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Lucifer Alone
|
One rat across the floor and quick to floor's a breeze,
But two a whisper of a human tongue.
One is a breath, two voice;
And one a dream, but more are dreamed too long.
Two are the portent which we may believe at length,
And two the tribe we recognize as true.
Two are the total, they saying and they saying,
So we must ponder what we are to do.
For every scuttle of motion in the corner of the eye
Some thought of thought is asked in us indeed,
But of two, more: there we have likeness moving,
And there knowledge therefore, and therefore creed.
| Josephine Miles | null | null |
Kind
|
When I think of my kindness which is tentative and quiet
And of yours which is intense and free,
I am in elaboration of knowledge impatient
Of even the patientest immobility.
I think of my kind, which is the human fortune
To live in the world and make war among its friends,
And of my version, which is to be moderately peaceful,
And of your version; and must make amends
By my slow word to your wish which is mobile,
Active and moving in its generous sphere.
This is the natural and the supernatural
Of humankind of which I grow aware.
| Josephine Miles | Relationships,Social Commentaries | null |
Tally
|
After her pills the girl slept and counted
Pellet on pellet the regress of life.
Dead to the world, the world's count yet counted
Pellet on pill the antinomies of life.
Refused to turn, the way's back, she counted
Her several stones across the mire of life.
And stones away and sticks away she counted
To keep herself out of the country of life.
Lost tally. How the sheep return to home
Is the story she will retrieve
And the only story believe
Of one and one the sheep returning home
To take the shapes of life,
Coming and being counted.
| Josephine Miles | null | null |
The Invention of Cuisine
|
Imagine for a moment
the still life of our meals,
meat followed by yellow cheese,
grapes pale against the blue armor of fish.
Imagine a thin woman
before bread was invented,
playing a harp of wheat in the field.
There is a stone, and behind her
the bones of the last killed,
the black bird on her shoulder
that a century later
will fly with trained and murderous intent.
They are not very hungry
because cuisine has not yet been invented.
Nor has falconry,
nor the science of imagination.
All they have is the pure impulse to eat,
which is not enough to keep them alive
and this little moment
before the woman redeems
the sprouted seeds at her feet
and gathers the olives falling from the trees
for her recipes.
Imagine. Out in the fields
this very moment
they are rolling the apples to press,
the lamb turns in a regular aura of smoke.
See, the woman looks once behind her
before picking up the stone,
looks back once at the beasts,
the trees,
that sky
above the white stream
where small creatures live and die
looking upon each other
as food.
| Carol Muske-Dukes | Eating & Drinking | null |
Pediatrics
|
When she came to visit me, I turned my face to the wall—
though only that morning, I'd bent my head at the bell
and with the host on my tongue, mumbled thanks.
Cranked up, then down in my bed—
I told the nurses jokes,
newly precocious, but too old
at twelve to be anything
but a patient. I slouched in my robe
among the other child-guests of St. Joseph,
the parrot-eyed scald masks,
the waterheads and harelips,
the fat girl with the plastic shunt.
The old crippled nun on her wheeled
platform dispensed her half-witted blessings,
then was gone like the occasional covered gurneys
sliding by my numbered door. Gone
told me I'd go away too—
orderly as dusk in the brick courtyard:
the blank windows curtained one by one.
I could not abide that yearning face
calling me home. Like the Gauls,
in my penciled translations: I saw
Caesar was my home. Through the streets
of the occupied city, his gold mask rose, implacable.
In the fervent improvisational style of the collaborator—
I imagined pain not as pain
but the flickering light embedded
in the headboard, the end
of the snake-wire uncoiling from
the nurses' station. The painkiller winked
in its paper cup, its bleak chirp
meant respect should be paid
for the way I too wielded oblivion,
staring at the wall till six,
gifts unopened in her lap,
the early dark deepening between us.
| Carol Muske-Dukes | Living,Health & Illness,Philosophy | null |
Monk’s House, Rodmell
|
—for Lynne McMahon
In her bedroom,
she set a convex mirror on a stand,
so that when the visitor
looked in
expecting to see the familiar
line of lip and brow,
what appeared instead
was the head up-ended—
the mouth a talking wound—
above
the eyes, upside down, fluttering,
like the eyes in the skull
of a calf slung on the blood-hook—
or a baby's lightning blink, dropped low
in the bone cage about to be born
Walls washed down with the cold pardons of the nurse.
Gem green paint restored from old scrapings.
Here and there, a trifling, a lightening
beyond the author's original intent,
which was in the drawing room, positively spleenish.
From razor bits of palette, touch-ups: Mrs. Woolf's favorite color.
The Trust ladies place the still-ticking brain
of Leonard's wireless next to the empty brass stalk
with its single blossom: old black hat
she wore like pharaoh gazing down
the Nile-green Nile.
That's her:
the flat drainboard of a face
set so fiercely against the previous
owner's trompe 1'oeil beard and jug.
The simpleton's request: a picture of her young—
So the trees walk up burning,
the birds speak Latin
for the dull-witted, drenched palette
the glimpse of whirlwind in the pond
where their handfuls of ash
drifted down
and over
the great mown meadow next door
where the Rodmell August Fair is on.
My daughter astride a steam engine,
bored as any child
with the past. Later makes an X
(her favorite letter) with two sticks
held up to the window
of the great writer's garden study.
But the mirror standing in the air
a glass knot tying and retying itself
would repolarize, and she, drawing near,
reverse herself. A woman's rapt beautiful face
drawn downward by gravity, sorrow,
lit upward by the flame of age—
could turn over, floating, then submerge, amniotic!
Across the green from the bedroom window
she saw it: a fin cleaving dark waters—
"and that became The Waves." The ladies sip and look.
Vanessa, pregnant,
laughing, crosses the garden. Two women
walk among the hollyhocks with shears.
The hedge dented by one's fluttering hands.
Inside her sister's body: fluttering hands.
Annie's white sweater catches
on the thorns of blackberry canes. I pull her free
then pick six little ones, busy, like the swarm cells
of a fetus. Or the enlarging failure in those rooms,
unchecked growth: death-drawn, claustrophobic.
The wind, up from the South Downs,
blew the two women across the garden,
their shadows like crossed sticks. Sisters.
One shrugging slightly, a loose mauve shawl.
Where her sculpted head sits now, a stone wall.
She sat at this table
eating mutton and bread.
He was talking about the socialist initiative
and she turned away: someone was knocking
at the window. It was the French photographer
we surprised on our way out,
shooting the forbidden
interior through the dark glass.
| Carol Muske-Dukes | Religion,Christianity,Painting & Sculpture | null |
Mosaic
|
1. THE SACRIFICE
On this tile
the knife
like a sickle-moon hangs
in the painted air
as if it had learned a dance
of its own,
the way the boy has
among the vivid
breakable flowers,
the way Abraham has
among the boulders,
his two feet heavy
as stones.
2. NEAR SINAI
God's hand here
is the size of a tiny cloud,
and the wordless tablets
he holds out
curve like the temple doors.
Moses, reaching up
must see on their empty surface
laws chiseled in his mind
by the persistent wind
of the desert, by wind
in the bulrushes.
3. THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT
We know by the halos
that circle these heads
like rings around planets
that the small donkey
has carried his burden
away from the thunder
of the Old Testament
into the lightning
of the New.
4. AT THE ARMENIAN TILE SHOP
Under the bright glazes
Esau watches Jacob,
Cain watches Abel.
With the same heavy eyes
the tilemaker's Arab assistant
watches me,
all of us wondering
why for every pair
there is just one
blessing.
| Linda Pastan | Travels & Journeys,Judaism | null |
The Safecracker
|
On nights when the moon seems impenetrable—
a locked porthole to space;
when the householder bars his windows
and doors, and his dog lies until dawn,
one jeweled eye open; when the maiden sleeps
with her rosy knees sealed tightly together,
on such nights the safecracker sets to work.
Axe . . . Chisel . . . Nitroglycerin . . .
Within the vault lie forty thousand
tons of gold; the heaped up spoils
of Ali Baba's cave; the secrets of the molecule.
He sands his fingertips
to feel the subtle vibrations
of wheel lining up, just so, with wheel.
His toolmarks are his fingerprints.
And now a crack appears on the side
of the egg, a single fault line,
and within: the golden yolk just waiting.
A kind of wind . . . a door flies open . . . a glitter
of forsythia forced out of the branch.
With smoothest fingertips you touch
the locked cage of my ribs . . . just so.
My knees fall open. And Cleopatra smiles,
whose own Egyptians first invented the lock.
| Linda Pastan | Love,Desire,Romantic Love,Relationships,Men & Women | null |
The Suburban Classes
|
There is far too much of the suburban classes
Spiritually not geographically speaking. They’re asses.
Menacing the greatness of our beloved England, they lie
Propagating their kind in an eightroomed stye.
Now I have a plan which I will enfold
(There’s this to be said for them, they do as they’re told)
Then tell them their country’s in mortal peril
They believed it before and again will not cavil
Put it in caption form firm and slick
If they see it in print it is bound to stick:
‘Your King and your Country need you Dead’
You see the idea? Well, let it spread.
Have a suitable drug under string and label
Free for every Registered Reader’s table.
For the rest of the gang who are not patriotic
I’ve another appeal they’ll discover hypnotic:
Tell them it’s smart to be dead and won’t hurt
And they’ll gobble up drug as they gobble up dirt.
| Stevie Smith | Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Class,History & Politics | null |
The Reason
|
My life is vile
I hate it so
I’ll wait awhile
And then I’ll go.
Why wait at all?
Hope springs alive,
Good may befall
I yet may thrive.
It is because I can’t make up my mind
If God is good, impotent or unkind.
| Stevie Smith | Disappointment & Failure,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine | null |
Sunt Leones
|
The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena
By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a
Not entirely negligible part
In consolidating at the very start
The position of the Early Christian Church.
Initiatory rites are always bloody
And the lions, it appears
From contemporary art, made a study
Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy
Liturgically sacrificial hue
And if the Christians felt a little blue—
Well people being eaten often do.
