The Yurt Master

YURTMASTER

2010-12-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

by Lucia Pizzo

When he named them,
he held his fingers
webbed

At the bottom of his
mind,
a filed of pennies

Beard full of fingers
of old soup

He had a horse once,
let the hair grow wild;
he matched his teeth
to horse hide, slipped
them behind his stretched
lips
starched.

*

Seventeen years ago
and on a train.

He never could whistle,
fingers stuck with spit
and cheeks red raw,
filled thimbles with wishing
and set them to sea.

He liked the way
his face fit in a jar
when the light was just
his nose in an O
his lips hidden under.

He could whistle at night
when his lips would flit
to other faces, the heavy skin:
plight of a seed, of lowing.

*

He left his shoes
his pockets
his oiled rags
left streaks in the
mirror

In rain, he left his lips
to pucker, grow long
again

He experimented with vowel
sounds, left he baby out
carved freckles

Loved, in the stoop of his
back leaning, loved
between the bones and in
wood grain.

And he smothered
his fingers with buds.

*

Later
he became a stone,
spoke with quick lips,
paced.

He collected:
leaves
(soil)
his own teeth
the curled bodies of cicadas
left
in his windowsill

He filled boxes to mail
changed his mind
taught his fingers to forget
the way they’d cup around his
mouth to call out and back,
call through old maps, old roads.

.

THE YURT MASTERS

2010-12-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

by Pablo Peschiera

In the felt-dulled light a million threads rampant and wrecked.

Slats run in finch steps crushing the cold, forgotten, dumb,
pitching in silence. Onto steppes and grasslands—

winds and yak milk like bitter chocolate.
Trotting—when the smoke blows

the taste of meat hangs in the mouth. A loud whistle.
The horses arrive—ridden bare. We beckon twice,

their blissful manes swinging and drunk.
The wounds and the bows strapped to our backs

like deadly children. We return a tribe, piled and bruised,
hood the falcons, drink our mares’ milk,

and on the rugs dare our brothers to raise our uncles
whose ashes lie and foam like broth.

In the tent we in the cupboard loll with abandon
near our sisters’ pallets rolled like skins.

We ask the storms buffeting the iris smoke sneaks through
where our legs end and earth begins. Sky’s bright sliver.

We pretend the ger is the world as reflected
in horses’ thighs —a ripple’s graze in our horses’ eyes.

The broken cricks fade to twinges. The crept-in night
dried and fetid. The moon shuttles across constellations.

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-11-25T08:02:00.001-08:00

by Ryan Smith

goes flying, arrives @ Fujiama
@ 6:02am & expects delays,
expect to bleed RFID-tagged
cells, the cute blue-to-red
trick of the mind & body
being one, soul lagging out
over the ocean somewhere,
stopping to fish for beluga & sunken
Somalis still smiling & from up here
the melange of satellite dishes
like cues for base-jumping,
NOW IS GOOD THE WIND
IS FAINT with all that messy
fluidic loss.

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-11-24T07:16:00.000-08:00

by Mathias Svalina

But why here
with my brother.

He has a good
handshake.

In the forest,
on the drive home,

In the fields
of known snow,

he did not breathe
a wet word

of the inked
skull, the base

of the lamp
unlightable.

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-11-22T08:33:00.001-08:00

by Robert Miltner

Yarrow ripening in the meadow, rippling
paprika, cinnamon, cream, and yellow.

The yurt master brought his crew of plow
men to the deserted shelter. Not a farmer’s

daughter for miles on this lane-off-a-lane.
Not a Roma, tinker, or gypsy to find a line

on a palm to encourage a singer to sidle
up to such an entourage in a stone hut.

