Here we go again.

This first poem is a continuation of my poem "losses" from the last post. the second is what happens when a recovering Catholic reflects. The third is what happens when a recovering catholic gets drunk.


15. The old man is monkeying around
Under the hood and the sun
and mom
Is reading a book aloud
About a family that adopts a whitetail fawn.
They eventually have to tie pink ribbons
To its antlers
To show the hunters why this animal is unafraid
Why it would be foolish to shoot it
And one day it does not walk into the yard
Out of the dark woods.
Mom pauses and looks out the window into the pines
We hear the wind and our breathing
And the old man’s colorful language
And the ticking of the overheated engine.
Someday we will have a car that is dependable.
That will be a sad day.

16. A loon followed the boat
Watching every cast as if the lure
Were a new animal
It could learn to love
Something
worth building a nest
on a waterlogged stump for
Something
It could greet the sun with
Something
That would not go away.


18. seventeen fell before the invading hordes
And perished in the mud of history
Choking on the blood and bone
Of its shattered existence.
This lack of voice is its power
And its legacy.
A warm blanket covering its sixteen predecessors .
This is its being and its nothingness.

19. the gravel crunches under the tires
As I pull the car into the turn-off
And I hear the gulls screaming from down the bluff.
This dune country holds white and red pines
By their spidery roots
Until the water and wind exposes enough
Of the wooden labyrinth to upend them.
This is the building of the mountains of sand.
The dead and bleached bones of trees
Catching and holding and rising.
I look out past the pines into lake Michigan
And watch the burn of the sun
On the sharp whitecaps that break the deep green horizon.
US-2 will carry me out of the state of my birth
Into the nation of my exile.

20. this snowshoe hare shrieks like a child
For a slaughtered moment.
Redskin potatoes, baby carrots, yellow onions,
Rutabaga, cracked black peppercorns,
A half-dozen large cloves of garlic,
Three-quarters cup of water,
And a single bay leaf,
Will soften the animal’s pain
As its life becomes more life
As its body becomes my body.

21. what if the iceberg were not bigger under the water?
What then would we fear out on the high seas?
The truly serious lack of ice would force
The sailors into stories of giant squid out for the blood
Of the virginal.
That is what the unseen mass of ice would become.
The blood of the pure, innocent, and ignorant.

22. the arm he held her with is no more.
It went missing on a hot june day in the back meadows.
Fields full of alfalfa and clover
And sporadic patches of milkweed
That was grown to fill the life vests
Of soldiers during world war two.
The arm he held her with was torn from him
In a field that saved ten thousand lives
Seventy-years ago.
The man he was is looked for
Everyday
By the woman she has become.

23. tonight I sleep on the floor
Next to a man from cinncinnati
And across from a loud woman
On her way to san diego.
This train stops in cleveland
Not cinncinnati.
I fear for my neighbor.
I always do.






“on being raised knowing a wealthy god”
How many earthworms
have I killed
By opening this ground
To the winter-starved robins?

How many neighborhood cats
have I fed
By starting this garden
And inviting
those orange-bellied birds ?
Everything must eat
And I will thank the dead
While I savor the tomatoes
From this holy place.

This is the suffering of guilt
And the atomic structure of truth.



“zen”
I stole tulips from under beaumont tower for my mother.
They were gifts to the university from the queen of holland.
My mother admired them on her last visit to campus
And our scholars had more than one-hundred thousand.
Fifteen would not be missed.
They were dug up on a warm april evening
And put in a backpack next to a half-empty
Half-full
Fifth of jameson.
The moon showed its full fat face
And lit my efforts.
After I had pilfered the royal goods
I sat beneath the tower
And toasted the moon
and all the queens.
My mother loves those tulips
And the story
Of their origin.
A quality sin i say.

Trains, Writers, A Moving Truck, And One Pissed Off Panda.

I have been out and about quite a bit in the last month. I took my second train escapade to Washington and Philadelphia and found the whole mode of rail travel to be built especially for me. I remember when the Detroit & Mackinac line was still running and I would see those trains come through and think, fairly seriously, about chasing one down and seeing where I would end up. It is likely for the best that I did not act on that impulse because I would have ended up in either Detroit or Mackinac and while both of those places have, relatively speaking, very redeeming qualities they would not have lived up to the romantic notions that I had nurtured.

Rail travel is an excellent catalyst for a romantic. I guessed at the lives of my fellow riders. I imagined the train falling off the tracks in the middle of the Allegheny mountains and into the Allegheny or Monogahela Rivers and floating the rest of the way. I watched trains like those I grew up with pass us by full of cattle, pigs, coal, iron ore, scrap steel, and chemicals I do not even want to guess at. I spoke to a nurse from Baltimore who hated her job and wanted to just stay home and teach her daughter. I spoke to a man who sells skyscrapers to anyone interested in buying one. He was on his way to close a billion dollar sale in Chicago. Apparently that is the general asking price for these imposing monsters of steel and concrete and glass. I watched a domestic dispute over an extremely expensive shooter made of two-parts vodka and one-part gin. This particular drink caused me quite a bit of distress for a while, not from drinking it, but from imagining anyone else drinking it.

Both Union Station in Washington and 30th Street Station in Philadelphia are wonderful pieces of historical architecture. Any of you who know me well can picture the scene: I am standing in the middle of a throng of people staring up at the ceilings of these gorgeous depots trying to figure out the designs and knocking over folks in my own special and clumsy way.

To make a long story short I helped Rachel move her stuff from Philly to DC over the weekend so the initial journey was from South Bend to Washington to Philadelphia to Lederach which is a nice solid twenty-four hours of travel. We spent a full day filling the truck and then had a surprisingly uneventful drive from Lederach back to Washington on I-95. With the help of a half-dozen fine people we were able to unload the truck in one/sixteenth the time it took to fill it. Yay for fine people!!!

Rachel's apartment is in the Mount Pleasant area and just across Rock Creek from the National Zoo which was my commute everyday to the American Writers and Publishers Conference. I saw an elephant playing with a squirrel, a gorilla demolish a pile of snow, and I made a panda angry with my constant questions and comments. Pandas are a bit uppity and do not care to converse all that much. I saw a male lion knock a cub tumbling over some rocks. I watched a tiger watch me and knew I looked delicious. There was much more but instead of telling the stories I would simply suggest that you all get yourselves to a zoo soon and keep your eyes open. Things will happen, as they do, in all kinds of spectacular ways.

Writers are an odd lot. I met some decent people and made some good contacts that I hope to keep working with for a long time. I knocked over Joyce Carol Oates. I heard some lovely poetry and had some strange discussions. I talked to more publishers than I could have even guessed existed. I drank whiskey sours, some good and some bad, in the bar where Langston Hughes used to work and where he passed a couple of his poems to Vachel Lindsay under a glass of wine while serving that cranky Russian. Interestingly I had no idea Hughes had worked there until I got back to South Bend and received a book from the lovely Rachel telling me this bit of literary history. It seems like something that might be shared with writers at a writers conference. I guess not.

I had many excellent walks in Washington with people from many different universities, publishing houses, and by myself, but the best ones were always with Rachel who knows the city well and likes to share her knowledge with me.

