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THE IBPC BOARDS
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Poetry Month 2005:
The Daily Verse
Penelope's Song
by Louise Glück
Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
Do now as I bid you, climb
The shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
Wait at the top, attentive, like
A sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
It behooves you to be
Generous. You have not been completely
Perfect either; with your troublesome body
You have done things you shouldn't
Discuss in poems. Therefore
Call out to him over the open water, over the bright
Water
With your dark song, with your grasping,
Unnatural song--passionate,
Like Maria Callas. Who
Wouldn't want you? Whose most demonic appetite
Could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
He will return from wherever he goes in the
Meantime,
Suntanned from his time away, wanting
His grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him,
You must shake the boughs of the tree
To get his attention,
But carefully, carefully, lest
His beautiful face be marred
By too many falling needles.
A Journey Through The Moonlight
by Russell Edson
In sleep when an old man's body is no longer
aware of his boundaries, and lies flattened by
gravity like a mere of wax in its bed . . . It drips
down to the floor and moves there like a tear down a
cheek . . . Under the back door into the silver meadow,
like a pool of sperm, frosty under the moon, as if in
his first nature, boneless and absurd.
The moon lifts him up into its white field, a cloud
shaped like an old man, porous with stars.
He floats through high dark branches, a corpse tangled
in a tree on a river.
Snow
by Charles Wright
If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,
Then we will rise and recongregate
In the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue,
Things in a fall in a world of fall, and slip
Through the spiked branches and the snapped joints of the evergreens,
White ants, white ants and the little ribs.
His Wife, The Painter
by Charles Bukowski
There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austin, Jane Austin, too.
"I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are
at work."
He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he
fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like
a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.
He feels hatred and discard of the world, sharper than
his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he
self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his
hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.
Daumier. Rue Transonian, le 15 Avril, 1843. (lithograph.)
Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.
"She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known."
"What is it? A love affair?"
"Silly. I can't love a woman. Besides, she's pregnant."
I can paint- a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a
lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,
and that under everything some river, some beat, some twist that
clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy. . .
men drive cars and paint their houses,
but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.
Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.
Paris, Louvre.
"I must write Kaiser, though I think he's a homosexual."
"Are you still reading Freud?"
"Page 299."
She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one
arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the
snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I have
time and the dog.
About church: the trouble with a mask is it
never changes.
So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.
So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs
and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the
wind like the ned of a tunnel.
He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some
segment in the air. It floats about the peoples heads.
When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches
warmer and more blood-real than the dove.
Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.
Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.
He burned away in his sleep.
The Concert
by Lisel Mueller
In memory of Dimitri Mitropoulos
The harpist believes there is music
in the skeletons of fish
The French horn player believes
in enormous golden snails
The piano believes in nothing
and grins from ear to ear
Strings are scratching their bellies
openly, enjoying it
Flutes and oboes complain
in dialects of the same tongue
Drumsticks rattle a calfskin
from the sleep of another life
because the supernatural crow
on the podium flaps his wings
and death is no excuse
Ode to Pornography
by David Lehman
If you could write down the words
moving through a man's mind as
he masturbates you'd have a quick
bonus bonk read, I used to think.
But words were never adequate
or the point in the bar where the girl
is a boy the boy is a girl the two girls
exchange underpants the one with
the dildo is the boy each needs to know
what the other is feeling, so the thrill
of humiliation is visited on one and
the other is disbelieved, perennial virgin,
with teeth marks on her buttocks
hiding in the closet and the power
between them is distributed unequally
the other on her knees in ecstasy.
Morning
by Frank O'Hara
I've got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death
in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe
chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow
At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes
I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine
although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you'd be proud of
the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle
what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it
is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone
Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I'll not be cordial
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is
when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go
Heaven
by Philip Levine
If you were twenty-seven
and had done time for beating
our ex-wife and had
no dreams you remembered
in the morning, you might
lie on your bed and listen
to a mad canary sing
and think it all right to be
there every Saturday
ignoring your neighbors, the streets,
the signs that said join,
and the need to be helping.
You might build, as he did,
a network of golden ladders
so that the bird could roam
on all levels of the room;
you might paint the ceiling blue,
the floor green, and shade
the place you called the sun
so that things came softly to order
when the light came on.
