#steve scafidi

[firstfullmoon]

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”

[poemwav]

by Steve Scafidi

[wintryblight]

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.

[exhaled-spirals]

« 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

[seaanimalonland]

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.

[likespunglass]

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

[dk-thrive]

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)

[nsantand]

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…

[thismtnsoul]

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

[poem-today]

A Favourite Steve Scafidi Poem

Ode to the Perineum

Maybe the soul is only a small place on the body

                      --Larry Levis

And maybe not. Maybe the invisible filament that flickers

           in the idea of the soul is the soul.

                       Some hummingbird of the universal mind--

brightly colored, precise and infinitely quick.

And dull.  It shouldn’t be, in any case, as intimate

           as say, the perineum, that pleasurable

                       one millionth acre

of nerves that lies between the asshole and the valleying

gradual beginning of our sex. No, the soul can’t be that

           close by and so inappropriate

                       that to speak of it now

is to cross over into the language of the body and of

the hidden crevasses of the body. Well, the hummingbird

           now floats over a rose although

                       such a symbol for the soul

to be honest must include the microscopic blue turds

thudding lightly onto the grass wherever that hummingbird,

            for you, will pass. I prefer the taint,

                       this prairie of pure desire

so secret even the body knows little of its power until quietly

reminded we buck like a horse on some Mississippi street.

           This deep true south of ourselves.

                       Patch of the promised land.

Kingdom of the cartwheel and the lazy falling handstand

in swimming pools. I praise the carnival hairs sprouting

            there like trees Dr. Seuss drew

                       in a forbidden mood

and I praise blue moons, kazoos and white hot rivers

with fiery canoes in that vision of scramble pleasure

           makes us live through and I praise

                       this small place on the body

that might be the soul. Hinge from which our legs swing.

Tingling thing. Like the soft spot on a baby’s head,

            this fragile holy span,

                       must be praised now and then

with all the gentle force that words can stand.

Steve Scafidi

Ode to the Perineum first appeared in The Georgia Review.

Poem, copyright © 2005 by Steve Scafidi

[firstfullmoon]

Steve Scafidi, from “Ode to And”

[april-is]

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

[pruzzels]

"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

[aronsonfilm]

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

[seaanimalonland]

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.

[likespunglass]

To One Lingering in the Trees

The beauty bush that never blooms waves            in the yard and gods of all kinds die every year of loneliness wandering down into mountain valleys to look at themselves in the Shenandoah or the Amazon and it's clear            to all of us that you are not yet here.

Who knew we could need one more mouth            to feed and to listen to and to love? Lingerer, come on! Your mother and I have already started to embarrass you making love everyday. Every day this Spring            we have called to you in the body's way.

Of calling that is careful and gentle            we have invented three new ways! Come on! Creature sprawled in the high still trees of the jungle heaven must be, wake up and swing down to us. Come on.            I will buy you a seersucker suit.

Your mother will keep your favorite cigars            in a mason jar and I will help sometimes to encourage you when you mow the yard. It is only three quarters of an acre but we have twenty-nine redbud trees, wild            raspberries and today I planted

the rooty burlap of a hemlock in the yard            if you are homesick and need to climb the high branches and look at the world from some distance and remove both of which we all need sometimes. I've written these lines            to tempt you and your mother says

she loves you and it is true her eyes send light            so warm and clear the sunlight you know and are used to—you will find shining here when she looks at you. Look! She is making a sandwich with peanutbutter and bananas.            It is delicious. You'll love it. Come on.

–Steve Scafidi