All of this said I have been writing, of course, about Washington quite a bit recently. I am thinking of turning it into a one-hundred poem project. Here are the first three. Be well friends.




The washington poems


"epiphanies & epochs"
A moment like that when the sun
Shines as the rain falls

heavy. Or when your mother finds
the porn under the bed

and cannot look you in the face
without laughing

and you know what she is laughing
about because she stole one

and left it on the coffee table next to
a good housekeeping.

There are moments that exist outside of themselves.
Like walking through the national zoo

And watching a one and a half-ton asian elephant
Playing games

With a black phase grey squirrel
And it is easily noticeable

That these two have been friends for
Quite some time.

Your mother would giggle and wink
At this.




“such certainty”
They whitewash the apartments to rid them of their history
But sometimes they forget to patch the holes
And we can see where the wineglass
Hit the wall
After missing the ducking head
During a discussion about healthcare policy
For theoretical people
In maine or texas.

I make up stories about the scratch on the floor
Where a drunken intern for senator so and so
Slid naked on a saddleback chair
All the while trying to not upset the two bottles of malbec
Balanced on the palm of each hand.

The outlet under the bed was broken after both occupants returned from work
With guatemalean fighting cocks under their arms
A strange but not unheard of coincidence
And the birds became indignant
And fought to a feathery death.
The winner dying later in the evening from horrific wounds
Suffered while being cleaned for dinner
The loser expiring after being thrown into the wall
And sticking a spur into
One hundred-twenty volts of pepco.

Did the others discuss cookware?
She was right about what I have said about non-stick surfaces
But I often forget what I say.
No harm done.




"the farmer's kitten and the cooper's hawk"
The police look on
But do nothing
About the man sleeping in a box
On the steps leading to the senate side
Of the capital.
I wonder at their thoughts.
Do they judge or suffer for him?

Likewise there is a cooper’s hawk
In the main reading room of the library of congress.
It is like the one I saw in the barn chasing a tawny kitten
After a third cutting of decepit hay
On a mid-august morning.
It did not seem to want to hurt the tiny thing
Just the chase was enough.

The experts believe this particular raptor
followed a rat or pigeon through an open door.
There is no sign of the vermin.
Experts are known to be wrong.

There is the chance that this hawk saw
A door with shadows
And possibilities within
Like a hopper window
With the curtains blowing into another life unknown
And it just said “fuck it, let us see what we can see.”
And it exercised its rights
Like the guy sleeping in the box.

The police should escort him to the library.
they should let him settle
next to the Gutenberg
that cost as much as a block of rowhouses
in adams-morgan.
it should be his manifest destiny.

Open the doors that I paid for
And let this man
And all the hawks
And rats and pigeons
Tawny kittens and tired farmers
and adams-morgan hipsters
in.

let us all in
and we can see
what we can see
and that should be
just enough.

Back from hiatus.

It has been a hectic, sad, and wonderful time for the last month. I am pleased to say that there are plenty of grand goings on, errr, going on. I have spent some quality time in New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Northern Michigan, a train through the mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I have drank and danced and played and written and thought and loved and been loved quite nicely over the past bit of time. It makes for difficulties in trying to post updates on this thing. I remain very busy but have decided to pick this all back up and give it another run. I appreciate those of you, my good and kind friends, who care enough to bother me about such things. I wish you all well and will try to be more timely. Again.

Here are some poems I have been working on. They are all still in progress but they have been finished enough so that you can get the gist fairly easily.



“losses”
1. It can be as small as a key
Or a lucky coin, rabbit’s foot, phone number
On a napkin.
It can be the leaves dropping from the maples along the street
Or the opening of the ice on the bay.
Burying a dog
has sometimes brought more suffering than
Burying an angry man
who happened to share my blood.
I remember
the white ponies that burned in the barn
The black bones.
Thinking
This used to be one thing and is now another.
No certainty
as to what was removed
and what gained.

2. This café is going somewhere
And they are holding the secret close.
The view of the bad traffic pattern
will soon be gone.
It has been a comfortable and dark cave
Where many worthy projects were born
friends and lovers laughed and talked
It had done well, as cafes go, successful.
There has always been, to me, confusion
As to what success actually is.

The landlord was angered by the politics
There was no reason given but this is the one inferred
And rightly so.
This place pays for itself
By itself
In a dead sea of commerce and ambition without soul,
Without thought.
It is too real for this particular reality.
All of the good things are.

3. There is a canadian geologist living in sweden
And an american biologist in france,
A Michigan painter in iowa city
A government aid worker from philadelphia
A sad poet in south bend
And this is what travel gets you:
Movement and missing parts.

4. A weathered piece of paper on the light pole
Surrounded by the tacks of former occupants
Shows what may be a dog,
Maybe a cat,
At least something in the mode of a pet
That disappeared
On a wet and grey day a month before
When a man stood in his front doorway
Coffee in hand
looking out at the bouncing pebbles of water
a slight body brushed past his pajama clad leg
Never to be seen again.

5. This song reminds this girl of that boy
And she moves her head back and forth
Without meaning to
Forgetting that she hates him.

6. Under a crooked stack of books
Is found the one
that was read
during he death of the woman
who fed him,
Cleaned him, loved him, built him.
It was about a crazed sea captain
His crew and a terribly angry whale
Of an unnatural color.
Finding the book made the coffins
Explode to the surface
Open
And allow life
Once again.

7. The chickadee looked at the feeder
And was saddened by the fact
That the squirrels had been the earliest
Visitors to this once perfect place.

8. A mechanic of the brain
Told him a lie
About how things would go back
To what they were.
Money was exchanged for bad theories
And the only normalcy to come
Was the setting of the western sun.

9. A thousand words are shown to her
And she acts as if she remembers
But
Actually
Her history is at odds with the facts
And if
In the evening
She could remember her dreams
She would know this.
Her invented nightmares seem to overpower
Her blessed existence.
Nothing gets better.
She will not let it because there is excitement
In the fictional foundations of her pain.
Happiness is
To her
The most boring of trends.
She would even argue
with the smile in the photograph
Just to make sure it never happened again.

10. As the soul left the fox
Did it ask the question:
“have I lived my life the right way?”
Or
just let out that one last reluctant breath
And cease the worries of its hard life?
Neither question
Stops the wind and rain from bringing down the mountains.

11. That thing that made me jump out of bed
Every day and run from moment to moment
Without worry.
That thing that made me smile at the barn cats
Chasing one another through the shadows
In loft that always had the smell
of july.
That thing that made me take someone at their word
And believe that their mean ways were
Simple mistakes.
That time before my brain cracked my skull
And invaded that fine world.
Here I sit knowing exactly what I want to say
And hating it.

12. A woodcut of clean light through
White pine branches
That I disrespected enough
To put a cup on
And one drop of coffee ran slowly down
The side to create a bronze circle
In the sky
Of the setting or rising sun.
It was given away against my wishes
And now I only see this outline of thought.
I sometimes spill coffee
With the hope that I can rebuild
The beauty
That the dark liquid will grow a tree
And the light
Of the most ambiguous of times.

