Right Now, William Stafford
Tonight in our secret town
wires are down. Black
lights along the street blow
steady in a wind held still.
A deaf dog listens. A girl
retreats from her gaze: her eyes
go endlessly black, a spool of shadow.
Led by my own dark I go
my unmarked everlasting round
frozen in this moment: Now
smooths all the smother, held,
wild but still. I know
so well nothing moves, arrived:
my glimpse, this town, our time.
For Two Jameses, Nikki Giovanni
(Ballantine and Snow)
In iron cells
we all start
as a speck
nobody notices us
but some may hope
we’re there
some count days and wait
we grow
in a cell that spreads
like a summer cold
to other people
they notice and laugh
some are happy
some wish to stop
our movement
we kick and move
are stubborn and demanding
completely inside
the system
they put us in a cell
to make us behave
never realizing it’s from cells
we have escaped
and we will be born
from their iron cells
new people with a new cry
A Poem Without a Single Bird in It, Jack Spicer
What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.
sent to Robert Blaser in Boston 12/2/56
Untitled (29 May 02), Michael Palmer
So cut the rope, dusty ghost.
Time to leave, time to undream
the star chars and instruction books,
the smart cards and tootling teapots.
Remember that bogus Moscow map
they always handed out?
Remember the singer on stilts
in the mist by the Stone Bridge
raging against God and nakedness?
The plan sacred to Artemis,
a hairbrush abandoned beside it?
And the House of the Hanged Man
smelling of sage and mint?
Did you know, Capricorn is rising?
So pack up your favorite owls and goats
and barrel rolls, and let’s go.
House (Blown Apart), David Shapiro
I can see the traces of old work
Embedded in this page, like your bed
Within a bed. My old desire to live!
My new desire to understand material, raw
Material as if you were a house without windows
A red stain. Gold becomes cardboard.
The earth grows rare and cheap as a street.
Higher up a bird of prey affectionate in bright grey travels without purpose.
I beg you to speak with a recognizable accent
As the roof bashed in for acoustics
Already moans. What is not a model
Is blown to bits in this mature breeze.
If students visit for signs
Or signatures we would discuss traces. We would examine each other for doubts.
Old work we might parody as an homage
Losing after all the very idea of parody.
Traces of this morning’s work are embedded in this page.
Learning a Language, Franz Wright
She’s reading your minds
as you pass by, the
dipsomane déguisée en rose
While she waits
for her date
to turn up, the moon
in the man…
She know exactly what is going to happen
she’ll be guided
upstairs
to a bedroom, and turning around
he will show her his
gun
He’ll ask if she would like to
hold it,
which she will
amazed
at its lightness
and beauty
this thing
it must have taken 4 million years to make
squeezing it she will feel cold
and invisible light flowing
into her spine
So there is a door out of here after all
And to visit a new place creates one
in the brain
How do you say no
How do you say anything
to throw up in
Can I use this room to cry
Radiant fuel
body
of water
along which she walks, she is
walked
Why
did we leave, and how
are we ever getting back—
IV from Imaginary Elegies, Jack Spicer
Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought
When I wrote that. The dreamers sag a bit
As if five years had thickened on their flesh
Or on my eyes. Wake them with what?
Should I throw rocks at them
To make their naked private bodies bleed?
No. Let them sleep. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
The dummies in the empty funhouse watch
The tides wash in and out. The thick old moon
Shines through the rotten timbers every night.
This much is clear, they think, the men who made
Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats
Are just as cold as we. The lights are out.
The lights are out.
You’ll smell the oldest smells
The smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep
Before you wake. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
What have I gone to bed with all these years?
What have I taken crying to my bed
For love of me?
Only the shadows of the sun and moon
The dreaming groins, their creaking images.
Only myself.
Is there some rhetoric
To make me think that I have kept a house
While playing doll? This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
That two-eyed monster God is still above.
I saw him once when I was young and once
When I was seized with madness, or was I seized
And mad because I saw him once. He is the sun
And moon made real with eyes.
He is the photograph of everything at once. The love
That makes the blood run cold.
But he is gone. No realer than old
Poetry. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
Upon the old amusement pier I watch
The creeping darkness gather in the west.
Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts
I hear seagulls call. They’re going west
Toward some great Catalina of a dream
Out where the poem ends.
But does it end?
The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds.
shapeshifter poems, Lucille Clifton
1
the legend is whispered
in the woman’s tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night their daughters
do not know them
2
who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing not the moon
that awful eye not the woman
she will become with her
scarred tongue who who who the owl
laments into the evening who
will protect her this prettylittlegirl
3
if the little girl lies
still enough
shut enough
[cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty]
hard enough
shapeshifter may not
walk tonight
the full moon may not
find him here
the hair on him
bristling
rising
up
4
the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world
Trope, Ed Ochester
In college Irony won a medal
for the 100-yard dash.
He still wears an athletic supporter
but now travels on package tours,
sneering “Show me”
as he runs past the monuments.
His favorite food is sour kidneys;
water is his only drink.
Every morning he spends hours
carefully parting his hair in the middle
and choosing fashionable clothes.
Though he refuses to disclose
his means of support,
he is a frequent an well-paid speaker
at second-rate universities, board meetings,
advertising agencies, and charity hospitals.
His secret shame is that he is a virgin
through fear.
His greatest pleasure is to secretly mock
old women, adolescents, prophets, and martyrs.
If threatened by the earnest and indignant,
he will cheerfully slit his own throat.
Life Forms, Robin Becker
When a whale rolls ashore
the villagers know a drowned person
is coming home
who may have started life
as a halibut, shucked tail and fins
for a musher’s lot.
If she is going to die soon,
a woman may hear the owl call her name.
A screech owl is a person
punished for speaking out of turn.
I didn’t know the canoe
in the museum
had been a two-headed sea serpent
the Kwakiutl fed with seals.
I didn’t know that raven’s wings
could open to reveal
a human head.
A woman washing in a stream refused
to come when her husband called.
Her leather apron slapped the shore,
became a tail. She grew thick fur
and slipped from her marriage
disguised as a beaver.
We stopped at Nenana to place our bets
on the exact minute of the ice breakup.
I wanted to see the clock that stops
when the ice goes out.
I wanted to see the salmon-man
who pumps gas at the filling station,
forced into the human world
after leaping upriver.
