of needs: how to hold water / like a woman & not / drown.
Jack Gilbert, "By Small and Small: From Midnight to Four A.M." | I wanted / to crawl in among the machinery / and hold her in my arms
William Brewer, "Resolution" | sometimes / you have to tell yourself / you’re the first person / to look out over / the silent highway / at the abandoned billboard / lit up by the moon / and think it’s selling a new / and honest life.
265 notes
·
View notes
« Because words dazzle in the dizzy light of things
and the soul is like an animal —hunted and slow—
this buffalo walks through me every night as if I was
some kind of prairie and hunkers against the cold dark,
snorting under the stars while the fog of its breathing
rises in the air, and it is the loneliest feeling I know
[...] and today while the seismic quietness of
the earth spun beneath my feet and while the world
I guess carried on, that lumbering thing moved heavy
thick and dark through the dreams I believe we keep
having whether we sleep or not and when you see it
again say I’m sorry for things you didn’t do and
then offer it some sweet-grass and tell it stories
you remember from the star-chamber of the womb
or at least the latest joke, something good to keep it
company as otherwise it doesn’t know you are here
for love, and like the world tonight, doesn’t really
care whether we live or die. Tell it you do and why. »
— Steve Scafidi, “For the Last American Buffalo” in Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer
48 notes
·
View notes
Ode to Rosa Parks | Steve Scafidi
In the forests of Alabama where pine trees crowd the air and scrape
the blue sky raw and heat sifts down a few degrees
where green moss creeps on stones and crawls over the earth,
I will bet all I ever loved that just below the surface here you will find
the bones of men smashed by roots and the gray rinds
of the skulls of women broken open like sudden storms one at a time
over the brutal Southern course of years and you could populate
three or four medium-sized towns with the bodies lost
in the forests outside Montgomery Alabama and forty-five years of
clear starry nights have passed over these pines since that afternoon
in December in 1955 when you risked the sudden
rage of whites who mobbed up at a moment’s notice and the midnight
cruelties of Alabama were practiced so well so often that the smallest
act of defiance was a matter of life and death and you
did not move to the back of the bus as you were told to and it was
dangerous, always dangerous, to have any courage in the South,
just to open your mouth, or to breathe in and out,
and you did not move to the back of that bus on Cleveland Avenue,
Secretary of an Alabama chapter of the NAACP, Lady Courageous,
Rosa Parks, sitting in that seat you saved us
the difficult sweet word free.
1 note
·
View note
Lines for the Gates of a Cemetery
We had bound volumes of Persian
geometry and guitars made of cedar.
We had loose talk and shivering
as snow fell from the Eiffel Tower.
We had dishes and the bloody dream
of a flea sleeping in an eyebrow.
The sadness of being was it turns out
a kind of joy and everyone suffered
as they disappeared. We had rivers
flowing over top themselves and green
molecules and the slow eyes of sheep.
We had a use for things. We knew
the names of a thousand kinds of tea.
We had the white possum in the dark
with the other tiny possums holding on.
It's sad. We didn't know what we had.
And we had iodine in tiny blue jars.
We had eucalyptus trees and the planet
Mars circled with us through mizzen
dot-light of the distant stars. We had
the tintinnabulation of bells and a word
for everything. The pink dumb
moon rising and death with a top hat
quietly laughing at us as he passed.
Even that we will miss. Even that we loved.
–Steve Scafidi
2 notes
·
View notes
It is me. Dammit.
There is a broken-down
burning house inside the soul and someone
in the window waves. It is me. Dammit
— Steve Scafidi, from “The Denunciation of Ricky Skaggs from On High,” The Cabinetmaker’s Window (Louisiana State University Press, 2014)
6 notes
·
View notes
- Steve Scafidi, The Cabinetmaker’s Window
3 notes
·
View notes
From this interview with Steve Scafidi, living genius and my favorite poet. http://www.32poems.com/blog/10296/run-full-speed-dark-interview-steve-scafidi-cate-lycurgus
2 notes
·
View notes
Steve Scafidi, from “Ode to And”
628 notes
·
View notes
April 29, 2022: Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be, Ross Gay
Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be
Ross Gay
—after Steve Scafidi
The way the universe sat waiting to become,
quietly, in the nether of space and time,
you too remain some cellular snuggle
dangling between my legs, curled in the warm
swim of my mostly quietest self. If you come to be—
And who knows?—I wonder, little bubble
of unbudded capillaries, little one ever aswirl
in my vascular galaxies, what would you think
of this world which turns itself steadily
into an oblivion that hurts, and hurts bad?
