april is: a poem a day for national poetry month

April 30, 2009: from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:51:00 -0400

from The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od’ und leer das Meer.

[The online annotated The Waste Land.

The full text of The Waste Land.

At last, I can’t resist posting an excerpt from my one and only love, and the origin of this mailing list’s name, The Waste Land. This is the beginning of the first of five parts of the poem, and right away you get so much of what it’s known for: a welter of different voices and languages and allusions: an aristocratic woman remembering her childhood, lines from Tristan and Isolde about longing, and water and death and life all tangled together, which comes up over and over and over again.

If you’d like to try to take this apart, this online annotated text is great for explaining and cross-referencing things. Or you can just appreciate it as it is, the sound and flow of it, Eliot being awesome. It’s a fantastic poem to read lots of times: new patterns and connections keep appearing.

And today is the last day of National Poetry Month! Thanks so much for sticking around, and I hope you’ll still be here next year. In the meantime, if you’d like to keep poetry-ing, I recommend checking out The Poetry Foundation’s website or NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, both of which do daily poems.

And of course the whole April Is archive is online here!

xo,
Martha]

On this day in …

2008: from Five-Finger Exercises, T.S. Eliot
2007: Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot
2006: Preludes, T.S. Eliot
2005: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot

April 29, 2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:49:00 -0400

There Are Many Theories About What Happened
John Gallagher

The bright yellow newspaper stand is selling papers
where the president is waving. It’s April.

We stood a little off to one side. “We’re
watching the president for a hundred days” we said.

The president on a plane. The president
playing basketball.

“Was there enough about the drapes? The puppy?”
we asked all winter.

“At different times of the day,
the president appears older or more luminous,”
we said. However old we got. However old
we started.

It’s day 87, and our trees are looking like real trees
in bright green, almost yellow,
so that the still town looks like a real town.

Maybe the body really is you. Maybe a picture
is a fact.

And our river is looking like a real river, with a dock,
and a boy and his father fishing.

There’s a picture of the president with a dog.

We want so many things.

[This is from the Poems for the First 100 Days project, which let a hundred poets respond to the first hundred days of the Obama presidency: one per day through today, the hundredth. It’s an interesting snapshot of very different styles and levels of politicization, and really contemporary events. Some of my favorites:

Praise for The Inaugural Poet, January, 2009, Cornelius Eady (which I like more than Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural day poem itself); In Oxford Mississippi, Anne Fisher-Worth; Welcome to Hard Times, Ian Harris; The First Easter, 2009, cin salach; and Dear Steve, Craig Arnold.]

A year ago today: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett
Two years ago: Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok
Three years ago: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath
Four years ago: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch

April 28, 2009: from Tag, Anne Carson

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:45:00 -0400

from Tag
Anne Carson

THIS

Insatiable April, trees in place,
in their scraped-out place,
their standing,
Standing way.
Their red branch areas,
green shoot areas (shock),
river, that one.
I surprised a goose and she hissed.
I walk and walk with cold hands.
Back at the house it is filled with longing,
nothing to carry longing away.
I look back over my life.
I try to find analogies.
There are none.
I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.
Not like this.
It was not this.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

[Full poem.]

A year ago today: The Leaving, Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Two years ago: Theories of Time and Space, Natasha Trethewey
Three years ago: Dream Song 145, John Berryman
Four years ago: Having It Out With Melancholy, Jane Kenyon

April 27, 2009: To This May, W.S. Merwin

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:40:00 -0400

To This May
W.S. Merwin
They know so much more now about
the heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season and here
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
its light pretending not to move
always beginning as it goes

[My favorite Merwin poem is still A Birthday, but everything he writes is wonderful. How had I overlooked him for so long?]

A year ago today: Father, Ted Kooser
Two years ago: from Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, Galway Kinnell
Three years ago: Crusoe in England, Elizabeth Bishop
Fouryears ago: Dream Song 1, John Berryman

April 26, 2009: In Me as the Swans, Leslie Williams

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:11:00 -0400

In Me as the Swans
Leslie Williams

Not embittered
even while freezing
to the ice of their own lakes.
The night I was leaving for Madrid
into the noisy party a dazzling
friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much
(as a couple of kids on the dance floor want)
to slow the tempo, hold there longer,
to feel that seedly longing
to be pressed into the soil,
or that little lift the mothers get
when stocking larders, even now,
vestige of the primitive urge
to be provided for and to provide.