He and the bird lived
in the fine weather of heaven;
they never aged, they
never tired or wanted
all through that war,
but when it was over
and the nation had been saved,
he knew they'd be hunted.
He knew, as you would too,
that he'd be laid off
for not being braver
and it would do no good
to show how he had taken
clothespins and cardboard
and made each step safe.
It would do no good
to have been one of the few
that climbed higher and higher
even in time of war,
for now there would be the poor
asking for their share,
and hurt men in uniforms,
and no one to believe
that heaven was really here.
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
'It's all taking pace in one mind'
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There's a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
and bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
manhatta steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes
Two Hours Before Sunrise
by Judy Jordan
Only he and I in the all-night deli
so I'm afraid to leave,
must listen
as he tells me about his spaceship stolen by NASA,
Nobel Prizes lost to politics,
medicine he doesn't need, sleep he hasn't had,
listen as he repeats, all I need is a home-baked apple pie
and a woman to rock me in her arms.
It's as if he knows I've seen those who mumble into their greasy coat sleeves,
the ones who grab pickles off the plates of the restaurant's uncleared tables,
shake out handfuls of salt, mumbling, "I've got to eat something"
then run into the street,
as if he knows I've risen in fog,
my third day without food,
knows I know what it is to be without a home
and to uncurl from sleep on a riverbank
like the trees uncurl from ice
and turn into a day that never held out its hands to me.
Though he says nothing about the maps of childhood,
I've heard his story before.
The moths stain the streetlights with it,
rats whisper it to the foundation's knotty beams.
It's an ordinary story, though in the night unrecognizable,
like the years
that have paused to rub their furred mouths against my leg and pass on.
~~~
Strange, the brain's leaps. The deli, then my cousin
who taught me to drive a column stick shift
in the rust-blotched Ford behind our grandmother's cabin, gets life.
Over the years things happened I don't understand,
and he kills a roomful of men.
A twist in the chain of neurons
and he decapitates them.
Who's to say what curves and u-turns haunted him,
which smudges on that strange map he couldn't follow
so the same night he'd leave the poolhall, that roomful of bodies,
and shoot Johnny Jones,
set him on fire
then watch as the flames rose to smoke, rose as the dead do
and like the dead, drifted in the gauze light of the bruised sky, back to me.
As one by one their stories are told
they unfold themselves into the sledged dark and ask the same thing,
track the edges of my body, give me a name.
~~~
Will our minds' slips and jumps ever be understood, even to ourselves?
I'm in a deli and suddenly remembering
that more than a decade has passed since I saw my father,
and I don't know what-
a blood-clot in the gray pleats of his brain,
small strokes, DT's or Alzheimer's-stumbled
him through the rooms of my childhood home,
drubbed up his hallucinations,
smashed chairs through windows,
raked glasses and plates from the cabinets,
flung food to the floor in his search for boys,
the houseful he was convinced I'd hid.
The way he looked at me, what he said,
what I still can't say.
No matter what archangel I've called to my circle of salt
or which words I've cast in the hour of Venus,
the dead have me in their pocket,
knotted in a map
whose making I had no part in,
and with me is a man turned in his seat
to tell me the government has robbed him,
as if he knows I've felt the sudden suck of a leg in quicksand,
the clang of a beaver trap on my ankle.
He knows the flinty joints that keep me looking for sure ground,
knows that where I grew up
even the smallest rains are floods that redefine the earth,
and land rises in water and turns over on itself.
Is there a place where this transformation doesn't happen?
Where one doesn't wake in the brilliance of reflected light
and the entire acreage of beans vanished under water?
Ask the calf who wandered into Brown swamp never to be seen again,
ask the chokeberry shaking its fruit into the pond of sand.
~~~
A home-baked apple pie and a woman
to rock him in her arms.
He leans closer and whispers this again,
as if he knows while bulbs pushed flesh heads through years of waste,
I have lain in a johnboat
in water churning with mating toads,
thinking of nothing but the pond's depth
and my desire to be picked clean.
He knows I lie down each night in a solitary box of dust
and am raised again
only by morning's scour,
knows the trail I follow is not of my making,
that the search defines me.
Signals pass from cell to cell
so I want to join the dead, be one of the hallucinations,
to follow the invisible boys scrambling
through the windows of my father's mind and erased in a brain's blink.
