Poet's Corner

[midcan5]

'Grandfather'

"Dead before I came into this world, grandfather,
I carry your name, yet I've never met you.
I hear my name, and know
that somehow they refer to you.
When I scribble those six letters
fast, to sign some document
or print them neatly in a box,
I feel your presence flow with the ink
stain and burn through the paper,
forever imprinted in my mind.
Late summer nights
gathered around the dinner table,
leftovers being cleared away,
faces clouded in cigarette smoke,
I hear voices pass the word
back and forth in reverence.
Somehow I know it's not me
the little one grabbing for attention.
They speak of you, Andrei,
the one I've never met,
whose name I carry."

Andrei Guruianu

 

[midcan5]

'On Snow'

A Riddle

"From Heaven I fall, though from earth I begin.
No lady alive can show such a skin.
I'm bright as an angel, and light as a feather,
But heavy and dark, when you squeeze me together.
Though candor and truth in my aspect I bear,
Yet many poor creatures I help to insnare.
Though so much of Heaven appears in my make,
The foulest impressions I easily take.
My parent and I produce one another,
The mother the daughter, the daughter the mother."

James Parton

 

[midcan5]

'Must keep in touch'

"I ran into myself
at a party.
There was definitely
a certain rapport:
ground shared,
tastes in common,
attitudes
not all that far apart.
But –
well,
you know how it is at parties.
After a bit
we shuffled our feet,
started looking around,
swapped cards,
said
let’s meet for a drink
one of these days.
Must keep in touch
old boy,
must keep in touch."

Michael Swan

 

[midcan5]

'8 Count'

"from my bed
I watch
3 birds
on a telephone
wire.
one flies
off.
then
another.
one is left,
then
it too
is gone.
my typewriter is
tombstone
still.
and I am
reduced to bird
watching.
just thought I'd
let you
know,
fucker. "

Charles Bukowski

 

[midcan5]

'Corned Beef and Cabbage'

"I can see her in the kitchen,
Cooking up, for the hundredth time,
A little something from her
Limited Midwestern repertoire.
Cigarette going in the ashtray,
The red wine pulsing in its glass,
A warning light meaning
Everything was simmering
Just below the steel lid
Of her smile, as she boiled
The beef into submission,
Chopped her way
Through the vegetable kingdom
With the broken-handled knife
I use tonight, feeling her
Anger rising from the dark
Chambers of the head
Of cabbage I slice through,
Missing her, wanting
To chew things over
With my mother again."

George Bilgere

 

[midcan5]

I couldn't find a Valentine's day poem I really liked, but I liked the images. By the way, my three year old granddaughter is my valentine so stop sending all those heart shaped cards.

And another bit of romance in pictures. http://todayspictures.slate.com/20100212/


'Windchime'

"She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It’s six-thirty in the morning
and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

windchime in her left hand,
hammer in her right, the nail
gripped tight between her teeth
but nothing happens next because
she’s trying to figure out
how to switch #1 with #3.

She must have been standing in the kitchen,
coffee in her hand, asleep,
when she heard it—the wind blowing
through the sound the windchime
wasn’t making
because it wasn’t there.

No one, including me, especially anymore believes
till death do us part,
but I can see what I would miss in leaving—
the way her ankles go into the work boots
as she stands upon the ice chest;
the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it."

Tony Hoagland

 

[midcan5]

'The Quiet World'

"In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe."

Jeffrey McDaniel

 

[midcan5]

'Love Explained'

"Guy calls the doctor, says the wife’s
contractions are five minutes apart.
Doctor says, Is this her first child?
guy says, No, it’s her husband.

I promise to try to remember who
I am. Wife gets up on one elbow,

says, I wanted to get married.
It seemed a fulfillment of some

several things, a thing to be done.
Even the diamond ring was some

thing like a quest, a thing they
set you out to get and how insane

the quest is; how you have to turn
it every way before you can even

think to seek it; this metaphysical
refraining is in fact the quest. Who’d

have guessed? She sighs, I like
the predictability of two, I like

my pleasures fully expected,
when the expectation of them

grows patterned in its steady
surprise. I’ve got my sweet

and tumble pat. Here on earth,
I like to count upon a thing

like that. Thus explained
the woman in contractions

to her lover holding on
the telephone for the doctor

to recover from this strange
conversational turn. You say

you’re whom? It is a pleasure
to meet you. She rolls her

eyes, but he’d once asked her
Am I your first lover? and she’d
said, Could be. Your face looks
familiar. It’s the same type of

generative error. The grammar
of the spoken word wall flip, let alone

the written, until something new is
in us, and in our conversation."

Jennifer Michael Hecht

 

[midcan5]

'Raking'

"Anna Bell and Lane, eighty,
make small leaf piles in the heat,
each pile a great joint effort,
like fifty years of marriage,
sharing chores a rusty dance.
In my own yard, the stacks
are big as children, who scatter them,
dodge and limbo the poke
of my rake. We’re lucky,
young and straight-boned.
And I feel sorry for the couple,
bent like parentheses
around their brittle little lawn.
I like feeling sorry for them,
the tenderness of it, but only
for a moment: John glides in
like a paper airplane, takes
the children for the weekend,
and I remember,
they’re the lucky ones—
shriveled Anna Bell, loving
her crooked Lane."

Tania Rochelle

 

[midcan5]

'What I Learned From My Mother'

"I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewing even if I didn’t know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch."

Julia Kasdorf

 

[midcan5]

'Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet'

"Here is a genial congregation,
well fed and rosy with health and appetite,
robust children in tow. They have come
and all the generations of them, to be fed,
their old ones too who are eligible now
for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age.
Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one,
heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said.

