Source by Mark Doty
Manhattan: Luminism
The sign said immunology
but I read
illuminology: and look,
heaven is a platinum latitude
over Fifth, fogged result
of sun on brushed
steel, pearl
dimensions. Cézanne:
"We are an iridescent chaos."
•
Balcony over Lexington, May evening,
fog-wreath'd towers,
gothic dome lit from within,
monument of our aspirations
turned hollow, abandoned
somehow. And later, in the florist's window
on Second Avenue, a queen's display
of orchid and fern, lush heap
of dried sheaves, bounty of grasses ...
What's that? Mice
far from any field
but feasting.
•
The sign said
K YS MADE,
but what will op n,
if the locksmith's
lost his vowel
—his entrance,
edge, his means
of egress—
which held together
the four letters
of his trade?
City of consonants,
city of locks,
and he's lost
the E.
•
(A Mirror in the Chelsea Hotel)
Here, where odd old things have come to rest
—a lamp that never meant
to keep on going, a chest
whose tropical veneers
are battered and submissive—
this glass gives the old hotel room
back to itself in a warmer atmosphere,
as if its silver were thickening,
a gathering opacity held here,
just barely giving back ...
This mirror resists what it can,
too weary for generosity.
As if each coming and going,
each visitor turned, one night
or weeks, to check a collar
or the angle of a hat, left some residue,
a bit of leave-taking preserved in mercury.
And now, filled up with all that regard,
there is hardly any room for regarding,
and a silvered fog fills nearly all
the space, like rain: the city's lovely,
crowded dream, which closes you
into itself like a folding screen.
•
Almost nightfall, West 82nd,
and a child falls to her knees
on the cement, and presses
herself against the glass
of the video store,
because she wants to hold her face
against the approaching face,
huge, open, on the poster
hung low in the window,
down near the sidewalk:
an elephant walking toward
the viewer, ears wide to the world.
She cries out in delight,
at first, and her mother
acknowledges her pleasure,
but then she's still there,
kneeling, in silence, and no matter
what the mother does or says
the girl's not moving,
won't budge, though her name's
called again and again.
Could you even name it,
that longing—which suddenly seems
to rule these streets,
as if the underlying principle
of the city had been drawn up
from beneath the pavement
by a girl who doesn't know
any better than to insist
on the force of her wish
to look into the gaze which seems
to go on steadily coming toward her,
though of course it isn't moving at all.
•
I woke in the old hotel.
The shutters were open
in the high, single window;
the light gone delicate, platinum.
What had I been dreaming,
what would become of me now?
There were doves calling,
their three-note tremolo
climbing the airshaft
—something about the depth
of that sound, where it reaches in you,
what it touches. You've been abraded,
something exchanged or given away
with every encounter, on the street,
the train, something of you lost
to the bodies that unnerved you,
in the station, streaming ahead,
everyone going somewhere certain
in the randomly intersecting flow
of our hurry, until you could be anyone,
in the furious commingling...
But now you're more awake, aren't you,
and of course these aren't doves,
not in the middle of Manhattan;
a little harsher, more driven,
these pigeons, though recognizable
still in the pulse of their throats
the threnody of their kind, rising
to you or to that interior ear
with which you are always listening,
in the great city, where things are said
to no one, and everyone, and still
it's the same... You were afraid
you were edgeless, one bit
of light's indifferent streaming,
and you are—but in a way you also
are singled out, are, in the old sense,
a soul, because you have heard
the thrilling, deep-entering rumple
and susurrus of the birds, and now
a little cadence of sun in motion
on the windowsill's bricked edge,
where did it come from?
Moving with the same ripple... As if,
audible in the ragged yearning,
visible in this tentative assertion of sun
on the lip of a window in Chelsea,
is a flake of that long waving
long ago lodged in you. All this light
traveled aeons to become 23rd Street,
and a hotel room in the late afternoon
—the singular neon outside already
warm and quavering and you in it,
sure now, because of the song
being delivered to you, dealt to you
like an outcome, that there is
something stubborn in us
—does it matter how small it is?—
that does not diminish.
What is it? An ear, a wave?
Not our histories or who we love
or certainly our faces, which dissolve
even as were living. Not a bud
or a cinder, not a seed
or a spark: something else:
obdurate, specific, insoluble.
Something in us does not erode.
