Poet's Corner

[midcan5]

'Coming Close'

"Take this quiet woman, she has been
standing before a polishing wheel
for over three hours, and she lacks
twenty minutes before she can take
a lunch break. Is she a woman?
Consider the arms as they press
the long brass tube against the buffer,
they are striated along the triceps,
the three heads of which clearly show.
Consider the fine dusting of dark down
above the upper lip, and the beads
of sweat that run from under the red
kerchief across the brow and are wiped
away with a blackening wrist band
in one odd motion a child might make
to say No! No! You must come closer
to find out, you must hang your tie
and jacket in one of the lockers
in favor of a black smock, you must
be prepared to spend shift after shift
hauling off the metal trays of stock,
bowing first, knees bent for a purchase,
then lifting with a gasp, the first word
of tenderness between the two of you,
then you must bring new trays of dull
unpolished tubes. You must feed her,
as they say in the language of the place.
Make no mistake, the place has a language,
and if by some luck the power were cut,
the wheel slowed to a stop so that you
suddenly saw it was not a solid object
but so many separate bristles forming
in motion a perfect circle, she would turn
to you and say, "Why?" Not the old why
of why must I spend five nights a week?
Just, "Why?" Even if by some magic
you knew, you wouldn't dare speak
for fear of her laughter, which now
you have anyway as she places the five
tapering fingers of her filthy hand
on the arm of your white shirt to mark
you for your own, now and forever."

Philip Levine

 

[midcan5]

'It’s Like This'

for Peter Parrish

"Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible
cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark,
the cord that makes him always dissatisfied,
has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes.

He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes,
but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with
different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men
that people who hardly know him often mistake
for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus.

He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank
or a library or turning a piece of flat land
into a ditch. All day something that refuses to
show itself hovers at the corner of his eye,
like a name he is trying to remember, like
expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone
were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress
whom he has never met, would never meet again.
And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor
is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can
almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge
of a burning field with smoke swirling around it
like white curtains shot full of wind and light.

When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see
what person he should be that evening. He wants to say:
All day I have been listening, all day I have felt
I stood on the brink of something amazing.
But he says nothing, and his family walks around him
as if he were a stick leaning against a wall.

Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed.
He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure
of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water
drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him.
Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress,
and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him.
Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more,
until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me."

Stephen Dobyns

 

[midcan5]

'Homework'

'Homage Kenneth Koch'

"If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran
I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,
I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal
Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I’d throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean."

Allen Ginsberg

 

[midcan5]

'The Past'

"It shows up one summer in a greatcoat,
storms through the house confiscating,
says it must be paid and quickly,
says it must take everything.

Your children stare into their cornflakes,
your wife whispers only once to stop it,
because she loves you and she sees it
darken the room suddenly like a stain.

What did you do to deserve it,
ruining breakfast on a balmy day?
Kiss your loved ones. Night is coming.
There was no life without it anyway."

Michael Ryan

 

[midcan5]

'Out of the Blue'

1.

"All lost.

All lost in the dust.
Lost in the fall and the crush and the dark.
Now all coming back.

2.

Up with the lark, downtown New York.
The sidewalks, the blocks.
Walk. Don't walk. Walk. Don't Walk.

Breakfast to go:
an adrenalin shot
in a Styrofoam cup

Then plucked from the earth,
rocketed skyward,
a fifth a mile
in a minute, if that.
The body arrives
then the soul catches up."


rest here.

Out of the Blue Simon Armitage

 

[midcan5]

'Self-Portrait'

"Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers--but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor's profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife's face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don't know.
I'm truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that--so far--
belongs to me."

Adam Zagajewski

translated by Clare Cavanagh

 

[midcan5]

'Identity Crisis'

"He was urged to prepare for success: "You never can tell,
he was told over and over; "others have made it;
one dare not presume to predict. You never can tell.

Who’s Who in America lists the order of cats
in hunting, fishing, bird-watching, farming,
domestic service--the dictionary order of cats

who have made it. Those not in the book are beyond the pale.
Not to succeed in you chosen profession is unthinkable.
Either you make it or--you’re beyond the pale.

Do you understand?"
"No," he shakes his head.
"Are you ready to forage for freedom?"
"No," he adds,
"I mean, why is a cat always shaking his head?

Because he’s thinking: who am I? I am not
only one-ninth of myself. I always am
all of the selves I have been and will be but am not."

"The normal cat," I tell him, "soon adjusts
to others and to changing circumstances;
he makes his way the way he soon adjusts."