13. When I did not drink
I was a terrible bastard
And the most judgmental fool I knew.
We must never fear the bottle
For it is the best of friends.
It kills the bastard
And throws away the gavel
And makes us all grow up a little.
Leave the keys on the table
Empty a bottle or two
On a walk through the city
Along the river
Or into the trees.
Commune with that which is hidden
By ugly sobriety.

14. the radio was not always this painful.
It used to play merle, waylon, Johnny, willie,
Some paycheck.
Now we have the travesty of modern twang.
An evil imitation without the busted bones and bruises.
Even the steel of the guitar is tempered.









"routine"

A dusting of hoarfrost on the leaves
Of the maples and oaks
The branchs look like glass
And the cold morning wind
Rattles them without tone
In gorgeous perfection.

I am reminded of a late October morning
When I awoke to the same
Scene
In a different play.
I went to water the horses
And on the trough’s thin skin of ice
Stood a single chickadee
Moving along with the breeze.
A tiny black and grey figure skater
Not concerned by the audience
Consisting of a boy and three Belgian’s.
The horses were waiting patiently
For the bird to finish its routine
And I looked to hills ten miles north
Thinking
“I hope I never forget this”
And here
In this city
With sirens and gunshots and angry yells
Exists trees wrapped in frozen water
Making sounds
Like a small bird full of life.
there is a healthy world under the thin skin
of this place.






“two short stories: a critique”
In the Pretrushevskaya story “The Arm”
the pilot tells the colonel not to be concerned
by the appearance of his decrepit plane
the stump of flesh
that used to be his navigator
or the smell of cooked meat.
“I had a small crash on the way here.”
And the colonel accepts this with military grace.

Murakami’s “The Folklore Of Our time”
is resplendent with outward success
smothering inner turmoil.
The pain of popularity is thrown in the face of the judgmental
and ignorant.
The golden boy never gets his angelic other
although she promises herself to him after she becomes betrothed to another.
They try but they fail
look lovely in their suffering.


the end.








"there is no moderation"

On my travels of the morning
The leaves of three trees
Through some happy circumstance
Found their way to me.

The leaf of the cottonwood was large and rough as a farmer’s hand
But a muted yellow that gentled it
Making it sweet and comfortable
As if the farmer were holding his daughter
After some disappointment or heartbreak
That he knew would pass
But felt her pain all the same

The oak leaf
Fell on me like a stone thrown
By some angry youth who knows not the damage that can be done.
It was a crisp brown
The loss of life was the loss of color.
It was an atheist leaf
holding out for existence but not for death.
The end was the end.

Finally a dainty and serrated river birch leaf
That seemed made of copper and gold
Found its way onto my leg.
Of the three
it should have been the quickest to blow away from me
But it seemed anchored
As if it were a part me
It seemed to have a more serious weight than that of the other two.
It was the runt that held firm to be respected.
The small birch leaf
Was the one that made me
Truly happy.
It fought to be.
it made itself important.
It was a small leaf
But it was also a painting
And a book
And many thoughts
Flowing
From the bending tree
In the wind and the sun
Its brothers and sisters floated on the river
To other lives
To the lakes
To the cities
To the everywhere
While this one traveled with me
Telling me its powerful little philosophy
In a quiet but noble voice.

Yes, it is true. I am still doing this thing.

It must be said that a few close friends have been pushing for more content here. A wonderfully loud Canadian Geologist living in Sweden at the moment and a grand and heartsick Biologist living in France. I find it interesting that the world travelers are the ones with time enough to complain to me about posting. I love complaint so I appreciate and applaud their efforts. To all my friends, not just the lucky globetrotters, I say this: life is terribly hectic but there must, must always be time enough for art and creation. If we lose our creativity then we lose our sense of worth. We become drones and automatons without any real understanding of self. It is good to have friends that will kick you in the ass when you need it. Sorry if I Have not given you guys anything interesting recently. I will try to be better.


THE ROAD AND THE END

I SHALL foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.
I shall foot it
In the silence of the morning,
See the night slur into dawn,
Hear the slow great winds arise
Where tall trees flank the way
And shoulder toward the sky.

The broken boulders by the road
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
I shall watch for
Slim birds swift of wing
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
Drive the wild processionals of rain.

The dust of the traveled road
Shall touch my hands and face.

Carl Sandburg




"From One Who Stays"

How empty seems the town now you are gone!
A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls
Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls
Eery, distorted, as it long had shone
On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone.
The whir of motors, stricken through with calls
Of playing boys, floats up at intervals;
But all these noises blur to one long moan.
What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange
That other men still go accustomed ways!
I hate their interest in the things they do.
A spectre-horde repeating without change
An old routine. Alone I know the days
Are still-born, and the world stopped, lacking you.

AMY LOWELL







“knowing the field”
this morning begins with a ceiling of cedar
panels and my eye tracing the knots
thinking
of how much is too much to drink
and coming to no conclusions.

i remember a bad rock band preceded by a much better jukebox
that played merle, willie, and hank
over and over
a girl
with what seemed to be a bandana for a shirt
she was with a biker
who looked and sounded the part
but his hands were soft.

the best guess
being he was a lawyer
when the expensive chromed motorcycle was taken into consideration.

we had spent the early morning
under the orange and pink eastern sky
cutting hay
windrowing it
into straight and fragrant lines that stretched
twenty acres.
the dogs
ran behind us
chasing the rabbits that were confused
by the change of landscape.
we drank
well-water from gallon jugs.
sweet on our dry lips under the growing sun
and the smell of the first cutting
on our darkened skins
keeping us solid and in our easy places.

at night the coyotes
leave the swamp
to play in this moon drenched field.
the rabbits would hide in the tall alfalfa
watching.

they must learn to run today
rather than hide.
pound the blood through their delicate veins
so that it may not spill.

while the rabbits educate themselves
the farmers drink too much under neon
and dance in their heavy boots
leaving a dry mud mosaic on the floor.

artists in all of the important ways
seeing patterns
in the work, the fields, the jukebox
and the knots of the cedar.


Lawrence Scott Parkinson







From HENRY FOOL:


Henry lifts up one of Simon's newly acquired classics...

HENRY
And look, if you're gunna read
Wordsworth you've gotta get a more
up-to-date edition. This odoriferous
tome you're so attached to doesn't
even have all fourteen books of the
Prelude. And you need notes.
Commentary. I'll go to the library
and find you the best edition they
have.

SIMON
Thank you, but that's OK. I'll stop
there on my way back from work. Well,
yes, maybe not today, but, you know,
tomorrow, probably.

HENRY
Quit.

SIMON
My job?

HENRY
Yeah.

SIMON
Why?

HENRY
You need time to write, Simon. To
study. To reflect.

SIMON
But I like my job.

HENRY
We all have to make sacrifices. A
vocation like ours, Simon, is not a
nine to five thing. You can't put a
fence around a man's soul. We think
and feel where and when we can think
and feel. We are the servants of our
muse and we toil where she commands.