He felt the walls: rough. Felt his hands:
soft. Left the crew in the loft and walked,

yearning to find a yurt of melodies, lyrics,
ballads that mirrored the meager earnings

of the yeomen, his yes men, at year end.
So said, he sought songs of apprentices

assumed to be soldiers seducing milkmaids
and goat-fudge makers, the course chorus

more wit than nit, more maypole than not.
Nothing deterred? Then nothing’s incurred,

except tunes of May wine and late Riesling,
the deceit of the newly barreled and betrayal

of an aged vintage. In stone cottage cloister
it was done, was sung, was long into night

that both Master and crew crowed and cawed.
Dawn, they’ll be sleeping around the barrow.

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-11-19T16:49:00.000-08:00

by Jennifer Militello

Substitute its cockeyed geometry for a precinct of sudden flowers.
Let your fingerprints membrane along its naked scythe.
Let its lyres trace your past along the banks of a now-dry river.

Its struggle diagrams your profile, the gallop of your gaze,
where heads are bowed and bulls sacrificed
and a zodiac alluded to: the fragment of the hour.

It is full of the miles, curtsy of them, certain of the lace
they ache, as velvet lasts, a letter—

Above the gnaw of time, a wild that shimmers with wind.
Your pulse can be felt trembling, rustic and mad, waxing
as autumn lattices, as it stews. Exquisite. As it roams.

Open the snow of your eyes: such cold.

Our minds are bright with limits. Quiets soar,
sag-weary and dashed to adieu.

Thrust like tusks at the cognizant moon.

Let death void the beautiful construction.

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-11-16T15:14:00.000-08:00

By Will Schutt

You can’t do to it what you can
do to a hole. Holes are nearer;
you can get your arms around them
and fit them to your purpose.
Here I hit a wall. The furniture
has been prebuilt and shipped
from Sweden and all you have to
do is slide the tongue bits into
the, well, hole bits. Mostly I wanted
to dig my hole and get sad in it.
How could I get sad in something
called a sod iglu or a wickiup?
I refuse to drag indigenous populations
into this debate. But that’s another
thing pretty good to wring a tear.
.

YURTMASTER?

2010-11-11T13:34:00.001-08:00

by Rusty Morrison

Hurt asters, curt disasters, blurted nesters, maniacal measurer... yes.

But no yurts can I master... not one will lumber up from the murk to take up the yolk of my language cart, theirs is a more languid art.

My need for mastery is thin, some mornings.

Thin as my imagining of what a yurt’s hoof print would look like, if left where no yurt comes to graze.

Some mornings, my need for mastery is weightless.

Weighed down by only the ash left after sleep's controlled burn.

“Some mornings” is not a master’s phrase, steeped in dream’s cooling embers.

Some mornings I hold out my hand a long time, my palm cupped in the shape of reception.

There needn’t be hope in such a gesture; some mornings, air is all that’s needed to fill it.

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-11-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

by Ed Skoog

When the grid goes down, and if the apartments
cockatiels chirrup from are shaken down in cuttlebone,
moan more for stripes of afternoon light,
like lawn-chair slats, on freshly-painted drywall,

the last tenants moved out away from sea-fronted
smash of crowds and slooped their wages
now write to them where the Missouri breaks
its bank across the faltering prairie because

yurts have them now to dream within
though most nights when the mind is in its recess
they are back on avenues and avenidas
purchasing cut asters on the corner with change

morning puts the reins back in hands hardened
finally by work, the gathering of reeds along pond reflection
patting down green seedlings in broken clay
and dealing hard with extended possibility.

.

YURT MASTER

2010-11-03T20:19:00.000-07:00

by Matthew Cooperman

tell me what to do, where am I
in this conversation, chiming dawn
again with the local machinery
mimicking lawns, laws, Lowe’s, lulls
which are a symmetry and a blessing
to our people, excellent builders
who source the freight that shines
for those who built the yurt that kept the man
from telling the world what Jack built,
all these nom de plumes, falling sky hawks,
there will be people there fully dismembered,
shut up Jack, the Arun Vale’s a pure white noise
suspension in this guru shit, futures too,
tell me something I don’t know

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-10-29T10:08:00.000-07:00

by Kathleen Ossip

My love is a love
of contraries.

