January 2009
32 posts
5 tags
What She Did in the Morning, I Wouldn't Know, She...
They were like sofa cushions.
She was constantly rearranging them
To form new patterns and support her frame.
Her attention was mainly directed toward herself
And some of it, a small part, I would say,v
Was aimed at trying to bend others that way,
But few responded, few fulfilled her wish;
She was simply not their kind of dish,
So, she remained, unmarried and complaining.
She had a bird, a...
2 tags
A Coat, William Butler Yeats
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
And though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
3 tags
The Red Poppy, Louise Glück
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never...
3 tags
The Self-Unseeing, Thomas Hardy
Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in,
She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.
Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!
5 tags
Dog's Death, John Updike
She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was...
3 tags
A Decade, Amy Lowell
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savor,
But I am completely nourished.
3 tags
Original Sin, Miller Williams
Wednesday nights
I walked in shadows past prayer meeting lights
and gave my time
for an hour and a half to the movies
and god’s dime.
I was scared
when the girl who sold the tickets because she was dared
by a man as old
as my father let me feel.
She was cold
and this surprise
was me revelation—but I made lies
and looking at her
twisted my mouth as if it
didn’t...
2 tags
A Little Poem (for Jack Marr), Miller Williams
We say that some are mad. In fact
if we have all the words and we
make madness mean the way they act
then they as all of us can see
are surely mad. And then again
if they have all the words and call
madness something else, well then—
well then, they are not mad at all.
3 tags
Entropy, Miller Williams
You say Hello and part of what you spend
to say it goes to God. There is a tax
on all our simplest thoughts and common acts.
It will come to pass that a friend greets friend
and there is not a sound. Thus God subtracts
bit by little bit till in the end
there is nothing at all. Intend. Intend.
2 tags
Novermber 25, Steve Martin
A thread strains to say goodbye
you snip the thread goodbye
2 tags
I Met a Genius, Charles Bukowski
I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it’s not pretty.
it was the first time I’d
realized
that.
2 tags
How to Stop Smoking, Miller Williams
If you are a man
think of a woman wiggling out of her underwear
saying come on you don’t have to love me.
If you are a woman
think of the man thinking that.
Practice.
3 tags
Fly Me to the Moon, Miller Williams
He learns what love can do and what it can’t do.
He sees it in her face more than he wants to.
He recognizes the interrogative tough
he can’t decipher and doesn’t like too much.
Sometimes they do lie down together
and feel at home in the grace of one another.
This is not what he thought it would be,
but nothing else it, either. She would agree.
3 tags
And Then, Miller Williams
Your toothbrush won’t remember your mouth
Your shoes won’t remember your feet
Your wife one good morning
will remember your weight
will feel unfaithful
throwing the toothbrush away
dropping the shoes in the Salvation Army box
will set your picture in the living room
Someone wearing a coat you would not have worn
will ask was that your husband
she will say yes
3 tags
Moving, Franz Wright
You were gone love
voice invisible
presence
for lack of which
welling up
how would I live
No lightbulbs
And how would I write
without
light
corner of Nowhere and Everywhere, I swear
on my own grave
I’ll never move again
3 tags
A Walk in the Country, Galway Kinnell
We talked all morning, she said
The day’s nice, on this summer
Day let’s walk where birds glide
At berries ripening everywhere.
And I thought, is it only me such
Beauty refuses to touch?
But I walked all the same, to please
What only an arm held close,
Through a green wood to a space
Where grass was turned over by a farmer whose
Rickety horses ploughed
While crow and robin...
5 tags
Wait, Galway Kinnell
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other...
3 tags
Parkersburg, W. Va., Dave Smith
Along the river tin roofs
the color of blood
release little rivulets
of greasy smoke,
longjohns hang in the wind
like loose-jointed ghosts.
I can see the current
herringbone
against the blue slate rocks.
I am told my grandfather
used to come here.
I toss someone’s whiskey bottle
to see it spread out like stars.
No one notices this.
I wonder if anyone remembers
the day he fell.
3 tags
Walking Out Alone in Dead of Winter, Galway...
Under the snow the secret
Muscles of the underearth
Grow taut
In the pain, the torn love
Of labor. The strange
Dazzled world yearning dumbly
To be born.
