April 2011
30 posts
4 tags
April 30, 2011: Wandering Around an Albuquerque...
Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal Naomi Shihab Nye After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the gate immediately. Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, Just like my grandma wore,...
4 tags
April 29, 2011: Prayer, Marie Howe
Prayer Marie Howe
Someone or something is leaning close to me now trying to tell me the one true story of my life: one note, low as a bass drum, beaten over and over: It’s beginning summer, and the man I love has forgotten my smell the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter when he picked me up and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down, among the scattered daffodils on...
4 tags
April 28, 2011: Like Kerosene, Olena Kalytiak...
Like Kerosene Olena Kalytiak Davis Yes, it’s daily that we move into each other—but this morning I was separate even from myself— my hands were shovels, I had mosquito netting for hair, and the insect beating against the night was my heart. My name was hallow and the sky was made of shale when I walked into a part of morning I’ve never seen: the sky still heavy, still smoldering with the...
5 tags
April 27, 2011: from The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry
from The Wild Geese Wendell Berry
Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
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Read the full poem.
More like this: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
On this day in…
...
6 tags
April 26, 2011: In Praise of My Bed, Meredith...
In Praise of My Bed Meredith Holmes
At last I can be with you! The grinding hours since I left your side! The labor of being fully human, working my opposable thumb, talking, and walking upright. Now I have unclasped unzipped, stepped out of. Husked, soft, a be-er only, I do nothing, but point my bare feet into your clean smoothness feel your quiet strength the whole length of my body. I close my...
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April 25, 2011: Three Rivers, Alpay Ulku
Three Rivers Alpay Ulku What are you doing now, Anne-Marie, on the night we would bring home good things to cook and watch movies from the 1940’s, the work week finally at an end. Who will light the stove for you now that I’m not there? I imagine you in our city of bridges, where the mid-West flows into the East and South, singing. What with the apple trees baring...
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April 24, 2011: Sweet Star Chisel, Dearest Flaming...
Sweet Star Chisel, Dearest Flaming Crumbs in Your Beard Lord, John Rybicki May my body last—last so I can sing apple blossoms blown out of my open mouth and raining their petals onto rag-top convertibles, and fields of wild asparagus; raining their petals onto milk barns and silos and blowing them wide open; petals melting down onto the tongues of men and women hanging their clock faces...
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April 23, 2011: the laughing heart, Charles...
the laughing heart Charles Bukowski
your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do...
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April 22, 2011: Northern Pike, James Wright
Northern Pike James Wright
All right. Try this, Then. Every body I know and care for, And every body Else is going To die in a loneliness I can’t imagine and a pain I don’t know. We had To go on living. We Untangled the net, we slit The body of this fish Open from the hinge of the tail To a place beneath the chin I wish I could sing of. I would just as soon we let The living go on...
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April 21, 2011: The Forties, Franz Wright
The Forties Franz Wright And in the desert cold men invented the star
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More by (& about) Franz Wright:
Letter | The Only Animal | The Poem | Publication Date
On this day in…
2010: Prayer of the Backhanded, Jericho Brown 2009: A Primer, Bob Hicok 2008: Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry, Howard Nemerov 2007: Open Letter to the Muse, Kristy Bowen...
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April 20, 2011: Staying After, Linda Gregg
Staying After Linda Gregg I grew up with horses and poems when that was the time for that. Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky in the Fillmore West when everybody was dancing. I sat in the balcony with my legs pushed through the railing, watching Janis Joplin sing. Women have houses now, and children. I live alone in a kind of luxury. I wake when I feel like it, read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva. At night...
6 tags
April 19, 2011: I Remember, Anne Sexton
I Remember Anne Sexton
By the first of August the invisible beetles began to snore and the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color—no more than the sand was a color and we had worn our bare feet bare since the twentieth of June and there were times we forgot to wind up your alarm clock and some nights we took our gin warm and neat from old jelly glasses while the sun blew out of...
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April 18, 2011: Written in Pencil in the Sealed...
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car Dan Pagis here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i
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translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell Other Holocaust poems:
September Song, Geoffrey Hill All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann, Leonard Cohen
On this day in…
2010: The Moss of His Skin, Anne Sexton 2009: It’s...