Like 3 women
in a café

ordering tea
then making a play

for the check,
then going off

separately
to meet another 3

friends for dinner,
etc.

my love
is a love

of contraries.
One contrary

is called
The Yurt Master.

He walks
all day, then

plies his trade.
He does

not stay.
When does

he play?
He will not

have tea with me
in a café.

Oh Yurt Master,
try to play

as I have
tried to play.

We compromise.
Here’s a park

not unlike
a windy steppe.

Shall we build
our yurt right here,

(shall we play,
have some tea?)

a Buddhist symbol
at its tip?

Yurt Master,
don’t you agree?

Hello, señor?
Don’t you agree

you play in the
park you pick?

THE YURT MASTER

2010-10-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

by Joshua Corey

It’s a blot, I mean a blurt, on our shared world.
The idea of huts, aged. A woman looks out.
She wears a hat like a hurt, sturdy against the sun.
Riders on the plain of the history of Outer Mongolia.
A trained eye sees more than elephants in a hillside.
But this is not a metaphor. Speak ill of the dead.
A column of soldiers tries to dazzle the eye,
shouting Vive la peignor and combing all night.
Try to find out. Spun, a disk reveals infirmities:
solid objects turn to lines, trace brilliancies
so topography comes plain, and planed.
The little house at the center of the universe
grows chicken legs when it can. The master
gets left behind; sweating, squats on an anthill.
The thunder of hooves. He has no hat.
He squints at the sun and squirts out his juice.
A thousand cuts. A thousand cuts out
the ceiling of my sublime. It’s a parasol,
the yurt. Call like a coin that’s tossed
into midair’s silver sphere. Call it a second sun.
The home that is not one.

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-10-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

by Aaron Belz

Whenever I get shored
I pull the hair out of retarded
children and paste it on the
heads of bald astronauts—
“baldstronauts,” I’ve taken
to calling them. Oh wat:
thaits there monkey suit,
air-proof, not mere human
head! Helmet head!

DER ZWöLFTE JURTENMEISTER

2010-10-18T05:52:00.000-07:00

vom Ron Winkler

vor mir die Steppe: ein Ist, soweit das Auge reicht.

der Eingang zur Jurte erinnert mich
an das Maul meines ersten Pferdes, dem Mutter ein Stückchen
Zucker gab,
als ich zwölf war und meine Kleidung
Sonntag.

ein Staat ohne Grenzen.

Wind streicht kühl um die äußeren Decken: der Winter
holt aus.

er reitet mit Luft in einer anderen Luft.

weitet die Nüstern der Herde. Tiere, in denen das Land
Fleisch geworden ist.

der Himmel.

ein kleines Blau huscht durch die Vaterschicht
aus Wolken.

durchquert mich. eine Silbe aus Licht.

ich spüre die reinste Zwölfheit.

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-10-16T13:40:00.000-07:00

by Molly Brodak

Huge news,

you woke up saying,

and then did nothing for three years.

Awoke later

to mom can I have a diamond gravestone

but can I have a diamond gravestone,

now addressing the whole bus?

A fly bumping along the window,

a coma instead of a day, like

a photograph of you on the bus,

next to me on the bus, asleep;

is this how I normally feel?

you wondered, poached in dreamhood.

She said rhinestone if you’re lucky

ha ha ok, now go back to sleep.

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-10-14T05:40:00.000-07:00

by John Cross

the plywood floor gives gives gives says
the first of the nobler truths says
the crosshatching of darker lighter darker says
charged by the wattage of raccoons’ eyes says
Sally is a formidable archer perched on the shaky canvas says
nothing is terribly wrong about this says
you’re not listening

we keep forgetting more things says
night’s plectrum plunks at the canvas says
its music glares in the door like a devil says
standing in my underwear I stare back says
I’m okay with the animal body says
there’s nothing terribly wrong with this says
you’re not listening

please keep us alive says
the annual freebie day for pancakes says
it was a cover-up in Whisper Valley says
there’s nothing terribly wrong with this says
you’ve no experience in the yurt