“description is like fencing a soul”
do not talk to me of sacrifice you lazy bastard
you beautiful and interesting lazy bastard.
i know nothing of your imprisonment but judge you all the same.

that is what we are. Judges of everything different from us.
Judges without history without crucial information
with misplaced hearts like filthy coinage stuck in worn down broken sofas

strung along the streets of some third-rate college town.
you want to fix that heart? then you reach between those cushions
and we will go from there.

only the desperate do of course. those who need Schlitz
and pool funds. those who need to find something,
anything , just to continue.

every so often a homer or hesiod rears up a disturbed voice
sometimes an ovid answers with a different tone
and a discussion commences

but mostly it is more of a bly. loud and interesting for a moment
but too heavyhanded to live very long in another head.
a frightened mind born


of a little knowledge with no direction. Structured more on chaos
theory than any sense of form. enough bullets fired find
the mark. eventually.

let us for a moment, my simon, think of you and while thinking
of you let us also paint into this picture that other bane
of humanity, jesus.

absentee father. misunderstood to a dangerous fault. portrayed
as quite sexless. a solitary dead-end job. crucified
and apparently risen.

You could be brothers, my simon, but he did not have me to guide
his way through the philistines. If anything i
am the mary Magdalene

character but instead of washing your feet I will bathe your mind
and cleanse you of your impure self-doubt and
show you how to love.

Where does one go from yahweh’s child? vonnegut of course.
sacrifice, my simon, does not just mean
one thing only, alone.


it is a process and gathering of many outcomes eventually becoming
loss. Sometimes it goes unnoticed by the one giving
up the ghost, so to speak.

could you imagine walking into a slaughterhouse in beautiful Dresden
then walking out, alive, surrounded by an allied
kristalnacht?

the sacrifice then was of the soul and born of that suffering was a
fractured multi-dimensional account of the
good guys doing bad things.

growth, in other words, my simon. growth from the soil that was
tended by an enemy and a friend. These two
things are the same.

these psycho-philosophical meanderings have put me in mind of
the russians. not those of kubrick infamy but
the originators

gogol and his self-loathing mixed with dostoyevsky’s bleak
brushstroke and chekhov’s mostly
rhetorical questioning.


these men knew sacrifice and called it life. They understood this
disease well. What a grandiose
illness it is,

my simon , to be afflicted by the expansion of the lungs in unison
with a mind unfettered by the
shackles of normalcy

like a slave freed by a mere thought. this is power that no bomb nor
war nor trial of man can
tear asunder.

mark these words as true, my simon, that even as we shit,
you and i, we are beyond
the ordinary. well beyond.

we sit at the right hand of fyodor and drink from a cup offered to
us by homer himself who is closer
to our jesus .

it matters not if we are from st. petersburg or athens or south bend.
what does mean something is where we find
ourselves eventually.


we have to travel the right paths, my simon, or we become lost and
simple. the curse of the garbage man
is simplicity

and a tight schedule. It is a necessity to gather the trash but it is
not our necessity. In fact we can live
in filth and must

to understand qualification. This is good and this is bad and this is
somewhere in between like an
over-ripe orange.

our place in this world, my simon, is to witness and then describe
with crystalline clarity at times the
absolute junk

while, at other times, we must show the most gorgeous series of
events with a single word. this
is our test

to know what to sacrifice and when.


Lawrence Scott Parkinson






“A good-sized hate for the boat-tailed grackle”
I used to sleep poorly
Because I was sure the devil
Was beneath my bed.
You cured that with your simple presence.
I could hear you breath and dream
And knew then
That it was safe for me to do the same.

I awoke to chores and you helped feed the cattle
And the overbred horses would stamp out their frustration
In staccato code against the bottom rail of the corral
Until we poured the oats into the trough.
They purred like barn-cats then.
This fascinated you.

You stood at my side as the hay caught fire
The jumping flames
And the screams and the smell
Like where the devil really lived.
That night I prayed that he was back under my bed
So we could have it out
For what he did
For those he stole.


I told you to leave and you did
And I closed my eyes challenging
the black angel
But he had other appointments
Instead
I rode bareback the bay
Through a clover -field under fresh cotton and sapphire.
I had on the boots we could never afford.
I was followed by tawny mourning-doves
And cardinals dripping scarlet
And out of every lost feather grew a red-oak.
I dug my hands into the black wire mane
And felt the equine history overshadow my own
The power I used and took for granted
Was bleeding up through my arms defying
Gravity and other laws that we will name
Without ever really comprehending
Behind me a sound
Of tearing muscle
The ripping of flesh
And beyond the tragic doves
Beyond the cardinals shedding their souls
Beyond the now tall and massive oaks
A blackness condensed on the horizon
Like a harsh wool blanket pulled over
A once laughing face
The cloud screamed with a thousand voices
My head snapped forward
Because if I stared too long
I would see the things behind me
The field stretched on into small hills
And on the far side
Mountains of a color that cannot exist
A yellow purple like a bruise between
The azure sky and the fertile earth
Salvation lay in those unlikely mountains

Again the dark chorus
louder and sharper
as if it needed my attention to continue on
turning
the red oaks were ash
surrounded by bright embers
that once were cardinals and doves
there were birds still
the cloud was made of black birds
shrieking diving snapping
like miniature crows
eyes without pity or empathy
eyes devoid of anything like a soul
they looked like a thousand rags
soaked in oil
begging for a flame

the animal beneath me was powerful but tiring
and I could feel its heart
pounding on the anvil of its ribs

I looked again to the mountains
And standing on the last hill
Between myself and peace
Was a tall man outfitted like a priest
In a habit the color of a deep hole in the ground
And the air around him bent
As if not wanting to be too close

The hellish menagerie was almost upon me
And driving me into god-awful company
As the first bird touched me
with an ebony wing
the tall man looked at me and smiled
warmly
like he knew me.


“are you there?”
I asked into the night sounds
Of crickets and bullfrogs
I took a deep breath and focused on the ceiling
That my mother had painted eggshell white
“to let the light in” she had said
And it seemed to
“are you there? Please?”
And I heard you in the hall
Pitter-pattering into the room
Licking my hopeful outstretched hand
And crawling under the bed
To drive the boat-tailed grackles and the devil himself
Away from the mountains.

There is very little difference between
god and a good dog.


Lawrence Scott Parkinson

The dangers of barefoot soccer...

are many. The worst of these are toes popping out the bottom of one's foot. Actually, the worst is likely having a foot fall off but the toe thing is pretty bad too. The nice advantage to hopping about on one foot is that it slows life down and clarifies thoughts. True wisdom is knowing this trick without the blood and broken bones. It is very hard to be wise. Mainly I would say that injuries can be a lot of fun if looked at properly. It is only the truth. Read these poems slowly and soak them in.


"THERE ARE THOSE WHO LOVE TO GET DIRTY"

There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,

And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.

There are those who do both,
they drink tea.



GARY SNYDER



"FLYING AT NIGHT"

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.


TED KOOSER






"summer sadness"

The sun, on the sand, O sleeping wrestler,
Warms a languid bath in the gold of your hair,
Melting the incense on your hostile features,
Mixing an amorous liquid with the tears.