This man who is haunted by women and apple pies-
he knows what it is to want nothing
but a backwards walk through black feathers and moths,
the salt licked from skin,
knows I long to be taken in the teeth of pondweed,
to leave my body to the river of fog,
the stories to themselves,
to let them fall through nights to an earth too full
and be gathered by those I can't touch, but who touch me,
who touch me.
Speaking To You (From Rock Bottom)
by Michael Ondaatje
Speaking to you
this hour
these days when
I have lost the feather of poetry
and the rains
of separation
surround us tock
tock like Go tablets
Everyone has learned
to move carefully
'Dancing' 'laughing' 'bad taste'
is a memory
a tableau behind trees of law
In the midst of love for you
my wife's suffering
anger in every direction
and the children wise
as tough shrubs
but they are not tough
--so I fear
how anything can grow from this
all the wise blood
poured from little cuts
down into the sink
this hour it is not
your body I want
but your quiet company
Putting It All Away
by Stephen Dobyns
The wind from the mountains is closing my doors;
it is time to begin forgetting.
I'm sitting in a chair with a woman
who is reading a story.
The story is green. It sounds
like wind or morning light.
I am the story she is reading.
The woman smells of babies.
I put them aside. I begin forgetting like changing my clothes.
I have gone to a funeral: black shoes, black suit.
They smell of dust; I lock them away.
I am in a hospital. There are nails
in my leg. I shout into a rubber cup.
I hang from the edge of a star, then drop.
Two goats and the smell of ether fall with me.
In the morning there is Cream of Wheat
and a boy with freckles and stories of escape.
I put them aside. As I begin forgetting, I grow thinner.
Sadness is five pounds, pleasure three.
When I am done, I will be light or air:
something to see by, the draft that shuts the door.
I stand by a bonfire. Chickens
without heads run circles around me.
Above me the body of a deer hangs
upside down. Its stomach is slit open.
I see my friends and my family waving,
calling from the belly of the deer.
I put them aside. * * *
When I am done forgetting, I will forget
my name, and priests will come and give me
a new one. Or perhaps I will have no name,
and when I am told what has been done
or not done, or when police come or men
with brittle prizes, I will say he just left,
never arrived, doesn't ring a bell.
I am in the kitchen. Someone is baking.
I take dry mittens from the radiator.
The mittens are warm. There is the smell
of fresh bread, shaving soap in the morning.
A man and a woman embrace in the center of the kitchen.
The whole house is like red mittens.
I put them aside.
Kinky
by Denise Duhamel
They decide to exchange heads.
Barbie squeezes the small opening under her chin
over Ken's bulging neck socket. His wide jaw line jostles
atop his girlfriend's body, loosely,
like one of those novelty dogs
destined to gaze from the back windows of cars.
The two dolls chase each other around the orange Country Camper
unsure what they'll do when they're within touching distance.
Ken wants to feel Barbie's toes between his lips,
take off one of her legs and force his whole arm inside her.
With only the vaguest suggestion of genitals,
all the alluring qualities they possess as fashion dolls,
up until now, have done neither of them much good.
But suddenly Barbie is excited looking at her own body
under the weight of Ken's face. He is part circus freak,
part thwarted hermaphrodite. And she is imagining
she is somebody else-- maybe somebody middle class and ordinary,
maybe another teenage model being caught in a scandal.
The night had begun with Barbie getting angry
at finding Ken's blow up doll, folded and stuffed
under the couch. He was defensive and ashamed, especially about
not having the breath to inflate her. But after a round
of pretend-tears, Barbie and Ken vowed to try
to make their relationship work. With their good memories
as sustaining as good food, they listened to late-night radio
talk shows, one featuring Doctor Ruth. When all else fails,
just hold each other, the small sex therapist crooned.
Barbie and Ken, on cue, groped in the dark,
their interchangeable skin glowing, the color of Band-Aids.
Then, they let themselves go-- Soon Barbie was begging Ken
to try on her spandex miniskirt. She showed him how
to pivot as though he was on a runway. Ken begged
to tie Barbie onto his yellow surfboard and spin her
on the kitcen table until she grew dizzy. Anything,
anything, they both said to the other's requests,
their mirrored desires bubbling from the most unlikely places.
