February 2012
2 posts
amountingtothesoul asked: Why aren't you posting more??? Please???
dailywindow asked: I just started posting on Tumblr. I write a daily blog that I take from an email I send to family and friends. I usually include a poem, but on so public a venue as this I worry about copyright. Do you get permission to post the poems you do? Have you had anyone want you to take down poems or any trouble with publishers or poets over your use of their poems?
May 2011
1 post
fidelis asked: I miss reading poetry every day. I hope your busy schedule will relinquish soon so I can enjoy those beautiful words.
April 2011
6 posts
4 tags
Song, Cecilia Meireles
I placed my dream in a ship
and the ship on top of the sea;
—and then parted the sea with my hands
to sink my dream in the deep.
My hands still drip with water
from the blue of the waves thus parted
and the color that runs from my fingers
colors the sands, now deserted.
The wind is approaching from afar,
the night in the cold submits;
under the waves lies dying
my dream, in the...
10 tags
Failing and Flying, Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars...
Anonymous asked: "Inspired by Billy Collins' Poetry 180 project, I post one poem per day here, for at least [a] year." -- Accidentally caught a missed letter so I thought I'd let you know as I myself cannot stand when I make any type of grammatical error. Anyway, I find your blog to be absolutely spectacular!
Anonymous asked: How are you able to find a poem each day.
Anonymous asked: What happened to the journal? I'm excited you finally posted something again.
8 tags
After Your Death, Natasha Trethewey
First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
rom your touch, left empty the jars
you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,
I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken rom the inside:
a...
December 2010
0 posts
1 tag
A Diminished Thing, Rachel Contreni Flynn
We could make a meal
of what’s left in this box:
potato, onion, rind of cheese,
elderly egg. We could make
another baby without much
fear, at our age. Name her
Rosa and set her in the yard
with us, pulling weeds,
listening to the birds dusting
their wings in the drive. We
could instead just hold each other
here in the cold house,
and say enough, enough.
November 2010
3 posts
-colorfulchaos asked: I dont know if it's thanksgiving in your place but happy thanksgiving anyways. Have a good day!
Anonymous asked: Are you coming back? I'm starting to panic.
October 2010
2 posts
Anonymous asked: How do you rack your brains to come up with a different poem each day? And your stuff is good too. Are you just naturally gifted or is that some secret to crafting good poetry? Love your stuff btw. Cheers~
Anonymous asked: Is there any good poems about broken hearts?
September 2010
27 posts
5 tags
Iron, Jane Cooper (for 9/25)
Every morning I wake
with blood on my pillow
and the taste of fresh blood
like iron against my tongue.
They say my gums are inflamed
and the bleeding will cease
at first frost—
Each morning the sun wakes me.
I think some nerve is exposed—
it is only August—
or a fine skin was peeled off
the night you were killed.
Conversations at breakfast
have the stripped truth of...
8 tags
This Hour and What Is Dead, Li-Toung Lee (for...
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.
At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is...
5 tags
Grief, Stephen Dobyns (for 9/23)
Trying to remember you
is like carrying water
in my hands a long distance
across sand. Somewherev
people are waiting.
They have drunk nothing for days.
Your name was the food I lived on;
now my mouth is full of dirt and ash.
To say your name was to be surrounded
by feathers and silk; now, reaching out,
I touch glass and barbed wire.
Your name was the thread connecting my life;
now I am...
6 tags
The Shout, Simon Armitage (for 9/22)
We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face
I don’t remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,
I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.
He called from over the park—I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,
from the...
8 tags
White Crane, Dean Young
I don’t need to know any more about death
from the Japanese beetles
infesting the roses and plum
no matter what my neighbor sprays
in orange rubber gloves.
You can almost watch them writhe and wither,
pale and fall like party napkins
blown from a table just as light fades,
and the friends
as often happens when light fades,
talk of something painful, glacial, pericardial,
and the...
4 tags
The Purist, Ogden Nash (for 9/20)
I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later
Been eaten by an alligator.
Profesor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”
6 tags
Dinner Hour, December, Eamon Grennan (for 9/19)
In little dark-ringed frames of light
the neighborhood is dining: heads nod
to one another; candlelight catches on things—
threads of it snapped by knives and forks,
the glass of water, the wine. No one
is not at home here except the man
walking the block alone and peering in
as if he were a visitor from beyond
and wanted to feast his eyes again
on this picture of felicity, trying...
4 tags
Seams, Hazel Hall
I was sewing a seam one day.
Just this way—
Flashing four silver stitches there
With thread, like this, fine as a hair,
And then four here, and there again,
When
The seam I sewed dropped out of sight…
I saw the sea come rustling in,
Big and grey, windy and bright…
Then my thread that was as thin
As hair, tangled up like smoke
And broke.