Theirs was the death, and theirs the crown undying,
A state of things which must be satisfying.
My point which up to this has been obscured
is that it was the lions who procured
By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone
The martyrdoms on which the Church has grown.
I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked
As if the part the lions played was being overlooked.
By lions’ jaws great benefits and blessings were begotten
And so our debt to Lionhood must never be forgotten.
| Stevie Smith | Religion,Christianity,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries | null |
Tender Only to One
|
Tender only to one
Tender and true
The petals swing
To my fingering
Is it you, or you, or you?
Tender only to one
I do not know his name
And the friends who fall
To the petals’ call
May think my love to blame.
Tender only to one
This petal holds a clue
The face it shows
But too well knows
Who I am tender to.
Tender only to one,
Last petal’s latest breath
Cries out aloud
From the icy shroud
His name, his name is Death.
| Stevie Smith | Death | null |
My Soul
|
In the flame of the flickering fire
The sins of my soul are few
And the thoughts in my head are the thoughts of a bed
With a solitary view.
But the eye of eternal consciousness
Must blink as a bat blinks bright
Or ever the thoughts in my head be stilled
On the brink of eternal night.
Oh feed to the golden fish his egg
Where he floats in his captive bowl,
To the cat his kind from the womb born blind,
And to the Lord my soul.
| Stevie Smith | Religion,God & the Divine | null |
In My Dreams
|
In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away,
Whither and why I know not nor do I care.
And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,
And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air.
In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye,
And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,
I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going,
I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think.
| Stevie Smith | Travels & Journeys,Relationships | null |
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
|
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.
He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.
It was not right, it was wrong,
But often we all do wrong.
*
May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock?
Why, Porson, didn’t you know?
He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill
So had a long way to go,
He wasn’t much in the social sense
Though his grandmother was a Warlock,
One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy
And nothing to do with Porlock,
And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said
And had a cat named Flo,
And had a cat named Flo.
I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am becoming impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend,
Often I look out of the window
Often I run to the gate
I think, He will come this evening,
I think it is rather late.
I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.
*
I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock
To break up everything and throw it away
Because then there will be nothing to keep them
And they need not stay.
*
Why do they grumble so much?
He comes like a benison
They should be glad he has not forgotten them
They might have had to go on.
*
These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing,
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting
With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
| Stevie Smith | God & the Divine,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries | null |
Was He Married?
|
Was he married, did he try
To support as he grew less fond of them
Wife and family?
No,
He never suffered such a blow.
Did he feel pointless, feeble and distrait,
Unwanted by everyone and in the way?
From his cradle he was purposeful,
His bent strong and his mind full.
Did he love people very much
Yet find them die one day?
He did not love in the human way.
Did he ask how long it would go on,
Wonder if Death could be counted on for an end?
He did not feel like this,
He had a future of bliss.
Did he never feel strong
Pain for being wrong?
He was not wrong, he was right,
He suffered from others’, not his own, spite.
But there is no suffering like having made a mistake
Because of being of an inferior make.
He was not inferior,
He was superior.
He knew then that power corrupts but some must govern?
His thoughts were different.
Did he lack friends? Worse,
Think it was for his fault, not theirs?
He did not lack friends,
He had disciples he moulded to his ends.
Did he feel over-handicapped sometimes, yet must draw even?
How could he feel like this? He was the King of Heaven.
...find a sudden brightness one day in everything
Because a mood had been conquered, or a sin?
I tell you, he did not sin.
Do only human beings suffer from the irritation
I have mentioned? learn too that being comical
Does not ameliorate the desperation?
Only human beings feel this,
It is because they are so mixed.
All human beings should have a medal,
A god cannot carry it, he is not able.
A god is Man’s doll, you ass,
He makes him up like this on purpose.
He might have made him up worse.
He often has, in the past.
To choose a god of love, as he did and does,
Is a little move then?
Yes, it is.
A larger one will be when men
Love love and hate hate but do not deify them?
It will be a larger one.
| Stevie Smith | Living,Death,Disappointment & Failure | null |
Pretty
|
Why is the word pretty so underrated?
In November the leaf is pretty when it falls
The stream grows deep in the woods after rain
And in the pretty pool the pike stalks
He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too,
The prey escapes with an underwater flash
But not for long, the great fish has him now
The pike is a fish who always has his prey
And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty
His paws are not webbed, he cannot shut his nostrils
As the otter can and the beaver, he is torn between
The land and water. Not ‘torn’, he does not mind.
The owl hunts in the evening and it is pretty
The lake water below him rustles with ice
There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist
All this is pretty, it could not be prettier.
Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes
It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough,
Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier
A field in the evening, tilting up.
The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late
The sky is lighter than the hill field
All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary
Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty.
And it is careless, and that is always pretty
This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless,
As Nature is always careless and indifferent
Who sees, who steps, means nothing, and this is pretty.
So a person can come along like a thief—pretty!—
Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel,
Lick the icicle broken from the bank
And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty.
Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you’ll be able
Very soon not even to cry pretty
And so be delivered entirely from humanity
This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.
| Stevie Smith | Nature,Humor & Satire | null |
from The Return
|
IV. The Fireflies I have climbed blind the way down through the trees
(How faint the phosphorescence of the stones)
On nights when not a light showed on the bay
And nothing marked the line of sky and sea—
Only the beating of the heart defined
A space of being in the faceless dark,
The foot that found and won the path from blindness,
The hand, outstretched, that touched on branch and bark.
The soundless revolution of the stars
Brings back the fireflies and each constellation,
And we are here half-shielded from that height
Whose star-points feed the white lactation, far
Incandescence where the single star
Is lost to sight. This is a waiting time.
Those thirty, lived-out years were slow to rhyme
With consonances unforeseen, and, gone,
Were brief beneath the seasons and the sun.
We wait now on the absence of our dead,
Sharing the middle world of moving lights
Where fireflies taking torches to the rose
Hover at those clustered, half-lit porches,
Eyelid on closed eyelid in their glow
Flushed into flesh, then darkening as they go.
The adagio of lights is gathering
Across the sway and counter-lines as bay
And sky, contrary in motion, swerve
Against each other's patternings, while these
Tiny, travelling fires gainsay them both,
Trusting to neither empty space nor seas
The burden of their weightless circlings. We,
Knowing no more of death than other men
Who make the last submission and return,
Savour the good wine of a summer's night
Fronting the islands and the harbour bar,
Uncounted in the sum of our unknowings
How sweet the fireflies’ span to those who live it,
Equal, in their arrivals and their goings,
With the order and the beauty of star on star.
| Charles Tomlinson | Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Summer | null |
Hymn of Not Much Praise for New York City
|
When the windows of the West Side clash like cymbals in the setting sunlight,
And when wind wails amid the East Side’s aerials,
And when, both north and south of thirty-fourth street,
In all the dizzy buildings,
The elevators clack their teeth and rattle the bars of their cages,
Then the children of the city,
Leaving the monkey-houses
of their office-buildings and apartments,
With the greatest difficulty open their mouths, and sing:
“Queen among the cities of the Earth: New York!
Rich as a cake, common as a doughnut,
Expensive as a fur and crazy as cocaine,
We love to hear you shake
Your big face like a shining bank
Letting the mad world know you’re full of dimes!
”This is your night to make maraccas out of all that metal money
Paris is in the prison-house, and London dies of cancer.
This is the time for you to whirl,
Queen of our hopped-up peace,
And let the excitement of your somewhat crippled congas
Supersede the waltzes of more shining
Capitals that have been bombed.
“Meanwhile we, your children,
Weeping in our seasick zoo of windows while you dance,
Will gobble aspirins,
And try to keep our cage from caving in.
All the while our minds will fill with these petitions,
Flowering quietly in between our gongs of pulse.
These will have to serve as prayers:
“ ‘O lock us in the safe jails of thy movies!
Confine us to the semiprivate wards and white asylums
Of the unbearable cocktail parties, O New York!
Sentence us for life to the penitentiaries of thy bars and nightclubs,
And leave us stupefied forever by the blue, objective lights
That fill the pale infirmaries of thy restaurants,
And the clinics of thy schools and offices,
And the operating-rooms of thy dance-halls.
“ ‘But never give us any explanations, even when we ask,
Why all our food tastes of iodoform,
And even the freshest flowers smell of funerals.
No, never let us look about us long enough to wonder
Which of the rich men, shivering in the overheated office,
And which of the poor men, sleeping face-down on the Daily Mirror,
Are still alive, and which are dead.’ ”
| Thomas Merton | Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Money & Economics | null |
Song
|
(From Crossportion’s Pastoral)
The bottom of the sea has come
And builded in my noiseless room
The fishes’ and the mermaids’ home,
Whose it is most, most hell to be
Out of the heavy-hanging sea
And in the thin, thin changeable air
Or unroom sleep some other where;
But play their coral violins
Where waters most lock music in:
The bottom of my room, the sea.
Full of voiceless curtaindeep
There mermaid somnambules come sleep
Where fluted half-lights show the way,
And there, there lost orchestras play
And down the many quarterlights come
To the dim mirth of my aquadrome:
The bottom of my sea, the room.
| Thomas Merton | Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
How to Enter a Big City
|
I
Swing by starwhite bones and
Lights tick in the middle.
Blue and white steel
Black and white
People hurrying along the wall.
”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“
Curve behind the sun again
Towers full of ice. Rich
Glass houses, “Here,
Have a little of my blood,”
Rich people!”
Wheat in towers. Meat on ice.
Cattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls.
Baseball between these sudden tracks.
Yell past the red street—
Have you any water to drink, City?
Rich glass buildings, give us milk!
Give us coffee! Give us rum!
There are huge clouds all over the sky.
River smells of gasoline.
Cars after cars after cars, and then
A little yellow street goes by without a murmur.
There came a man
(”Those are radios, that were his eyes“)
Who offered to sell us his bones.
Swing by starwhite buildings and
Lights come to life with a sound
Of bugs under the dead rib.
Miles of it. Still the same city.