Would you curse me my careless caressing you
into this world or would you rise up
and, mustering all your strength into that tiny throat
which one day, no doubt, would grow big and strong,
scream and scream and scream until you break the back of one injustice,
or at least get to your knees to kiss back to life
some roadkill? I have so many questions for you,
for you are closer to me than anyone
has ever been, tumbling, as you are, this second,
through my heart’s every chamber, your teeny mouth
singing along with the half-broke workhorse’s steady boom and gasp.
And since we’re talking today I should tell you,
though I know you sneak a peek sometimes
through your father’s eyes, it’s a glorious day,
and there are millions of leaves collecting against the curbs,
and they’re the most delicate shade of gold
we’ve ever seen and must favor the transparent
wings of the angels you’re swimming with, little angel.
And as to your mother—well, I don’t know—
but my guess is that lilac bursts from her throat
and she is both honeybee and wasp and some kind of moan to boot
and probably she dances in the morning—
but who knows? You’ll swim beneath that bridge if it comes.
For now let me tell you about the bush called honeysuckle
that the sad call a weed, and how you could push your little
sun-licked face into the throngs and breathe and breathe.
Sweetness would be your name, and you would wonder why
four of your teeth are so sharp, and the tiny mountain range
of your knuckles so hard. And you would throw back your head
and open your mouth at the cows lowing their human songs
in the field, and the pigs swimming in shit and clover,
and everything on this earth, little dreamer, little dreamer
of the new world, holy, every rain drop and sand grain and blade
of grass worthy of gasp and joy and love, tiny shaman,
tiny blood thrust, tiny trillion cells trilling and trilling,
little dreamer, little hard hat, little heartbeat,
little best of me.
--
Today in:
2021: Choi Jeong Min, Franny Choi
2020: Earl, Louis Jenkins
2019: Kul, Fatimah Asghar
2018: My Life Was the Size of My Life, Jane Hirshfield
2017: I Would Ask You To Reconsider The Idea That Things Are As Bad As They’ve Ever Been, Hanif Abdurraqib
2016: Tired, Langston Hughes
2015: Democracy, Langston Hughes
2014: Postscript, Seamus Heaney
2013: The Ghost of Frank O’Hara, John Yohe
2012: All Objects Reveal Something About the Body, Catie Rosemurgy
2011: Prayer, Marie Howe
2010: The Talker, Chelsea Rathburn
2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher
2008: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett
2007: Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok
2006: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath
2005: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch
27 notes
·
View notes
The Junebugs from oddfellows on Vimeo.
The Junebugs
Original poem by Steve Scafidi
Read by David Purdham
Directed by Oddfellows
Creative Direction: Chris Kelly
Art Direction: Colin Trenter
Producer: TJ Kearney
Screenplay: Justin Kelly
Design and Illustration: Yuki Yamada, Hana kim
Title Design: Lisa Mishima
Animation: Stan Cameron, Chris Anderson, Nata Metlukh, Josh Parker, Kavan Magsoodi, Jay Quercia, Lorraine Sorlet, Chris Kelly, Colin Trenter, Jordan Scott
Music and Sound by Antfood
0 notes
and if there is a heaven of any kind Oh lord let it be
this city where the poet undresses
tonight and swims
in the river while the mermaid plays
a ukulele and calls to him under the silver trees.
Steve Scafidi, from “For Love of Common Things”
1 note
·
View note
And so lovers who were strangers once have a long life after death.
Steve Scafidi, from “Luck’s Bird Over Love’s House”
3 notes
·
View notes
For the Last American Buffalo | Steve Scafidi
Because words dazzle in the dizzy light of things
and the soul is like an animal–hunted and slow–
this buffalo walks through me every night as if I was
some kind of prairie and hunkers against the cold dark,
snorting under the stars while the fog of its breathing
rises in the air, and it is the loneliest feeling I know
to approach it slowly with my hand outstretched
to tenderly touch the heavy skull furred and rough
and stroke that place huge between its ears where
what I think and what it thinks are one singing thing
so quiet that, when I wake, I seldom remember
walking beside it and whispering in its ear quietly
passing the miles, the two of us, as if Cheyenne or
the lights of San Francisco were our unlikely destination
and sometimes trains pass us and no one leans out hard
in the dark aiming to end us and so we continue on
somehow and today while the seismic quietness of
the earth spun beneath my feet and while the world
I guess carried on, that lumbering thing moved heavy
thick and dark through the dreams I believe we keep
having whether we sleep or not and when you see it
again say I’m sorry for things you didn’t do and
then offer it some sweet-grass and tell it stories
you remember from the star-chamber of the womb
or at least the latest joke, something good to keep it
company as otherwise it doesn’t know you are here
for love, and like the world tonight, doesn’t really
care whether we live or die. Tell it you do and why.
1 note
·
View note