Poetry Dump (Long)
Jun. 19th, 2010 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormFor my own later reference:
"There is a television, for instance; the truth
is that almost everybody,
given the choice between being loved and
watching TV,
would choose the latter." (look it up)
In the Middle
of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.
Barbara Crooker
Address to Winnie in Paris
Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He loves you and wants you to love him. I have never been to Paris, but I have heard that it is a good place to be in love in.
The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is real. The Eiffel Tower is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real. None are necessary to your life.
Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until afterward.
The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing that it has already happened.
Diderot writes that the word is not the thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing. Plato wrote of the need to be reconjoined with the rest of oneself. My analyst speaks of codependent impulses in modern society. These various explanations are metaphors for an inaccessible truth.
In de Laclos, a betrayal is an invitation to a string of further betrayals, each one taking you further from the original. If the hell for lovers consists in being betrayed, the hell for the beloved consists in betraying. These hells comprise the world.
A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision.
Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. In Bullfinch's, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind us that we live underwater.
Up above the high-water mark, angels with their teeth and their sharp little wings watch us with murderous disinterest. They sentence us for the one crime we all commit.
It is said by area doctors that cowboys notoriously misrepresent their degree of pain. For this reason their diseases progress far beyond the point at which treatment is beneficial. Are they lying?
If I could read only one sentence for the rest of my life, it would be the one where the jailor says to Socrates I can see that you are a good man, the best one that has ever been in this place.
These examples are meant to dissuade you, Winnie, from loving men other than my friend Harris. He asked me to write this poem.
Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the head of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.
What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone.
by Sarah Manguso
Acknowledgement
When I was lonely
Your fingers reached for mine, their touch
Natural as sunlight's.
When I was hardened
Your warmness thawed my rock as gently
As music thought.
When I was angry
You smiled: "But this our day is short
For these long shadows."
When I was solemn
You held out laughter, casual as light
For a cigarette.
When I was troubled
Your understanding crossed the bounds of
Words to silence
When I was frightened
Your eyes said: "Fear's a child's dream. I too
Have dreamed and woken."
A. S. J. Tessimond
Sometimes
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
Sheenagh Pugh
My Lover Asks Me
My lover asks me:
"What is the difference between me and the sky?"
The difference, my love,
Is that when you laugh,
I forget about the sky.
Nizar Qabbani
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
IT'S LIFE, CARLOS.
It's life that is hard: waking, sleeping, eating, loving, working and
dying are easy.
It's life that suddenly fills both ears with the sound of that
symphony that forces your pulse to race and swells your
heart near to bursting.
It's life, not listening, that stretches your neck and opens your eyes
and brings you into the worst weather of the winter to arrive
once more at the house where love seemed to be in the air.
And it's life, just life, that makes you breathe deeply, in the air that
is filled with wood smoke and the dust of the factory, because
you hurried, and now your lungs heave and fall with the
nervous excitement of a leaf in spring breezes, though it is
winter and you are swallowing the dirt of the town.
It isn't death when you suffer, it isn't death when you miss each
other and hurt for it, when you complain that isn't death,
when you fight with those you love, when you misunder-
stand, when one line in a letter or one remark in person ties
one of you in knots, when the end seems near, when you
think you will die, when you wish you were already
dead---none of that is death.
It's life, after all, that brings you a pain in the foot and a pain in the
hand, a sore throat, a broken heart, a cracked back, a torn
gut, a hole in your abdomen, an irritated stomach, a swollen
gland, a growth, a fever, a cough, a hiccup, a sneeze, a
bursting blood vessel in the temple.
It's life, not nerve ends, that puts the heartache on a pedestal and
worships it.
It's life, and you can't escape it. It's life, and you asked for it. It's
life, and you won't be consumed by passion, you won't be
destroyed by self-destruction, you won't avoid it by
abstinence, you won't manage it by moderation, because it's
life---life everywhere, life at all times---and so you won't be
consumed by passion: you will be consumed by life.
It's life that will consume you in the end, but in the meantime ...
It's life that will eat you alive, but for now ...
It's life that calls you to the street where the wood smoke hangs,
and the bare hint of a whisper of your name, but before you
go ...
Too late: Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your
heart, and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time,
and you are standing in a part of the town where the air is
sweet---your face flushed, your chest thumping, your
stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a
separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn
separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among
the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows you
apart in her arms.
Marvin Bell
Sparrow, My Sparrow
The voice that loves me best when I am dreaming
comes from every corner of the circle of my sleep
speaking in the sound of my own drowning.
She says the body's just a habit getting old,
a crystal turning on a nerve of ancient longing.
She says I will teach you how to be with yourself
always, she says we do not live in the same world.
All this is just an allegory for the truth.
Truth is, I cannot speak
the voice that I've been dreaming.
Truth is, the slate sky darkens,
clouds of sparrows heave in the wind,
the trees are massed with sparrows screaming
and the fields are dotted with them.
the birds are bracing themselves. The birds
are frenzied by something about to happen.
Truth is, I have my feet on the slimy banks.
I look for my face in the murk-green river
and the water's surface does not change.
But I hear myself in the screech of sparrows
and I am panicked by something about to happen.
Slate sky--darkened; sound in wind:
I enter this world like myself as a prayer.
I enter this world as myself.
I cannot help myself.
What is a prayer but a song of longing
turning on the thread of its own history?
I feel myself loved by a voice in the wind--
I cover my ears with my palms.
The whole world rocks and still
the cold green river does not spill.
Jane Mead
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
Pablo Neruda
the sun
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
Mary Oliver
The Prophet, Chapter 16, Pain
And a woman spoke, saying, "Tell us of Pain."
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.
Kahlil Gibran
MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Robert Hass
burn all the letters
don't ask me about his mouth.
most days this job has me at the wrong ocean
missing Brooklyn, our slanted kitchen, your ankles.
at the register: green apples, zucchini, lime popsicles.
most days this job has me at the wrong ocean
-- a pattern's a pattern, not everything fits.
at the register: green apples, zucchini, lime popsicles
(there's a subway card in the other pocket.)
a pattern's a pattern, not everything fits,
I can write this. our names on the checks, the mailbox,
there's a subway card in the other pocket.
his mouth, the ocean. your voice on the machine.