I threaded up my needle,...
3 tags
How to Be Alone, Tanya Davis
If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.
We could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library. Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and...
4 tags
Hélas, Oscar Wilde (for 9/16)
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights,...
3 tags
Love in a Life, Robert Browning
Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her—
Next time, herself!—not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch’s perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew;
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.
Yet as the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the...
3 tags
Crossing Legs, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
in see, in captaincy
in collar, see. in carpenter.
the fathering. in senate
the reckoning, in senate
this is the hole in your roof.
this is the bed you carry on your back.
this is the usual undoing.
the fathering, upon the undoing.
this is walking, heel and toe
this is walking on toes.
this is passing lip to lip and hand to hand
this is your pretty clothes, she knows
in starts and...
3 tags
Loss, Abayomi Animashaun
Such lies have been told about her.
My favorite: ‘when she comes
The blue hand of the sky vanishes.
Hippos storm the sun.
Birds peck furiously at anthills.
Wings wrap tightly against trees.’
But notice how she doesn’t say a word
And sits beside you when
The moments of love have flickered their last.
How she stands beside you when solitude
Has you cornered. Right now she...
4 tags
They Lived Next Door to Mermaids, Stephanie...
the house was new
untouched by ghosts
or the dead who like
to sing
the weeds were growing,
we took a spade
hooking through, like
a needle
into the hearth of dirt
until he found red again
as we laughed
despite all the water.
5 tags
Windowsill, Altar, Charles F. Thielman (for 9/10)
Lit votives tongue the air, horizon
red with the approach of dawn.
Brake lights strobe downtown,
the birds do not wish us to rise,
the results of gunshots well known.
Headlines stitch a fatwa across
each white-eyed gaze as Time
reaches for mirror shades,
eyes like shot deer salting
their wounds in pacific waves.
Lit votives tongue the air.
She murmurs inside a dream cave
beyond...
5 tags
Trail, Lightsey Darst
The woods are green, the path winds
through blackberries.
You dream of his hands on your thigh,
you dream of his hands on your neck.
You follow
a narrow path, can’t smell
him up ahead, the bear, nose
deep in arbutus.
But always his breath
on your throat, his hand, his mouth.
You will eat the blackberried, listen
for the tremble of clear water
on mica-flecked rock.
You dream a...
5 tags
Hunting Horns (Cors de Chasse), Guillaume...
Our history is noble and tragic
Like a tyrant’s glaring mask
No hazard nor magical drama
No trivial detail
Makes pathos of our love
Opium possessed de Quincey
Chaste poison drunk to Anne
He dreamed his life away
On on since all must past
I’ll frequently turn back
Memories are hunting horns
Whose sound dies out along with the wind
Notre historie est noble et tragique
Comme...
4 tags
Now That I am in Madrid I Can Think, Frank O'Hara
I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York
see a vast bridge stetching to the humbled outskirts with only you
Standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree...
6 tags
Last Supper, Whit Griffin (for 9/4)
“They found the woman’s body
under the porch of an abandoned
house,” Mary told me on the
second floor of the bookstore.
“She had been preparing a meal
and discovered she lacked one
of the ingredients. She was one
her way to the store when she
disappeared.”
Mary began to sob as she read me
the newspaper story.
“I just wish I knew what she
had been...
7 tags
Struggle, Richard Moore
It’s done; I planned, did it deliberately,
and wormed a place in you with some dull lies.
And now, does a hurt anger in your eyes
whip back? I’ll slash the cords you lash to me.
Cast off. Wakes mingled. O sweet piracy—
flesh grappling below rafters, cries…All cries
stop when rising depths choke your replies.
And then blank surface and white debris.
And so it’s...
2 tags
You Have What I Look For, Jamie Sabines (for 9/3)
You have what I look for, what I long for, what I love,
you have it.
The fist of my heart is beating, calling.
I thank the stories for you,
I thank your mother and father
and death who has not seen you.
I thank the air for you.
You are elegant as wheat,
delicate as the outline of your body.
I have never loved a slender woman
but you have made my hands fall in love,
you moored my desire,...
7 tags
The History of Poetry, Mark Strand
Our masters are gone and if they returned
Who among us would hear them, who would know
The bodily sound of heaven of the heavenly sound
Of the body, endless and vanishing, that tuned
Our days before the wheeling stars
Were stripped of power? The answer is
None of us here. And what does it mean if we see
The moon-glazed mountains and the town with its silent doors
And water towers, and feel...