Here there is good will; here peace
on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits
of the gardens of America's heartland. Here is abundance,
here is the promised
land of milk and honey, out of which
a flank of the fatted calf, thick still
on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction
over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter."

Anne Caston

 

[midcan5]

'Section 60'

'Section 60 of Arlington Cemetery in Washington,
which are buried most of the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan.'

"The gravestones rose as nails
from the frozen land
trying to pierce the clouds
in a final attempt to escape
death.

The slow shade of the trees
drown the sound of tears,
sometimes the wind brings the dreadful
thunder of war,
There are moments in the day
that the secrecy of the leaves
break the white cadence
of the horizon scattering
among the names that are entangled
in newly planted grass.

Piece of land where the pain
woven a subtle fabric of sadness
where the moments of smiles
are light escaping between the wings of birds,
there are no songs of praise
only we see withered cheeks
by inconsequential sadness.

The rows are clean, intact,
white waiting for the order
to navigate the fathomless sea
of spirits seeking a reason
for the future of their souls."

Leonardo Ibanez

 

[midcan5]

'February 23'

"Light rain is falling in Central Park
but not on Upper Fifth Avenue or Central Park West
where sun and sky are yellow and blue
Winds are gusting on Washington Square
through the arches and on to LaGuardia Place
but calm is the corner of 8th Street and Second Avenue
which reminds me of something John Ashbery said
about his poem "Crazy Weather" he said
he was in favor of all kinds of weather
just so long as it's genuine weather
which is always unusually bad, unusually
good, or unusually indifferent,
since there isn't really any norm for weather
When he was a boy his mother met a friend
who said, "Isn't this funny weather?"

It was one of his earliest memories."

David Lehman

 

[midcan5]

'The Arrow and the Song'

"I SHOT an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where:
For so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak,
I found the arrow still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

[midcan5]

'The Dead Will Rise'

"Maybe a sense of history is not important.
After all, the winners write the books,
The official version is handed down, received
And passed from generation to generation.

I would like to hear what the losers think,
The ones who lost their families, their homes,
And had their country taken over.
Or from the shade of the soldier I saw dead

(I do not know or care his nationality)
On the front page of the paper. Tell me, friend,
Was any of it worth your life? You have a story,
And tonight, it’s quiet. Let me hear you speak."

Tony Lewis-Jones

 

[midcan5]

'Walking to School, 1964'

"Blurring the window, the snowflakes' numb white lanterns.
She's brewed her coffee, in the bathroom sprays cologne
And sets her lipstick upright on the sink.
The door ajar, I glimpse the yellow slip,

The rose-colored birthmark on her shoulder.
Then she's dressed—the pillbox hat and ersatz fur,
And I'm dressed too, mummified in stocking cap
And scarves, and I walk her to the bus stop

Where she'll leave me for my own walk to school,
Where she'll board the bus that zigzags to St. Paul
As I watch her at the window, the paperback

Romance already open on her lap,
The bus laboring off into snow, her good-bye kiss
Still startling my cheek with lipstick trace."

David Wojahn

 

[midcan5]

'If I Were In Charge of the World'

"If I were in charge of the world
I'd cancel oatmeal,
Monday mornings,
Allergy shots, and also Sara Steinberg.

If I were in charge of the world
There'd be brighter nights lights,
Healthier hamsters, and
Basketball baskets forty eight inches lower.

If I were in charge of the world
You wouldn't have lonely.
You wouldn't have clean.
You wouldn't have bedtimes.
Or "Don't punch your sister."
You wouldn't even have sisters.

If I were in charge of the world
A chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts would be a vegetable
All 007 movies would be G,
And a person who sometimes forgot to brush,
And sometimes forgot to flush,
Would still be allowed to be
In charge of the world."

Judith Viorst

 

[midcan5]

'Mother Doesn't Want a Dog'

"Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they smell,
And never sit when you say sit,
Or even when you yell.
And when you come home late at night
And there is ice and snow,
You have to go back out because
The dumb dog has to go.

Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they shed,
And always let the strangers in
And bark at friends instead,
And do disgraceful things on rugs,
And track mud on the floor,
And flop upon your bed at night
And snore their doggy snore.

Mother doesn't want a dog.
She's making a mistake.
Because, more than a dog, I think
She will not want this snake."

Judith Viorst

 

[midcan5]

'Caged Bird'

"A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom."

Maya Angelou

 

[midcan5]

'Crimson Invitation'

"More sex, more books, more cake, more murder--consider the invitation to do it all again, could it be that some might refuse the journey? What does the cruel soul have to look forward to but further cruelty? Why should the shy soul locate itself in one more clumsy body? The suicides, the downcast, the rejected--why should they return if they can remain bodiless, carried aloft as specks of light? What must have happened not to want it again? Never to watch the sun sink into the sea, never to embrace, never to live again. The beggar, would he refuse the journey? The woman who lost her children, the man whose dear love ran off with another? Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a fistful of ash--so Marcus Aurelius tells us. But consider all that comes between, the fleeting, the sweet, never to be repeated, never to happen again.

I think of skiing through the woods in winter, a few sparrows and chickadees in the branches, sunlight glistening on the snow, rabbit tracks, the whisper of trickling water beneath the ice, the silence rising into the blue bowl of sky. What does it mean never to want it again? I think of the faces of my children, the caress of my wife's fingertips against my cheek. Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a fistful of ash. Is Marcus Aurelius's dark soul still a point of light carried aloft by currents of wind? I want them all to want to again, not just the happy ones or thoughtless ones or the ones who believed themselves successful. For even one to hang back creates a shard of doubt, a stone in the shoe."

[excerpt]

Stephen Dobyns