I can write this: our names on the checks, the mailbox,
both our names, leave a message.
his mouth, the ocean, your voice on the machine.
so much blood. today is green. ginger ale. leaving.
both our names, leave a message:
I have a lover and something like a husband.
so much blood. today is green. ginger ale. leaving.
J says your confessions are overwhelming.
I have a lover and something like a husband.
we've never been a good idea.
J says your confessions are overwhelming.
if it weren't for metaphor, we'd never write anything.
we've never been a good idea.
to write this down – he says you write it all?
if it weren't for metaphor, we'd never write anything.
never trust a poet. so much blood.
to write this down – he says you write it all?
I wanted this we so long I got over the wanting
(never trust a poet. so much blood.)
and there you were. no roses. a cactus.
I wanted this we so long I got over the wanting.
write it: maybe I invented you
and there you were: no roses, a cactus.
if so, I want the keys back.
write it: maybe I invented you.
(take the trash out. change the sheets.)
if so, I want the keys back.
your hair, it's on everything.
take the trash out. change the sheets.
(missing Brooklyn, our slanted kitchen, your ankles.)
your hair, it's on everything.
don't ask me about his mouth.
marty mcconnell
Black Oaks
Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,
or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.
Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.
But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen
and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage
of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.
Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.
Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another -- why don't you get going?
For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,
I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
Mary Oliver
Talking in the Dark
Before college, before high school, before my voice
finally cracked, before I could do my first pull-up,
and long before my first real kiss, you and I
held the same girls’ hands. First Karen, then Tiffany,
then Jessica. And by the time you kissed Amy, I knew
it wasn’t her I wanted to kiss. I spent the night at your house
and we talked in the dark until we fell asleep. Those years
were short ones, seem shorter now. I hated myself for lying
so still in the bed beside you, as awkward as a body
and as inarticulate. I have never wanted to kiss you,
only hold you now and then or be held. I know now
that you wouldn’t have cared and just wanted to be
trusted. I have pictures of us with girls at dances.
I’m wearing my father’s dress shirt. It balloons away
from my body. But you are right there next to me,
in my shirt’s reach. Later you won’t stand so close, and Amy
will have to pose us, pleading closer. No, no. Closer.
Billy Merrell
A Story about the Body
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." the radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.
Robert Haas
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee
This is My Heart
This is my heart. It is a good heart.
Weaves a membrane of mist and fire
When we make love in the flower world.
My heart is close enough to sing to you
In a language too clumsy, for human words.
This is my head. It is a good head.
Whirrs inside with a swarm of worries.
What is the source of the mystery?
And why can't I see it right here, right now
As real as these hands hammering
The world together.
This is my soul. It is a good soul.
It tells me, "come here forgetful one.
And we sit together.
We cook a little something to eat.
Then a sip of something sweet.
For memory. For memory.
This is my song. It is a good song.
It walked forever the border of fire and water.
Climbed ribs of desire to my lips to sing to you.
Its new wings quiver with vulnerability.
Come lie next to me.
Put your head here.
My heart is close enough to sing.
Joy Harjo
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
e.e. cummings
Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere
I am THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
so don't mess with me
I've got a big bag full of SEX TOYS
and you can't have any
'cause they're all mine
'cause I'm
the SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
"Hey," you may say to yourself,
"who the hell's she tryin' to kid,
she's no sex goddess,"
But trust me,
I am
if only for the fact that I have
the unabashed gall
to call
myself a SEX GODDESS,
I mean, after all,
it's what so many of us have at some point thought,
we've all had someone
who worshipped our filthy socks
and barked like a dog when we were near
giving us cause
to pause and think: You know, I may not look like much
but deep inside, I am a SEX GODDESS.
Only
we'd never come out and admit it publicly
well, you wouldn't admit it publicly
but I will
because I am
THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
I haven't always been
a SEX GODDESS
I used to be just a mere mortal woman
but I grew tired of sexuality being repressed
then manifest
in late night 900 number ads
where 3 bodacious bimbettes
heave cleavage into the camera's winking lens and sigh:
"Big Girls oooh, Bad Girls oooh, Blonde Girls oooh,
you know what to do, call 1-900-UNMITIGATED BIMBO ooooh."
Yeah
I got fed up with the oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh
I got fed up with it all
so I put on my combat boots
and hit the road with my bag full of SEX TOYS
that were a vital part of my SEX GODDESS image
even though I would never actually use
my SEX TOYS
'cause my being a SEX GODDESS
it isn't a SEXUAL thing
it's a POLITICAL thing
I don't actually have SEX, no
I'm too busy taking care of
important SEX GODDESS BUSINESS,
yeah,
I gotta go on The Charlie Rose Show
and MTV and become a parody
of myself and make
buckets full of money off my own inane brand
of self-righteous POP PSYCHOLOGY
because my pain is different
because I am a SEX GODDESS
and when I talk,
people listen
why ?
Because, you guessed it,
I AM THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
and you're not.
Maggie Estep
What we have learned about love in this life
can never be removed from us. (look up)
How I'd Like to Die
I'd like to be swallowed alive by a giant anaconda
and the poor thing would have to lug me around itside it
until there was nothing left of me
but a small pearl of wisdom.
I'd like to whip out a knife and stab myself to death
while delivering a sentimental speech at a family reunion,
the knife a magic one handed down generation by generation
from neolithic times and to be used only
for circumcision and severing the umbilical cord.
I'd like to drown while frolicking with nuns
in a private swimming pool
filled with warm tapioca pudding.
I'd like to be sitting in the lotus posture
in the centre of a totally dark and silent room
until everything became so still
there'd be no need to draw another breath
and I'd have to be buried in a pyramid-shaped box
with a pleasant look on my face
and no signs of rot having set in.
I'd like to starve to death
while managing a busy and successful delicatessen.
I'd like to be hanged
for attempting to assassinate Hitler.
I'd like to be machine-gunned while trapped in barbed wire
at Dieppe, seasick, drenched, in 1942,
along with all the other guys
from the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.
I'd like to die laughing in the front row of the Bloor Cinema
during the rabbit-hunting scene in Rules of the Game
with my friend Christopher at my side, embarrassed,
pretending he didn't know me.