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-10-11T20:38:00.000-07:00

by Paul Otremba

I miss the feel of the felt I brushed for shoes, I miss the look of mountains.
I’d wait outside the kitchen tent for the riders to return from the valleys
rubbing the felt between my fingers, which made me think of the horses,
which made the riders kick and laugh, “Oh, silly yurtnoob! Look!
He thinks he can touch a horse.” I would go out some mornings
to the pen and stare into the dark bowls of their eyes, and I’d sing

them the words I’d heard the elder use in the goat pen, his goat-song
I called it. At night, I’d lie inside my hut and think of the mountains
and if only I had a horse the riders would be sorry. In the morning
I’d wake to the goat-song echoing in my head like shouts in the valley,
or so I heard the riders say what happened there. I looked
across the plains toward the mountains and knew the horses

lived where I saw green, like how blood, some say, lives in our arms. The horses
are what I miss most. Not the riders, who got drunk and wanted singing,
they’d call, “Bring in the yurtnoob!” And they’d pretend to be dogs looking
for me, circling and thrashing. They’d crowd over me like mountains,
say, “Sing us that song you sing!” It helped to think about the valleys,
you could hide there. Some nights, they’d dance until morning,

they’d slur, “There’s work to be done, yurtnoob, but not this morning,”
and they’d howl off to the tents, snapping at each other’s legs. The horses
were left to me. They gathered together like clouds over the valleys.
When it was cold, their breath was also like clouds, and my singing
could not reach them. The bowls never made mirrors, like the mountains
the riders say fill up the still lakes. I stood for a long time looking.

I began to dream about those clouds and the empty look
of horse-eyes. I dreamed there was no valley. One morning,
I woke to the riders’ kicks but at first I saw only the mountains
their felt hats made in the sunlight behind them. I thought the horses,
my dream had cursed the horses, but they said, “What is that singing?
The elder wants to know that song you are singing from the valley

of your sleep.” The elder was behind them, his face an impossible valley
to reach. He said, “What is that language?” His face had the look
of clouds gathering, of horse-eyes. “What are those words you sing,
no words like that in our language?” I was afraid to tell him of the morning
I spied on his goat-song. He said, “Sing what you were dreaming.” The horses
could not save me. I sang, and the elder said, “You must go to the mountains.”

The mountains seemed so far away. I didn’t believe the valleys,
I didn’t believe the horses live there. The elder told the riders, “Look”—
morning could not save me—“this is not the yurtnoob singing.”

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-10-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

by Oliver de la Paz

Snow has come to the plains early, and patches of grass
thrust their arms up like cannon brooms. Despite this
the sky is unusually bright with stars—the cold night air
drinks its flask of constellations.
In the narrows
of the mountain pass, a team of dark riders is a sudden ache
growing slowly into a fist as they close the distance.
The once sleeping flocks of sheep are parting before them
like an unhooked blouse.

A clamor of mouths sets the lights
of the yurts on the periphery as the steppes ring with the heavy
percussion of hooves and the shouts of harried men, scurrying
to their bows. The registers of the scouts shear the evening
in two.

The steppes have grown loud with the sounds of war
and the Urals are a heavy apparition. In the hills, torches
descend like the burning wax of a candle.
The lamp in the yurt master’s home has blazed
all morning and evening, illuminating the skins
from within as it dances to the weight of running horses.
The hides curing beneath the fire
sway a little—their hairs slightly singed.

Dried pelts of foxes sway over the entrance
of the emptied quarters while stalactites of bone
chime their hollow discords as the force of the horsemen
rushes past and a hiss of arrows blisters the white hides.

The khan has vanished
in a flourish of animal smoke and fletching burst.
The yurt master’s horses are merely a fume in the light
dusting of winter. The riders dismount, pulling
their arrows from the strung-up skins while the decibels
from a handful of sheep blow the evening into an open eye.