5 tags
April 17, 2011: from Narrative: Ali, Elizabeth...
from Narrative: Ali a poem in twelve rounds Elizabeth Alexander 1. My head so big they had to pry me out. I’m sorry Bird (is what I call my mother). Cassius Marcellus Clay, Muhammad Ali; you can say my name in any language, any continent: Ali. 2. Two photographs of Emmett Till, born my year, on my birthday. One, he’s smiling, happy, and the other one is after. His mother did the...
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April 16, 2011: Why They Went, Elizabeth Bradfield
Why They Went Elizabeth Bradfield
that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens. —Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Frost bitten. Snow blind. Hungry. Craving fresh pie and hot toddies, a whole roasted unflippered thing to carve. Craving a bed that had, an hour before entering, been warmed with a stone from the hearth. Always back to Eden—to the time...
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April 15, 2011: Trying to Raise the Dead, Dorianne...
Trying to Raise the Dead Dorianne Laux
Look at me. I’m standing on a deck in the middle of Oregon. There are friends inside the house. It’s not my house, you don’t know them. They’re drinking and singing and playing guitars. You love this song. Remember? “Ophelia.” Boards on the windows, mail by the door. I’m whispering so they won’t think I’m crazy. They don’t know me that well. Where are you...
April 14, 2011: Happiness (3), Jean Valentine
Happiness (3) Jean Valentine The moment you turned to me on W. 4th St. Your gentleness to me The hard winter grass here under my shoes The frost I knelt in the frost to your parents The warm light on the right hand side of your face The light on the Buddha’s eyelids I knelt to my parents Their suffering How much sleep there...
1 tag
April 13, 2011: Graves We Filled Before the Fire,...
Graves We Filled Before the Fire Gabrielle Calvocoressi Some lose children in lonelier ways: tetanus, hard falls, stubborn fevers that soak the bedclothes five nights running. Our two boys went out to skate, broke through the ice like battleships, came back to us in canvas bags: curled fossils held fast in ancient stone, four hands reaching. Then two sad beds wide enough for planting wheat or...
4 tags
April 12, 2011: Now That I Am in Madrid and Can...
Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think Frank O’Hara
I think of you and the continents brilliant and arid and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you...
4 tags
April 11, 2011: Across a Great Wilderness without...
Across a Great Wilderness without You Keetje Kuipers
The deer come out in the evening. God bless them for not judging me, I’m drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe and make strange noises at them— language, if language can be a kind of crying. The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow, each bullet hole suffused with moon, like the...
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April 10, 2011: Consolation for Tamar, A.E....
Consolation for Tamar A.E. Stallings
on the occasion of her breaking an ancient pot You know I am no archeologist, Tamar, And that to me it is all one dust or another. Still, it must mean something to survive the weather Of the Ages—earthquake, flood, and war— Only to shatter in your very hands. Perhaps it was gravity, or maybe fated— Although I wonder if it had not waited Those years in...
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April 9, 2011: Death, Is All, Ana Božičević
Death, Is All Ana Božičević
I woke up real early to write about death (the lake through the trees) from the angle of the angel. There’s the kind of angel that when I say Someone please push me out of the way Of this bad poem like it was a bus.—well, it comes running & tackles me and oh, it’s divine football—Or in the dream when the transparent buses came barreling towards us:—it...
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April 8, 2011: Getting Away with It, Jack Gilbert
Getting Away with It Jack Gilbert
We have already lived in the real paradise. Horses in the empty summer street. Me eating the hot wurst I couldn’t afford, in frozen Munich, tears dropping. We can remember. A child in the outfield waiting for the last fly ball of the year. So dark already it was black against heaven. The voices trailing away to dinner, calling faintly in the...
6 tags
April 7, 2011: Boston, Aaron Smith
Boston Aaron Smith
I’ve been meaning to tell you how the sky is pink here sometimes like the roof of a mouth that’s about to chomp down on the crooked steel teeth of the city, I remember the desperate things we did and that I stumble down sidewalks listening to the buzz of street lamps at dusk and the crush of leaves on the pavement, Without you here...
8 tags
April 6, 2011: Pluto, Maggie Dietz
Pluto Maggie Dietz
Don’t feel small. We have all been demoted. Go on being moon or rock or orb, buoyant and distant, smallest craft ball at Vanevenhoven’s Hardware spray-painted purple or day-glow orange for a child’s elliptical vision of fish line, cardboard and foam. No spacecraft has touched you, no flesh met the luster of your heavenly body. Little cold one, blow your...