I'd like to meet, by chance, my mystical twin soul,
someone to whom I'd be so attracted and who
would be so attracted to me
that our hearts would stop
and our souls would lift off into angelic realms.
I would not like to die in a nuclear holocaust.
David McFadden
Cats like angels
Cats like angels are supposed to be thin;
pigs like cherubs are supposed to be fat.
People are mostly in between, a knob
of bone sticking out in the knee you might
like to pad, a dollop of flab hanging
over the belt. You punish yourself,
one of those rubber balls kids have
that come bouncing back off their own
paddles, rebounding on the same slab.
You want to be slender and seamless
as a bolt.
When I was a girl
I loved spiny men with ascetic grimaces
all elbows and words and cartilage
ribbed like cast up fog-grey hulls,
faces to cut the eyes blind
on the glittering blade, chins
of Aegean prows bent on piracy.
Now I look for men whose easy bellies
show a love for the flesh and the table,
men who will come in the kitchen
and sit, who don't think peeling potatoes
makes their penis shrink; men with broad
fingers and purple figgy balls,
men with rumpled furrows and the slightly
messed look at ease of beds recently
well used.
We are not all supposed
to look like undernourished fourteen year
old boys, no matter what the fashions
ordain. You are built to pull a cart,
to lift a heavy load and bear it,
to haul up the long slope, and so
am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid
shapely dark glazed clay pots that can
stand on the fire. When we put our
bellies together we do not clatter
but bounce on the good upholstery.
Marge Piercy
An Apology
Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.
It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.
I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.
F.J.Bergmann
And lately -- with this whole war thing -- the language machine
supporting it -- I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're
injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:
Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,
and it's the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,
washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,
like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,
like I'm the executioner's fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don't know how to speak love
when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting
into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself
with the thought that we'll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we'll teach her
how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect hte first straw, because no one
ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late.
Jeffrey McDaniel
From Murder in the Cathedral
Chorus:
We do not wish anything to happen.
Seven years we have lived quietly,
Succeeded in avoiding notice,
Living and partly living.
There have been oppression and luxury,
There have been poverty and license,
There has been minor injustice.
Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living.
Sometimes the corn has failed us,
Sometimes the harvest is good,
One year is a year of rain,
Another a year of dryness,
One year the apples are abundant,
Another year the plums are lacking.
Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living.
We have kept the feasts, heard the masses,
We have brewed beer and cyder,
Gathered wood against the winter,
Talked at the corner of the fire,
Talked at the corners of the streets,
Talked not always in whispers,
Living and partly living.
We have seen births, deaths and marriages,
We have had various scandals,
We have been afflicted with taxes,
We have had laughter and gossip,
Several girls have disappeared
Unaccountably, and some not able to.
We have all had our private terrors,
Our particular shadows, our secret fears.
But now a great fear is upon us, a fear not of one but of many,
A fear like birth and death, when we see birth and death alone
In a void apart. We
Are afraid in a fear which we cannot know, which we cannot face, which none understands,
And our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, our selves are lost lost
In a final fear which none understands.
TS Eliot
How the Pope is Chosen
Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy.
Almost always a toy is an imitation
of something grown-ups use.
Popes with unclipped hair are called corded popes.
If a Pope's hair is allowed to grow unchecked,
it becomes extremely long and twists
into long strands that look like ropes.
When it is shorter it is tightly curled.
Popes are very intelligent.
There are three different sizes.
The largest are called standard Popes.
The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes.
I could go on like this, I could say:
"He is a squarely built Pope, neat,
well-proportioned, with an alert stance
and an expression of bright curiosity,"
but I won't. After a poodle dies
all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven.
They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up
and then he's the new Pope.
He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone,
day and night in all kinds of weather.
The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope,
like "Wild Bill" or "Buffalo Bill."
He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front.
Most Popes are called "Babe" because
growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.
All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,
but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy.
They have to go to the bathroom by themselves,
and they spend almost all of their time sleeping.
Parents seem to be incapable of helping their little popes grow up.
Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows,
but the sky is full of them.
It looks as if they are just taking it easy,
but they are learning something else.
What, we don't know, because we are not like them.
We can't even dress like them.
We are like red bugs or mites compared to them.
We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper,
but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands.
We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes.
When a Pope is ready to come into the world,
we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well.
Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us.
They open their mouths at regular intervals.
They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross
and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips.
Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream
and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection
when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush
in search of a sheep.
James Tate
Neighbors
The conversation consisting of
thud and fuck you
Something heavy hits the wall
A picture shifts
Fuck you, she shouts, fuck you
A dish or a glass. No, a bottle.
Fuck you, she shouts, you motherfucker,
you fucking motherfucker, fuck you
I want to reach through the wall with
an armload of sharpened intensifiers –
You mongoose bowel, you cabinet of phlegm,
you guppy-hearted elbow pipe –
so that, if when she bleeds, the Red Sea,
she can end the refrain, thrust home
But does it matter what she shouts,
but that she shouts, against thud
and push, any words, any arithmetic
One fuck you plus one fuck you
is one fuck you Some days, I suppose,
only the classics will do
Robert Hershon
To Have Without Holding
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon rasberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bounding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.
Marge Piercy
The Art of Disappearing
When they say Don't I know you?
say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say We should get together
say why?
It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.
Naomi Shihab Nye
THE BICYCLE
once
forgotten by tourists
a bicycle joined
a herd
of mountain goats
with its splendidly turned
silver horns
it became
their leader
with its bell
it warned them
of danger
with them
it partook
in romps
on the snow covered
glade
the bicycle
gazed from above
on people walking;
with the goats
it fought
over a goat,
with a bearded buck
it reared up at eagles
enraged
on its back wheel
it was happy
though it never
nibbled at grass
or drank
from a stream
until once
a poacher
shot it
tempted
by the silver trophy
of its horns
and then
above the Tatras was seen
against the sparkling
January sky
the angel of death erect
slowly
riding to heaven
holding the bicycle's
dead horns.
Jerzy Harasymowicz (originally published in Polish)
Lesbian Academic Love Poem
When I buy you perfume, my dearest,
it signifies a profound respect for
your argumentative abilities. When I buy
you lingerie, I mean to say there is something
I do not understand, let me dress it in this way.
