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.
First Boyfriend, Sharon Olds
(for D.R.)
We would park on any quiet street,
gliding over to the curb as if by accident,
the houses dark, the families sealed into them,
we’d park away from the street-light, just the
fait waves of its amber grit
reached your car, you’d switch off the motor and
turn and reach for me, and I would
slide into your arms as if I had been born for it,
the ochre corduroy of your sports jacket
pressing the inside of my wrists,
making its patter of rivulets,
water rippling out like sound waves from a source.
Your front seat had an overpowering
make smell, as if the chrome had been
rubbed with jism, a sharp stale
delirious odor like the sour plated
taste of the patina on an old watch, the
fragrance of your sex polished till it shone in the night, the
jewel of Channing Street, of Benvenue Avenue, of
Panoramic, of Dwight Way, I
returned to you as if to the breast of my father,
grain of the beard on your umber cheeks,
delicate line of tartar on the edge of your teeth,
the odor of use, the stained brass
air in the car as if I had come
back to a pawnshop to claim what was mine—
and as your tongue went down my throat,
right down the central nerve of my body, the
gilt balls of the street-light gleamed like a
pawnbroker’s over your second-hand Chevy and
all the toasters popped up and
all the saxophones began to play
hot riffs of scat for the return to their rightful owners.
Letter to an Old Love, Tennessee Williams
I sold you playthings, very little more
Though greater things for less I might have given:
You only took such small things from my store
As a cup of wine or a penny’s worth of ribbon!
I sold you silky trinkets to amuse
You for an idle summer’s hour or two:
upon my higher shelves were things to use
More earnestly, but these escaped your view.
Or if you noticed them you gave no sign,
And I somehow lacked courage to display
Such precious things. You drank the cup of wine
And tucked the bit of silken goods away
And nonchalantly went on graceful feet
To spend you gold across the shallow street.
Unwritten Law, Louise Glück
Interesting how we fall in love:
in my case, absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often—
so it was in my youth.
And always with rather boyish men—
unformed, sullen, or shyly kicking the dead leaves:
in the manner of Balanchine.
Nor did I see them as as versions of the same thing.
I, with my inflexible Platonism,
my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time:
I ruled against the indefinite article.
And yet, the mistakes of my youth
made me hopeless, because they repeated themselves,
as is commonly true.
But in you I felt something beyond the archetype—
a true expansiveness, a buoyance and love of the earth
utterly alien to my nature. To my credit,
I blessed my good fortune in you.
Blessed it absolutely, in the manner of those years.
And you in your wisdom and cruelty
gradually taught me the meaninglessness of that term.
Young Love at the Bat, Jan McLaughlin
He takes a step to get
inside the pitch
and his arms swing back
to grab the air on a stick
and push the ball
past third base,
Elizabeth’s house;
he grimaces and gives a puff
imbuing the ball
with the breath of lick
while traffic noise
swells like a crowd
as it rises;
he pauses to see
if he should run or swagger
as the ball draws its arc
almost too far left of center,
through the dim oak branches;
stuck for a moment,
he drifts
past the stoop
where Elizabeth
pretends to read a book.
Trackl, Franz Wright
It is November 1914. I am not very old
yet. Now I almost feel you
place the needle in your arm, dreaming
of the lightvessel in Mary’s right wrist,
the wheatfields, the blond cemeteries,
the wind shepherding the dead leaves.
Now I am you walking among the trees.
I have walked a long way from my army. I am dead.
I have already slept through the twentieth century,
I’ve slept through my cloths, through my body,
and nothing remains. I am a blind man who’s
sitting with photographic absence in a park
in Vienna, which at twilight is utterly silent
and vacant as only a city I have never
visited can be. Now I am in a small bed,
I can hear myself breathing. I haven’t learned to talk.
Aubade, Louise Glück
The world was very large. Then
the world was small. O
very small, small enough
to fit in a brain.
It had no color, it was all
interior space: nothing
got in or out. But time
seeped in anyway, that
was the tragic dimension.
I took time very seriously in those years,
if I remember accurately.
A room with a chair, a window.
A small window, filled with the patters light makes.
In its emptiness the world
was whole always, not
a chip of something, with
the self at the center.
And at the center of the self,
grief I thought I couldn’t survive.
A room with a bed, a table. Flashes
of light on the naked surfaces.
I had two desires: desire
to be safe and desire to feel. As though
the world were making
a decision against white
because it disdained potential
and wanted in its place substance:
panels
of golf where the light struck.
In the window, reddish
leaves of the copper beech tree.
Out of the stasis, facts, objects
blurred or knitted together: somewhere
time stirring, time
crying to be touched, to be
palpable,
the polished wood
shimmering with distinctions—
and then I was once more
a child in the presence of riches
and I didn’t know what the riches were made of.
from No Way Back to the Past, Allen Ginsberg
On the Ferris Wheel rising to the full moon
by the canal, looking down on Ocean Grove
over a red-bulb-rooft green-lit carousel, silver Chariot of Muse with her Lyre, revolving all too fast
through years from 1937 with cousin Claire in Ashbury park
wandering Sunday morning from Belmar with a few pennies dimes for tickets in Playland—
the wire-mesh railed cage swinging under canvas-flowered awning toward the full moon forty years later,
a bent Hunchback at the Gate pulling his iron-rod handle to bring the iron-spoked circle hung with pleasure cars to rest.
Whacy shack’s painted toy-wizard witch-monster window
Machinery’s laughing screaming lifting wooden eyelids
at fair skinned blond boys rubber-bumping electric cars along a sheet-tin floor,
with trolleypole antennae sliding and sparking across the silvery ceiling.
I used to ride the skooter with my cousins Claire and Joel Gaidemack or brother Gene,
cars shocking lightly on the happy floor, wheeling the toy Dodgem in a circle
turning round the curve, I looked up in the mirror
and saw a bald white bearded man in a white shirt staring in my eyes—
and entered in the giant wood Barrel-form slippery rolling underfoot reflecting mirrored through its other end Time Tunnel,
Passing Through, Stanley Kunitz
—on my 79th birthday
Nobody in the widow’s household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren’t for a census report
if a five-year-old White Male
sharing my mother’s address
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester
I’d have no documentary proof
that I exist. You are the first,
my dear, to bully me
into these festive occasions.
Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.
