Shirley Kaufman

[from Shirley Kaufman’s Rivers of Salt, 1993]

The Temples of Khajuraho (excerpt)

At the airport waiting for our plane,
we sat next to a Chinese man.
He took off his shoe and sock
and massaged his foot,
working his thumb and fingers
over the sole and delicate arch
of the instep. Then he held
his whole foot between his palms
and forgave it, rocking it
gently back and forth.
His hands seemed to know
what his foot wanted. . . .


Wild Flowers

After everything I’ve forgotten, now
on the other side of the world I hid in
as a child, it’s the same sun
running down my back, the same tick
of insects in the moist air.
When I stare into the tiny radiant pupil
of this blue-violet one and you say
eye of the madonna—the whole field
stares back in a golden nimbus,
leaves shine and the sweet quattrocento
faces I never prayed to.
There are daisies bunched in the grass,
red poppies, all the old flowers
I sang to, made chains from,
or sucked the milk out of,
shaggy and tender and on the verge.
And I’m down on my knees in the clover
where nothing has changed
or slipped through our fingers, still
looking for luck.


Three Songs of Love and Plenitude (excerpt)

2 To Know

Gönül says there is a special word
for know in Turkish which stands
for visual experience. To keep it
separate from the rest of knowing.

In Hebrew there are two words
with three meanings. Carnal,
as used in the Bible, and the others.
You have to be careful.

Now when you sit on the edge
of our bed, I know the smooth muscles
of your back in more than one language,
but I touch you just to be sure. . . .

Lynn Emanuel

[from Lynn Emanuel’s The Dig, 1992]

One Summer Hurricane Lynn Spawns Tornadoes as Far West as Ely

The storm with my name dragged one
heavy foot over the roads of the county.
It was a bulge in a black raincoat, pointed
and hard as the spike in a railroad tie;
it dipped like a dowser’s rod and screamed
like the express at the bend at Elko.
It made the night feverish and the sky
burn with the cold blue fire of a motel sign.
Oh that small hell of mine nipped at the town,
turned the roads to mud, lingered at the horizon,
a long clog, a sump. All sigh and lamentation,
the whole city of grief rose up to face that black
boot that waited to kick us open like a clay pot.


This Is the Truth

Now, this is the truth of that particular fiction,
sweet angel, I mean, she hopes you do not buy
all that sweet domesticity, that tenderness and yielding.
She remembers her father only vaguely,
the glittering wreckage of his black hair,
rinsed in oils, the sap of melting pomade
that leaked from his sideburns which he dabbed
with a hankie. He inhabited his armchair
like a black cloud. Glum. Cultivated.
His temper was a downed power line
that fishtailed back and forth across their lives.
Lethal Hits. Near Misses. To avoid it
they crept for miles over dangerous passes
to Ely, my precious, they had stolen a car,
and were on the run, sleeping in tacky motel
rooms, cooking on a hot plate,
terrified and poor at last, oh my darling girl,
as you can only be when you have become
a fugitive from domestic life and are blessed
with nothing that anyone could want,
free and out of luck and poor, poor at last.

Gibbons Ruark

[from Gibbons Ruark’s A Program for Survival, 1971]

The Spring

The car works the road into a lather
Of dust that falls through the glittering lens
Of sky till the world is washed by another
Weather. Trees that shivered their black bones open
Into flapping leaf-tents, the thick shade spreads
And fills the cross-work shadows of branches.
Sunken water rises and inflates the heads
Of mushrooms as the earth’s stiff sponge eases
Under my feet and the warm grass prickles.
I come to the flowers that tell me to turn
Down the breezy tunnel of trees until
The teeth of the fence turn white and turn
Me again and I am through the loosening
Gate and kneeling at the spring. I feel them
Watch me from the porch where they are talking,
Rocking. The sweet mist rises to the rim
Of the bricked-in hollow. I take the stone
Steps one at a time, clinging to the mossy
Side till every flicker of sun is gone
And I cup my hands to swallow the chilly
Spout springing from the bottom. I can hear
Dry birds’ voices babble down from the grass
And I dip my face again in the water.
They are calling. Before they call the last
Time I press my ear to the cooling
Wall and listen. I go up into the sun.
One is in the white swing, two are rocking.
I climb the steps to where they rock me one
By one in the bony hollows of their laps
And brush my cheek with their papery lips.