6 tags
Sadness of a Star, Guillaume Apollinaire (for 9/2)
Minerva stepped out calmly from my head
And I will be forever crowned with blood
There is reason within and sky above my skull
Where Goddess you were buckling on your arms
Of my misfortunes this is not the worst
This almost mortal wound became a star
The secret sorrow which is my despair
Is more than any other soul could hide
I bear with me a suffering of fire
Just as a glow-worm bears...
4 tags
Cheap Date, James Bobrick
Such time as I’d drop by
you’d lead me to the den
straight past your parents, who’d
pointedly sit there glued
to talk shows, CNN,
the volume turned up high.
So what if dystrophy
shriveled your tits and clit
as long as you’d crouch, eyes
famished, between my thighs;
I treated you like shit,
your only hold on me
exerted on my twists
and turnings in the chair;...
6 tags
Haunted, Thachom Poyil Rajeevan (for 9/1)
broken wires
tubes
and rusty needles
in the nose
mouth
and penis.
on the forehead
misleading like a star
dullard or burnt-out bulb
in the spiraling wriggles
of the intestine
the putrid stench
of missing dreams
in sleep
when heavy footsteps come
and give key
it wakes up
grinding worn-out cogs
in the eye-wells,
the spinal passes
the skull-sky
at the bottom of the stomach...
5 tags
How You Taste The Apples, Joan Jobe Smith
The winter of Yolo County Fair’s 1989
First Prize for Apple Pies showed me
how to keep my pie flute golden while
it baked by simply making an aluminum
foil collar for the pie pan like you might
for the TIn Man’s whip-lashed neck.
While she showed me how to weave
a lattice tio for y cherry pie she
told me her apple pie won because of
the Gravensteins, those large, yellow...
Apologies, etc.
With the end of August came the end of Reader Submissions as well as the end of my vacation, hence the lack of posts the past few days.
Regular posts (with make-up posts for the missed ones) will resume tonight, with new and wonderful poets/poetry! I got some new anthologies as well as some collected Apollinaire. I’m excited!
2 tags
Skin to skin messaging, Christine Bernardo
please let it always end this way:
staying up late,
both of us soft and warm,
writing words on each other’s backs
with our fingers
like a lazy southern drawl.
and me with puckered brow,
trying hard to concentrate
on semantics
and failing miserably each time,
because you with small grin
obliterate everything else
with each tiny delicate stroke.
-http://chrstn.tumblr.com
August 2010
42 posts
seattlebooks asked: Is there any one poet in particular whose style you try to emulate?
tumblintomotivate asked: hi . do you have poems about high school graduation ? thanks. i really need it as my project, hope you can help me.
2 tags
And you may be worth the smoke in my lungs, Gem
Where did you find me even, as i walked into the bar
five years passed, my heart half broken,
my bones soaked in a fine liquor.
I did not think you knew me then,
of me maybe, about me, just as I knew you.
Having never really spoken, you smirked as if
you’d seen a ghost of higher splendor.
Last time, you remember,
perched on the arm chair
in your younger brother’s bedroom,
a thirteen year...
2 tags
Bluebird, where did you go?, Lucas Kolthof
scene 1,
we’re sharing gentle smiles,
genuine echoes trailing
our words. faint whispers
turn into distant screams
as time lunges at us
with our personal hell.
but we trail tulips
amongst a field of
lonely little petunias,
so why doubt? love
will keep us alive.
day by day, i’d walk
you home and saying goodbye
was never enough for me.
we’d stand on your
broken porch and become
lost...
Submissions
I’ve had a lot of fun this month with Reader Submissions (even if I had a few missed/made up days; these things happen). I’ve read some REALLY incredible poetry. Unfortunately I won’t be able to post it all this month. I will be saving it for my next batch of reader submission posts.
Those of you wondering if I’m still taking submissions, technically the answer is...
akasealion asked: Hello! A while back, you posted a poem called "Sophie's Song" by Tom Holmes. I was wondering, did you extract this poem from a book of poems written by Holmes, and if so, which one? Thank you very much in advance!
2 tags
There's an emptiness, Travis James Lancaster
There’s an emptiness that resides
In these walls.
They’re choking from built up
Clutter and old telephone bills.
If the walls could speak they’d say:
“Get the fuck out of this house”.
But still you lie on that twin bed,
In the back room, with your alarm clock
Set 13 minutes fast.
Sometimes I wake up in the room
Above their old bed,
And I want to pound the cold tile floor and scream:...
2 tags
In Essence, My Lifeblood, Spencer Perez
In a quaint dive, clammy with years
of cooking oil coagulated
under squeaky barstools,
I clawed at
dozens of ethereal thoughts
Much in the same way that I scrapped
linty change from my pockets
to pay for this stiff cup of coffee.
“Is this exact?”
I sure hope so.
-http://lookoutmountaineer.tumbrl.com