Almost a Conjurer
by Lucie Brock-Broido
The sleight white poet would assume non-human forms, homely
Grampus fish, a wahoo, nut-hatch, nit.
He had no romance except
Remorse, which he used like fuzzy algebra. By pouring bluing
On black porous coal, he crystallized, pronounced himself almost
A sorcerer. He had an empty cloakroom
In the chest of him.
All the lost wool scarves
Of all the world collected there & muffled him
With wool.
He imagined he could move a broom if he so desired, just by wishing
It. If he spoke of ghosts, he thought he could make of art vast
Tattersall & spreading wings.
When they found him in the nurse's office,
He was awkward as a charlatan, slightly queasy
In an emperor's real clothes.
The Thermos in his lunchbox was perpetually broken and he lied.
The small world smelled of oil of peppermint, for a broken spell.
Everything is plaid
And sour in oblivion, as well.
Last News About The Little Box
by Vasko Popa
The little box which contains the world
Fell in love with herself
And conceived
Still another little box
The little box of the little box
Also fell in love with herself
And conceived
Still another little box
And so it went on forever
The world from the little box
Ought to be inside
The last offspring of the little box
But not one of the little boxes
Inside the little box in love with herself
Is the last one
Let's see you find the world now
The Shark's Parlor
by James Dickey
Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall on Cumberland Island
Where the night tide came crawling under the stairs came up the first
Two or three steps and the cottage stood on poles all night
With the sea sprawled under it as we dreamed of the great fin circling
Under the bedroom floor. In daylight there was my first brassy taste of beer
And Payton Ford and I came back from the Glynn County slaughterhouse
With a bucket of entrails and blood. We tied one end of a hawser
To a spindling porch-pillar and rowed straight out of the house
Three hundred yards into the vast front yard of windless blue water
The rope out slithering its coil the two-gallon jug stoppered and sealed
With wax and a ten-foot chain leader a drop-forged shark-hook nestling.
We cast our blood on the waters the land blood easily passing
For sea blood and we sat in it for a moment with the stain spreading
Out from the boat sat in a new radiance in the pond of blood in the sea
Waiting for fins waiting to spill our guts also in the glowing water.
We dumped the bucket, and baited the hook with a run-over collie pup. The jug
Bobbed, trying to shake off the sun as a dog would shake off the sea.
We rowed to the house feeling the same water lift the boat a new way,
All the time seeing where we lived rise and dip with the oars.
We tied up and sat down in rocking chairs, one eye on the other responding
To the blue-eye wink of the jug. Payton got us a beer and we sat
All morning sat there with blood on our minds the red mark out
In the harbor slowly failing us then the house groaned the rope
Sprang out of the water splinters flew we leapt from our chairs
And grabbed the rope hauled did nothing the house coming subtly
Apart all around us underfoot boards beginning to sparkle like sand
Pulling out the tarred poles we slept propped-up on leaning to sea
As in land-wind crabs scuttling from under the floor as we took runs about
Two more porch-pillars and looked out and saw something a fish-flash
An almighty fin in trouble a moiling of secret forces a false start
Of water a round wave growing in the whole of Cumberland Sound the one ripple.
Payton took off without a word I could not hold him either
But clung to the rope anyway it was the whole house bending
Its nails that held whatever it was coming in a little and like a fool
I took up the slack on my wrist. The rope drew gently jerked I lifted
Clean off the porch and hit the water the same water it was in
I felt in blue blazing terror at the bottom of the stairs and scrambled
Back up looking desperately into the human house as deeply as I could
Stopping my gaze before it went out the wire screen of the back door
Stopped it on the thistled rattan the rugs I lay on and read
On my mother's sewing basket with next winter's socks spilling from it
The flimsy vacation furniture a bucktoothed picture of myself.
Payton came back with three men from a filling station and glanced at me
Dripping water inexplicable then we all grabbed hold like a tug-of-war.
We were gaining a little from us a cry went up from everywhere
People came running. Behind us the house filled with men and boys.