The immutable calm of this white burning,
O my fearful kisses, makes you say, sadly,
‘Will we ever be one mummified winding,
Under the ancient sands, and palms so happy?’

But your tresses are a tepid river,
Where the soul that haunts us drowns, without a shiver
And finds the Nothingness you cannot know!

I’ll taste the unguent of your eyelids’ shore,
To see if it can grant to the heart, at your blow,
The insensibility of stones and the azure.

Stéphane Mallarmé







"PATRIOTICS"

Yesterday a little girl got slapped to death by her daddy,
out of work, alcoholic, and estranged two towns down river.
America, it's hard to get your attention politely.
America, the beautiful night is about to blow up

and the cop who brought the man down with a shot to the chops
is shaking hands, dribbling chaw across his sweaty shirt,
and pointing cars across the courthouse grass to park.
It's the Big One one more time, July the 4th,

our country's perfect holiday, so direct a metaphor for war,
we shoot off bombs, launch rockets from Drano cans,
spray the streets and neighbors' yards with the machine-gun crack
of fireworks, with rebel yells and beer. In short, we celebrate.

It's hard to believe. But so help the soul of Thomas Paine,
the entire county must be here--the acned faces of neglect,
the halter-tops and ties, the bellies, badges, beehives,
jacked-up cowboy boots, yes, the back-up singers of democracy

all gathered to brighten in unambiguous delight
when we attack the calm and pointless sky. With terrifying vigor
the whistle-stop across the river will lob its smaller arsenal
halfway back again. Some may be moved to tears.

We'll clean up fast, drive home slow, and tomorrow
get back to work, those of us with jobs, convicting the others
in the back rooms of our courts and malls--yet what
will be left of that one poor child, veteran of no war

but her family's own? The comfort of a welfare plot,
a stalk of wilting prayers? Our fathers' dreams come true as
nightmare.
So the first bomb blasts and echoes through the streets and shrubs:
red, white, and blue sparks shower down, a plague

of patriotic bugs. Our thousand eyeballs burn aglow like punks.
America, I'd swear I don't believe in you, but here I am,
and here you are, and here we stand again, agape.

David Baker





"GREEN-STRIPED MELONS"


They lie
under stars in a field.
They lie under rain in a field.
Under sun.

Some people
are like this as well—
like a painting
hidden beneath another painting.

An unexpected weight
the sign of their ripeness.


Jane Hirshfield

Yeah, so, I skipped a month.

It was not all vacationy, just busy. Today seems like a good day to post something, what with the cute Russion spy story and the prehistoric whale that ate other whales making this morning so interesting. It is very difficult to write artistically and academically and that is my reasoning for not having posted any new poems. Yep, that is my excuse. Here are some poems. Now the Canadians will not complain so much, trust me that makes sense.



"SHINTO"

When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us--
touch us and move on.

Jorge Luis Borges



"THE RIVER OF BEES" This is our newest Poet Laureate for these United States and all that.

In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blind man followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older

Soon it will be fifteen years

He was old he will have fallen into his eyes

I took my eyes
A long way to the calenders
Room after room asking how shall I live

One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Images of hope
It was offered to me by name

Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say

He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass

I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay

He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

William Stanley Merwin



"THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS"

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry




"SLOW MOVEMENT"

All those treasures that lie in the little bolted box whose tiny space is
Mightier than the room of the stars, being secret and filled with dreams:
All those treasures—I hold them in my hand—are straining continually
Against the sides and the lid and the two ends of the little box in which I guard them;
Crying that there is no sun come among them this great while and that they weary of shining;
Calling me to fold back the lid of the little box and to give them sleep finally.

But the night I am hiding from them, dear friend, is far more desperate than their night!
And so I take pity on them and pretend to have lost the key to the little house of my treasures;
For they would die of weariness were I to open it, and not be merely faint and sleepy
As they are now.

William Carlos Williams



"THE GIANT TOAD"

I am too big. Too big by far. Pity me.
My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even
so. They see too much, above, below. And yet, there is not much
to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin
in drops. The drops run down my back, run from the corners of
my downturned mouth, run down my sides and drip beneath
my belly. Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty,
like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill me
through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pig-
ments gradually shudder and shift over.
Now I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop.
Two or three times more, silently. That was too far. I'm
standing up. The lichen's gray, and rough to my front feet. Get
down. Turn facing out, it's safer. Don't breathe until the snail
gets by. But we go travelling the same weathers.
Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give voice, just
once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound, angelic
bell I rang!
I live, I breathe, by swallowing. Once, some naughty children
picked me up, me and two brothers. They set us down again
somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes. We could
not help but smoke them, to the end. I thought it was the death
of me, but when I was entirely filled with smoke, when my slack
mouth was burning, and all my tripes were hot and dry, they
let us go. But I was sick for days.
I have big shoulders, like a boxer. They are not muscle,
however, and their color is dark. They are my sacs of poison,
the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my great
responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my back. Beware,
I am an angel in disguise; my wings are evil, but not deadly. If
I will it, the poison could break through, blue-black, and
dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the air.
Beware, you frivolous crab.

Elizabeth Bishop



"DRUNK AS DRUNK"

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

Pablo Neruda




"THE ICE CREAM PEOPLE"

the lady has me temporarily off the bottle
and now the pecker stands up
better.
however, things change overnight--
instead of listening to Shostakovich and
Mozart through a smeared haze of smoke
the nights change, new
complexities:
we drive to Baskin-Robbins,
31 flavors:
Rocky Road, Bubble Gum, Apricot Ice, Strawberry
Cheesecake, Chocolate Mint...

we park outside and look at icecream
people
a very healthy and satisfied people,
nary a potential suicide in sight
(they probably even vote)
and I tell her
"what if the boys saw me go in there? suppose they
find out I'm going in for a walnut peach sundae?"
"come on, chicken," she laughs and we go in
and stand with the icecream people.
none of them are cursing or threatening
the clerks.
there seem to be no hangovers or
grievances.
I am alarmed at the placid and calm wave
that flows about. I feel like a leper in a
beauty contest. we finally get our sundaes and
sit in the car and eat them.

I must admit they are quite good. a curious new
world. (all my friends tell me I am looking
better. "you're looking good, man, we thought you
were going to die there for a while...")
--those 4,500 dark nights, the jails, the
hospitals...

and later that night
there is use for the pecker, use for
love, and it is glorious,
long and true,
and afterwards we speak of easy things;
our heads by the open window with the moonlight
looking through, we sleep in each other's
arms.

the icecream people make me feel good,
inside and out.


Charles Bukowski

The Wrights.

"Northern Pike"


All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.

James Wright




"On the Skeleton of a Hound"


Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the body. Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer. Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.

I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.


James Wright






"Rorschach Test"


To tell you the truth I’d have thought it had gone out of use long ago;
there is something so 19th-century about it,

with its absurd reverse Puritanism.

Can withdrawal from reality or interpersonal commitment be gauged
by uneasiness at being summoned to a small closed room to discuss
ambiguously sexual material with a total stranger?