***
Paul's Tattoo
The flesh dreams toward permanence,
and so this red carp noses from the inked dusk
of a young man's forearm as he tilts
the droning burin of his trade toward
the blank page of my dear one's biceps
—a scene framed, from where I watch,
in an arched mirror, a niche of mercuried glass
the shape of those prosceniums in which still lifes
reside, in cool museum rooms: tulips and medlars,
oysters and snails and flies on permanently
perishing fruit: vanitas. All is vanitas,
for these two arms—one figured, one just beginning
to be traced with the outline of a heart—
are surrounded by a cabinet of curiosities,
the tattooist's reflected shelves of skulls
—horses, pigs?—and photos of lobes and nipples
shocked into style. Trappings of evil
unlikely to convince: the shop's called 666,
a casket and a pit bull occupy the vestibule,
but the coffins pink and the hellhound licked
our faces clean as the latex this bearded boy donned
to prick the veil my lover's skin presents
—rent, now, with a slightly comic heart,
warmly ironic, lightly shaded, and crowned,
as if to mean feeling's queen or king of any day,
certainly this one, a quarter-hour
suddenly galvanized by a rippling electric trace
firing adrenaline and an odd sense of limit
defied. Not overcome, exactly; this artist's
filled his shop with evidence of that.
To what else do these clean,
Dutch-white bones testify?
But resistant, still, skin grown less subject
to change, ruled by what is drawn there:
a freshly shadowed corazón
now heron-dark, and ringed
by blue exultant bits of sweat or flame—
as if the self contained too much
to be held, and flung out droplets
from the dear proud flesh
—stingingly warm—a steadier hand
has raised into art, or a wound,
or both. The work's done,
our design complete. A bandage,
to absorb whatever pigment
the newly writ might weep,
a hundred guilders, a handshake, back out
onto the street. Now all his life
he wears his heart beneath his sleeve.
***
Source
Id been traveling all day, driving north
—smaller and smaller roads, clapboard houses
startled awake by the new green around them—
when I saw three horses in a fenced field
by the narrow highway's edge: white horses,
two uniformly snowy, the other speckled
as though he'd been rolling in flakes of rust.
They were of graduated sizes
—small, medium, large— and two stood
to watch while the smallest waded
in a shallow pond,
tossing his head and taking
—it seemed unmistakable—delight
in the cool water around his hooves
and ankles. I kept on driving, I went into town
to visit the bookstores and the coffee bar,
and looked at the new novels
and the volumes of poetry, but all the time
it was horses I was thinking of,
and when I drove back to find them
the three companions left off
whatever it was they were playing at,
and came nearer the wire fence—
I'd pulled over onto the grassy shoulder
of the highway—to see what I'd brought them.
Experience is an intact fruit,
core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open,
entered, it can't be the same, can it?
Though that is the dream of the poem:
as if we could look out
through that moment's blushed skin.
They wandered toward the fence.
The tallest turned toward me;
I was moved by the verticality of her face,
elongated reach from the ear-tips
down to white eyelids and lashes,
the pink articulation
of nostrils, wind stirring the strands
of her mane a little to frame the gaze
in which she fixed me. She was the bold one;
the others stood at a slight distance
while she held me in her attention.
Put your tongue to the green-flecked
peel of it, reader, and taste it
from the inside: Would you believe me
if I said that beneath them a clear channel
ran from the three horses to the place
they'd come from, the cool womb
of nothing, cave at the heart
of the world, deep and resilient and firmly set
at the core of things? Not emptiness,
not negation, but a generous, cold nothing:
the breathing space out of which new shoots
are propelled to the grazing mouths,
out of which horses themselves are tendered
into the new light. The poem wants the impossible;
the poem wants a name for the kind nothing
at the core of time, out of which the foals
come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming,
and into which the old crumple, fetlock
and skull breaking like waves of foaming milk ...
Cold, bracing nothing, which mothers forth
mud and mint, hoof and clover, root-hair
and horse-hair and the accordion bones
of the rust-spotted little one unfolding itself
into the afternoon. You too: you flare
and fall back into the necessary
open space. What could be better than that?
It was the beginning of May,
the black earth nearly steaming,
and a scatter of petals decked the mud
like pearls, everything warm with setting out,
and you could see beneath their hooves
the path they'd traveled up, the horse-road
on which they trot into the world, eager for pleasure
and sunlight, and down which they descend,
in good time, into the source of spring.
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Day 27: A cemetery full of dead, dry flowers as if all the plots have been forgotten, some of the stones cracked or sinking into the dirt.
Finishing out the last few days of the October event by the RPCDev Discord.
After a majority of the snow had been plowed or melted away, Darcy, perhaps against her better judgment, decided to play the part of tourist and visit the memorials put up either by the city or SI around town to commemorate the people she knew. The one at Grand Central Station caused a lump to form in her throat that stayed with her all the way to the entrance to Stark--now Avengers--Tower.
There was a tour group gathering in the lobby that she could see from the sidewalk, in front of a memorial wall detailing Tony’s life and eventual sacrifice. It was flanked by a pair of large vases--the size of two of the preteens in the group--with elegantly arranged flora. Undoubtedly Pepper’s doing.
Darcy swallowed hard and did an about face to go back up Lexington Ave to the florist’s shop she had passed, wiping furiously at her leaky eyes with her sleeve cuff at the memory of her friend and former boss.