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-10-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

by David Welch

Under the hand, the boy imagined
there lay on the table a secret, or
otherwise an imagination waiting
to be uncovered like a table, dinner
having ended hours ago, the draped
cloth jeweled by the spackled idea
of it, the forks and their many points
cleared, having for hours scavenged
for the mouths, for how
they pursed towards an idea, the glasses
raising like wind in the hands.

The boy did not discuss this.
He imagined the long cloth unspooling
from his tongue, how it would coax
from the ear an understanding,
an invitation. How it would
lay in waiting. In the conversation
around him, the boy found how
the hand might be taken
or otherwise held, and since it was night
and the long sigh of the stars crept
outside above their heads,

and since each night became
a gesture the boy would not remember,
a hand uncovering a moment in sleep
otherwise meant for the eye,
the ear, the mouth and its point
of exit for the word the boy knew
soon to appear against the table,
the weight of the air, the hand,
how it moved then and continued
to move, over and over, as if wind
turning a tent in a field.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-10-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

by G.C. Waldrep

We wrote the tune & then tuned the strings
so tightly the neck of the sitar broke.
It wasn’t like the other time, when the deciduous
laminations of the calendar trees wafted
as ash up the lower reaches of the slopes
toward where the horses stood, bunched up
like heavy flowers. There are only so many
things a body can do with wood, &
most of them involve combustion. Here,
the translucent syrup the radiator is brewing
from the effluent of the abandoned mills.
We breathe every day, is part of the problem,
even when we aren’t exactly making anything
better or worse than anybody might expect.
We use up all this oxygen, which Charles
Sheeler’s wife characterized as half windows,
windows, windows, half rain, rain, rain.
There is something undeniably sentimental
about an old chimney lowering itself into the sea
for the last time, the clouds at half-mast
& all the mysterious ley lines of the trolleys
etched like ransom notes in tightly-wrapped
cakes of soap. I want what you want
is the other part of the problem, which,
coupled with weather, results in more organ
donor failures. Here is my bloodline, & here
is my derelict central business district.
I want what you want: your presumptuous
apparel, your Baba-Yaga filmstrip obsession,
the somehow sensuous craniums of the horses
modeled in bright Plasticine, or at least
as we remember them, as a sort of gallows
the northern tribes went up against, not without
certain lingering reservations, of course,
but with a dignity that befit their lineage.
We wash their old garments with reverence.
Soon the flags will run out, and the fires
we need to make more flags. Take this kindling
& bundle it on your back. Take something
to trade. When you get to the other side,
let them know that we were faithful brethren.
We bound our children’s wounds in gold thread.
We hid our clocks in the color-fast snow.

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-10-02T07:55:00.000-07:00

by Mary Biddinger

After a while the meter maids had nothing left
to mete out. So they cleaned the houses we didn’t have.

It only took a few minutes. There was some kind of end
to the street, and it was radiant, the way my mother

tortured the batter on a greased skillet. Just a tiny kill.
We all became our own prey, until nobody cared.

Shouted at our likenesses in rainwater, arm-wrestled
the creeping vinca and almost beat it. The maids

became made, as in impenetrable. They sold us
our own belongings before we missed them.

We had nothing but our bolts of felt and our rods.
Somebody’s church became firewood, char,

then firewood again when the fire came back.
Our city knew better than to build anything for good.

My flock preferred the brisk anonymity of a drive-by
corn stand. Sometimes I valued far too highly

the circular nature of the roof above. The maids
too short to assemble dwellings such as bungalows.

I lacked a fierce mandible, but compensated.
When moorings tore there was simply nobody else.