Yusef Komunyakaa

[from Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau]

Sappers

Opium, horse, nothing
sends anybody through concertina
this way. What is it in the brain
that so totally propels a man?
Caught with women in our heads
three hours before daybreak,
we fire full automatic
but they keep coming,
slinging satchel charges
at our bunkers. They fall
& rise again like torchbearers,
with their naked bodies
greased so moonlight dances
off their skin. They run
with explosives strapped
around their waists,
& try to fling themselves
into our arms.


Prisoners

Usually at the helipad
I see them stumble-dance
across the hot asphalt
with crokersacks over their heads,
moving toward the interrogation huts,
thin-framed as box kites
of sticks & black silk
anticipating a hard wind
that’ll tug & snatch them
out into space. I think
some must be laughing
under their dust-colored hoods,
knowing rockets are aimed
at Chu-Lai—that the water’s
evaporating & soon the nail
will make contact with metal.
How can anyone anywhere love
these half-broken figures
bent under the sky’s brightness?
The weight they carry
is the soil we tread night & day.
Who can cry for them?
I’ve heard the old ones
are the hardest to break.
An arm twist, a combat boot
against the skull, a .45
jabbed into the mouth, nothing
works. When they start talking
with ancestors faint as camphor
smoke in pagodas, you know
you’ll have to kill them
to get an answer.
Sunlight throws
scythes against the afternoon.

Ted Hughes

[from Ted Hughes's Crow]

Crow’s Theology

Crow realized God loved him—
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

And he realized that God spoke crow—
Just existing was His revelation.

But what
Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?

And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?

Crow realized there were two Gods—

One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.


Crow’s Nerve Fails

Crow, feeling his brain slip.
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.

Who murdered all these?
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood
Till he’s visibly black?

How can he fly from his feathers?
And why have they homed on him?

Is he the archive of their accusations?
Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance?
Or their unforgiven prisoner?

He cannot be forgiven.

His prison is the earth. Clothed in his conviction,
Trying to remember his crimes

Heavily he flies.


Littleblood

O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains.
Wounded by stars and leaking shadow
Eating the medical earth.

O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.

O littleblood, drumming in a cow’s skull
Dancing with a gnat’s feet
With an elephant’s nose with a crocodile’s tail.

Grown so wise grown so terrible
Sucking death’s mouldy tits.

Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.

Frank Bidart

If you know (and possibly dislike) recent Bidart, take a look at some early Bidart, 1966-1967, from Golden State, an excerpt from a poem titled "California Plush":

. . .

He [my father] was, of course, mistrustful, knowing I was bored,
knowing he had dragged me up here from Bakersfield

after five years

of almost managing to forget Bishop existed.

But he soon became loquacious, ordered a drink
and settled down for
an afternoon of talk . . .

He liked Bishop: somehow, it was to his taste, this
hard-drinking, loud, visited-by-movie-stars town.
“Better to be a big fish in a little pond.”

And he was: when they came to shoot a film,
he entertained them; Miss A——, who wore
nothing at all under her mink coat; Mr. M——,
good horseman, good shot.

“But when your mother
let me down” (for alcoholism and
infidelity, she divorced him)
“and Los Angeles wouldn’t give us water any more,
I had to leave.”

We were the first people to grow potatoes in this valley.”

When he began to tell me
that he lost control of the business
because of the settlement he gave my mother,

because I had heard it
many times,

in revenge, I asked why people up here drank so much.

He hesitated. “Bored, I guess.
—Not much to do.”

And why had Nancy’s husband left her?

In bitterness, all he said was:
“People up here drink too damn much.”

And that was how experience
had informed his life.

“So now I think I’ve learned all I want
after I have learned all this: this sure did teach me a lot of things
that I never knew before.
I am a little nervous yet.”

. . .

                 I think of Proust, dying
in a cork-lined room, because he refuses to eat
because he thinks that he cannot write if he eats
because he wills to write, to finish his novel

—his novel which recaptures the past, and
with a kind of joy, because
in the debris
of the past, he has found the sources of the necessities

which have led him to this room, writing

—in this strange harmony, does he will
for it to have been different?

. . .

Denise Levertov

Marianne Boruch, In the Blue Pharmacy, reprints and discusses this poem by Denise Levertov from Relearning the Alphabet]

An Embroidery (IV) Swiss Cheese

(after a lost poem, 1947)

Lost wooden poem,
cows and people wending
downmountain slowly
to wooden homesteads

cows first, the families
following calmly their swaying,
their pausing, their moving ahead in dreamy
constancy.
Children asleep in the arms of old men,
healthy pallor of smooth cheeks facing
back to high pastures left for the day,
are borne down as the light
waits to leave.