On the third step from the sea I took my place looking down the rope
Going into the ocean, humming and shaking off drops. A houseful
Of people put their backs into it going up the steps from me
Into the living room through the kitchen down the back stairs
Up and over a hill of sand across a dust road and onto a raised field
Of dunes we were gaining the rope in my hands began to be wet
With deeper water all other haulers retreated through the house
But Payton and I on the stairs drawing hand over hand on our blood
Drawing into existence by the nose a huge body becoming
A hammerhead rolling in beery shallows and I began to let up
But the rope strained behind me the town had gone
Pulling-mad in our house far away in a field of sand they struggled
They had turned their backs on the sea bent double some on their knees
The rope over their shoulders like a bag of gold they strove for the ideal
Esso station across the scorched meadow with the distant fish coming up
The front stairs the sagging boards still coming in up taking
Another step toward the empty house where the rope stood straining
By itself through the rooms in the middle of the air. "Pass the word,"
Payton said, and I screamed it "Let up, good God, let up!" to no one there.
The shark flopped on the porch, grating with salt-sand driving back in
The nails he had pulled out coughing chunks of his formless blood.
The screen door banged and tore off he scrambled on his tail slid
Curved did a thing from another world and was out of his element and in
Our vacation paradise cutting all four legs from under the dinner table
With one deep-water move he unwove the rugs in a moment throwing pints
Of blood over everything we owned knocked the buckteeth out of my picture
His odd head full of crashed jelly-glass splinters and radio tubes thrashing
Among the pages of fan magazines all the movie stars drenched in sea-blood
Each time we thought he was dead he struggled back and smashed
One more thing in all coming back to die three or four more times after death.
At last we got him out logrolling him greasing his sandpaper skin
With lard to slide him pulling on his chained lips as the tide came,
Tumbled him down the steps as the first night wave went under the floor.
He drifted off head back belly white as the moon. What could I do but buy
That house for the one black mark still there against death a forehead-
toucher in the room he circles beneath and has been invited to wreck?
Blood hard as iron on the wall black with time still bloodlike
Can be touched whenever the brow is drunk enough. All changes. Memory:
Something like three-dimensional dancing in the limbs with age
Feeling more in two worlds than one in all worlds the growing encounters.
your little voice
by e.e. cummings
your little voice
Over the wires came leaping
and i felt suddenly
dizzy
With the jostling and shouting of merry flowers
wee skipping high-heeled flames
courtesied before my eyes
or twinkling over to my side
Looked up
with impertinently exquisite faces
floating hands were laid upon me
I was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing
up
Up
with the pale important
stars and the Humorous
moon
dear girl
How i was crazy how i cried when i heard
over time
and tide and death
leaping
Sweetly
your voice
Chaplinesque
by Hart Crane
We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.
For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.
We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!
And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lovely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
Coming To This
by Mark Strand
We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.
And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.
Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.
Smoking
by Elton Glaser
I like the cool and heft of it, dull metal on the palm,
And the click, the hiss, the spark fuming into flame,
Boldface of fire, the rage and sway of it, raw blue at the base
And a slope of gold, a touch to the packed tobacco, the tip
Turned red as a warning light, blown brighter by the breath,
The pull and the pump of it, and the paper's white
Smoothed now to ash as the smoke draws back, drawn down
To the black crust of lungs, tar and poisons in the pink,
And the blood sorting it out, veins tight and the heart slow,
The push and wheeze of it, a sweep of plumes in the air
Like a shako of horses dragging a hearse through the late centennium,
London, at the end of December, in the dark and fog.
Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Graceland
by Carl Sandburg
Tomb of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
For upkeep and flowers
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
The merchant prince gone to dust
Commanded in his written will
Over the signed name of his last testament
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,
For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance
Around his last long home.
(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables
Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose
silver dollars in their pockets.
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or
dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages
And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she
is reckless about God and the newspapers and the
police, the talk of her home town or the name
people call her.)
Watermelons
by Davis McCombs
Pestered with sprays
and bedded in straw,
we are kept boys, swollen
like a bum knee; we look
like the bullfrog sounds.
Plugged with a knife
or zippered open wide,
tapped for our flaming insides.
We are water clocks,
weaned from the tube-footed vine,
hauled in by the load,
a tear-striped dirty child.
We cannot spill.
We wish we could read
the lightning on our hide,
the unhysterical thump
of a talking drum:
do not trust the speed of beauty
do not trust the beauty
45 Mercy Street
by Anne Sexton
In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign --
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.