II
Do you know where you are going?
Do you know whom you must meet?
Fortune, perhaps, or good news
Or the doctor, or the ladies
In the long bookstore,
The angry man in the milkbar
The drunkard under the clock.
Fortune, perhaps, or wonder
Or, perhaps, death.
In any case, our tracks
Are aimed at a working horizon.
The buildings, turning twice about the sun,
Settle in their respective positions.
Centered in its own incurable discontent, the City
Consents to be recognized.
III
Then people come out into the light of afternoon,
Covered all over with black powder,
And begin to attack one another with statements
Or to ignore one another with horror.
Customs have not changed.
Young men full of coffee and
Old women with medicine under their skin
Are all approaching death at twenty miles an hour.
Everywhere there is optimism without love
And pessimism without understanding,
They who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts
Cannot agree to be at peace
With their own images, shadowing them in windows
From store to store.
IV
Until the lights come on with a swagger of frauds
And savage ferns,
The brown-eyed daughters of ravens,
Sing in the lucky doors
While night comes down the street like the millennium
Wrapping the houses in dark feathers
Soothing the town with a sign
Healing the strong wings of sunstroke.
Then the wind of an easy river wipes the flies
Off my Kentucky collarbone.
The claws of the treacherous stars
Renegade drums of wood
Endure the heavenward protest.
Their music heaves and hides.
Rain and foam and oil
Make sabbaths for our wounds.
(Come, come, let all come home!)
The summer sighs, and runs.
My broken bird is under the whole town,
My cross is for the gypsies I am leaving
And there are real fountains under the floor.
V
Branches baptize our faces with silver
Where the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills.
Winds at last possess our empty country
There, there under the moon
In parabolas of milk and iron
The ghosts of historical men
(Figures of sorrow and dust)
Weep along the hills like turpentine.
And seas of flowering tobacco
Surround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.
| Thomas Merton | Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Money & Economics | null |
Untitled [1. Now you are all here you might as well know ...]
|
1. Now you are all here you might as well know this is America we do what we like.
2. Be spontaneous it is the right way.
3. Mothers you have met before still defy comprehension.
4. Our scene is foggy we are asking you to clarify.
5. Explains geomoetry of life. Where? At Catholic Worker.
6. Very glad you came. With our mouths full of cornflakes we were expecting an emergency.
7. Cynics declare you are in Greece.
8. Better get back quick before the place is all used up.
9. The night court: the mumbling judge: confused.
10. Well-wishers are there to meet you head on.
11. For the journal: soldiers, harbingers of change.
12. You came just in time, the score is even.
13. None of the machines has yet been broken.
14. Come on we know you have seen Popes.
15. People have been a little self-conscious around here in the emergency.
16. Who cares what the cynics declare. But you have been in Greece.
| Thomas Merton | Religion,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,History & Politics | null |
Thread
|
Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds
among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues,
bright hair blazing in the theater,
red hair raving in the bar—as now
the little leaves shoot veils of gold
across the trees’ bones, shroud of spring,
ghost of summer, shadblow snow, blood-
russet spoor spilled prodigal on last year’s leaves . . .
When your yellows, greens, and yellow-greens,
your ochres and your umbers have evolved
nearly to hemlock blackness, cypress blackness,
when the woods are rife with soddenness
(unfolded ferns, skunk cabbage by the stream,
barberry by the trunks, and bitter
watercress inside the druid pool)
will your thin, still-glinting thread insist
to catch the eye in filigreed titrations
stitched along among beneath the branches,
in the branches where it lives all winter,
occulted fire, brief constant fleeting gold . . .
| Jonathan Galassi | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Trees & Flowers | null |
Turning Forty
|
The barroom mirror lit up with our wives
has faded to a loaded-to-the-gills
Japanese subcompact, little lives
asleep behind us, heading for the hills
in utter darkness through invisible
countryside we know by heart by light;
but woods that are humane and hospitable
often turn eerie on a moonless night.
Our talk is quiet: the week’s triumphs, failings,
gossip, memories—but largely fears.
In our brief repertoire of poses ailing’s
primary, and more so with the years
now every step seems haunted by the future,
not only ours, but all that they will face:
a stricter world, with scarceness for a teacher,
bad air, bad water, no untrammeled space
or so it seems to us, after the Fall,
but for the young the world is always new.
Maybe that’s what dates us worst of all
and saves them: What we’ll miss they never knew.
We’re old enough now to be old enough,
to know what loss is—not just hair and breath;
each has eyeballed reality by now:
a rift, a failure, or a major death.
They landed on us; we were not consulted,
although our darkest yearnings aren’t so deep.
Let’s tick off the short wish list of adulthood:
sleep, honor, sleep, love, riches, sleep, and sleep . . .
and camaraderie, that warms the blood,
the mildest, most forgiving form of love.
In an uncertain world a certain good
is one who’ll laugh off what you’re leery of.
That’s why we’re out here, racing with the clock
through cold and darkness: so that, glass in hand,
we’ll face our half-life, padded for the shock
by a few old souls who understand.
Now the odometer, uncompromising,
shows all its nines’ tails hanging in the air.
Now an entire row of moons is rising,
rising, rising, risen—we are there:
Total Maturity. The trick is how
to amortize remorse, desire, and dread.
Eyes ahead, companions: Life is Now.
The serious years are opening ahead.
| Jonathan Galassi | Living,Growing Old,Time & Brevity | null |
North of Childhood
|
FOR B.
Somewhere ahead I see you
watching something out your window,
what I don’t know. You’re tall,
not on your tiptoes, green,
no longer yellow,
no longer little, little one,
but the changeless changing
seasons are still with us.
Summer’s back,
so beautiful it always reeks of ending,
and now its breeze is stirring
in your room commanding the lawn,
trying to wake you to say the day is wasting,
but you’re north of childhood now and out of here,
and I’ve gone south.
| Jonathan Galassi | Living,Coming of Age,Parenthood,Nature,Summer,Philosophy | null |
Montale’s Grave
|
Now that the ticket to eternity
has your name on it, we are here to pay
the awkward tribute post-modernity
allows to those who think they think your way
but hear you only faintly, filtered through
a gauze of echoes, sounding in a voice
that could be counterfeit; and yet the noise
seems to expand our notion of the true.
An ivory forehead, landscape drunk on light,
mother-of-pearl that flashes in the night:
intimations of the miracle
when the null steps forward as the all—
these were signals, sparks that spattered from
the anvil of illusions where you learned
the music of a generation burned
by an old myth: the end that will not come.
There is no other myth. This sun-drenched yard
proves it, freighted with the waiting dead,
where votive plastic hyacinths relay
the promise of one more technicolor day
—the promise that is vouchsafed to you, scribe,
and your dictator, while your names get blurred
with all the others, like your hardest word
dissolving in the language of the tribe.
| Jonathan Galassi | null | null |
Saving Minutes
|
You were in bed.
You heard your mother working in the kitchen.
It was still light, the birds were bickering,
the waterfall behind the house was falling.
Its rushing lulled you,
you loved the moment you lay in,
and you counted the time
from this instant
to this,
and put it away
to be lived on another night,
your wedding night or some other night
that needed all the luck,
all the saved-up minutes you could bring it.
Later you filled bottles in the stream
and dated them and stored them in a cupboard.
Months after, you retrieved them
to stare at what time had done.
You were eight, but already you knew
it was working on you,
each minute you passed through was gone.
You didn’t want to give up your old clothes.
You’d watch your mother wrap
your dresses in a box for another girl
and know that where their stripes and buttons went
what you’d lived in them followed.
But those minutes in bed,
minutes of utter safety,
you heard the water falling
and didn’t want it to fall.
You wanted to keep it,
you saved yourself that minute.
I don’t know if you still have it
or if you’ve had to spend it
on you or on me.
But I know you still save minutes
I used to think went unwatched
into our account in time
that allows no withdrawals.
You hold onto the slippers and letters,
things that are leaving, things we’ve left,
evidence we’re judged unfairly by.
You have the picture, you and Pam in blue
fishing in the stream below the pool,
staring back at the camera half-abashed.
Your jacket is still in the closet.
You never wear it,
you don’t even remember when you did,
but it’s here to testify
the picture doesn’t lie
—though the color’s different,
your hair is shorter now,
and the water in the pool
is long gone downstream.
| Jonathan Galassi | Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships | null |
The Moment When Your Name is Pronounced
|
This high up, the face
eroding; the red cedar slopes
over. An accident chooses a stranger.
Each rain unplugs roots
which thin out like a hand.
Above the river, heat
lightning flicks silently
and the sound holds, coiled in air.
Some nights you are here
dangling a Valpolicella bottle,
staring down at the flat water
that slides by with its mouth full of starlight.
It is always quiet
when we finish the wine.
While you were a living man
how many pictures were done
of you. Serious as an angel,
lacing up your boots. Ice
blows into my fields.
| Forrest Gander | Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Stars, Planets, Heavens | null |
Loiter
|
I’ll know the time to leave the room
where I’ve been growing hair
from my face, drinking dark beers
when the light in the lake bums out.
That’s when fish
turn on their music.
They lie in a blue current
waiting for the moon
to pass over, and the fishermen
with their lanterns know this
as they spill a can of sweet corn
and wonder if they spoke
what they were just thinking.
I clear my way through the fog
as music will break through static.
The frogs strike up,
a window goes out
in the Home for Elders.
Don’t you wonder why
it is built far from anywhere,
as though memory needs a terrain
for forgetting; blind
driveways to lost roads.
As for my own parents, they did not
grow old. What I know:
dinners without conversation,
stars that shine for anyone.
I know my time
is brief. I know love of the cut sleeve.
I want to say
don’t feel sorry for men,
those who leave women
smouldering like cigarettes,
those who are fond of burials.
War is a habit of mind,
I swear by my mother’s gender.
Tonight sticks in the leaves
are slick as pilot snakes.
Wherever I part branches
no one is in a boat,
no one has stirred a wake.
Not jackknifing off the dock,
it’s hauling myself back up
that gooses my titties and makes my peter shrink.