         I went alone to see that balcony
in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries
above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant
footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver
tray and all but smoked them for you;
after your towels had warmed in London’s best
hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad,
glad now for the rest of empty August and
the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew,
glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners
that I have stood alone
wondering at illuminated books,
looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass
or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider
at the Tate—at times the best kept universe
was my own, no interceding docents
or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous
wandering—waif, naïf.

                  I liked the light enormously so why
did I obey the bell that called me in?

[I really like this as a paean to aloneness — traveling alone, being single — and that last couplet is such a wonderfully subtleway to express how life shifts. Plus the title is from a Plato quote which gives the whole thing interesting new dimensions.

This was published in the March issue of Poetry, which is an excellent way to get awesome poems in your face year-round.]

A year ago today: Gnosticism V, Anne Carson
Two years ago: American Names, Stephen Vincent Benet
Three years ago: since feeling is first, e.e. cummings
Four years ago: The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

April 25, 2009: We become new, Marge Piercy

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:37:40 -0400

We become new
Marge Piercy

How it feels to be touching
you: an Io moth, orange
and yellow as pollen,
wings through the night
miles to mate,
could crumble in the hand.

Yet our meaning together
is hardy as an onion
and layered.
Goes into the blood like garlic.
Sour as rose hips.
Gritty as whole grain.

Fragrant as thyme honey.
When I am turning slowly
in the woven hammocks of our talk,
when I am chocolate melting into you,
I taste everything new
in your mouth.

You are not my old friend.
How did I used to sit
and look at you? Now
though I seem to be standing still
I am flying flying flying
in the trees of your eyes.

A year ago today: The Only Animal, Franz Wright
Two years ago: Dream Song 385, John Berryman
Three years ago: The Quiet World, Jeffrey McDaniel
Four years ago: Man and Wife, Robert Lowell

April 24, 2009: Goodnight, Li-Young Lee

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:18:03 -0400

Goodnight
Li-Young Lee

You’ve stopped whispering
and are asleep. I go on listening

to apples drop in the grass
beyond the window. Earlier we tried to guess

each fall’s moment, but neither kept up
that little game of hope

or fear for long. Now your weight
against me is like … I was about to say

like no other, unmistakably
human, my son’s. But, truth is, you’re simply

heft. Burden like, say, grain,
your body brings my body pain,

your shoulders, knees, elbows, hands,
lumpy like sacked fruit, and

whatever concord is
actual between us is

not easily meant,
but is so only by our diligence.

I recall a far
season of flowers

when, for love, I crept to the edge of a roof to reach
a petal-decked branch.

It snapped, I
dropped, screaming down sky

and flowering. My father yelled
my name, ran out to find me sprawled,

dazed, gripping his crushed gift, thrust
at him in my bloody fist.

He plunges below us now, as we
fall soundless toward him, our bodies

crowded on your narrow bed,
my arm and leg gone numb, your torso wedged

between the wall and me.
You sleep uncomfortably,

though comforted by my
presence, for which you cry

some nights, and which you, such nights, endure.
Where did you, so young, learn

such sacrifice? Now
I no longer hear the apples fall. But how

they go! Incessantly, though
with no noise, no

blunt announcements of their gravity.
See!

There is no bottom to the night, no end
to our descent.

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

A year ago today: Bearhug, Michael Ondaatje
Two years ago: Meditation at Lagunitas, Robert Hass
Three years ago: Autumn, Rainer Maria Rilke
Four years ago: On Turning Ten, Billy Collins

April 23, 2009: A Step Away From Them, Frank O'Hara

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:37:57 -0400

A Step Away From Them
Frank O’Hara
It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S
CORNER. Giulietta Maina, wife of
Federico Fellini, é bell’ attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full of life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

[I love the cacophanous jumble of this kind of O’Hara poem: how the specifics of time and place and pop culture make it feel so immediate, and the sense of movement, things appearing as O’Hara walks, kind of like Leopold Bloom walking through Dublin in Ulysses. It just feels so alive. More talk about this poem here.

Read Frank, live better: Animals, Steps, Gamin, For Grace, After A Party]

A year ago today: Entry, Lisa Sewell
Two years ago: Meanwhile, Richard Siken
Three years ago: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Amiri Baraka
Four years ago: Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne

April 22, 2009: Alone, Jack Gilbert

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:30:00 -0400

Alone
Jack Gilbert

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.

[The Dance Most of All, Jack Gilbert’s latest — and probably last — book came out earlier this month. Like all his writing, it’s spare and intense, thick with memory.]

