Poetry 365

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
and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver
like glasses like and old ladies hair
It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together
It’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater

you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone together.

At first they look like any other birds
on gun line from the underbrush, so someone
calls them sparrows and someone who thinks
he knows, scarlet tanagers or something else
exotic, as if they’ve slipped captivity—
one of those white sky August days the hammer
of the heat picks out the old one of the child
locked in a car, while gathered above the blank
grave of the pavement, at the altitude of snow,
enough rain to almost forgive it all.
Only two are really red, the rest a buoyant
rust blood brown, young or female, all of them
with masks and crests that make them what
they are, explosions from the other side
or blown in, with the paper, with the storm.
Whoever starts the clapping is answered
by a show of hands to meet baptismal waters
and a couple, who are high, bird-dancing.
Whoever starts the shouting is quieted
by the lady who hears silences,
cupping her clownish ears. …
For a moment the ringing air is clean, then
for a moment nothing happens, nothing moved
except for the cardinals, in and out of trees.
And in that moment ends. The cloudburst
passes, the air turns to fire again,
the sirens sing their distances, the walls
of light burn down. And in no time,
in the time it takes the runoff to drain
back underground, there’s no one left
but lifers and the dealers and rain birds
swallowed upward b the sun, and rain, new rain,
in the rivers and the reservoir uptown,
ready to rise and to pour its heart out all over.

7
I have reached that middle ground
Luck sometimes takes, I think:
Not quite to have a winning streak
Or to be able to cut my losses,
Like love, which must speak,
And to whom all words are useless.

8
The last outpost of bodily desire:
The blank place even shadows flee.

9
The alcoholic wakes at 4 A.M.
To hear the water tap let down its drop
While the moon-slicked fire escape hangs in air
And, knock-kneed, drunk, his body moves in need
Stumbling barefoot toward the Frigidaire.

Then, behind the door,
a flock of black skirts
at the barre,
milling like traffic
on a city street (the small
cyclones of 14th Street),
solemn as the rush
of strings tuning:
but they are children,
I told myself—
too many
for this paucity of wings.

This Saturday (April 3) at 2:30 at Poets House you’ll have the opportunity to hear and speak with Camille T. Dungy, Sean Hill, Yusef Komunyakaa and Evie Shockley, all contributors to the recent anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. This event is part of Poets House’s EcoPoetic Futures series of events, which discuss poetry and the environment. As Poets House is a Green organization these events feature prominently on our Spring calendar and mean a great deal to us.

Personally I’m super excited because I fell in love with Komunyakaa’s poetry in high school and Shockley seems like the sweetest, most down to earth person ever.

Details
Saturday, April 3
Panel: 2:30pm; Reading: 4:00pm
Black Nature: A Panel & Poetry Reading
with Camille T. Dungy, Sean Hill, Yusef Komunyakaa & Evie Shockley

Contributors to the landmark anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry gather for conversation and readings. Cosponsored by Cave Canem.

$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members and Cave Canem Fellows

Part of Ecopoetic Futures, a series of events that examine poetry and the environment. Programs in this series are funded, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Council for the Humanities.

This Thursday at Poets House in Battery Park City, Manhattan you’ll have the opportunity to hear two Louisiana poets (one of them state Poet Laureate!) speak and read about Louisiana, it’s poetic culture and how it’s changed since their childhoods. Both poets know the physical, emotional and historical landscapes of Louisiana personally and will be wonderful to hear if you have the means.

Details
Thursday, March 11, 7:00pm
Imagining Louisiana: A Conversation & Reading
with Darrell Bourque & Sheryl St. Germain
Moderated by James Tolan

Two Louisiana poets discuss the history, challenges and future of Louisianan poetry, examining the influence of culture and landscape as well as the work of Cajun and Creole poets.

$10, $7 for students and seniors, Free to Poets House Members

for Charles Simic

Always so late in the day
In their rumpled clothes, sitting
Around a table lit by a single bulb,
The great forgetters were hard at work.
They tilted their heads to one side, closing their eyes.
Then a house disappeared, and a man in his yard
With all his flowers in a row.
The great forgetters wrinkled their brows.
Then Florida went and San Francisco
Where tugs and barges leave
Small gleaming scars across the Bay.
One of the great forgetters struck a match.
Gone were the harps of beaded lights
That vault the rivers of New York.
Another filled his glass
And that was it for crowds at evening
Under sulfur-yellow streetlamps coming on.
And afterward Bulgaria was gone, and then Japan.
“Where will it stop?” one of them said.
“Such difficult work, pursuing the fate
Of everything known,” said another.
“Down to the last stone,” said a third,
“And only the zero of perfection
Left for the imagination.” And gone
Were North and South America,
And gone as well the moon.
Another yawned, another gazed at the window:
No grass, no trees…
The blaze of promise everywhere.

Across the fortressed isle
I move at a jerky pace
elbows at odds with my body

crawl step after step
one hundred flights up
slip between blades

of enormous fans silent
of spinning atop the shafts
of abandoned lights

I hide for a while behind
cylinders of metallic water
net pigeons      defeather

purple loosestrife lures bees
I melt their wax
my skin catches fire

Dizzy I cling to the roof
at last kick off
flap dented wings      falling

rise on the currents of steam
and smoke over Hoboken
then over oceans I soar

When updrafts peter out
I too will drop in the sea
but now I’ve learned to swim