Don’t wake the cottonmouths.
Summertime. If you were here
and you remembered to stash your smokes
in a Glad bag so they didn’t soak like mine
we’d fall quiet now as pollen
on water, I would
tell you the true story of Urashima
and the turtle.
| Forrest Gander | Living,Growing Old,Midlife,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
The Tapestry
|
—for Pilar Coover
Me, when I think of you I see
Alley cats in your kitchen,
God weeping at your openings,
Individual acts of imagination, never
Culligan men under
Floorboards slipping hallucinogens into your water.
Let me say I have imagined you
Undressing guests before mirrors
To let their dragonfly bodies
Escape from human shells.
| Forrest Gander | Relationships | null |
“Luckies”
|
The loop of rusty cable incises
its shadow on the stucco wall.
My father smiles shyly and takes
one of my cigarettes, holding it
awkwardly at first, as if it were
a dart, while the yard slowly
swings across the wide sill of daylight.
Then it is a young man’s quick hand
that rises to his lips, he leans against the wall,
his white shirt open at the throat,
where the skin is weathered, and he chats
and daydreams, something he never does.
Smoking his cigarette, he is even
younger than I am, a brother who
begins to guess, amazed, that what
he will do will turn out to be this.
He recalls the house he had
when I was born, leaning against it
now after work, the pale stucco
of memory, 1947.
Baby bottles stand near the sink inside.
The new wire of the telephone, dozing
in a coil, waits for the first call.
The years are smoke.
| Reginald Gibbons | Living,Coming of Age,Parenthood,Philosophy | null |
Wood
|
for Maxine Kumin
A cylinder of maple
set in place, feet spread apart—
and the heavy maul, fat as a hammer
but honed like an axe, draws
a semicircle overhead and strikes
through the two new halves
to leave the steel head sunk
a half-inch in the block and the ash
handle rigid in the air.
A smack of the palm, gripping as it hits
the butt end, and the blade
rolls out of the cut. The half-logs
are still rocking on the flagstones.
So much less than what we have been
persuaded to dream, this necessity for wood
might have sufficed, but it is what
we have been taught to disown and forget.
Yet just such hardship is what saves.
For if the stacked cords
speak of felled trees, of countless
five-foot logs flipped end over end downhill
till the blood is wrung from your back
and snowbound warmth must seem
so far off you would rather freeze,
yet each thin tongue torn from the grain
when log-halves were sundered at one stroke
will sing in the stove.
To remind you of hands. Of how
mere touch is song in the silence
where hands live—the song of muddy bark,
the song of sawdust like cornmeal and down,
and the song of one hand over another,
two of us holding the last length of the log
in the sawbuck as inches away the chainsaw
keeps ripping through hickory.
| Reginald Gibbons | Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Trees & Flowers,Winter | null |
Maudlin; Or, The Magdalen’s Tears
|
If faith is a tree that sorrow grows
and women, repentant or not, are swamps,
a man who comes for solace here
will be up to his knees and slow
getting out. A name can turn on anyone.
But say that a woman washes the dust
from a stranger’s feet
and sits quite dry-eyed in front
of her mirror at night.
The candle flame moves with her breath, as does
the hand of the painter, who sees in the flame
his chance for virtuosity. She lets him leave
her shoulder bare.
Bedlam’s distilled from a Mary too,
St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, shelter
for all the afflicted and weak
of mind. The donors conceived of as magi
no doubt. The mad and the newborn
serve equally well for show.
A whore with a heart, the rich
with a conscience, the keepers of language
and hospitals badly embarrassed at times
by their charge. The mirror refuses
the candle, you see. And tears on another’s behalf
are not
the mirrors he’s pleased to regard.
Who loves his ironies buxom and grave
must hate the foolish water of her eyes.
| Linda Gregerson | Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Religion,Christianity,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture | null |
Like New
|
The ones too broke or wise to get parts
from a dealer come here where the mud is red
and eternal. Eight front ends
are stacked on girders he salvaged too.
Ask for Bruce, he said on the phone, and doesn’t
crack a smile when you show up.
Twenty-four fifty if we find one, sister.Bruce, it says on his coveralls, and Bruce
on the ones his helper wears. The routine’s so good
they’re keeping it. The taillight you can have.
Except for the traffic, the wrong parts of Baltimore
aren’t so bad: each house pulling
its straightest face, the curbs and stoops
lined up like a man inverting his pockets
to show he’s got nothing to hide. Construction
sites gone aimless and the detours
feeling more like home. You know
where to find a cheap lunch. Up front,
a woman hears the list through twice
before, as to a sweet and original
prompting, she picks fried trout.
Likewise the oyster shucker, pretending
you’ve asked for a straw with your beer.
He searches the counter above which reigns
a picture of Washington Stokes, retired,
who cleaned fish to order for fifty-nine years.
A girl on a schedule deserves
what she gets, and sometimes gets it kindly, earned
or no. Untouched by heat of sun or city
police, the fair-haired accommodate best
by having everything to learn.
But here comes your beer without a straw,
as though good nature were common as thirst.
Here’s Washington Stokes, who would understand
the strategy that lets the fool go free.
| Linda Gregerson | Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Class,Money & Economics | null |
Saints’ Logic
|
Love the drill, confound the dentist.
Love the fever that carries me home.
Meat of exile. Salt of grief.
This much, indifferent
affliction might yield. But how
when the table is God’s own board
and grace must be said in company?
If hatred were honey, as even
the psalmist persuaded himself,
then Agatha might be holding
her breasts on the plate for reproach.
The plate is decidedly
ornamental, and who shall say that pity’s
not, at this remove? Her gown
would be stiff with embroidery whatever
the shape of the body beneath.
Perhaps in heaven God can’t hide
his face. So the wounded
are given these gowns to wear
and duties that teach them the leverage
of pain. Agatha listens with special
regard to the barren, the dry,
to those with tumors where milk
should be, to those who nurse
for hire. Let me swell,
let me not swell. Remember the child,
how its fingers go blind as it sucks.
Bartholomew, flayed, intervenes
for the tanners. Catherine for millers,
whose wheels are of stone. Sebastian
protects the arrowsmiths, and John
the chandlers, because he was boiled
in oil. We borrow our light
where we can, here’s begging the pardon
of tallow and wick. And if, as we’ve tried
to extract from the prospect, we’ll each
have a sign to be known by at last—
a knife, a floursack, a hammer, a pot—
the saints can stay,
the earth won’t entirely have given us up.
| Linda Gregerson | Religion,Christianity | null |
With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath
|
In payment for those mornings at the mirror while,
at her
expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied
French Braids, for all
the mornings afterward of Hush
and Just stand still,
to make some small amends for every reg-
iment-
ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss,
I did as I was told for once,
gave up
my map, let Emma lead us through the woods
“by instinct,” as the drunkard knew
the natural
prince. We had no towels, we had
no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels
call them here, and I
am summer’s dullest hand at un-
premeditated moves. But when
the coppice of sheltering boxwood
disclosed its path and posted
rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed
poor excuse.
The ladies in their lumpy variety lay
on their public half-acre of lawn,
the water
lay in dappled shade, while Emma
in her underwear and I
in an ill-
fitting borrowed suit availed us of
the breast stroke and a modified
crawl.
She’s eight now. She will rather
die than do this in a year or two
and lobbies,
even as we swim, to be allowed to cut
her hair. I do, dear girl, I will
give up
this honey-colored metric of augmented
thirds, but not (shall we climb
on the raft
for a while?) not yet.
| Linda Gregerson | Living,Parenthood,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Summer | null |
“If you’re fond of road-blocks, this one can’t be beat:”
|
If you’re fond of road-blocks, this one can’t be beat:
A big tree in the middle of the street.
| Richard Wilbur | Humor & Satire,Language & Linguistics | null |
Light the Festive Candles
|
(FOR HANUKKAH)
Light the first of eight tonight—
the farthest candle to the right.
Light the first and second, too,
when tomorrow's day is through.
Then light three, and then light four—
every dusk one candle more
Till all eight burn bright and high,
honoring a day gone by
When the Temple was restored,
rescued from the Syrian lord,
And an eight-day feast proclaimed—
The Festival of Lights—well named
To celebrate the joyous day
when we regained the right to pray
to our one God in our own way.
| Aileen Lucia Fisher | Religion,Judaism,Hanukkah | null |
The Worm
|
When the earth is turned in spring
The worms are fat as anything.
And birds come flying all around
To eat the worms right off the ground.
They like the worms just as much as I
Like bread and milk and apple pie.
And once, when I was very young,
I put a worm right on my tongue.
I didn't like the taste a bit,
And so I didn't swallow it.
But oh, it makes my Mother squirm
Because she thinks I ate that worm!
| Ralph Bergengren | Living,Infancy,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life,Philosophy | null |
Tender-heartedness
|
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burned to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven't the heart to poke poor Billy.
| Harry Graham | null | null |
“How awkward when playing with glue”
|
How awkward when playing with glue
To suddenly find out that you
Have stuck nice and tight
Your left hand to your right
In a permanent how-do-you-do!
| Constance Levy | Activities,School & Learning | null |
I’m Glad I’m Me
|
I don’t understand why everyone stares
When I take off my clothes and dance down the stairs.
Or when I stick carrots in both of my ears,
Then dye my hair green and go shopping at Sears.
I just love to dress up and do goofy things.
If I were an angel, I’d tie-dye my wings!
Why can’t folks accept me the way that I am?
So what if I’m different and don’t act like them?
I’m not going to change and be someone I’m not.
I like who I am, and I’m all that I’ve got.
| Phil Bolsta | Living,Relationships,Home Life,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Philosophy | null |
The Toothless Wonder
|
Last night when I was sound asleep,
My little brother Keith
Tiptoed into my bedroom
And pulled out all my teeth.
You’d think that I would be upset
And jump and spit and swear.
You’d think that I would tackle Keith
And pull out all his hair.
But no! I’m glad he did it.
So what if people stare.