I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.
Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was...
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.
I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.
Pull the shades down --
I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?
Not there.
I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.
It Happens Like This
by James Tate
I was outside St. Cecelia's Rectory
smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me.
It was mostly black and white, with a little reddish
brown here and there. When I started to walk away,
it followed. I was amused and delighted, but wondered
what the laws were on this kind of thing. There's
a leash law for dogs, but what about goats? People
smiled at me and admired the goat. "It's not my goat,"
I explained. "It's the town's goat. I'm just taking
my turn caring for it." "I didn't know we had a goat,"
one of them said. "I wonder when my turn is." "Soon,"
I said. "Be patient. Your time is coming." The goat
stayed by my side. It stopped when I stopped. It looked
up at me and I stared into its eyes. I felt he knew
everything essential about me. We walked on. A police-
man on his beat looked us over. "That's a mighty
fine goat you got there," he said, stopping to admire.
"It's the town's goat," I said. "His family goes back
three-hundred years with us," I said, "from the beginning."
The officer leaned forward to touch him, then stopped
and looked up at me. "Mind if I pat him?" he asked.
"Touching this goat will change your life," I said.
"It's your decision." He thought real hard for a minute,
and then stood up and said, "What's his name?" "He's
called the Prince of Peace," I said. "God! This town
is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there's mystery
and wonder. And I'm just a child playing cops and robbers
forever. Please forgive me if I cry." "We forgive you,
Officer," I said. "And we understand why you, more than
anybody, should never touch the Prince." The goat and
I walked on. It was getting dark and we were beginning
to wonder where we would spend the night.
Louise in Love
by Mary Jo Bang
Much had transpired in the phantom realm:
Are we whole now? Louise asked.
I think we are, the other said.
And from the mirror: no longer blue in the face, and vague;
only destiny's dove bending a broke wing and beckoning.
The ride had been open and long, the car resplendent.
What rapture, this rode into sunset. This elegant end
where a band tugs a sleeve,
a hand labors with an illusion
of waving away a thread. And then they came to something
big: down the block, winking red lights and a crowd
of compelling circumference.
They were one with the woman, her rosacea face,
the snapdragon terrier, ten men in black helmets, a man supine
on a stretcher. O the good and evil of accident.
...
They were wary, and justifiably so. The mind says no,
Louise admitted, but the heart, it loves repetition
and sport:
cat's paw from under the bedskirt,
dainty wile, frayed thing,
fish hook.
Less time
by Andre Breton
Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than it takes to die; I've taken account of everything, there you have it. I've made a census of the stones, they are as numerous as my fingers and some others; I've distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to accept them. I've kept company with music for a second only and now I no longer know what to think of suicide, for if I ever want to part from myself, the exit is on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, the re-entrance is on the other. You see what you still have to do. Hours, grief, I don't keep a reasonable account of them; I'm alone, I look out of the window; there is no passerby, or rather no one passes (underline passes). You don't know this man? It's Mr. Same. May I introduce Madam Madam? And their children. Then I turn back on my steps, my steps turn back too, but I don't know exactly what they turn back on. I consult a schedule; the names of the towns have been replaced by the names of people who have been quite close to me. Shall I go to A, return to B, change at X? Yes, of course I'll change at X. Provided I don't miss the connection with boredom! There we are: boredom, beautiful parallels, ah! how beautiful the parallels are under God's perpendicular.
Real LIfe
by Lucie Brock-Broido
Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow.
I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire & then moving
Across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard,
Moving to country music & the heart
Is torn a little more because the song says the truth.