When I smear your lipstick, I am subverting
the romance that my readings of you display.
Because, as chaired faculty, I know
I Love You died eight years ago.
I might as well say, "You Mean the World to Me,"
Or, "Thinking of You With Fondness."
I have composed anagrams
("meteor aunt melody who?" or, "definition shown: funk got shy")
but again and again they read like endings,
sad avowals to the state of amorous communiqué.
Let me just propose to you, for argument's sake,
(I do, after all, wear perfume even when you're away)
that my problem with Love is that is doesn't signify
in anything but a series of contradictory analogies
that happen to turn me on.
So shall we start with a map, a common philosophy of dualities,
to transcend via nuance our butches and femmes --
no matter how convincing Sue-Ellen Case has been.
(See attached: memorandum.)
Sara Jane Stoner
Slow Leak
I don't know how to wish you well.
Your hair is out of control, you are downgraded and strange.
You used to be the man who whopped upon his chest,
wandered on a happy shoestring, made a nearly
perfect girl. Times we were electric.
Our talks teased out newness, mixed surprising
pigment. Our battles were not over ground
that mattered, so we walked away from them
with invisible limps, beautiful sticks
with no blood. Thinking ourselves
a perfect fit, we began to forget each other.
The way the roots of a perfect lawn watered too much
get lazy. You thought you should not
have to ask. I thought my private fizzings
and stirrings weightless, but you got sapped.
Your secret began as a scar and turned
to a decision flavored with payback.
The size of my thirst, your silence!
Between us now is the continent we didn't
finish, and one person's regret.
Because you have none, this is what I will never
tell you: I took too many days off
from loving you. And: I thought we could both
get larger. And: Neither of us was the right one
to unlock the other's body. My iron lung
of a father has become soft tissue,
joshing and washing the woman not quite still
my mother—a long tack in a small, hand-made boat.
You and I were so full of beans and promise—
I'm ashamed we failed at forever.
Ellen Doré Watson
Songs
I sat there singing her
Songs in the dark.
She said,
I do not understand
The words.
I said,
There are
No words.
Langston Hughes
There is Only One of Everything
Not a tree but the tree
we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind and bending down
like that again. What will push out of the earth
later, making it summer, will not be
grass, leaves, repetition, there will
have to be other words. When my
eyes close language vanishes. The cat
with the divided face, half black half orange
nests in my scruffy fur coat, I drink tea,
fingers curved around the cup, impossible
to duplicate these flavours. The table
and freak plates glow softly, consuming themselves,
I look out at you and you occur
in this winter kitchen, random as trees or sentences,
entering me, fading like them, in time you will disappear
but the way you dance by yourself
on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful,
so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair
sticking up from your head, it's your surprised
body, pleasure I like. I can even say it,
though only once and it won't
last: I want this. I want
this.
Margaret Atwood
A Fable
Two women with
the same claim
came to the feet
of the wise king. Two women,
but only one baby.
The king knew
someone was lying.
What he said was
let the child be
cut in half; that way
no one will go
empty-handed. He
drew his sword.
Then, of the two
women, one
renounced her share:
this was
the sign, the lesson.
Suppose
you saw your mother
torn between two daughters:
what could you do
to save her but be
willing to destroy
yourself--she would know
who was the rightful child,
the one who couldn't bear
to divide the mother.
by Louise Gluck
roses are #FF0000
violets are #0000FF
all my base
are belong to you
The Lovers
She is about to come. This time,
they are sitting up, joined below the belly,
feet cupped like sleek hands praying
at the base of each other's spines.
And when something lifts within her
toward a light she's sure, once again,
she can't bear, she opens her eyes
and seees his face is turned away,
one arm behind him, hand splayed
palm down on the mattress, to brace himself
so he can lever his hips, touch
with the bright tip the innermost spot.
And she finds she can't bear it --
not his beautiful neck, stretched and corded,
not his hair fallen to one side like beach grass,
not the curved wing of his ear, washed thin
with daylight, deep pink of the inner body --
What she can't bear is that she can't see his face,
not that she thinks this exactly -- she is rocking
and breathing -- it's more her body's thought,
opening, as it is, into its own sheer truth.
So that when her hand lifts of its own volition
and slaps him, twice on the chest,
on that pad of muscled flesh just above the nipple,
slaps him twice, fast, like a nursing child
trying to get a mother's attention,
she's startled by the sound,
though when he turns his face to hers --
which is what her body wants, his eyes
pulled open, as if she had bitten --
she does reach out and bite him, on the shoulder,
not hard, but with the power infants have
over those who have borne them, tied as they are
to the body, and so, tied to the pleasure,
the exquisite pain of this world.
And when she lifts her face he sees
where she's gone, knows she can't speak,
is traveling toward something essential,
toward the core of her need, so he simply
watches, steadily, with an animal calm
as she arches and screams, watches the face that,
if she could see it, she would never let him see.
Dorianne Laux
Prayer
The prayer read by Wiesel during the radio program [Speaking of Faith] originally appeared in a diary and was included in the collection One Generation After.
I no longer ask you for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware of Your listening.
I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You.
I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship. Love? Love is not Yours to give.
As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers. But not Your countenance.
They are modest, my requests, and humble. I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land.
I ask you, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me: God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too.
I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith. I only beg You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together.
Elie Wiesel
Friendly Advice to a Lot of Young Men
Go to Tibet.
Ride a camel.
Read the bible.
Dye your shoes blue.
Grow a beard.
Circle the world in a paper canoe.
Subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post.
Chew on the left side of your mouth only.
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a
straight razor.
And carve your name in her arm.
Brush your teeth with gasoline.
Sleep all day and climb trees at night.
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.
Hold your head under water and play the violin.
Do a belly dance before pink candles.
Kill your dog.
Run for Mayor.
Live in a barrel.
Break your head with a hatchet.
Plant tulips in the rain.
But don't write poetry.
Charles Bukowski
also additional note on breakups http://theferrett.livejournal.com/464157.html and cobra commander for president http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2463 )
Enough. I will listen to 'All I Need' by Matchbox 20 one more time and stop with the language stuff, I promise... or maybe just a couple more poems.
Or maybe I will turn off the music and read these all aloud right now instead of hoarding them? That's what poetry is for, after all.