Alone in the presence of the grave examiner, it soon becomes clear
that, short of strangling yourself, you are going to have to find a way
of suppressing the snickers of an eight-year-old sex fiend, and feign cu-
riosity about the process to mask your indignation at being placed in
this situation.

Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egypt-
ian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too.

Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their
male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pil-
lars and swords out of the old brain’s unconscious.

You keep finding yourself thinking, “God damn it, don’t tell me that
isn’t a pussy!”

But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying
to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.”

The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you’re
supposed to be crazy

(and are probably proving it).

Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn’t hurt your case. Yes,

it’s some little card game you’ve gotten yourself into this time, when
your only chance is to lose. Fold,

and they have got you by the balls—

just like the ones you neglected to identify.


Franz Wright

A Quick and Good Three.

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus
by William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning




From Collected Poems: 1939-1962, Volume II by William Carlos Williams





Porch Swing in September
by Ted Kooser

The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it’s time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.




From Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, by Ted Kooser






A Boat

by Richard Brautigan

O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.

Richard Brautigan, “A Boat” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster.

Fine poems, enjoy.

Littlefoot, 19, [This is the bird hour]
by Charles Wright

19

This is the bird hour, peony blossoms falling bigger than wren hearts
On the cutting border's railroad ties,
Sparrows and other feathery things
Homing from one hedge to the next,
late May, gnat-floating evening.

Is love stronger than unlove?
Only the unloved know.
And the mockingbird, whose heart is cloned and colorless.

And who's this tiny chirper,
lost in the loose leaves of the weeping cherry tree?
His song is not more than three feet off the ground, and singular,
And going nowhere.
Listen. It sounds a lot like you, hermane.
It sounds like me.



From Littlefoot © 2007 by Charles Wright






The Apple Trees at Olema
by Robert Hass

They are walking in the woods along the coast
and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they come upon
two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened
every bough and the wood of the limbs looked rotten
but the trees were wild with blossom and a green fire
of small new leaves flickered even on the deadest branches.
Blue-eyes, poppies, a scattering of lupine
flecked the meadow, and an intricate, leopard-spotted
leaf-green flower whose name they didn't know.
Trout lily, he said; she said, adder's-tongue.
She is shaken by the raw, white, backlit flaring
of the apple blossoms. He is exultant,
as if some thing he felt were verified,
and looks to her to mirror his response.
If it is afternoon, a thin moon of my own dismay
fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them.
He could be knocking wildly at a closed door
in a dream. She thinks, meanwhile, that moss
resembles seaweed drying lightly on a dock.
Torn flesh, it was the repetitive torn flesh
of appetite in the cold white blossoms
that had startled her. Now they seem tender
and where she was repelled she takes the measure
of the trees and lets them in. But he no longer
has the apple trees. This is as sad or happy
as the tide, going out or coming in, at sunset.
The light catching in the spray that spumes up
on the reef is the color of the lesser finch
they notice now flashing dull gold in the light
above the field. They admire the bird together,
it draws them closer, and they start to walk again.
A small boy wanders corridors of a hotel that way.
Behind one door, a maid. Behind another one, a man
in striped pajamas shaving. He holds the number
of his room close to the center of his mind
gravely and delicately, as if it were the key,
and then he wanders among strangers all he wants.




From The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass






Meditations in an Emergency
by Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the filth of life away," yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

"Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho' She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds."—Mrs. Thrale.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.



From Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara






Variation on the Word Sleep
by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.




From Selected Poems II: 1976-1986 by Margaret Atwood





Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye
by Gerald Stern

Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel—

you don't know it—that takes you through the rivers
and under the burning hills. I went there to cry
in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle
through fire and flood. Some have little parks—

San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque
is beautiful from a distance; it is purple
at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,
especially from the little rise on the hill

at 14-C; it has twelve entrances
like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,
has two small floating bridges in front of it
that brought me in and out. I said good-bye

to them both when I was 57. I'm reading
Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time.
I love how he lived in the desert. I'm looking at the skull
of Georgia O'Keeffe. I'm kissing Stieglitz good-bye.

He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city
in every sense of the word; he wore a library
across his chest; he had a church on his knees.
I'm kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,

the last true city; after him there were
only overpasses and shopping centers,
little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper
with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf

where whores couldn't even walk, where nobody sits,
where nobody either lies or runs; either that
or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,
a flower sucking the water out of a rock.

What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores
lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick
turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,
dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left

with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.
I put it in my leather pockets next
to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,
my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there

beside his famous number; there is smoke
and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter
is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting
is taking down his words. I'm kissing Stieglitz

goodbye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we're walking down Fifth Avenue;
we're looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall—I'm shaking now

when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.





From Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 by Gerald Stern

A Tsunami Of Poetry.

To make up for not having posted in a bit I will bombard you, friends, with a few poems by a few poets. The thought is that if one jumps out at you as having a voice or style that you particularly like you can travel around you interweb contraption or to any fine "used" bookstore and gather some more material to make you think or smile or cry. Whatever you think best. If you are in South Bend I would highly, highly recommend ERASMUS BOOKS on Wayne Street.


A Myth of Devotion
by Louise Glück

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn't everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That's what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there'd be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn't imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone's Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.



"A Myth of Devotion" from Averno by Louise Glück.





Home is so Sad
by Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.


From Collected Poems by Philip Larkin.






I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.






The Young Fools (Les Ingénus)
by Paul Verlaine
Translated by Louis Simpson

High-heels were struggling with a full-length dress
So that, between the wind and the terrain,
At times a shining stocking would be seen,
And gone too soon. We liked that foolishness.

Also, at times a jealous insect's dart
Bothered out beauties. Suddenly a white
Nape flashed beneath the branches, and this sight
Was a delicate feast for a young fool's heart.

Evening fell, equivocal, dissembling,
The women who hung dreaming on our arms
Spoke in low voices, words that had such charms
That ever since our stunned soul has been trembling.






Forced Bloom
by David Baker

1.

Such pleasure one needs to make for oneself.
She has snipped the paltry forsythia
to force the bloom, has cut each stem on
the slant and sprinkled brown sugar in a vase,
so the wintered reeds will take their water.
It hurts her to do this but she does it.
When are we most ourselves, and when the least?
Last night, the man in the recessed doorway,
homeless or searching for something, or sought—
all he needed was one hand and quiet.
The city around him was one small room.
He leaned into the dark portal, gray
shade in a door, a shadow of himself.
His eyes were closed. His rhythm became him.
So we have shut our eyes, as dead or as
other, and held the thought of another
whose pleasure is need, face over a face ...

2.

It hurts her to use her hands, to hold
a cup or bud or touch a thing. The doctors
have turned her burning hands in their hands.
The tests have shown a problem, but no cause,
a neuropathology of mere touch.
We have all made love in the dark, small room
of such need, without shame, to our comfort,
our compulsion. I know I have. She has.
We have held or helped each other, sometimes
watching from the doorway of a warm house
where candletips of new growth light the walls,
the city in likeness beyond, our hands
on the swollen damp branch or bud or cup.
Sometimes we are most ourselves when we are
least, or hurt, or lost, face over a face—.
You have, too. It's your secret, your delight.
You smell the wild scent all day on your hand.