Because in the thirty-six things that can happen
To people, men & women, women & women,
Men & men, in all these things the soul is bound
To be broken somewhere along the line,
That clove-scented, air-colored wanderer blushing
With no memory, no inkling & then proceeds
Across America
In the sap green of the tropics,
Toward the cadmium of a bitter sunrise to a new age,
At the white impossible ice hour, starving,
Past the electric blue of the rivers melting down,
Above the nude, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire,
Over the tiny fragile mound of finger bones
Of an Indian who died standing up,
Through the heliotrope of a song about the sunset,
To live the thirty-six things
& never comes home.
from The Book of Nightmares
by Galway Kinnell
II
THE HEN FLOWER
1
Sprawled
on our faces in the spring
nights, teeth
biting down on hen feathers, bits of the hen
still stuck in the crevices-if only
we could let go
like her, throw ourselves
on the mercy of darkness, like the hen,
tuck our head
under a wing, hold ourselves still
a few moments, as she
falls out into her little trance in the witchgrass,
or turn over
and be stroked with a finger
down the throat feathers,
down the throat knuckles,
down over the hum
of the wishbone tuning its high D in thin blood,
down over
the breastbone risen up
out of breast flesh, until the fatted thing
woozes off, head
thrown back
on the chopping block, longing only
to die.
2
When the ax-
scented breeze flourishes
about her,her cheeks crush in,
her comb
grays, the gizzard
that turns the thousand acidic millstones of her fate
convulses: ready or not
the next egg, bobbling
its globe of golden earth,
skids forth,
ridding her even
of the life to come.
3
Almost high
on subsided gravity, I remain afoot,
a hen flower
dangling from a hand,
wing
of my wing,
of my bones and veins,
of my flesh
hairs lifting all over me in the first ghostly breeze
after death,
wing
made only to fly-unable
to write out the sorrows of being unable
to hold another in one's arms-and unable
to fly,
and waiting, therefore,
for the sweet, eventual blaze in the genes,
that one day, according to gospel, shall carry it back
into pink skies, where geese
cross at twilight, honking
in tongues.
4
I have glimpsed
by corpse-light, in the opened cadaver
of hen, the mass of tiny,
unborn eggs, each getting
tinier and yellower as it reaches back toward
the icy pulp
of what is, I have felt the zero
freeze itself around the finger dipped slowly in.
5
When the Northern Lights
were opening across the black sky and vanishing,
lighting themselves up
so completely they were vanishing,
I put to my eye the lucent
section of the spealbone of a ram-
I thought suddenly
I could read the cosmos spelling itself,
the huge broken letters
shuddering across the black sky and vanishing,
and in a moment,
in the twinkling of an eye, it came to me
the mockingbird would sing all her nights the cry of the rifle,
the tree would hold the bones of the sniper who chose not to
climb down,
the rose would bloom no one would see it,
the chameleon longing to be changed would remain the color
of blood.
And I went up
to the henhouse, and took up
the hen killed by weasels, and lugged
the sucked
carcass into first light. And when I hoisted
her up among the young pines, a last
rubbery egg slipping out as I flung her high, didn't it happen
the dead
wings creaked open as she soared
across the arms of the Bear?
6
Sprawled face down, waiting
for the rooster to groan out
it is the empty morning, as he groaned out thrice
for the disciple
of stone,
he who crushed with his heel the brain out of the snake,
I remember long ago I sowed my own first milk
tooth under hen feathers, I planted under hen
feathers the hook of the wishbone, which had
broken itself so lovingly toward me.
For the future.
It has come to this.
7
Listen, Kinnell,
dumped alive
and dying into the old sway bed,
a layer of crushed feathers all that there is
between you
and the long shaft of darkness shaped as you,
let go.
Even this haunted room
all its materials photographed with tragedy,
even the tiny crucifix drifting face down at the center of the earth,
even these feathers freed from their wings forever
are afraid.
The Satyr's Heart
by Brigit Pegeen Kelley
Now I rest my head on the satyr's carved chest,
The hollow where the heart would have been, if sandstone
Had a heart, if a headless goat man could have a heart.
His neck rises to a dull point, points upward
To something long gone, elusive, and at his feet
The small flowers swarm, earnest and sweet, a clamor
Of white, a clamor of blue, and black the sweating soil
They breed in...If I sit without moving, how quickly
Things change, birds turning tricks in the trees,
Colorless birds and those with color, the wind fingering
The twigs, and the furred creatures doing whatever
Furred creatures do. So, and so. There is the smell of fruit
And the smell of wet coins. There is the sound of a bird
Crying, and the sound of water that does not move...
If I pick the dead iris? If I wave it above me
Like a flag, a blazoned flag? My fanfare? Little fare
with which I buy my way, making things brave? The way
Now I bend over and with my foot turn up a stone,
And there they are: the armies of pale creatures who
Without cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth.
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