"There is a television, for instance; the truth
is that almost everybody,
given the choice between being loved and
watching TV,
would choose the latter." (look it up)
In the Middle
of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.
Barbara Crooker
Address to Winnie in Paris
Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He loves you and wants you to love him. I have never been to Paris, but I have heard that it is a good place to be in love in.
The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is real. The Eiffel Tower is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real. None are necessary to your life.
Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until afterward.
The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing that it has already happened.
Diderot writes that the word is not the thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing. Plato wrote of the need to be reconjoined with the rest of oneself. My analyst speaks of codependent impulses in modern society. These various explanations are metaphors for an inaccessible truth.
In de Laclos, a betrayal is an invitation to a string of further betrayals, each one taking you further from the original. If the hell for lovers consists in being betrayed, the hell for the beloved consists in betraying. These hells comprise the world.
A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision.
Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. In Bullfinch's, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind us that we live underwater.
Up above the high-water mark, angels with their teeth and their sharp little wings watch us with murderous disinterest. They sentence us for the one crime we all commit.
It is said by area doctors that cowboys notoriously misrepresent their degree of pain. For this reason their diseases progress far beyond the point at which treatment is beneficial. Are they lying?
If I could read only one sentence for the rest of my life, it would be the one where the jailor says to Socrates I can see that you are a good man, the best one that has ever been in this place.
These examples are meant to dissuade you, Winnie, from loving men other than my friend Harris. He asked me to write this poem.
Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the head of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.
What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone.
by Sarah Manguso
Acknowledgement
When I was lonely
Your fingers reached for mine, their touch
Natural as sunlight's.
When I was hardened
Your warmness thawed my rock as gently
As music thought.
When I was angry
You smiled: "But this our day is short
For these long shadows."
When I was solemn
You held out laughter, casual as light
For a cigarette.
When I was troubled
Your understanding crossed the bounds of
Words to silence
When I was frightened
Your eyes said: "Fear's a child's dream. I too
Have dreamed and woken."
A. S. J. Tessimond
Sometimes
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
Sheenagh Pugh
My Lover Asks Me
My lover asks me:
"What is the difference between me and the sky?"
The difference, my love,
Is that when you laugh,
I forget about the sky.
Nizar Qabbani
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
IT'S LIFE, CARLOS.
It's life that is hard: waking, sleeping, eating, loving, working and
dying are easy.
It's life that suddenly fills both ears with the sound of that
symphony that forces your pulse to race and swells your
heart near to bursting.
It's life, not listening, that stretches your neck and opens your eyes
and brings you into the worst weather of the winter to arrive
once more at the house where love seemed to be in the air.
And it's life, just life, that makes you breathe deeply, in the air that
is filled with wood smoke and the dust of the factory, because
you hurried, and now your lungs heave and fall with the
nervous excitement of a leaf in spring breezes, though it is
winter and you are swallowing the dirt of the town.
It isn't death when you suffer, it isn't death when you miss each
other and hurt for it, when you complain that isn't death,
when you fight with those you love, when you misunder-
stand, when one line in a letter or one remark in person ties
one of you in knots, when the end seems near, when you
think you will die, when you wish you were already
dead---none of that is death.
It's life, after all, that brings you a pain in the foot and a pain in the
hand, a sore throat, a broken heart, a cracked back, a torn
gut, a hole in your abdomen, an irritated stomach, a swollen
gland, a growth, a fever, a cough, a hiccup, a sneeze, a
bursting blood vessel in the temple.
It's life, not nerve ends, that puts the heartache on a pedestal and
worships it.
It's life, and you can't escape it. It's life, and you asked for it. It's
life, and you won't be consumed by passion, you won't be
destroyed by self-destruction, you won't avoid it by
abstinence, you won't manage it by moderation, because it's
life---life everywhere, life at all times---and so you won't be
consumed by passion: you will be consumed by life.
It's life that will consume you in the end, but in the meantime ...
It's life that will eat you alive, but for now ...
It's life that calls you to the street where the wood smoke hangs,
and the bare hint of a whisper of your name, but before you
go ...
Too late: Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your
heart, and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time,
and you are standing in a part of the town where the air is
sweet---your face flushed, your chest thumping, your
stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a
separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn
separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among
the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows you
apart in her arms.
Marvin Bell
Sparrow, My Sparrow
The voice that loves me best when I am dreaming
comes from every corner of the circle of my sleep
speaking in the sound of my own drowning.
She says the body's just a habit getting old,
a crystal turning on a nerve of ancient longing.
She says I will teach you how to be with yourself
always, she says we do not live in the same world.
All this is just an allegory for the truth.
Truth is, I cannot speak
the voice that I've been dreaming.
Truth is, the slate sky darkens,
clouds of sparrows heave in the wind,
the trees are massed with sparrows screaming
and the fields are dotted with them.
the birds are bracing themselves. The birds
are frenzied by something about to happen.
Truth is, I have my feet on the slimy banks.
I look for my face in the murk-green river
and the water's surface does not change.
But I hear myself in the screech of sparrows
and I am panicked by something about to happen.
Slate sky--darkened; sound in wind:
I enter this world like myself as a prayer.
I enter this world as myself.
I cannot help myself.
What is a prayer but a song of longing
turning on the thread of its own history?
I feel myself loved by a voice in the wind--
I cover my ears with my palms.
The whole world rocks and still
the cold green river does not spill.
Jane Mead
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
Pablo Neruda
the sun
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
Mary Oliver
The Prophet, Chapter 16, Pain
And a woman spoke, saying, "Tell us of Pain."
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.
Kahlil Gibran
MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Robert Hass
burn all the letters
don't ask me about his mouth.
most days this job has me at the wrong ocean
missing Brooklyn, our slanted kitchen, your ankles.
at the register: green apples, zucchini, lime popsicles.
most days this job has me at the wrong ocean
-- a pattern's a pattern, not everything fits.
at the register: green apples, zucchini, lime popsicles
(there's a subway card in the other pocket.)
a pattern's a pattern, not everything fits,
I can write this. our names on the checks, the mailbox,
there's a subway card in the other pocket.
his mouth, the ocean. your voice on the machine.