In a highly unlikely turn of events, the florist had a Japanese spider lily in an elegant little pot that was probably more than a little overpriced. But she also figured it was fitting for the man and Pepper would appreciate it.
She paid for the little plant before trekking back to the Tower, smiling and nodding at the same receptionists she used to pass by every day going to work upstairs in Tony’s labs. It should’ve come as no surprise, then, that Happy stepped off an elevator and met her with a sad smile and a long overdue hug, careful not to crush the plant between them.
“Been a long time,” a beat before a proud, “Doctor. You finally reconsider Pepper’s offer for lab space and funding?”
She shook her head ever so slightly. “You and I both know how hard it would be.” She glanced towards the memorial wall, pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn’t just Tony’s name and life story presented, but the names of several people--some she recognized as SI employees who’d been casualties during the Chitauri invasion.
She sniffed and held out the bright red lily to Happy, “I came....I guess to pay my respects?” It sounded weird even to her own ears. “Or I guess to work through my own stuff since I kinda threw myself into work with no time for healing from the last few years. But it felt wrong to come empty-handed, so I guess this is for Pep. I have no idea how to take care of it, but I got it from the florist on Lex so I’m sure they could troubleshoot any issues.”
He accepted the delicate looking plant with both hands cradling the porcelain pot and a solemn little smile. “Do you want to see her? She’s actually in the office today, while Morgan’s at school.” Darcy shook her head, feeling more brittle and exposed than she had in months ever since Jane, the lump she had fought off while weaving in and out of pedestrians climbing its way back into her throat.
“I’d love to see her but I’d get snot all over her Chanel, and SHIELD doesn’t pay me enough to afford the dry cleaning we all know I’d insist on paying for,” she laughed in spite of herself. “Just send her my love? Oh, and my thanks for the SI generator in my mom’s building. Saved all our butts from freezing last night.”
She hugged Happy tightly, mindful of the last minute offering, but desperate for the connection with someone who understood the weight of the sadness she felt whenever she thought of Tony.
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In a local business, how do I rank a keyword?
You first got to know which search queries are helping people find your business.
Optimizing your website is going to be a way easier task once you recognize the keywords you’re ranking for. you'll then focus your efforts on other relevant keywords.
For instance, if your bakery shop is already ranking well for [bakery shop Lexington], you'll get to figure out other search terms. you'll divert your attention to ranking for searches like [Lexington bakery] or [best bakery in Lexington].
By improving your search results for other related phrases, you increase your reach to more potential customers.
Picking Local Keywords to Use
Google has been working toward producing more localized search results.
A few years ago, search engines would yield equivalent results for people running an equivalent search in Arizona as they might in California.
Today, Google takes a more local-first approach when ranking search results. It favors businesses with an area listing in proximity to the person conducting the search.
That means local businesses should be ready to rank for far more competitive and generic queries with local intent, like [bakery] or [florist].
However, local businesses still face a high level of competition for fewer spaces.
It’s called the Local 3-pack.
And it's like this on an inquiry engine results page (SERP):
Getting your local SEO game on point is an absolute priority if you would like to nab one among those top three spots.
1. Leverage Industry Keywords
Your objective is to spot commonly used phrases that folks will use to look for your business.
The first step is identifying words or phrases people use when describing your products or services.
Put yourself in their shoes. attempt to believe what they might type in search engines to seek out a business like yours.
Brainstorm and compile an inventory of local keywords and phrases that are relevant to your industry.
This list forms the essential foundation of your main keyword research.
For instance, as a bakery, your list may contain terms like:
Baguettes.
Wedding cakes.
Pastries.
Desserts.
2. Use Keyword Modifiers
The next step to finding the proper local keywords is to develop modifiers that folks will use in their searches.
Modifiers include words that will be wont to describe an occasion, a quality, a kind of product, or other associable words.
Examples include words like:
Weddings.
Best.
Lilies.
One-day delivery.
For a florist, meaning phrases like funeral wreaths, wedding bouquets, exotic flowers, best florists, etc.
3. Research Local Keywords
You want to spot keywords for your local SEO that pertain to your geographic location.
Consider the varied locations and areas you service and where your customers are from.
If you've got a delivery service, then include those area names, counties, cities, etc., in your blog posts and site content.
People tend to seem for businesses near them first. Account for where your audience lives or works when picking these local keywords.
For instance, the florist may target keywords like:
Best florist in Durham.
Exotic flower shops within the RDU area.
Florist near Hillsboro Road, Durham.
The tips above provide an excellent starting line for increasing your search rankings! That said, there's such a lot more you'll do beyond these essentials to enhance your site’s performance even further. By partnering with an experienced SEO agency like Brandingsavior, you'll cash in on those strategies more.
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