6 tags
April 5, 2011: Now comes the long blue cold, Mary...
Now comes the long blue cold Mary Oliver
Now comes the long blue cold and what shall I say but that some bird in the tree of my heart is singing. That same heart that only yesterday was a room shut tight, without dreams. Isn’t it wonderful—the cold wind and spring in the heart inexplicable. Darling girl. Picklock.
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On this day in…
2010: Jackie Robinson, Lucille Clifton 2009: In the...
4 tags
April 4, 2011: I Said to Poetry, Alice Walker
I Said to Poetry Alice Walker
I said to Poetry: “I’m finished with you.” Having to almost die before some weird light comes creeping through is no fun. “No thank you, Creation, no muse need apply. I’m out for good times— at the very least, some painless convention.” Poetry laid back and played dead until this morning. I wasn’t sad or anything, ...
5 tags
April 3, 2011: Expecting, Kevin Young
Expecting Kevin Young
Grave, my wife lies back, hands cross her chest, while the doctor searches early for your heartbeat, peach pit, unripe
plum–pulls out the world’s worst boom box, a Mr. Microphone, to broadcast your mother’s lifting belly.
The whoosh and bellows of mama’s body and beneath it: nothing. Beneath the slow stutter of her heart: nothing.
The doctor trying again to find...
6 tags
April 2, 2011: Onset, Kim Addonizio
Onset Kim Addonizio
Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers, bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications. Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing. And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately I can’t stand them, the shelves of...
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April 1, 2011: New York Poem, Terrance Hayes
New York Poem Terrance Hayes
In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles of buildings where there are more miles of shortcuts and alternative takes than there are Miles Davis alternative takes. There is a white girl who looks hi- jacked with feeling in her glittering jacket and her boots that look made of dinosaur skin and R is saying to her I love...
3 tags
April 30, 2010: from Pioneers! O Pioneers!, Walt...
from Pioneers! O Pioneers! Walt Whitman
Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready, Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!
For we cannot tarry here, We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!
O you youths, Western youths, So...
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April 29, 2010: The Talker, Chelsea Rathburn
The Talker Chelsea Rathburn
The details of his story aren’t the point, nor is the listener, who looked as bored as we, two accidental eavesdroppers in a London restaurant. The point is, well, his point, which after ten long minutes he came to abruptly, and with a flourish, saying slowly and in perfect seriousness, “All we are is dust in the wind. All we are. Is dust. In the wind.” I think we bit...
3 tags
April 28, 2010: Variations on a Theme by William...
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams Kenneth Koch
1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2 We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3 I gave away the money that...
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April 27, 2010: Love After Love, Derek Walcott
Love After Love Derek Walcott
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for...
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April 26, 2010: Black Swan, Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Black Swan Brigit Pegeen Kelly
I told the boy I found him under a bush. What was the harm? I told him he was sleeping And that a black swan slept beside him, The swan’s feathers hot, the scent of the hot feathers And of the bush’s hot white flowers As rank and sweet as the stewed milk of a goat. The bush was in a strange garden, a place So old it seemed to exist outside of time. In one...
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April 25, 2010: Ode to Hangover, Dean Young
Ode to Hangover Dean Young Hangover, you drive me into the yard to dig holes as a way of working through you as one might work through a sorry childhood by riding the forbidden amusement park rides as a grown-up until puking. Alas, I feel like something spit out by a duck, a duck other ducks are ashamed of when I only tried to protect myself by projecting myself on hilarity’s big screen...
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April 24, 2010: Rain Travel, W.S. Merwin
Rain Travel W.S. Merwin
I wake in the dark and remember it is the morning when I must start by myself on the journey I lie listening to the black hour before dawn and you are still asleep beside me while around us the trees full of night lean hushed in their dream that bears us up asleep and awake then I hear drops falling one by one into the sightless leaves and I do not know when they...