I can write this: our names on the checks, the mailbox,
both our names, leave a message.
his mouth, the ocean, your voice on the machine.
so much blood. today is green. ginger ale. leaving.
both our names, leave a message:
I have a lover and something like a husband.
so much blood. today is green. ginger ale. leaving.
J says your confessions are overwhelming.
I have a lover and something like a husband.
we've never been a good idea.
J says your confessions are overwhelming.
if it weren't for metaphor, we'd never write anything.
we've never been a good idea.
to write this down – he says you write it all?
if it weren't for metaphor, we'd never write anything.
never trust a poet. so much blood.
to write this down – he says you write it all?
I wanted this we so long I got over the wanting
(never trust a poet. so much blood.)
and there you were. no roses. a cactus.
I wanted this we so long I got over the wanting.
write it: maybe I invented you
and there you were: no roses, a cactus.
if so, I want the keys back.
write it: maybe I invented you.
(take the trash out. change the sheets.)
if so, I want the keys back.
your hair, it's on everything.
take the trash out. change the sheets.
(missing Brooklyn, our slanted kitchen, your ankles.)
your hair, it's on everything.
don't ask me about his mouth.
marty mcconnell
Black Oaks
Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,
or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.
Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.
But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen
and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage
of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.
Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.
Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another -- why don't you get going?
For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,
I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
Mary Oliver
Talking in the Dark
Before college, before high school, before my voice
finally cracked, before I could do my first pull-up,
and long before my first real kiss, you and I
held the same girls’ hands. First Karen, then Tiffany,
then Jessica. And by the time you kissed Amy, I knew
it wasn’t her I wanted to kiss. I spent the night at your house
and we talked in the dark until we fell asleep. Those years
were short ones, seem shorter now. I hated myself for lying
so still in the bed beside you, as awkward as a body
and as inarticulate. I have never wanted to kiss you,
only hold you now and then or be held. I know now
that you wouldn’t have cared and just wanted to be
trusted. I have pictures of us with girls at dances.
I’m wearing my father’s dress shirt. It balloons away
from my body. But you are right there next to me,
in my shirt’s reach. Later you won’t stand so close, and Amy
will have to pose us, pleading closer. No, no. Closer.
Billy Merrell
A Story about the Body
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." the radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.
Robert Haas
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee
This is My Heart
This is my heart. It is a good heart.
Weaves a membrane of mist and fire
When we make love in the flower world.
My heart is close enough to sing to you
In a language too clumsy, for human words.
This is my head. It is a good head.
Whirrs inside with a swarm of worries.
What is the source of the mystery?
And why can't I see it right here, right now
As real as these hands hammering
The world together.
This is my soul. It is a good soul.
It tells me, "come here forgetful one.
And we sit together.
We cook a little something to eat.
Then a sip of something sweet.
For memory. For memory.
This is my song. It is a good song.
It walked forever the border of fire and water.
Climbed ribs of desire to my lips to sing to you.
Its new wings quiver with vulnerability.
Come lie next to me.
Put your head here.
My heart is close enough to sing.
Joy Harjo
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
e.e. cummings
Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere
I am THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
so don't mess with me
I've got a big bag full of SEX TOYS
and you can't have any
'cause they're all mine
'cause I'm
the SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
"Hey," you may say to yourself,
"who the hell's she tryin' to kid,
she's no sex goddess,"
But trust me,
I am
if only for the fact that I have
the unabashed gall
to call
myself a SEX GODDESS,
I mean, after all,
it's what so many of us have at some point thought,
we've all had someone
who worshipped our filthy socks
and barked like a dog when we were near
giving us cause
to pause and think: You know, I may not look like much
but deep inside, I am a SEX GODDESS.
Only
we'd never come out and admit it publicly
well, you wouldn't admit it publicly
but I will
because I am
THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
I haven't always been
a SEX GODDESS
I used to be just a mere mortal woman
but I grew tired of sexuality being repressed
then manifest
in late night 900 number ads
where 3 bodacious bimbettes
heave cleavage into the camera's winking lens and sigh:
"Big Girls oooh, Bad Girls oooh, Blonde Girls oooh,
you know what to do, call 1-900-UNMITIGATED BIMBO ooooh."
Yeah
I got fed up with the oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh
I got fed up with it all
so I put on my combat boots
and hit the road with my bag full of SEX TOYS
that were a vital part of my SEX GODDESS image
even though I would never actually use
my SEX TOYS
'cause my being a SEX GODDESS
it isn't a SEXUAL thing
it's a POLITICAL thing
I don't actually have SEX, no
I'm too busy taking care of
important SEX GODDESS BUSINESS,
yeah,
I gotta go on The Charlie Rose Show
and MTV and become a parody
of myself and make
buckets full of money off my own inane brand
of self-righteous POP PSYCHOLOGY
because my pain is different
because I am a SEX GODDESS
and when I talk,
people listen
why ?
Because, you guessed it,
I AM THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
and you're not.
Maggie Estep
What we have learned about love in this life
can never be removed from us. (look up)
How I'd Like to Die
I'd like to be swallowed alive by a giant anaconda
and the poor thing would have to lug me around itside it
until there was nothing left of me
but a small pearl of wisdom.
I'd like to whip out a knife and stab myself to death
while delivering a sentimental speech at a family reunion,
the knife a magic one handed down generation by generation
from neolithic times and to be used only
for circumcision and severing the umbilical cord.
I'd like to drown while frolicking with nuns
in a private swimming pool
filled with warm tapioca pudding.
I'd like to be sitting in the lotus posture
in the centre of a totally dark and silent room
until everything became so still
there'd be no need to draw another breath
and I'd have to be buried in a pyramid-shaped box
with a pleasant look on my face
and no signs of rot having set in.
I'd like to starve to death
while managing a busy and successful delicatessen.
I'd like to be hanged
for attempting to assassinate Hitler.
I'd like to be machine-gunned while trapped in barbed wire
at Dieppe, seasick, drenched, in 1942,
along with all the other guys
from the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.
I'd like to die laughing in the front row of the Bloor Cinema
during the rabbit-hunting scene in Rules of the Game
with my friend Christopher at my side, embarrassed,
pretending he didn't know me.