"I can’t," he says, "perhaps because I’m blue,
big-footed, lop-eared, socially awkward, impotent,
and I drink too much, whether because I’m blue

or because I like it, who knows. I want to escape
at five o’clock into an untouchable world
where the top is the bottom and everyone wants to escape

from the middle, everyone, every day. I mean,
I have visions of two green eyes rising
out of the ocean, blinking, knowing what I mean."

"Never mind the picture, repeat after me
the self’s creed. What he tells you you
tells me and I repeats. Now, after me:

I love myself, I wish I would live well.
Your gift of love breaks through my self-defeat.
All prizes are blue. No cat admits defeat.
The next time that he lives he will live well.""

F. D. Reeve

 

[midcan5]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic1c_MaAMOI]YouTube - Laurie Halse Anderson - Speak Poem[/ame]

 

[midcan5]

'One September Afternoon'

"Home from town
the two of them sit
looking over what they have bought
spread out on the kitchen table
like gifts to themselves.
She holds a card of buttons
against the new dress material
and asks if they match.
The hay is dry enough to rake,
but he watches her
empty the grocery bag.
He reads the label
on a grape jelly glass
and tries on
the new straw hat again."

Leo Dangel

 

[midcan5]

'Rain'

"Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late."

Peter Everwine

 

[midcan5]

"Denial'

"He called it “his ranch,”
yet each winter day found her beside him
feeding hay to hungry cows.

In summer heat
you would find her in the hayfield—
cutting, raking, baling, stacking.

In between she kept the books,
cooked, cleaned
laundered, fed bum lambs.

Garden rows straight,
canned jars of food
lined cellar walls.

Then she died.
I asked him how he would manage.
“Just like I always have,” he said."

Patricia Frolander

 

[midcan5]

'On Turning 65'

From now on it's late.
—Tomas Tranströmer

"The actor's nightmare:
Opening night, center stage, the big soliloquy,
And he's forgotten his lines.
The professor's nightmare:
First day of classes, two hours late, the wrong room,
And because the teacher is also an actor of sorts,
He's forgotten his lines.
When I retired from teaching six years ago,
That nightmare, I'm happy to say,
Retired with me.
Now there's almost nothing I need to remember.
For 40 years my inamorata
And I have returned to the same place:
Motel on the beach of the central coast.
After this birthday dinner,
We sat on the balcony and lifted glasses of champagne
To toast my Medicare card.
For the third day in a row, a blue whale
And her calf spouted and breached
And held their dripping tail flukes high for us.
They even came shoreward
From the shallows marked by the buoy,
But always at high tide
When there was depth enough for those great bodies
With their elephant-sized tongues,
Hearts as big as Buicks.
Only ten thousand of them left in our hemisphere;
It's hard to know how we deserved this drama.
Maybe it's simple:
We saw them, while others walked the strand
Unaware of those huge blown breaths.
Back home, two days older,
I sit in the grass and read Transtromer,
His poems delicate and quiet as drawn breath,
While a mourning dove coos, loud as an owl.
In the dappled light next to me,
A lime green, iridescent beetle lumbers.
He climbs a blade of grass,
But halfway up gravity drops him on his back.
His legs whip, slowly he rights himself
To climb and fall again.
Ten poems later, he's gained
Less than that in inches.
The metaphor is obvious:
This is the progress of the poet,
This flopping along,
Trying to draw the world
Into a hard shell and then breathe it out
Onto the void of blank paper.
There is only one thing I have to remember:
From now on it's late.
Soon the crickets
Will draw the darkness down to them."

C. G. Hanzlicek

 

[midcan5]

'Bigger'

"Crouched low in a dank pool
of rage, I waited behind
the wooden fence until she walked
through the gate. She was
bigger than me, but slower,
and I sprang up, slamming
deep into her belly with both fists,
over and over with more force
than I believed my body
could produce. She collapsed, hard
and heavy as a wet pair of jeans
might drop from a clothesline, but she didn't
look angry or afraid. She stared at me
with what seemed like awe
before she stopped falling and began
to cry—not loudly, as I expected—
but softly, almost weeping, sitting there
in a pale clump of her mother's
spent daffodils, arms wrapped
around her knees. I could hear
a dog barking in the yard
next door, and someone's car
starting, as if nothing had happened,
and I just stood there, hands hanging
stupidly above her, trembling
with what should have been
shame, wanting her to stand,
to strike back, to make it right."