Upper air glows with motes color of hay,
deep valley darkens.
Lost poem, I know
the cows were fragrant
and sounds were of hooves and feet on earth,
of clumps of good grass torn off, to chew
slowly; and not much talk.
They were returning
to wooden buckets, to lantern-beams
crisp as new straw.

Swiss cheese with black bread,
meadow, wood walls, what

did I do with you, I'm looking
through holes, in cheese, or
pine knotholes, and

who were those peaceful folk, the poem
was twenty years ago, I need it now.

poets of the month

If you don't know about Poetry Net's poet of the month, you should.

Check out the poet of the month archives, for example, October, 2004, James Richardson, particularly his #5 and #6 aphorisms:

"All work is the avoidance of harder work."

"When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing."

Kerri Webster

[from Kerri Webster's We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone]

Lexicon

There’s a word for sadness that dwells in the small
of the back, the dell where you bury your chin. You mark
the page where the animal comes down to drink
from stale water. There’s a word for release born of grief,
tempered with soapy musk in the creases. There is no
gazelle. There’s a catalogue of frequently absent hours,
a figure of speech for ellipsis that starts at the throat
and sashays night continents, skirting veldt, dwelling eons
in tundra where underbrush is just story, fabulous tinder.
You rise several times to drink from the sink’s moony
white, under-pipes moaning like vast mammals
shimmying through canyons of sea ice, somewhere
a ledger that measures the damp of the sheets,
charts all things alluvial between first longing
and loss, breviary of the subzero plains where I toss,
insomniac, missing. There’s phrase for absence gullied
just short of reckoning, ghost-damaging your rising
and falling weight inside me, there’s a verb for slow peril
logged in a commonplace book dog-eared and oily—
finger, finger. You mark the chapter where drowning
mirages into understanding, the whole book stab-stitched
or was it accordioned, a flaunt of unfolding and the pilgrim
drinking from a dirty glass.

Samuel Beckett

[from Samuel Beckett's Molloy]

the sea loomed high in the waning sky . . .

Smoke, sticks, flesh, hair, at evening, afar, flung about the craving for a fellow. I know how to summon these rags to cover my shame. I wonder what that means. . . .

not that seeing matters but it's something to go on with . . .

It is in the tranquility of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion that was my life. . . .

the present tense, when speaking of the past. It is the mythological present . . .

in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on. . . .

I began to think, that is to say to listen harder . . .

there is never a last by the sea . . .

Jay Hopler

[from Jay Hopler's Green Squall, winner of the 2005 Yale Younger Poets Prize, judged by Louise Gluck]

And the Sunflower Weeps for the Sun, Its Flower

1
There is a hole in the garden. It is empty. I envy it.

Emptiness: the only freedom there is
In a fallen world.

2
Father Sunflower, forgive me — . I have been so preoccupied with
        my backaches and my headaches,
With my sore back and my headaches and my beat-skipping heart,

I have ignored the subtle huzzah of the date palms and daisies, of
        the blue daze and the date palms —

3
                                             Or don’t forgive me, what do I care?
I am tired of asking for forgiveness; I am tired of being frightened
        all the time.
I want to run down the street with a vicious erection,
Impaling everything, screaming obscenities
And flapping my arms; fuck the date palms,
Fuck the daisies —

4
As a man, I am a disappointment, I know that.
Is it my fault I was born in shadow? Through the banyan trees,

An entourage of slovenly blondes
Comes naked and begging —

5
My days fly from me as though from a murderer.
Can you blame them?
Behind us, the house is empty and quiet as light.

What have I done, Mother,
That I should spend my life
Alone?


Self-Portrait with Whiskey and Pistol

1
Of all the things this day turned out to be, a celebration of me
        was not one of them.

2
Maybe if I surrounded myself with prostitutes and strippers, my
        celibacy would feel less like a lack and more like an act
Of heroic self-denial.

3
My life and I live in the trees and share a tail.

4
Our stomach turns its peach pit to the moon!

5
Even if it’s true, what they say, that love is never a waste of time
        no matter how impossible the object,
You wouldn’t know it from living.
On this street.

6
How disappointing it all is!
The lemon trees, the banyan trees, the sky —
How disappointing it all is.

7
Look, the Great Poet of Solitude is pruning his roses!
(Even the way he does nothing is monstrous.)

8
O birds! O birds! Be not stingy with thy feathers white, I am
        washing my hands!

9
Cloudy or not, here I come —

Laura Jensen

[from Laura Jensen’s Bad Boats]

Subject Matter

On the good day, it cracks out,
the recognizable fowl that falls in love with you,
nothing to offer but itself in your eyes.
When you keep walking it starts after, helpless,
unrejectable. It would never harm you, you are certain.

