Tag art

* arguing & anniversarying

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

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The photo above is of my work desk at the Cincinnati Review office. The moon painting featured here was one of the first my wife worked on during our time living in Cincinnati. Her artwork inspires me, which is one of the reasons why it is featured on the covers of four of my chapbooks as well as on the cover of Everything We Think We Hear. Having an artist in the family means I get to come home to paintings mid-process on her desk. When this happens, the idea of “work-in-progress” becomes a physical metaphor in our living room. This definitely influences my thoughts as I work at my own desk.

I share this photo because I wanted to make the most of the fact that my wedding anniversary falls on a Friday this year. This week’s poem was also chosen in this spirit. Below is my poem “Arguing for the Stars,” which was originally published in Kansas City Voices in 2015.

We never really settled on a solid reason why we chose to get married right around the beginning of autumn. Could be all the stirring elements and changing weather. This poem, I like to think, has some of that as well.

*

Arguing for the Stars – José Angel Araguz

for ani

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead
there are those who believed the night sky
to be an iron plate, stars torches
hung over the world,

and those who believed the night to be
a goddess adorned in stars. Between
torches and jewelry believers
argued, side by side,

their voices dying down as the dark
grew, leaving only silence and those
points of light above them holding still.
There are nights you point

out a star, and without looking I
say it is a plane, a satellite,
something other than what you say. Such
is my disbelief,

not in stars, but in being able
to see anything clearly from here.
You argue for your stars, and your words
help me. The night sky

fills again with what
you would have me see.

*

Happy stars-ing!

José

* living, dreaming & apples

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Between living and dreaming
there is a third thing.
Guess it.

— Antonio Machado

I look at this quote and see much of the poetic craft summed up in it.

There is the living of everyday life – work, chores, relationships, food, tying your shoelaces – all the things that make up routine, the background to who we are.

Then there’s dreaming – both the idealizing of the future as well as the literal act of what is seen when we sleep.  The unspoken times.

Between these two things – the background and the unspoken – we do our best to do the guessing that Machado encourages.

*manzananza*

*manzananza*

In the poem below, Jay Leeming takes an everyday thing – in this case, an apple – and pushes it into dream.  The image of the apple’s core as a “little room” is a guess towards what the act of eating an apple suggests beyond the everyday.  You get the usual connotations of Adam and Eve, the Fall – but there’s something more to it.

The turn for me here is at the end, how the poem leaves you with enough image to keep on talking inside of you.  Just watch what happens when you get to the powerful compound word “tear-shaped.”

Apple – Jay Leeming **

Sometimes when eating an apple
I bite too far
and open the little room
the lovers have prepared,
and the seeds fall
onto the kitchen floor
and I see
that they are tear-shaped.

***

Happy appling!

Jose

p.s.  Jay Leeming is also the editor of Rowboat: Poetry in Translation, a great journal you can find out more about here.

* photo found here.

** published in the book Dynamite on a China Plate, The Backwaters Press.