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April 23, 2010: from Jenny, Genya Turovskaya
from Jenny Genya Turovskaya
Dear Jenny, I feel I am growing older, and the girls, the girls are so pretty, and I am no closer to being the boy that I was than I am to the man I thought I would be. I’m a cross country skier, Jenny, I cross from the livingroom into the bedroom, from the kitchen into the hall. I turn on the television, I watch it snow, I turn off the television, and...
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April 22, 2010: Humpbacks, Mary Oliver
Humpbacks Mary Oliver There is, all around us, this country of original fire. You know what I mean. The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something has to be holding our bodies in its rich and timeless stables or else we would fly away. . Off Stellwagen off the Cape, the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage of barnacles and joy they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it...
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April 21, 2010: Prayer of the Backhanded, Jericho...
Prayer of the Backhanded Jericho Brown Not the palm, not the pear tree Switch, not the broomstick, Nor the closest extension Cord, not his braided belt, but God, Bless the back of my daddy’s hand Which, holding nothing tightly Against me and not wrapped In leather, eliminated the air Between itself and my cheek. Make full this dimpled cheek Unworthy of its unfisted print And forgive my...
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April 20, 2010: Dream Song 14, John Berryman
Dream Song 14 John Berryman
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores...
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April 19, 2010: Letter, Franz Wright
Letter Franz Wright
January 1998 I am not acquainted with anyone there, if they spoke to me I would not know what to do. But so far nobody has, I know I certainly wouldn’t. I don’t participate, I’m not allowed; I just listen, and every morning have a moment of such happiness, I breathe and breathe until the terror returns. About the time when they are supposed to...
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April 18, 2010: The Moss of His Skin, Anne Sexton
The Moss of His Skin Anne Sexton
“Young girls in old Arabia were often buried alive next to their fathers, apparently as sacrifice to the goddesses of the tribes…” —Harold Feldman, “Children of the Desert” Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Review, Fall 1958 It was only important to smile and hold still, to lie down beside him and to rest awhile, to be...
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April 17, 2010: Baseball Canto, Lawrence...
Baseball Canto Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Watching baseball sitting in the sun eating popcorn reading Ezra Pound and wishing Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the First Canto and demolish the barbarian invaders When the San Francisco Giants take the field and everybody stands up to the National Anthem with some Irish tenor's voice piped over the loudspeakers with...
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April 16, 2010: Anxiety, Frank O'Hara
Anxiety Frank O’Hara
I’m having a real day of it.
There was something I had to do. But what? There are no alternatives, just the one something. I have a drink, it doesn’t help - far from it! I feel worse. I can’t remember how I felt, so perhaps I feel better. No, Just a little darker....
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April 15, 2010: Asking for Directions, Linda Gregg
Asking for Directions Linda Gregg We could have been mistaken for a married couple riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago that last time we were together. I remember looking out the window and praising the beauty of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world with its back turned to us, the small neglected stations of our history. I slept across your chest and stomach without asking...
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April 14, 2010: When I Think, Jeanne Marie...
When I Think Jeanne Marie Beaumont after Robert Creeley about how naive I was though never admitting it, how badly I chose early on spending my affections carelessly as spare change then making quick getaways igniting the bridges—or when I think of the time wasted brooding and stewing, my heart a sort of crock-pot simmering bitterness, it’s good to be grown-up at last with boxes of...
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April 13, 2010: On Being Asked To Write A Poem...
On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam Hayden Carruth
Well I have and in fact more than one and I’ll tell you this too I wrote one against Algeria that nightmare and another against Korea and another against the one I was in and I don’t remember how many against the three when I was a boy Abyssinia Spain and Harlan County and not one breath was...
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April 12, 2010: The Impossible Marriage, Donald...
The Impossible Marriage Donald Hall The bride disappears. After twenty minutes of searching we discover her in the cellar, vanishing against a pillar in her white gown and her skin’s original pallor. When we guide her back to the altar, we find the groom in his slouch hat, open shirt, and untended beard withdrawn to the belltower with the healthy young sexton from whose comradeship we detach...
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April 11, 2010: Poem About Morning, William...
Poem About Morning William Meredith Whether it’s sunny or not, it’s sure To be enormously complex— Trees or streets outdoors, indoors whoever you share, And yourself, thirsty, hungry, washing, An attitude towards sex. No wonder half of you wants to stay With your head dark and wishing Rather than take it all on again: Weren’t you duped yesterday? Things are not orderly...