Now, thanks to the Tooth Fairy,
I’ll be a millionaire!
| Phil Bolsta | Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
Michael O’Toole
|
Michael O’Toole hated going to school,
He wanted to stay home and play.
So lied to his dad and said he felt bad
And stayed home from school one day.
The very next day he decided to say
That his stomach felt a bit queasy.
He groaned and he winced ’til his dad was convinced,
And he said to himself, “This is easy!”
At the end of the week, his dad kissed his cheek
And said, “Son, you’ve missed too much school.”
“But still I feel funny, and my nose is all runny,”
Said the mischievous Michael O’Toole.
Each day he’d complain of a new ache or pain,
But his doctor could find nothing wrong.
He said it was best to let Michael rest,
Until he felt healthy and strong.
Michael O’Toole never did get to school,
So he never learned how to write—
Or to read or to spell or do anything well,
Which is sad, for he’s really quite bright.
And now that he’s grown, he sits home alone
’Cause there’s nothing he knows how to do.
Don't be a fool and stay home from school,
Or the same thing could happen to you!
| Phil Bolsta | Activities,School & Learning | null |
A Teacher’s Lament
|
Don’t tell me the cat ate your math sheet,
And your spelling words went down the drain,
And you couldn’t decipher your homework,
Because it was soaked in the rain.
Don’t tell me you slaved for hours
On the project that’s due today,
And you would have had it finished
If your snake hadn’t run away.
Don’t tell me you lost your eraser,
And your worksheets and pencils, too,
And your papers are stuck together
With a great big glob of glue.
I’m tired of all your excuses;
They are really a terrible bore.
Besides, I forgot my own work,
At home in my study drawer.
| Kalli Dakos | Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Pets | null |
This Little Piggy
|
This little piggy went to market, This little piggy stayed home, This little piggy had roast beef, This little piggy had none. This little piggy went ... Wee, wee, wee, all the way home!
| Mother Goose | Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
"There was a crooked man,"
|
There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
| Mother Goose | Relationships,Pets | null |
"Hush little baby, don't say a word,"
|
Hush little baby, don't say a word,
Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird won't sing,
Papa's gonna buy you a diamond ring.
And if that diamond ring turns to brass,
Papa's gonna buy you a looking glass.
And if that looking glass gets broke,
Papa's gonna buy you a billy goat.
And if that billy goat won't pull,
Papa's gonna buy you a cart and bull.
And if that cart and bull turn over,
Papa's gonna buy you a dog named Rover.
And if that dog named Rover won't bark,
Papa's gonna buy you a horse and cart.
And if that horse and cart fall down,
You'll still be the sweetest little baby in town!
| Mother Goose | Living,Infancy,Relationships,Family & Ancestors | null |
"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,"
|
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
| Mother Goose | Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
"Mary had a little lamb,"
|
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow;
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
It followed her to school one day,
Which was against the rule;
It made the children laugh and play
To see a lamb at school.
And so the teacher turned it out,
But still it lingered near,
And waited patiently about
Till Mary did appear.
Why does the lamb love Mary so?
The eager children cry;
Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know,
The teacher did reply.
| Sarah Josepha Hale | Relationships,Home Life,Pets | null |
"Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross,"
|
Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
| Mother Goose | Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Men & Women,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
Yankee Doodle
|
Yankee Doodle went to town,
A-riding on a pony;
Stuck a feather in his hat
And called it macaroni.
| Mother Goose | Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
"Mary, Mary, quite contrary"
|
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells
And pretty maids all in a row.
| Mother Goose | Activities,Gardening,Relationships,Friends & Enemies | null |
"Ladybird, ladybird,"
|
Ladybird, ladybird,
Fly away home,
Your house is on fire
And your children all gone;
All except one
And that's little Ann,
And she has crept under
The warming pan.
| Mother Goose | Nature,Animals,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
"Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man,"
|
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man,
Bake me a cake, as fast as you can;
Pat it, prick it, and mark it with B,
Put it in the oven for baby and me.
| Mother Goose | Activities,Eating & Drinking | null |
"There was an old woman who lived in a shoe."
|
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread;
And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
| Mother Goose | Relationships,Family & Ancestors | null |
Little Bo-Peep
|
Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,
And can't tell where to find them;
Leave them alone, and they'll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.
Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep,
And dreamt she heard them bleating;
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were still all fleeting.
Then up she took her little crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they'd left their tails behind them.
It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails, side by side,
All hung on a tree to dry.
She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks she raced;
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
That each tail be properly placed.
| Mother Goose | Activities,Jobs & Working,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Relationships,Pets | null |
"The three little kittens, they lost their mittens,"
|
The three little kittens, they lost their mittens,
And they began to cry,
"Oh, mother dear, we sadly fear,
That we have lost our mittens."
"What! Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens!
Then you shall have no pie."
"Meow, meow, meow."
"Then you shall have no pie."
The three little kittens, they found their mittens,
And they began to cry,
"Oh, mother dear, see here, see here,
For we have found our mittens."
"Put on your mittens, you silly kittens,
And you shall have some pie."
"Purr, purr, purr,
Oh, let us have some pie."
The three little kittens put on their mittens,
And soon ate up the pie,
"Oh, mother dear, we greatly fear,
That we have soiled our mittens."
"What, soiled your mittens, you naughty kittens!"
Then they began to sigh,
"Meow, meow, meow,"
Then they began to sigh.
The three little kittens, they washed their mittens,
And hung them out to dry,
"Oh, mother dear, do you not hear,
That we have washed our mittens?"
"What, washed your mittens, then you're good kittens,
But I smell a rat close by."
"Meow, meow, meow,
We smell a rat close by."
| Mother Goose | Living,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Pets,Philosophy | null |
"Polly, put the kettle on,"
|
Polly, put the kettle on,
Polly, put the kettle on,
Polly, put the kettle on,
We'll all have tea.
Sukey, take it off again,
Sukey, take it off again,
Sukey, take it off again,
They've all gone away.
| Mother Goose | Activities,Eating & Drinking | null |
"Pease porridge hot,"
|
Pease porridge hot,
Pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old.
| Mother Goose | Activities,Eating & Drinking | null |
"Ring around the rosy,"
|
Ring around the rosy,
Pocket full of posy,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down!
| Mother Goose | Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
Little Boy Blue
|
Little boy blue,
Come blow your horn,
The sheep's in the meadow,
The cow's in the corn.
But where is the boy
Who looks after the sheep?
He's under a haystack,
Fast asleep.
| Mother Goose | Living,Activities,Jobs & Working,Philosophy,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
Little Jack Horner
|
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, "What a good boy am I!"
| Mother Goose | Living,Coming of Age,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Philosophy | null |
Jack and Jill
|
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
and Jill came tumbling after.
Up Jack got, and home did trot,
As fast as he could caper,
To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob
With vinegar and brown paper.
| Mother Goose | Living,Coming of Age,Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Philosophy | null |
"Jack be nimble,"
|
Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick.
| Mother Goose | Living,Activities,School & Learning,Philosophy | null |
Sunflakes
|
If sunlight fell like snowflakes,
gleaming yellow and so bright,
we could build a sunman,
we could have a sunball fight,
we could watch the sunflakes
drifting in the sky.
We could go sleighing
in the middle of July
through sundrifts and sunbanks,
we could ride a sunmobile,
and we could touch sunflakes—
I wonder how they'd feel.
| Frank Asch | Nature,Winter | null |
If You Catch a Firefly
|
If you catch a firefly
and keep it in a jar
You may find that
you have lost
A tiny star.
If you let it go then,
back into the night,
You may see it
once again
Star bright.
| Lilian Moore | Nature,Animals | null |
I Left My Head
|
I left my head
somewhere
today.
Put it down for
just
a minute.
Under the
table?
On a chair?
Wish I were
able
to say
where.
Everything I need
is
in it!
| Lilian Moore | Living,The Body,The Mind | null |
Mine
|
I made a sand castle.
In rolled the sea.
"All sand castles
belong to me—
to me,"
said the sea.
I dug sand tunnels.
In flowed the sea.
"All sand tunnels
belong to me—
to me,"
said the sea.
I saw my sand pail floating free.
I ran and snatched it from the sea.
"My sand pail
belongs to me—
to ME!"
| Lilian Moore | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Summer | null |
The Monsters in My Closet
|
The monsters in my closet
Like to sleep the day away.
So when I get home from school,
I let them out to play.
When Mom calls me for supper,
I give them each a broom.
First they put my toys away,
And then they clean my room.
The Mummy hates to vacuum.
So if he starts to whine,
I kick his rear and tell him,
“Trade jobs with Frankenstein.”
Wolfman used to fold my clothes.
I’ll give him one more chance—
Last time he wasn’t careful
And left furballs in my pants.
When my room is nice and neat,
I bring them up some food.
But Dracula wants to drink my blood—
I think that’s pretty rude.
When it’s time to go to bed,
I hug them all goodnight.
They jump back in my closet,
While I turn out the light.
I’ve taken care of monsters
For as long as I recall,
But the monsters in my closet
Are the nicest ones of all!
| Phil Bolsta | Living,Relationships,Home Life,Philosophy,Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural,Halloween | null |
Messenger
|
We shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed.
Two nights he came to me, mute,
on fire, no dream. I woke to find
the window embered and fog filling
the willows. The third time
he was milder and early, his gray form
all ash. He said to me at bedside, kneeling,
“You must say your life to save it.”
Midnight, hoarfrost. I was not yet ten
and didn’t know what to make of so brief
a bedtime story. His features
were simple and familiar—the smile,
both eyes shut in bliss, I guessed,
head and torso echoing an antique
keyhole. From sleep’s icy edge
I asked, “How?” But he was gone,
the room all hazed. The air smelled
of struck matches, scuppernong,
a copperhead’s musk. What next?
The moon was new in the budding
bird cherry and Venus startling overhead.
Dizzy for water, I followed
my flashlight down the stairs
where the black mantel clock
was bonging. Beside it sat the twin
of my herald, a stone bookend
from Kildare and no more able
to speak or take wing than a weathercock.