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-09-30T04:35:00.000-07:00

by David Dodd Lee

Extemporaneous fidelity, you’re sheik, almost

Like a saint’s dinner but with each lake distinct, calling, calling

Into actual cheeses

I’ve got to get these numbers down

“You big lug, you baboon
It’s the moon, not the dishwasher”

Or the worst kind of provisional thinking

Rain outside the temple

Song after song after song after song after song after song after song

(I can’t stop crying)

Atlantic Records was then audited

We split our wings, and we lost
We lost our wings, and we split

I know for a fact you’ve been horse-kicked

Pitiful, dressed-for-lodging in it, quite psyched-up about it

900 volts

Swans, bridges and mist, people wearing soft white hats

Severe leafburns

Breakers everyone: Out in the night, sinking with your pants flapping out the car window

By the time you read this I will most likely be out of the country

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-09-28T05:22:00.000-07:00

by Amy Newman

As rude dreams go, it's not as bad
as the one when Robert Lowell arrives
and yells at me for failing him.
He yells. He really lets me have it
and he starts to get undressed,
and then he turns, and his glasses...something....
I think he throws his glasses
against a wall. Or he throws a glass of vodka
against that wall.

In some other time, I can imagine him
smiling at something I've said,
but I have let him down.
You always let me down, he says, thinking:
(little comrade,
little tov., tchotchke, love, darling,
sweet one, teiglach and sweet apple,
dove, white girl, feather, bothersome,
oh ye of little shelter, so skinny,)

something so nothing about you,
he says, watching me go
the bees don't even bother to sting.
Stop the car, I say, pull over,
there's something out there,
the sign says: Portland's Best.
The sign says: don't be like that.
There's something over there.

.

THE YURT MASTER

2010-09-26T02:42:00.000-07:00

by John Gallaher

You can destroy your house in many ways. Say
you have this problem or this belief.
The house falls. You sit on the steps maybe
and talk with your father. You sit there a long time
without speaking. Was this a good house?
Did you see how I lifted it? It’s how
one survives pleasure. How I held it
over my head. The goal is not to inhabit
but to inhibit questions we lift from our favorite places
while stunting. Getting into everything.
Call it a problem or a song. Elaborating.
Trying again. Say we’re along the Pacific
without attempting to master or contain it.
We sit on the side of HWY 1. It gives the impression
of hills rising and advancing. There are no subtle
questions when I’m hoping you’ll be
at the house. Cover it in dirt. Cover it
in wanting, how when you turn cause follows effect.
I will lift my house as all plans for museums
are encumbrances. If one holds one’s head
at just the right angle, one can see for several yards
as one walks. And then quickly make a joke. Say
you regret you have but one yurt
to give for your country. But either way
your house is upside down. Your children
come to speak with you as flares of thought
I can’t carry everything I am. Why should I
have thought I could? You’re standing in
for the rest of us and something always falls.
Some desire you didn’t forget. The clock
or the sun across the floor. Some
elaborate theory of movement. Of throwing yourself
in the snow. It’s the song you would
wish to be buried with. And who wouldn’t
want that? Who wouldn’t do anything for that?

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-09-24T17:28:00.000-07:00

by Noah Eli Gordon

True, sunlight was, for a time,
nomadic, if only in our affectionate
rejection of actually having to give it
a name. The more we thought
about it, the more the thought
would recede, condensing elsewhere
and always later on. A candle doesn’t care
about shadows, nor should it,
waiting to leave less of itself
in the same way. But which way was it?
All this talk of illumination and already
the under-lit hallway of self-composure
seems ready to erupt, or, more accurately,
to collapse, although they’re both
insufferable stand-ins for what we were
after—non-picturesque separation,
like stepping purposefully in a puddle
to become saturated with whatever
the world’s put in front of you.
And behind? We don’t look that way
anymore, do we? The door faces only
ever-outward permanence, until that
too, friends, dim constellations, fades.

.

THE YURTMASTER

2010-09-23T23:08:00.000-07:00

by Colin Sheldon

Do the fine thing in the sailboat.

The language is speaking. It says,

Prevail. This much we know:

Anaphylaxis promotes breathing

In small children. It is not

Without charm, we say of Art,

Through the teeth of our manifest

Insecurities. You break it,

We buy it: synthetic corundum,

The chain-link fence. Look,

Egrets in sensuous slow-motion.

That’s your hair burning

In its chronic archetype of sun.

.