4 tags
One Generation, Galway Kinnell
A girl of twenty walks with a gray-
haired man, her lover, a book of narrow verse
in his hand. In the sunset they sink
down the slope together, tied
into a knot of love, to be undone
only by extremes and crying, and then
never done again. An old man reads a newspaper
on the hill; not far off a little girl. The night
comes over them. And I
alone on the grass: what if I now should
touch...
4 tags
Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the...
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
2
I have heard you tell
the sun, don’t go down, I have stood...
2 tags
Rain, Donald Hall
Curled on the sofa,
In the fetal position, Jane wept day
And night, night and day.
I could not touch her, I could do nothing.
Melancholia fell
Like rain over Ireland for weeks
Without end.
I never
Belittled her sorrows or joshed at
Her dreads and miseries.
How admirable I found myself.
2 tags
Question and Answer, Charles Bukowski
he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that—
it had kept them going when
all seem
truly
hopeless.
putting the blade on the table, he
flicked it with a finger
and it whirled
in a flashing circle
under the light....
2 tags
Song of the Powers, David Mason
Mine, said the stone,
mine is the hour.
I crush the scissors,
such is my power.
Stronger than wishes,
my power, alone.
Mine, said the paper,
mine are the words
that smother the stone
with imagined birds,
reams of them, flown
from the mind of the shaper.
Mine, said the scissors,
mine all the knives
gashing through paper’s
ethereal lives;
nothing’s so proper
as tattering...
3 tags
First Kiss, April Lindner
This collision of teeth, of tongues and lips,
is like feeling for the door
in a strange room, blindfolded.
He imagines he knows her
after four dates, both of them taking pains
to laugh correctly, to make eye contact.
She thinks at least this long first kiss
postpones the moment she’ll have to face
four white walls, the kitchen table,
its bowl of dry petals and nutmeg husks,
the...
4 tags
Poem of Night, Galway Kinnell
1
I move my hand over
slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that give way so easily
it’s a shot to feel underneath them
The bones smile.
Muffles a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, mxillary, turbinate.
2
I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand—and so,
I know you’re a doormouse
Taken up in winter...
2 tags
The More Loving One, W. H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them,...
3 tags
For the Lost Generation, Galway Kinnell
Oddities composed the sum of the news
E=mc2
Was another weird
Sign of the existence of the Jews.
And Paris! All afternoon in someone’s attic
We lifted our glasses
And drank to the asses
Who ran the world and turned neurotic.
Ours was a wonderful part,
Everyone threw rice,
The fattest girls were nice,
The world was rich in wisecracks and confetti.
The war was a first wide,...
3 tags
The Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks, Pablo...
All these men were there inside
when she entered, utterly naked.
They had been drinking, and began to spit at her.
Recently come from the river, she understood nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The taunts flowed over her glistening flesh.
Obscenities drenched her golden breasts.
A stranger to tears, she did not weep.
A stranger to clothes, she did not dress.
They pocked her...
3 tags
Jack, Billy Collins
Just when I am about to telephone her
so she can hear me swallowing my pride,
a thing the size of a watermelon,
a giant barges out of a fairy tale,
picks up the house by the chimney
and carries it off laughing like thunder.
She will never believe this I tell myself.
From the windowsill where I hang on
I can see geysers of plumbing,
the exposed basement embarrassed by its junk,
snapped...
3 tags
Rip Van Winkle, Billy Collins
The illustrations always portray him outdoors,
sleeping at the base of a generous oak,
acorns bouncing off his elfin cap,
the beard grown over him like a blanket.
Here reclines the patron saint of sleep.
He has sawed enough logs to heat the Land of Nod.
His dreams are longer than all of homer.
And the Z above his head looks anchored in the air.
You would think a forest animal would trouble...
3 tags
Your Bed Is Too Small for Fucking and Poetry,...
I knew the bed would be too small
for all the things
I still want to dream about us
that we would toss
turn our way lose ourselves
in each other’s limbs
and rut there all over again
too small for the full-bodied voluptuousness
we carry
too small for the full-contact fuck
we create
too small for the full slick sweat we surrender
too small for the grunts and the screams
we extract...