His closed eyes told me, “Look
inside,” but I ached to see him blaze
again and say aloud how change
could shake me to a shining. “But
I must be the key,” I thought,
and stepped over the sparkling threshold.
My nightshirt floated ghostly
across the scalded lawn, under the arbor,
beside the barn, my soles not troubled
by white grass crackling
all the way to the well shed,
the burning that must
have been coming from me.
| R. T. Smith | Living,Philosophy | null |
A Local Doc, over Rocky Lunchtime Bourbon, Speaks of Barter and Hopeful Home Remedies
|
Nostrums? Lordy, I have seen them all.
Alcohol’s the favorite. Many a quack’s
panacea bottled in a cellar and hawked
from door to door is thriving still.
Bindweed’s supposed to heal a bruise.
Cherokee remedies still survive,
and slave recipes—hyssop, juniper, chives.
Waitress, freshen this elixir, if you please.
One day a hefty woman who works a loom
down at Pepperell Mills sauntered in
with no appointment and perched herself prim
as an English queen in the waiting room.
What happened next? For a prolapsed
uterus, folk medicine recommends
inserting an Irish potato. It works,
if you can stand the weight, my friends.
Well, she’d relied on that specific
since winter. We’d hit, you understand, July,
and her complaint, not one bit shy,
was, Leaves in my virginia. Not beatific,
no, but she was composed, no maniac,
and it made some sense. What better place
than a protected pocket, warm and moist?
But the spud had sprouted, sent runners amok.
You never know in these flatland burley
counties if your manual skills will bloom
as sawbones or private gardener. Deftly,
I removed the obstruction and took it home.
I’ve raised a whole colony in my window box,
and bake, fry, or boil, I’m proud as hell
of this year’s crop. The woman paid her bill
with eggs and applejack. Life is a paradox.
Now I’ve got to rush back and tend my flock.
Got appointments at four—a pregnant lady,
a leg to set, twins to inspect for chicken pox,
and Marvin with his routine emergency.
I guess you could say my practice is thriving.
Drop by, and I’ll fry you up some shallot
hash browns in Margie’s seasoned skillet,
a flavor I can promise is sure to revive
any ailing soul. Where do I get my onions?
Don’t ask. The whole sweet world is a garden.
| R. T. Smith | Living,Health & Illness,The Body,Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature | null |
Wade Seego Believes Soylent Green Is People
|
Down here we say we dare defend our rights,
our state motto. I’d back Charlton Heston
for any office in the land. A Christian,
he speaks right up. He’s got his head on straight,
and people listen. Even on the screen
of a honky-tonk TV he still looks
like a hero, and he wouldn’t let freaks
take over our country. If it takes firepower
to keep us free, I say stock up. Keep your
powder dry. Everything is dangerous
these days. Life sucks. We suck too. Disaster
is coming. Even God’s gone spleenish. Bless
the common man against the government.
They lie. They grind us up. Winchesters
might be our last resort. Hellfire preachers
say we best prepare for a dark event,
but maybe Charlie Heston could keep death
off our backs and tone down Jehovah’s wrath.
Sweet Jesus—and this is the gospel truth—
is pissed off at our newfangled unfaith.
He’s coming back, and he’s armed to the teeth.
| R. T. Smith | Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
Oxford Stroud Recollects Fishing with Electricity
|
I’ve caught fish everwhichaway they can be.
On the Chattahoochee River I’ve used nets, gigs,
trot lines, and bare hands. Even electricity.
One day Braleigh and me caught so many
that two-ended punt boat nearly went under.
We were boys and didn’t know any better.
Catfish were plentiful as water for all
we could figure. That was back then.
We’d wrap the copper pipe and drop it in,
then use the telephone battery to make a wet cell
of that whole muddy dogleg of the river.
The small channel cats would rise, then
recover, but big whites and blues would float,
belly up, and we’d haul ’em in, fill the boat
to the oarlocks with fresh fish to eat or sell.
Their backs shined so bright it was a wonder.
But let me tell you this: it was also a danger.
If you caught the coil wrong or touched iron
binding on that old craft with a live wire,
it was enough to knock you on your ass.
A man could get killed just trying to catch fish.
Of course, such a method was a sin against Jesus
and man, fish and fresh water, but we didn’t savvy.
We were just free as gnats for the summer,
a little enterprising and a little hungry.
Besides, we hadn’t heard of sport or mercy.
That was a cooter’s age ago. That was then.
| R. T. Smith | Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities | null |
Twang Chic: Sam Buckhannon Explores the Latest Fashion
|
If it’s true that Johnny Weismuller stole his Tarzan yell
from the Alpine yodel, did Hank Williams in the back seat
of his Cadillac dream the ululation of Bedouin women
welcoming the horsemen back from war? When I was a boy
only a fool would fake a country sound, and my father
made his voice over to ring as simple as Jack Parr’s
Midwest porkless, yamless, no-cornbread-or-cracklin’ patter.
He didn’t want to be from Butts County, Georgia, and hated
farm chores and coveralls. Football got him out. The FBI
gave him a way to travel under cover, but I have heard him,
years later, after choir practice and the church social,
sit back with a Pall Mall and follow Eight-Finger Fleming’s
banjo frail. He’d hold that smoke deep, his ash glowing till
his throat was bathed in tar, and then he’d cut loose and scroll
it out, a yodel to make Roy Rogers blush. It was no hymn,
I’ll tell you. We had a brick split-level in the suburbs,
and the radio station of choice adored Perry Como’s croon.
My mother adopted words like boocoo and oodles to mask
her peach-orchard drawl. An uncle might tell a farmer’s
daughter joke, the rake fleeing the cocked shotgun
stopping on a hill to yodel, “Andyouroldladytoo,”
but nobody could say ain’t or you’uns or I’ll get to it
directly | R. T. Smith | Social Commentaries,Class | null |
Sheriff Matt Whitlock Confesses to a Lesson in Zen after Hours
|
I like it quiet like this, Alton. I like
to think. I love the way spring light falls
easy, soft. This morning I was driving
the cruiser, savoring gold pollen everywhere
out in the south of the county. Real nice,
seeing forsythia and daffodils, ditch irises,
and a few Cherokee roses opening white.
It was a blue day, and I had a Tampa Jewel,
just counting cows, seeing an April breeze
in the catkins and new leaves, the radio off.
I know that’s hardly right, but curse
any citizen who’d grudge me an hour’s peace.
Then I started seeing this marksmanship
in the caution signs, the yellow diamonds
that warn of deer or curves ahead, a steep
grade—there’s one of those. Four circles
and a jagged hole, likely a thirty-eight
slug, smack in the center neater than Willard
cleaves meat at the joint. A dozen and more.
I got mad because I get paid to protect
what the county commission declares holy—
the park with its petting zoo, the rebel
sentry on the square, and all the highway signs—
and here’s all indications that some felon
has no respect, some felon who can shoot.
I admit my feelings were mixed, that right
indignation at the broken law, but envy
of his eye for centers. Mind you, I saw nary
a rip on the fringes or a near miss. Bull’s-eyes,
every sign I saw. A fool is what I feel, you
understand, cause I motored over to Pig Burton’s
store near The Bottle and asked him—he was
stacking feed sacks on Robert Ring’s vehicle—
who the hell was the target king of Beat Three.
Pig always has his hands in every pie; he’d
know if some individual had been hauling off all
the turkey shoot prizes. I know I should know,
too, but a sheriff’s got beaucoup chores
to do, mostly idiot paperwork. I’ve lost
touch since the last bond vote hired me four new
deputies, all dirt-dumb. Well, old Pig has
that laugh he can’t hold back, and he points
his finger pistol-like at Robert, who’s got
a shamed look on his face. “Pow,” he says
at me or Bob, looking back and forth, just
“Pow.” Seems Bob’s boy Earl, the one
that ain’t got the sense of a chicken under
that cowlick red as a rooster comb, is known
to have sneaked Bob’s Colt a week before
and shot every yellow sign he could till his pa
ran him down and whacked him good,
then locked him in the fall-down curing shed
overnight—he’s a hard man, but he loves
that boy. I remember once ... but how the hell
can any half-wit you wouldn’t trust to milk
hit the bull by the eye first time he ever gets
loose with a handgun? “It’s easy,” says Bob,
less shamed than afraid now he’ll have to pay
for fresh metal—his people have always
been tight—but he’s showing a grin I don’t like.
“Real easy. He just cuts loose from the hip,
five short feet back, sometimes maybe six,
and comes back later to paint the target circles
wheresomever his bullet hits. He aims that
paintbrush right smart.” Blessed if I don’t
feel the fool for being full dumbstruck
at a trick Earl’s not bright enough to see
as a joke. But I didn’t write it up nor charge
a soul, just ground my cigar in the dirt
and helped myself to a Dr. Pepper, made believe
it didn’t mean a thing, but all day I’ve been
riding, listening to crime reports on state radio—
robbery at the mall, attempted rape maybe, wrecks
on the bypass and a set fire in Brill’s deer woods.
It gets to be too much. I shouldn’t even take
the time to sit here watching this dark space
where folks have been dancing all evening,
hearing the quiet after all those raucous songs,
but Alton, don’t you see, the feeble boy’s right,
or half right, at least? It all comes to the same,
whether you get what you want in the end or
want what you get. The law works that way:
each law makes more crime, but it’s not my job
to say. Warm up my cup just one last time.
I’ve got to circle Ampex once more before
I turn it home. God, this dark feels right,
no matter what flowers out there shed spring
light. The dark is what hits me as holy.
