the immortal land

Text fragments from early Japanese court poetry (mainly the Manyoshu and Kokinshu) borrowed to create a new poem about the Moon.

Wanderlust #4

Text from a page of the 1909 “The Public: A Journal of Democracy” placed around a 19th century map of the Moon.

Miscellany #1

Text from the 1825 “United States Literary Gazette, Volume 2” redacted into a brief poem.

Still Life with Apple, circa 1986

“Bullet Through Apple,” by Harold Edgerton. Photo taken 1964 and printed 1984 by Gus Kayafas.

This very moment in front of the class
in front of the photo you took of an apple
exploded by a bullet in less time
than it takes to blink

I am thinking about the very moment
a bullet ricocheted up from a knot of wood
in our physics class
and pierced a ceiling tile

just a moment like your photo
too slick for the human eye

slicing awake the air
in front of the closed eyelids of the students

but in the very back row Donny
takes this moment because it is there
hidden between the frames

to hang his arm over the wood chair
and rest his hand on his girl’s thigh.

I was a student of the ground

Text from an early Scientific American article about flight stand in for text in an Apollo attitude indicator diagram.

with a mighty swirl

Poem built from snippets of old text. I cut the image of Cetus out of Flamsteed’s “Atlas Coelestis” (graciously digitized and provided online by the Linda Hall Library), and I colored in the black-and-white image with eyeshadow.  Background is handmade Japanese paper.