Corrinne Clegg Hales

 

[midcan5]

'The Rag Rug'

"In our kitchen was a rag rug
my mother bought for its bright mix of colors.
It was my task on cleaning days
to drape it over the line in the back yard
and, with a tool shaped like the wing
of a giant dragonfly, proceed to whack it
until a cumulus of dust swirled overhead,
earning my mother's approval.
Cleaning—what she called "redding up"—
was both industry and passion for her,
while I, in my arrogance, thought it foolish
and beneath my talents: The dust she chased
from one corner fled to another,
and then she, too, was dust.

Grown old now, I live alone
in a house Time traded me, house for house,
until I learned grief also is a kind of clutter:
Drive one grief out the door,
two others knock, seeking a place within.
And though too late, I ask for her forgiveness,
who hated whatever tarnished or made dim
the light and luster of common things:
lamp, glass vase, the figure in a photograph,
wood grain of table, braiding in a rug—
this rag rug I took from memory
and put into a poem, that I might see it, as before,
dancing its tiny fires into the morning's
early slant of light."

Peter Everwine

 

[midcan5]

'Ode To the Butterfly Mind'

"The Parliament of Butterflies
Was racked by deep division
Questions of what to teach the young
Demanded their decision.

It had been known and taught and thought
Since butterfly life began
That butterflies in glory rose
From their creators mighty hand

Now some few who this truth mocked
Had attacked faiths very pillars
All butterflies, these scientists claimed,
Came from caterpillars.

This indecent theory spread
Into butterfly education,
Until this caterpillar cult
Threatened creations revelation.

The faithful sought to restore the truth
About the origins of butterflies;
And to build an absolute moral base,
To stop the metamorphic lies.

Believe you descended from some worm
And wormlike you will be!
Reasoned those who'd seen faith's light
And knew there was nothing left to see.

We see no proof, some butterflies said
That we are all come from cocoons--
Unbelievers who would teach this tale
Are all immoral loons.

Some said the metamorphous lie
Was laid by the enemy, they believed,
Set, like candle flames and windshields,
To destroy all who were deceived.

The matter was at last resolved--
Both theories must be taught--how fine!
Now all youth can simply decide the truth,
Each in their own simple butterfly mind."

Edwin F. Kagin

 

[midcan5]

'Child Development'

"As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants."

Billy Collins

 

[midcan5]

'The Worlds I Know'

"Don't breathe, I tell my son,
they'll die. We lean over the cold
blue hood of the car, bend close

to watch the first flakes,
small as salt grains,
light and break or stay whole.

I point a numb finger:
Look there, tiny perfect stars,
I say without speaking,

only with my eyes, and he nods,
smiles, shows me one of his—
a palace so ephemeral

it floated here. I wish I had
a magnifying glass. I wish
I had another life to give him

the worlds I know, the worlds
I don't, and together we could
enter the church of a diamond.

I'll have to settle for this:
a logging spur two rutted miles
above Rattlesnake Gorge.

Over a broken pine, just visible
against grey, a red-tailed hawk
traces lonely ovals.

Flags of green moss cling
to a bony snag. He's tall,
nearly as tall as me.

Our lungs give out
and the ghosts inside us rise.
He shivers in bitter air,

says nothing, and I know too
well it's time to move on,
the snow normal now, not strange

lace along the line of hills.
On the quiet ride down, our hearts
whisper from their separate cells."

Edward Harkness

 

[midcan5]

'I Leave Her Weeping'

"I leave her weeping in her barred little bed,
her warm hand clutching at my hand,
but she doesn’t want a kiss, or to hug the dog goodnight—
she keeps crying mommy, uhhh, mommy,
with her lovely crumpled face
like a golden piece of paper I am throwing away.
We have been playing for hours,
and now we need to stop, and she does not want
to. She is counting on me to lower the boom
that is her heavy body, and settle her down.
I rub her ribcage, I arrange the blankets around her hips.
Downstairs are lethal phonecalls I have to answer.
Friends
dying, I need to call.
My daughter may be weeping all my tears,
I only know
that even this young
and lying on her side,
her head uplifted like a cupped tulip,
sometimes she needs to cry."

Liz Rosenberg

 

[midcan5]

'The Writer'

"In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder."

Richard Wilbur

 

[midcan5]

Another song that approaches poetry, great beat, and interesting words. A world in the past but is it.

Utah Phillips Ani DiFranco 'Anarchy'

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t6nzLX9gF4[/ame]