From Changeable Thunder by David Baker.







the suicide kid
by Charles Bukowski

I went to the worst of bars
hoping to get
killed.
but all I could do was to
get drunk
again.
worse, the bar patrons even
ended up
liking me.
there I was trying to get
pushed over the dark
edge
and I ended up with
free drinks
while somewhere else
some poor
son-of-a-bitch was in a hospital
bed,
tubes sticking out all over
him
as he fought like hell
to live.
nobody would help me
die as
the drinks kept
coming,
as the next day
waited for me
with its steel clamps,
its stinking
anonymity,
its incogitant
attitude.
death doesn't always
come running
when you call
it,
not even if you
call it
from a shining
castle
or from an ocean liner
or from the best bar
on earth (or the
worst).
such impertinence
only makes the gods
hesitate and
delay.
ask me: I'm
72.



Charles Bukowski. From Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems.




Freedom, Revolt, and Love
by Frank Stanford

They caught them.
They were sitting at a table in the kitchen.
It was early.
They had on bathrobes.
They were drinking coffee and smiling.
She had one of his cigarillos in her fingers.
She had her legs tucked up under her in the chair.
They saw them through the window.
She thought of them stepping out of a bath
And him wrapping cloth around her.
He thought of her walking up in a small white building,
He thought of stones settling into the ground.
Then they were gone.
Then they came in through the back.
Her cat ran out.
The house was near the road.
She didn't like the cat going out.
They stayed at the table.
The others were out of breath.
The man and the woman reached across the table.
They were afraid, they smiled.
The other poured themselves the last of the coffee.
Burning their tongues.
The man and the woman looked at them.
They didn't say anything.
The man and the woman moved closer to each other,
The round table between them.
The stove was still on and burned the empty pot.
She started to get up.
One of them shot her.
She leaned over the table like a schoolgirl doing her lessons.
She thought about being beside him, being asleep.
They took her long gray socks
Put them over the barrel of a rifle
And shot him.
He went back in his chair, holding himself.
She told him hers didn't hurt much,
Like in the fall when everything you touch
Makes a spark.
He thought about her getting up in the dark
Wrapping a quilt around herself.
And standing in the doorway.
She asked the men if they shot them again
Not to hurt their faces.
One of them lit him one of his cigarettes.
He thought what it would be like
Being children together.
He was dead before he finished it.
She asked them could she take it out of his mouth.
So it wouldn't burn his lips.
She reached over and touched his hair.
She thought about him walking through the dark singing.
She died on the table like that,
Smoke coming out of his mouth.




From The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford







Suicide of a Moderate Dictator
by Elizabeth Bishop

This is a day when truths will out, perhaps;
leak from the dangling telephone earphones
sapping the festooned switchboards' strength;
fall from the windows, blow from off the sills,
—the vague, slight unremarkable contents
of emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers
like ink from the un-proof-read newspapers,
crocking the way the unfocused photographs
of crooked faces do that soil our coats,
our tropical-wight coats, like slapped-at moths.

Today's a day when those who work
are idling. Those who played must work
and hurry, too, to get it downe,
with little dignity or none.
The newspapers are sold; the kiosk shutters
crash down. But anyway, in the night
the headlines wrote themselves, see, on the streets
and sidewalks everywhere; a sediment's splashed
even to the first floors of apartment houses.

This is a day that's beautiful as well,
warm and clear. At seven o'clock I saw
the dogs being walked along the famous beach
as usual, in a shiny gray-green dawn,
leaving their paw prints draining in the wet.
The line of breakers was steady and the pinkish,
segmented rainbow steadily hung above it.
At eight, two little boys were flying kites.



"Suicide of a Moderate Dictator" from Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box by Elizabeth Bishop.







The Moose
by Elizabeth Bishop

For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.




From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

James Schuyler: well worth the time.

Schuyler was good friends with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and Barbera Guest. Together this group was the core of the New york School of poets. This is one of the most influential groups of poets in history. Some would say this group brought a sophistication to the experimentation of contemporary poetry. Ashbery would later say that none of them ever knew they were the "New York School" but within this group of talent and egos it is hard imagine them not knowing, and reveling somewhat, in the notoriety of their connection and fame. In reading James Schuyler's works and different biographical sketches on him it is more likely he, rather than Ashbery, did not grasp the "big deal" as much. He was an intellectual vagabond who lived off of friends and slept in many spare rooms. He lived a life of severe depression. He was constantly confused and in pain. He has written some of the most startling and moving poetry from this messy history. Whatever couches or guest beds he may have slept on and no matter the instability of his life he saw and recreated an interesting and arresting world. He writes beautifully, gorgeously, about nature and our place in it. Though Schuyler had difficulties dealing with this world he, nonetheless, saw it very clearly. If anything James Schuyler may have understood the world too well.


