Landis Everson R.I.P.

RIP, landis... you started, stopped and resumed writing poetry for all the right reasons.


Lemon Tree

A tree that grew in the Garden of Eden
a tree of innocence called
the Tree of Good and Evil. It was harmless

as opposites are in balance. It was also
tasteless,
the taste of innocence before it is betrayed.
When God removed the wall

he gave the lemon thorns and bitterness because it had
no hostility.
It is a taste we want most to subdue. It asks
to be left alone.
We use it with fish and tea. We sugar it.

Look out the window. It stands with a donkey's
stance, hoping the day will pass.
Its scent through the curtains
cuts through
mustiness, sharp
with sweet blossoms. It hides the smell
of new babies.

I wasn't familiar with his work until I read the article and followed the link. he was amazing with words.

RIP.

suicide at 81. what a horrible shame.

i like this one:

Old Rain

How can time matter
if a thing once known
such as a language or a god
can be reborn
without derision or shame?

Love in the hotel
where it has stopped before is
in the same worn room.
Stars
older than wisdom itself
make light each night,
a book read
whose chapters repeat and repeat,

or that seen through new tears
old rain walks up and down
in the trees
outside
just around the corner
from what happened before.

This is very disappointing. I heart Landis.

R.I.P.

Death is a Hole

Death is a hole, or a gap
in the hole. The radio talks Texan,
the plain outside is shabby.

A false desert lost in its own dream.
I think of the forsaken rabbits, hope
they come back to me. I was a sex slave

near Tecate in the Casa Grande Hotel
spread-legged on the dining room table
the man called me Mable

no rabbits were available. Insanity
not an option, was not a remedy anyway
but the song down the throat

of death did sound beautiful, like rain
over a dry place sucking for air as with
a knife in my teeth I descend the stair.

It was a border town called Gates of Hell.
You know it, too? Filled with rabbits that
forsake you when you need them the most.

They were bygone days that should not have come
on a phantom planet that death controlled
always around, damn it, like static on the radio.

I wasn't familiar with him either, but I'm glad to read him now.
This says a lot about who he was.:

When the Berkeley Renaissance poets drifted apart in the early 1960s, Everson gave up poetry. He stopped because "for him poetry is a communication between friends, not a commercial enterprise," according to a 2005 New York Times article about Everson. "I wasn't seeing my friends," Everson said to explain his decision.
...
He returned to poetry in his 70s, after he retired. He was encouraged by poet and editor Ben Mazer, who discovered Everson's work while he was researching the Berkeley Renaissance poets several years ago. After meeting Mazer, Everson wrote some 300 poems in three years.

Click to expand...

No know survivors. What a shame.

We are all his survivors, as this thread attests.