I'd like to meet, by chance, my mystical twin soul,
someone to whom I'd be so attracted and who
would be so attracted to me
that our hearts would stop
and our souls would lift off into angelic realms.
I would not like to die in a nuclear holocaust.
David McFadden
Cats like angels
Cats like angels are supposed to be thin;
pigs like cherubs are supposed to be fat.
People are mostly in between, a knob
of bone sticking out in the knee you might
like to pad, a dollop of flab hanging
over the belt. You punish yourself,
one of those rubber balls kids have
that come bouncing back off their own
paddles, rebounding on the same slab.
You want to be slender and seamless
as a bolt.
When I was a girl
I loved spiny men with ascetic grimaces
all elbows and words and cartilage
ribbed like cast up fog-grey hulls,
faces to cut the eyes blind
on the glittering blade, chins
of Aegean prows bent on piracy.
Now I look for men whose easy bellies
show a love for the flesh and the table,
men who will come in the kitchen
and sit, who don't think peeling potatoes
makes their penis shrink; men with broad
fingers and purple figgy balls,
men with rumpled furrows and the slightly
messed look at ease of beds recently
well used.
We are not all supposed
to look like undernourished fourteen year
old boys, no matter what the fashions
ordain. You are built to pull a cart,
to lift a heavy load and bear it,
to haul up the long slope, and so
am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid
shapely dark glazed clay pots that can
stand on the fire. When we put our
bellies together we do not clatter
but bounce on the good upholstery.
Marge Piercy
An Apology
Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.
It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.
I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.
F.J.Bergmann
And lately -- with this whole war thing -- the language machine
supporting it -- I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're
injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:
Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,
and it's the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,
washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,
like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,
like I'm the executioner's fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don't know how to speak love
when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting
into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself
with the thought that we'll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we'll teach her
how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect hte first straw, because no one
ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late.
Jeffrey McDaniel
From Murder in the Cathedral
Chorus:
We do not wish anything to happen.
Seven years we have lived quietly,
Succeeded in avoiding notice,
Living and partly living.
There have been oppression and luxury,
There have been poverty and license,
There has been minor injustice.
Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living.
Sometimes the corn has failed us,
Sometimes the harvest is good,
One year is a year of rain,
Another a year of dryness,
One year the apples are abundant,
Another year the plums are lacking.
Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living.
We have kept the feasts, heard the masses,
We have brewed beer and cyder,
Gathered wood against the winter,
Talked at the corner of the fire,
Talked at the corners of the streets,
Talked not always in whispers,
Living and partly living.
We have seen births, deaths and marriages,
We have had various scandals,
We have been afflicted with taxes,
We have had laughter and gossip,
Several girls have disappeared
Unaccountably, and some not able to.
We have all had our private terrors,
Our particular shadows, our secret fears.
But now a great fear is upon us, a fear not of one but of many,
A fear like birth and death, when we see birth and death alone
In a void apart. We
Are afraid in a fear which we cannot know, which we cannot face, which none understands,
And our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, our selves are lost lost
In a final fear which none understands.
TS Eliot
How the Pope is Chosen
Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy.
Almost always a toy is an imitation
of something grown-ups use.
Popes with unclipped hair are called corded popes.
If a Pope's hair is allowed to grow unchecked,
it becomes extremely long and twists
into long strands that look like ropes.
When it is shorter it is tightly curled.
Popes are very intelligent.
There are three different sizes.
The largest are called standard Popes.
The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes.
I could go on like this, I could say:
"He is a squarely built Pope, neat,
well-proportioned, with an alert stance
and an expression of bright curiosity,"
but I won't. After a poodle dies
all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven.
They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up
and then he's the new Pope.
He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone,
day and night in all kinds of weather.
The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope,
like "Wild Bill" or "Buffalo Bill."
He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front.
Most Popes are called "Babe" because
growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.
All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,
but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy.
They have to go to the bathroom by themselves,
and they spend almost all of their time sleeping.
Parents seem to be incapable of helping their little popes grow up.
Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows,
but the sky is full of them.
It looks as if they are just taking it easy,
but they are learning something else.
What, we don't know, because we are not like them.
We can't even dress like them.
We are like red bugs or mites compared to them.
We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper,
but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands.
We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes.
When a Pope is ready to come into the world,
we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well.
Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us.
They open their mouths at regular intervals.
They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross
and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips.
Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream
and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection
when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush
in search of a sheep.
James Tate
Neighbors
The conversation consisting of
thud and fuck you
Something heavy hits the wall
A picture shifts
Fuck you, she shouts, fuck you
A dish or a glass. No, a bottle.
Fuck you, she shouts, you motherfucker,
you fucking motherfucker, fuck you
I want to reach through the wall with
an armload of sharpened intensifiers –
You mongoose bowel, you cabinet of phlegm,
you guppy-hearted elbow pipe –
so that, if when she bleeds, the Red Sea,
she can end the refrain, thrust home
But does it matter what she shouts,
but that she shouts, against thud
and push, any words, any arithmetic
One fuck you plus one fuck you
is one fuck you Some days, I suppose,
only the classics will do
Robert Hershon
To Have Without Holding
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon rasberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bounding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.
Marge Piercy
The Art of Disappearing
When they say Don't I know you?
say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say We should get together
say why?
It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.
Naomi Shihab Nye
THE BICYCLE
once
forgotten by tourists
a bicycle joined
a herd
of mountain goats
with its splendidly turned
silver horns
it became
their leader
with its bell
it warned them
of danger
with them
it partook
in romps
on the snow covered
glade
the bicycle
gazed from above
on people walking;
with the goats
it fought
over a goat,
with a bearded buck
it reared up at eagles
enraged
on its back wheel
it was happy
though it never
nibbled at grass
or drank
from a stream
until once
a poacher
shot it
tempted
by the silver trophy
of its horns
and then
above the Tatras was seen
against the sparkling
January sky
the angel of death erect
slowly
riding to heaven
holding the bicycle's
dead horns.
Jerzy Harasymowicz (originally published in Polish)
Lesbian Academic Love Poem
When I buy you perfume, my dearest,
it signifies a profound respect for
your argumentative abilities. When I buy
you lingerie, I mean to say there is something
I do not understand, let me dress it in this way.
When I smear your lipstick, I am subverting
the romance that my readings of you display.