NOW AND THEN

for Kenward Elmslie

Up from the valley
now and then a chain saw rising to a shriek, subsiding to a buzz
“Someone” is “cutting in his wood lot” another day
shows they are not
someone is two men clearing shoulders
of a narrow high-crowned road
stacked poles were lately sapling
the leaves on the slash gone limp, unstarched, unsized
one man with one fierce eye and where the other should be
an ill-knit cicatrix
men who don’t make much aren’t much
for spending what they do
on glass eyes, tooth-straightening devices (“a mouth
like the back of a switchboard”), nose jobs, dewenning operations
a country look prevails
and a vestigial fear of the evil eye lurks
“. . . my skin creeps . . .”
Out of Adamant Co-op
men in “overhauls” step into evening rising
in long-shadowed bluish haze to gold and pink
by Sodom Lake (was it that any Bible name
was an OK name?) and boys stare unabashed
and unaggressive not what the man on the bus fled
from his one day job talking excitedly about
“teen-age Puerto Rican tail-bait” and
“You can have New York!” Some present
you’d rather have wouldn’t you an apple tree
that climbed up into keels over
sad, and too bad, the best apples on Apple Hill
still, it can be propped or budded on new stock or just
that it once was there
Driving past, driving down, driving over
along the Winooski
through the home of Granite City Real Ice Cream
The Monument Capitol
buildings of rusticated granite marred
to our eyes by etched polished granite remodeled downstairs
may be found by a future happily heterodox
“There’s a touch of autumn—
there’s another touch of autumn”
and the dark tranquility of hemlocks encroaching on untilled fields
“You can’t make a living
plowing stones” subsistence
farming is well out of style: “You can’t call it living
without the margin”
coveted obsolescence!
a margin like that on this page
a paper luxury “Collectors”
the lady in the antique shop said “are snapping up
silver” “Since we’re off the silver standard?” “Why,
maybe so” Perhaps
six 1827 Salem coin-silver spoons for $18
or what about
“Have you The Pearl of Orr’s Island?”
“That’s a book I’d want to read myself.
I’m from here but live in Florida.
Winters are too hard: 40 below.
You don’t feel it though
like zero in Boston. I’ll take St. Johnsbury any day
over Boston.”
Over St. Johnsbury the clouds shift in curds
and a street goes steeply down
into Frenchtown by the railroad station
into which anachronistically comes
a real train: yesterday’s torment of dust-exhaling plush
on the backs of bare knees today’s nostalgia
but not much. Curls cut out of wood, brick
of a certain cut and color, a hopped-up cripple
on a hill above his pond, a slattern
frowning at the early-closed state liquor store,
an attic window like a wink,
The Scale Co., St. Johnsbury has everything
Not this high hill a road
going in undergrowth leads up to
by walls of flat cleared-field stones
so many and so long a time to take
so much labor so long ago and so soon
to be going back, a host to hardhack
and blueberry baby steps
first fallings from a sky
in which the wind is moving furniture
the upholstery of summer coming all unstitched
the air full of flying kapok
and resolutions: “remember to fetch the ax
whack back pine intrusions”
from the road turning down to a lower field
and across the roughest one the County keeps
a woman and a boy come up
on heavy horses. “Morning!
Had frost
last night at Adamant.
Might have a killing frost
tonight.” Quick and clear as the water
where cress grows the cold
breaks on the hills to the soft crash
of a waterfall beyond
a beaver pond
and slides on
flinging imaginary fragments of cat’s ice
from its edges to flash
a bright reality in the night sky and it —
the cold—stands, a rising pool, about
Sloven’s farmhouse and he dreams
of dynamite. A bog sucks
at his foundations. Somewhere a deer
breaks branches. The trees
say Wesson. Mazola
replies a frog.
It doesn’t happen though the cold
that is not that night. It happens all right
not then when the white baneberry
leans secretively where a road forks
met with surprise: “Why here it is:
the most beautiful thing.” The spirit
of Gelett Burgess sets Mother Nature
gabbing. “That’s my Actea pachypoda, dear, we
call it Doll’s-Eyes.” Got up as smart
as ever in muck and dank she belches
—“’Scuse: just a touch of gas”—
swamp maple flames and ambles over and plunks
down on a dead rubber tire
to contemplate smashed glass and a rusty tin
and “some of my choicer bits: that
I call Doctor’s Dentures. These
are Little Smellies.” Not
the sort you look to meet so near
gold-domed, out of scale Montpelier
a large-windowed kind of empty public bigness
so little to show, so much
to take pride in rather more than on the way to Stowe
a pyrocrafted maple board in a Gyp-to-teria
IF MORE MEN WERE SELF STARTERS
FEWER WIVES WOULD HAVE TO CRANK.
Welcome to the chair lift and cement chalet.
Days
of unambiguous morning when dawn
peels back like a petal to disclose blue depths
deep beyond all comprehending and tall field growth bends
with a crushing weight of water cut
into sac-shaped portions, each less than a carat
and which streak an early walker’s trouser legs
“You’re soaked!” crossing on a door
the spill to where Nodding Ladies’ Tresses
pallidly braid their fragrance and the woods
emit their hum. Days
when the pond holds on its steel one cloud
in which thin drowned trees stand
spare shapes of winter when summer
is just loosening to fall and bits of ribbon
from an electric typewriter patch a screen.
Croquet days, scissor-and-paste nights
after dinner on the better sort of ham
and coffee strong enough to float a goose egg.
Are those geese, that V, flying so early?
Can it be so late? in the green state
needles, leaves, fronds, blades, lichens and moss create
Can it be so soon before the long white
refrozen in frost on frost
on all twigs again will flash
cross cutting star streaks—the atoms
dance—on a treacherous night
in headlights?

“Horrible Cold Night
Remain at Home”

“Clear and Beautiful
Remain at Home”



BY JAMES SCHUYLER from "COLLECTED POEMS" FSG

My Poems.

These poems are very much written out of a sense of observation. Every work of art is photographic in that it represents a certain moment and thought process. Time moves on but those moments are captured forever. They will constantly be reinterpreted and the artist may evolve to the point of changing the reasoning behind the work but the work, itself, will always be a snapshot of that certain time.

"Regional Photographs" is an ongoing project. This is a small part of it. It is, basically, a series of small portraits of one massive community. Some would read a section and say "California" while another may say "North Carolina" and neither would be right nor wrong. These people can be anywhere but the reader will recognize them in their own way, put them in a city, state, or country the reader understands. They are just pictures found in a box under a bed without names, beginnings, or ends.


“the question of domestication”

this herd of deer is the answer. the flicking ears and slim legs and hair that is the brown of a childhood sandbox. the alfalfa blooms they eat taste like sugar and their long pink tongues nervously touch their black lips as if the sweetness were essential to their existence. the does sniff the wind and watch the hills. the bucks watch the edges where all of the danger of this world hides. the fawns run and jump or sleep in the sun. it is simple.
the letter in the mail today
said she would lose this house.
her son’s bad lungs were acting up.
his cough a rattle in a tiny chest.
she never knew her father.
her son would never know his.
she watched her child sleep fitfully on the old yellow couch
and licked her cracked lips
imagining a gentle life she had once seen.





“regional photographs”

Man, mid-fifties to sixties, straw cowboy hat down low
Over eyes without humor
Staring at hand as if there were answers beneath the skin.
White-tipped mountains beyond flatlands behind him.
Eight-thousand foot peaks far enough away that his hat
Brushes the snow.
Color but looks black and white.

Little girl on rock touches the water with her big toe
Squeals at the cold or just the wet.
Looking up at something unseen in an unclouded sky.
Her yellow t-shirt says “i love louisiana”
In indigo letters.
Small black mutt on her left
looks at her foot
Like it could be a meal.

Three young tan men
The color of fake Indians in old films
With overwhelming sunglasses
Drive a car that is impossibly red
Like a firetruck full of wrecked cardinals
Down a boulevard lined with palms
That match their hair
All spikes and sawed edges.
The middle one lifts the corner of his mouth
And this is all that distinguishes them .
Triplets without the blood relation.

Absolutely tiny boy on stage
Faded rust colored curtain with golden tassels behind.
From a string around his neck
Hangs a sign that reads 47.
Other children sit off to the left
Out of focus
white blocks for chests.
The boy’s eyes are wet and if he blinks
The tears will fall in sheets like a gale
But there is also a sense of control
As if the boy refuses
To let the weather turn.

Two girls sit on a windowsill of an abandoned house
Smoking pilfered cigarettes from one mother or the other
Talking about boys who pay no attention to them.
The boys are actually interested but too shy
To act humanely.
One girl has dyed her hair a beautiful and rich purple
And it is in pigtails
She is wearing a green shirt and yellow pants.
Her blue shoes have pink laces.
The other girl has a mousy brown bob cut
With a nailpolished red barrette that serves no particular purpose.
Her floral dress was bought by her older sister in Copenhagen
Ten years ago.

They whisper and laugh and touch hands
When something becomes too shocking
Or perfectly witty.
They love one another
In a gentle and kind way that allows total honesty.
They are the friends that will wonder about each other
When they are having children
Getting divorced
Watching death and dying themselves
Even though they will not have spoken for decades.
They flick ashes into the overgrown yard below.
They do not like the cigarettes
But it gives them a reason to be here
Near each other.