I’m calling it a day. Catch you later. Night.
| R. T. Smith | Activities,Jobs & Working,Religion,Buddhism | null |
The Impalpable Brush Fire Singer
|
No
he is not an urn singer
nor does he carry on rapport
with negative forces within extinction
he is the brush fire singer
who projects from his heart
the sound of insidious subduction
of blank anomaly as posture
of opaque density as ash
he
distanced from prone ventriloqual stammer
from flesh
& habit
& drought
the performer
part poltergeist & Orisha
part broken in-cellular dove
part glance from floating Mongol bastions
where the spires are butane
where their photographic fractals are implanted with hypnosis
because he allegedly embodies
a green necrotic umber
more like a vertical flash or a farad
posing like a tempest in a human chromium palace
therefore his sound
a dazed simoom in a gauntlet
a blizzard of birds burned at the touch of old maelstroms
because he gives off the odour of storms
this universal Orisha
like a sun that falls from a compost of dimness
out of de-productive hydrogen sums
out of lightless fissures which boil outside the planet
yes
he sings at a certain pitch
which has evolved beyond the potter’s field
beyond a tragic hummingbird’s cirrhosis
surmounting primeval flaw
surmounting fire which forms in irreplaceable disjunction
under certain formations of the zodiac he is listless
he intones without impact
his synodic revelations no longer of the law
of measured palpable destinations
because he sings in such a silence
that even the Rishis can’t ignore
as though
the hollow power which re-arises from nothingness
perpetually convinces
like a vacuum which splits within the spinning arc of an
intangible solar candle
such power can never be confusedly re-traced
because
it adumbrates & blazes
like a glossary of suns
so that each viral drill
each forge
casts a feeling
which in-saturates a pressure
bringing to distance a hidden & elided polarity
like a subjective skill
corroded & advanced
he sings
beyond the grip of a paralytic nexus
where blood shifts
beyond the magnet of volume
where the nerves no longer resonate
inside an octagonal maze
stung at its source by piranhas
| Will Alexander | null | null |
To a Real Standup Piece of Painted Crockery
|
I wonder what the Greeks kept in these comicstrip canisters.
Plums, milletseed, incense, henna, oregano.
Speak to me, trove. Tell me you contained dried smoked tongue once.
Or a sorcerer or a cosmetologist’s powders and unguents.
And when John Keats looked at you in a collection of pots
it was poetry at first sight: quotable beautiful
teleological concatenations of thoughts.
It’s the proverbial dog of a poem, though:
slobbering panting and bright-eyed like a loquacious thug
or a spokesperson embattled on behalf of a sociopolitical thesis*
to which he has not had access owing to the need-to-know basis.
And he never says which pot. Just an oasis
of tease in a sea of tilth, kind of a concrete catachresis
bopping along with timbrels, irrepressible as Count Basie,
fabulous I mean classic I mean vout,
keeping the buckwheat in and the weevils out
while the rest of us get and spend and ache and earn
and go to the Bruce Springsteen concert and take our turn
lining up at the Metropolitan to look at the Macedonian gold krater
and promising ourselves to read up seriously.
| George Starbuck | Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets | null |
I Could Not Tell
|
I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,
because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
when I had one foot in the air.
I would not remember the tightening of my jaw,
the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out
into the air, the clear child
gazing about her in the air as I plunged
to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it,
the bus skidding to a stop, the driver
jumping out, my daughter laughingDo it again.
I have never done it
again, I have been very careful.
I have kept an eye on that nice young mother
who lightly leapt
off the moving vehicle
onto the stopped street, her life
in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.
| Sharon Olds | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Parenthood | null |
Rite of Passage
|
As the guests arrive at our son’s party
they gather in the living room—
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to anotherHow old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat youup, a seven says to a six,
the midnight cake, round and heavy as a
turret behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.
| Sharon Olds | Living,Coming of Age,Philosophy | null |
Wonder as Wander
|
At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,
my mother potters around her house.
Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one
there, no one to tell what to do,
she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,
fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly
throws out her arms and screams—high notes
lying here and there on the carpets
like bodies touched by a downed wire,
she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through
the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.
I feel, now, that I do not know her,
and for all my staring, I have not seen her
—like the song she sang, when we were small, I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,
for poor lonely people, like you, and like I | Sharon Olds | Living,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life | null |
Statue
|
The angel asked, as his shoulders were pressed into the stone
Why me? And taken away from the inhabited body,
Like the lyric voice rustling from memory forests,
Childhood rushes toward death, a wind in those woods,
Crashing through trees, dying out,
Settling like a white mist over everything.
| Tom Clark | Living,Death,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture,Philosophy | null |
Human Life
|
Always behind my back I hear
The spastic clicking of jerked knees
And other automatic reactions
Tracking me through the years to where
Time’s winged chariot is double
Parked near the eternity frontier
And in such moments I want to participate
In human life less and less
But when I do the obligatory double take
And glance behind me into the dark green future
All I see stretching out are vast
Arizona republics of more
| Tom Clark | Living,Time & Brevity | null |
Terminator Too
|
Poetry, Wordsworth
wrote, will have no
easy time of it when
the discriminating
powers of the mind
are so blunted that
all voluntary
exertion dies, and
the general
public is reduced
to a state of near
savage torpor, morose,
stuporous, with
no attention span
whatsoever; nor will
the tranquil rustling
of the lyric, drowned out
by the heavy, dull
coagulation
of persons in cities,
where a uniformity
of occupations breeds
cravings for sensation
which hourly visual
communication of
instant intelligence
gratifies like crazy,
likely survive this age.
| Tom Clark | Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Popular Culture | null |
Sounding Chinese at Inspiration Point
|
Nice spring day off big white cloud
At Inspiration Point escaping time wars
Poet takes book & wine bottle up into Mist Mountains
Since only available agenda is rhyming with silence
Seeking window of opportunity on a wall
I disguise what I have to say by sounding Chinese
Such as stars are now darker and farther away
They take deeper drinks because space is
Drying out afraid to think own thoughts
Administered citizen achieving condition of robot
In public mind things not so good these days
Nor in wrong run will it matter to Tu Fu
| Tom Clark | Nature,Spring,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets | null |
Radio
|
Don’t hurt the radio for
Against all
Solid testimony machines
Have feelings
Too
Brush past it lightly
With a fine regard
For allowing its molecules
To remain 100% intact
Machines can think like Wittgenstein
And the radio’s a machine
Thinking softly to itself
Of the Midnight Flower
As her tawny parts unfold
In slow motion the boat
Rocks on the ocean
As her tawny parts unfold
The radio does something mental
To itself singingly
As her tawny parts unfold
Inside its wires
And steal away its heart
Two minutes after eleven
The color dream communicates itself
The ink falls on the paper as if magically
The scalp falls away
A pain is felt
Deep in the radio
I take out my larynx and put it on the blue chair
And do my dance for the radio
It’s my dance in which I kneel in front of the radio
And while remaining motionless elsewise
Force my eyeballs to come as close together as possible
While uttering a horrible and foreign word
Which I cannot repeat to you without now removing my larynx
And placing it on the blue chair
The blue chair isn’t here
So I can’t do that trick at the present time
The radio is thinking a few licks of its own
Pianistic thoughts attuned to tomorrow’s grammar
Beautiful spas of seltzery coition
Plucked notes like sandpaper attacked by Woody Woodpecker
The radio says Edwardian farmers from Minnesota march on the Mafia
Armed with millions of radioactive poker chips
The radio fears foul play
It turns impersonal
A piggy bank was smashed
A victim was found naked
Radio how can you tell me this
In such a chipper tone
Your structure of voices is a friend
The best kind
The kind one can turn on or off
Whenever one wants to
But that is wrong I know
For you will intensely to continue
And in a deeper way
You do
Hours go by
And I watch you
As you diligently apply
A series of audible frequencies
To tiny receptors
Located inside my cranium
Resulting in much pleasure for someone
Who looks like me
Although he is seated about two inches to my left
And the both of us
Are listening to your every word
With a weird misapprehension
It’s the last of the tenth
And Harmon Killebrew is up
With a man aboard
He blasts a game-winning home run
The 559th of his career
But no one cares
Because the broadcast is studio-monitored for taping
To be replayed in 212 years
Heaven must be like this, radio
To not care about anything
Because it’s all being taped for replay much later
Heaven must be like this
For as her tawny parts unfold
The small lights swim roseate
As if of sepals were the tarp made
As it is invisibly unrolled
And sundown gasps its old Ray Charles 45 of Georgia
Only through your voice
| Tom Clark | Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Arts & Sciences,Music,Philosophy | null |
Realism
|
The smashed weirdness of the raving cadenzas of God
Takes over all of a sudden
In our time. It speaks through the voices of talk show moderators.
It tells us in a ringing anthem, like heavenly hosts uplifted,
That the rhapsody of the pastoral is out to lunch.
We can take it from there.
We can take it to Easy Street.
But when things get tough on Easy Street
What then? Is it time for realism?
And who are these guys on the bus
Who glide in golden hats past us
On their way to Kansas City?
| Tom Clark | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,God & the Divine | null |
Reflections on History in Missouri
|
This old house lodges no ghosts!
Those swaggering specters who found their way
Across the Atlantic
Were left behind
With their old European grudges
In the farmhouses of New England
And Pennsylvania
Like so much jettisoned baggage
Too heavy
To lug over the Piedmont.
The flatlands are inhospitable
To phantoms. Here
Shadows are sharp and arbitrary
Not mazy, obscure,
Cowering in corners
Behind scary old boots in a cupboard
Or muffled in empty coats, deserted
By long-dead cousins
(Who appear now and then
But only in photographs
Already rusting at the edges)—
Setting out in the creaking wagon
Tight-lipped, alert to move on,
The old settlers had no room
For illusions.
Their dangers were real.
Now in the spare square house
Their great-grandchildren
Tidy away the past
Until the polished surfaces
Reflect not apparitions, pinched,
Parched, craving, unsatisfied,
But only their own faces.
| Constance Urdang | Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
The Luggage
|
Travel is a vanishing act
Only to those who are left behind.
What the traveler knows
Is that he accompanies himself,
Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked,
Stolen, or lost, or mistaken.
So one took, past outposts of empire,
“Calmly as if in the British Museum,”
Not only her Victorian skirts,
Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith
In the civilizing mission of women,
Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor;
Another, friend of witch-doctors,
Living on native chop,
Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes,
Heralded her astonishing arrival
Under shivering stars
By calling, “It’s only me!” A third,
Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate
That a woman could travel as easily as a man,
Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears
And only once permitted a tribal chieftain
To stroke her long, golden hair.
| Constance Urdang | Activities,Travels & Journeys,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
Poorly Dressed
|
I have a friend who’s not well dressed.