Because, as chaired faculty, I know
I Love You died eight years ago.
I might as well say, "You Mean the World to Me,"
Or, "Thinking of You With Fondness."
I have composed anagrams
("meteor aunt melody who?" or, "definition shown: funk got shy")
but again and again they read like endings,
sad avowals to the state of amorous communiqué.
Let me just propose to you, for argument's sake,
(I do, after all, wear perfume even when you're away)
that my problem with Love is that is doesn't signify
in anything but a series of contradictory analogies
that happen to turn me on.
So shall we start with a map, a common philosophy of dualities,
to transcend via nuance our butches and femmes --
no matter how convincing Sue-Ellen Case has been.
(See attached: memorandum.)
Sara Jane Stoner
Slow Leak
I don't know how to wish you well.
Your hair is out of control, you are downgraded and strange.
You used to be the man who whopped upon his chest,
wandered on a happy shoestring, made a nearly
perfect girl. Times we were electric.
Our talks teased out newness, mixed surprising
pigment. Our battles were not over ground
that mattered, so we walked away from them
with invisible limps, beautiful sticks
with no blood. Thinking ourselves
a perfect fit, we began to forget each other.
The way the roots of a perfect lawn watered too much
get lazy. You thought you should not
have to ask. I thought my private fizzings
and stirrings weightless, but you got sapped.
Your secret began as a scar and turned
to a decision flavored with payback.
The size of my thirst, your silence!
Between us now is the continent we didn't
finish, and one person's regret.
Because you have none, this is what I will never
tell you: I took too many days off
from loving you. And: I thought we could both
get larger. And: Neither of us was the right one
to unlock the other's body. My iron lung
of a father has become soft tissue,
joshing and washing the woman not quite still
my mother—a long tack in a small, hand-made boat.
You and I were so full of beans and promise—
I'm ashamed we failed at forever.
Ellen Doré Watson
Songs
I sat there singing her
Songs in the dark.
She said,
I do not understand
The words.
I said,
There are
No words.
Langston Hughes
There is Only One of Everything
Not a tree but the tree
we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind and bending down
like that again. What will push out of the earth
later, making it summer, will not be
grass, leaves, repetition, there will
have to be other words. When my
eyes close language vanishes. The cat
with the divided face, half black half orange
nests in my scruffy fur coat, I drink tea,
fingers curved around the cup, impossible
to duplicate these flavours. The table
and freak plates glow softly, consuming themselves,
I look out at you and you occur
in this winter kitchen, random as trees or sentences,
entering me, fading like them, in time you will disappear
but the way you dance by yourself
on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful,
so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair
sticking up from your head, it's your surprised
body, pleasure I like. I can even say it,
though only once and it won't
last: I want this. I want
this.
Margaret Atwood
A Fable
Two women with
the same claim
came to the feet
of the wise king. Two women,
but only one baby.
The king knew
someone was lying.
What he said was
let the child be
cut in half; that way
no one will go
empty-handed. He
drew his sword.
Then, of the two
women, one
renounced her share:
this was
the sign, the lesson.
Suppose
you saw your mother
torn between two daughters:
what could you do
to save her but be
willing to destroy
yourself--she would know
who was the rightful child,
the one who couldn't bear
to divide the mother.
by Louise Gluck
roses are #FF0000
violets are #0000FF
all my base
are belong to you
The Lovers
She is about to come. This time,
they are sitting up, joined below the belly,
feet cupped like sleek hands praying
at the base of each other's spines.
And when something lifts within her
toward a light she's sure, once again,
she can't bear, she opens her eyes
and seees his face is turned away,
one arm behind him, hand splayed
palm down on the mattress, to brace himself
so he can lever his hips, touch
with the bright tip the innermost spot.
And she finds she can't bear it --
not his beautiful neck, stretched and corded,
not his hair fallen to one side like beach grass,
not the curved wing of his ear, washed thin
with daylight, deep pink of the inner body --
What she can't bear is that she can't see his face,
not that she thinks this exactly -- she is rocking
and breathing -- it's more her body's thought,
opening, as it is, into its own sheer truth.
So that when her hand lifts of its own volition
and slaps him, twice on the chest,
on that pad of muscled flesh just above the nipple,
slaps him twice, fast, like a nursing child
trying to get a mother's attention,
she's startled by the sound,
though when he turns his face to hers --
which is what her body wants, his eyes
pulled open, as if she had bitten --
she does reach out and bite him, on the shoulder,
not hard, but with the power infants have
over those who have borne them, tied as they are
to the body, and so, tied to the pleasure,
the exquisite pain of this world.
And when she lifts her face he sees
where she's gone, knows she can't speak,
is traveling toward something essential,
toward the core of her need, so he simply
watches, steadily, with an animal calm
as she arches and screams, watches the face that,
if she could see it, she would never let him see.
Dorianne Laux
Prayer
The prayer read by Wiesel during the radio program [Speaking of Faith] originally appeared in a diary and was included in the collection One Generation After.
I no longer ask you for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware of Your listening.
I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You.
I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship. Love? Love is not Yours to give.
As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers. But not Your countenance.
They are modest, my requests, and humble. I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land.
I ask you, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me: God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too.
I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith. I only beg You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together.
Elie Wiesel
Friendly Advice to a Lot of Young Men
Go to Tibet.
Ride a camel.
Read the bible.
Dye your shoes blue.
Grow a beard.
Circle the world in a paper canoe.
Subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post.
Chew on the left side of your mouth only.
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a
straight razor.
And carve your name in her arm.
Brush your teeth with gasoline.
Sleep all day and climb trees at night.
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.
Hold your head under water and play the violin.
Do a belly dance before pink candles.
Kill your dog.
Run for Mayor.
Live in a barrel.
Break your head with a hatchet.
Plant tulips in the rain.
But don't write poetry.
Charles Bukowski
also additional note on breakups http://theferrett.livejournal.com/464157.html and cobra commander for president http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2463 )
Enough. I will listen to 'All I Need' by Matchbox 20 one more time and stop with the language stuff, I promise... or maybe just a couple more poems.
Or maybe I will turn off the music and read these all aloud right now instead of hoarding them? That's what poetry is for, after all.