Someone has seen one go fighting, taking a chevron
in lieu of the humming garden. Roses are red
because their ears are burning.
Someone hears the ocean and repeats its sound.

In your favorite country, the one no one remembers yet,
the hen, the duck, the other ones that settle—
all of them are minor deities. It is with composure
that they see flocks turn to the other mothers,
the peculiar foreigners they look in the eye.

Charles Simic

[from Charles Simic's Selected Early Poems]

Explorers

They arrive inside
The object at evening.
There's no one to greet them.

The lamps they carry
Cast their shadows
Back into their own minds.

They write in their journals:

The sky and the earth
Are of the same impenetrable color.
If there are rivers and lakes,
They must be under the ground.
Of the marvels we sought, no trace.
Of the strange new stars, nothing.
There's not even wind or dust,
So we must conclude that someone
Passed recently with a broom . . .

As they write, the new world
Gradually stitches
Its black thread into them.

Eventually nothing is left
Except a low whisper,
Which might belong
Either to one of them
Or to someone who came before.

It says: "I'm happy
We are finally all here . . .

Let's make this our home."

Linda Gregg

[from Linda Gregg's Too Bright to See]

We Manage Most When We Manage Small

What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.

RealPoetik

RealPoetik has published two of my poems.

Tomas Transtromer

[from Tomas Transtromer's Selected Poems 1954-1986]

Breathing Space July
(translated by Robert Bly)

The man who lies on his back under huge trees
is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.
He sways back and forth,
he sits in a catapult chair that hurtles forward in slow motion.

The man who stands down at the dock screws up his eyes against
        the water.
Docks get old faster than men.
They have silver-gray posts and boulders in their gut.
The dazzling light drives straight in.

The man who spends the whole day in an open boat
moving over the luminous bays
will fall asleep at last inside the shade of his blue lamp
as the islands crawl like huge moths over the globe.

more Robert Hass

[excerpted from "Songs to Survive the Summer" in Praise]

*

The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them

a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and

feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,

time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.
There is no other world.

*

Robert Hass

[from Robert Hass's Praise]

Like Three Fair Branches
From One Root Deriv’d

I am outside a door and inside
the words do not fumble
as I fumble saying this.
It is the same in the dream
where I touch you. Notice
in this poem the thinning out
of particulars. The gate
with the three snakes is burning,
symbolically, which doesn’t mean
the flames can’t hurt you.
Now it is the pubic arch instead
and smells of oils and driftwood,
of our bodies working very hard
at pleasure but they are not
thinking about us. Bless them,
it is not a small thing to be
happily occupied, go by them
on tiptoe. Now the gate is marble
and the snakes are graces.
You are the figure in the center.
On the left you are going away
from yourself. On the right
you are coming back. Meanwhile
we are passing through the gate
with everything we love. We go
as fire, as flesh, as marble.
Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light.

Charles Simic

[from Charles Simic's Jackstraws]

Non-Stop War with Bugs

An ideal hideout under my bed
To make big plans, grow brazen,
Crawl in and out of my nose
As I lie with my eyes tightly shut
Dreaming of a world
Beyond these sad appearances.

Teeny dadaists on the march,
You're sly and most witty
As you disrupt my rare moments
Of calm, making me perform
Showstopping contortions
To reach after you with a slipper
In a fit of unbecoming frenzy.

Samuel Beckett

[from Samuel Beckett’s Collected Poems in English and French; this 1938 poem an English one]

Ooftish

offer it up plank it down
Golgotha was only the potegg
cancer angina it is all one to us
cough up your T.B. don’t be stingy
no trifle is too trifling not even a thrombus
anything venereal is especially welcome
that old toga in the mothballs
don’t be sentimental you won’t be wanting it again
send it along we’ll put it in the pot with the rest
with your love requited and unrequited
the things taken too late the things taken too soon
the spirit aching bullock’s scrotum
you won’t cure it you won’t endure it
it is you it equals you any fool has to pity you
so parcel up the whole issue and send it along
the whole misery diagnosed undiagnosed misdiagnosed
get your friends to do the same we’ll make use of it
we’ll make sense of it we’ll put it in the pot with the rest
it all boils down to blood of lamb