He wears no hat. He wears no vest.
Upon his back he wears no shirt,
so you can see there’s lots of dirt.
He wears no shoes upon his feet.
He wears no pants upon his seat.
In fact, he doesn’t wear a stitch,
so he can scratch if there’s an itch.
I hope that you don’t find him rude—
my dog is happy in the nude.
| Bruce Lansky | Living,The Body,Nature,Animals | null |
Looking For Each of Us
|
I open the box of my favorite postcards
and turn them over looking for de Chirico
because I remember seeing you standing
facing a wall no wider than a column where
to your left was a hall going straight back
into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down
to where you stood alone and where the room
opened out on your right to an auditorium
full of people who had just heard you read
and were now listening to the other poet.
I was looking for the de Chirico because of
the places, the empty places. The word
“boulevard” came to mind. Standing on the side
of the fountains in Paris where the water
blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night.
It was dark then too and I was alone.
Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t
somebody find me all those years? The form
of love was purity. An art. An architecture.
Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue
and the statue with its front turned away
from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone,
hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones
and the stone walls. I turn the cards looking
for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes
full of caring and something remote.
His eyes are loving and empty, but not with
nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because
he is working. The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap
statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene
and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men
with smudges for mouths, backed by water,
each held still by the impossibility of what
art can accomplish. A broken river god,
only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed.
The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.
| Linda Gregg | Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences | null |
Winter Love
|
I would like to decorate this silence,
but my house grows only cleaner
and more plain. The glass chimes I hung
over the register ring a little
when the heat goes on.
I waited too long to drink my tea.
It was not hot. It was only warm.
| Linda Gregg | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Love,Desire,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Nature,Winter | null |
The Lamb
|
It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God’s fist made in the walls.
All our desire for love or children
is treated like rags by the enemy.
I knew so much and sang anyway.
Like a bird who will sing until
it is brought down. When they take
away the trees, the child picks up a stick
and says, this is a tree, this the house
and the family. As we might. Through a door
of what had been a house, into the field
of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting
its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.
| Linda Gregg | Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict | null |
Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire
|
Titled after Satie
I.
Three pears ripen
On the ledge. Weeks pass.
They are a marriage.
The middle one’s the conversation
The other two are having.
He is their condition.
Three wings without birds,
Three feelings.
How can they help themselves?
They can’t.
How can they stay like that?
They can.
II.
The pears are consulting.
Business is bad this year,
D’Anjou, Bartlett.
They are psychiatrists,
Patient and slick.
Hunger reaches the hard stem.
It will get rid of them.
III.
The pears are old women;
They are the same.
Slight rouge,
Green braille dresses,
They blush in unison.
They will stay young.
They will not ripen.
In the new world,
Ripeness is nothing.
| Brenda Hillman | null | null |
Saguaro
|
Often visitors there, saddened
by lack of trees, go out
to a promontory.
Then, backed by the banded
sunset, the trail
of the Conquistadores,
the father puts on the camera,
the leather albatross,
and has the children
imitate saguaros. One
at a time they stand there smiling,
fingers up like the tines of a fork
while the stately saguaro
goes on being entered
by wrens, diseases, and sunlight.
The mother sits on a rock,
arms folded
across her breasts. To her
the cactus looks scared,
its needles
like hair in cartoons.
With its arms in preacher
or waltz position,
it gives the impression
of great effort
in every direction,
like the mother.
Thousands of these gray-green
cacti cross the valley:
nature repeating itself,
children repeating nature,
father repeating children
and mother watching.
Later, the children think
the cactus was moral,
had something to teach them,
some survival technique
or just regular beauty.
But what else could it do?
The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.
| Brenda Hillman | Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature | null |
Time Problem
|
The problem
of time. Of there not being
enough of it.
My girl came to the study
and said Help me;
I told her I had a time problem
which meant:
I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes.
Numbers hung in the math book
like motel coathangers. The Lean
Cuisine was burning
like an ancient city: black at the edges,
bubbly earth tones in the center.
The latest thing they’re saying is lack
of time might be
a “woman’s problem.” She sat there
with her math book sobbing—
(turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers
dangle in little nooses)
Hawking says if you back up far enough
it’s not even
an issue, time falls away into
'the curve' which is finite,
boundaryless. Appointment book,
soprano telephone—
(beep End beep went the microwave)
The hands fell off my watch in the night.
I spoke to the spirit
who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing
they invented. Had wakened from a big
dream of love in a boat
No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face
lived for months in my dresser,
no arrows
for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio
nose (before the lie)
left in the center; the watch
didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I.
My girl was doing
her gym clothes by herself; (red leaked
toward black, then into the white
insignia) I was grading papers,
heard her call from the laundry room:
Mama?
Hawking says there are two
types of it,
real and imaginary (imaginary time must be
like decaf), says it’s meaningless
to decide which is which
but I say: there was tomorrow-
and-a-half
when I started thinking about it; now
there’s less than a day. More
done. That’s
the thing that keeps being said. I thought
I could get more done as in:
fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller
archon, then push-push-push
the tired-tired around the track like a planet.
Legs, remember him?
Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . .
Hawking says
there are little folds in time
(actually he calls them wormholes)
but I say:
there’s a universe beyond
where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. .
Push us out in the boat and leave time here—
(because: where in the plan was it written,
You’ll be too busy to close parentheses,
the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water,
even the caterpillar will hurry past you?
Pulled the travel alarm
to my face: the black
behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark
from being ruined. Opened
the art book
—saw the languorous wrists of the lady
in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning
gently. The glove
(just slightly—but still:)
“aghast”;
opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed
into a fourth dimension
but I say
space thought it up, as in: Let’s make
a baby space, and then
it missed. Were seconds born early, and why
didn’t things unhappen also, such as
the tree became Daphne. . .
At the beginning of harvest, we felt
the seven directions.
Time did not visit us. We slept
till noon.
With one voice I called him, with one voice
I let him sleep, remembering
summer years ago,
I had come to visit him in the house of last straws
and when he returned
above the garden of pears, he said
our weeping caused the dew. . .
I have borrowed the little boat
and I say to him Come into the little boat,
you were happy there;
the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out
onto the pond,
or onto the reflection of the pond,
whichever one is eternal
| Brenda Hillman | Living,Time & Brevity,Activities,Indoor Activities,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Popular Culture | null |
Waking from Sleep
|
Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the waterlines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.
It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full
Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.
Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,
Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.
Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
We know that our master has left us for the day.
| Robert Bly | The Body,Nature | null |
Kalaloch
|
The bleached wood massed in bone piles,
we pulled it from dark beach and built
fire in a fenced clearing.
The posts’ blunt stubs sank down,
they circled and were roofed by milled
lumber dragged at one time to the coast.
We slept there.
Each morning the minus tide—
weeds flowed it like hair swimming.
The starfish gripped rock, pastel,
rough. Fish bones lay in sun.
Each noon the milk fog sank
from cloud cover, came in
our clothes and held them
tighter on us. Sea stacks
stood and disappeared.
They came back when the sun
scrubbed out the inlet.
We went down to piles to get
mussels, I made my shirt
a bowl of mussel stones, carted
them to our grate where they smoked apart.
I pulled the mussel lip bodies out,
chewed their squeak.
We went up the path for fresh water, berries.
Hardly speaking, thinking.
During low tide we crossed
to the island, climbed
its wet summit. The redfoots
and pelicans dropped for fish.
Oclets so silent fell
toward water with linked feet.
Jacynthe said little.
Long since we had spoken Nova Scotia,Michigan, and knew beauty in saying nothing.
She told me about her mother
who would come at them with bread knives then
stop herself, her face emptied.
I told her about me,
never lied. At night
at times the moon floated.
We sat with arms tight
watching flames spit, snap.
On stone and sand picking up
wood shaped like a body, like a gull.
I ran barefoot not only
on beach but harsh gravels
up through the woods.
I shit easy, covered my dropping.
Some nights, no fires, we watched
sea pucker and get stabbed
by the beacon
circling on Tatoosh.
2
I stripped and spread
on the sea lip, stretched
to the slap of the foam
and the vast red dulce.
Jacynthe gripped the earth
in her fists, opened—
the boil of the tide
shuffled into her.
The beach revolved,
headlands behind us
put their pines in the sun.
Gulls turned a strong sky.
Their pained wings held,
they bit water quick, lifted.
Their looping eyes continually
measure the distance from us,
bare women who do not touch.
Rocks drowsed, holes
filled with suds from a distance.
A deep laugh bounced in my flesh
and sprayed her.
3
Flies crawled us,
Jacynthe crawled.
With her palms she
spread my calves, she
moved my heels from each other.
A woman’s mouth is
not different, sand moved
wild beneath me, her long
hair wiped my legs, with women
there is sucking, the water
slops our bodies. We come
clean, our clits beat like
twins to the loons rising up.
We are awake.
Snails sprinkle our gulps.
Fish die in our grips, there is
sand in the anus of dancing.
Tatoosh Island
hardens in the distance.
We see its empty stones
sticking out of the sea again.
Jacynthe holds tinder
under fire to cook the night’s wood.If we had men I would make
milk in me simply. | Carolyn Forché | Love,Desire,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
Taking Off My Clothes
|
I take off my shirt, I show you.
I shaved the hair out under my arms.
I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair
on my legs with a knife, getting white.
My hair is the color of chopped maples.
My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south.
(Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills)
Skin polished as a Ming bowl
showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds
of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet.
In the night I come to you and it seems a shame
to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man.
You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.
You want to know what I know?
Your own hands are lying.
| Carolyn Forché | The Body,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Nature | null |
[in Just-]
|
in Just- spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old balloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope and it's spring and the goat-footed balloonMan whistles far and wee
| E. E. Cummings | Living,Coming of Age,Nature,Spring,Philosophy,Mythology & Folklore | null |