A year ago today: From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee
Two years ago: For Grace, After A Party, Frank O’Hara
Three years ago: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
Four years ago: A Brief for the Defense, Jack Gilbert

April 21, 2009: A Primer, Bob Hicok

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:09:00 -0400

A Primer
Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

[Bob Hicok is not only fantastically good, he’s particularly great for recessionary times; the fact that he worked for years in the Michigan auto industry, in the kind of jobs most modern poets never get near, gives his poems a sense of groundedness and awareness of class issues that can be hard to find. See Calling him back from layoff.
Some more of his work: Switching to deer time, An old story, Root root root for the home team, Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem. I highly recommend his latest book, This Clumsy Living.]

A year ago today: Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry, Howard Nemerov
Two years ago: Open Letter to the Muse, Kristy Bowen
Three years ago: A Sad Child, Margaret Atwood
Four years ago: The Crunch, Charles Bukowski

April 20, 2009: What We Kept, Megan Alpert

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:35:19 -0400

What We Kept
Megan Alpert

We kept the war under our skins
we kept it in our hamstrings
in our bones.
We kept the war in our cereal bowls
in our juice
kept it in our first love
standing in the porch light
waiting to be kissed.
We kept it close
in the hems of our shirts
our face cream
kept it in our bad skin.
We kept it in our driveways
kept it sitting quiet in the yard.
Flying the Bronx River Parkway, 2 a.m.,
kept it in key rings
smashed into tables,
the imprints they left
on our palms.
We kept it door-to-door,
moss-green in hinges.
We kept it mean
under our fingernails
forgotten in our socks—-

Sometimes we stood at the edge
of a blueberry field, birds lit
by the last of the sun,
but under our skins
the whirr-click of the war beginning…

[I really love first person plural (“we”) poems, and am always on the lookout for more — definitely let me know if you come across any. Here’s another one: Sleep Positions, Lola Haskins]

A year ago today: Please Take Back the Sparrows, Suzanne Buffam
Two years ago: It Happens Like This, James Tate
Three years ago: Tantalus in May, Reginald Shepherd
Four years ago: September Song, Geoffrey Hill

April 19, 2009: 23rd Street Runs Into Heaven, Kenneth Patchen

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 10:05:00 -0400

23rd Street Runs Into Heaven
Kenneth Patchen

You stand near the window as lights wink
On along the street. Somewhere a trolley, taking
Shop girls and clerks home, clatters through
This before-supper Sabbath. An alley cat cries
To find the garbage cans sealed; newsboys
Begin their murder into pennies round.

We are shut in, secure for a little, safe until
Tomorrow. You slip your dress off, roll down
Your stockings, careful against runs. Naked now,
with soft light on soft flesh, you pause
For a moment; turn and face me-
Smile in a way that only women know
Who have lain long with their lover
And are made more virginal.

Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful.

A year ago today: HOUSEHOLD ACTIVITY NO. 26, J.R. Quackenbush
Two years ago: from Briggflatts, Basil Bunting
Three years ago: The Chores, Frannie Lindsay
Four years ago: Direct Address, Joan Larkin

April 18, 2009: It's This Way, Nazim Hikmet

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 08:00:00 -0400

It’s This Way
Nazim Hikmet

I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.

My eyes can’t get enough of the trees—
they’re so hopeful, so green.

A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I’m at the window of the prison infirmary.

I can’t smell the medicines—
carnations must be blooming nearby.

It’s this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.

A year ago today: The Problem With Skin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Two years ago: Serenade, Terrance Hayes
Three years ago: The Old Liberators, Robert Hedin
Four years ago: Morning Song, Sylvia Plath

April 17, 2009: Nothing but winter in my cup, Alice George

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:16:28 -0400

Nothing but winter in my cup
Alice George

     but then
she comes climbing out the manhole
wreathed in steam mouth a red
       message and she’s sobbing
              like a siren for mama.

When I pin spring close
her breasts press like yeast rolls
       and somehow daffodils still wet from their low prison
              insist between us and

she must be bleeding
       from somewhere because I taste
               iron and honey.

When she starts to talk
my ears learn such a wild high humming
       I forget almost everything
             got wrecked when she was away.

A year ago today: Poppies in October, Sylvia Plath
Two years ago: I Imagine The Gods, Jack Gilbert
Three years ago: An Offer Received In This Morning’s Mail, Amy Gerstler
Four years ago: The Last Poem In The World, Hayden Carruth

April 16, 2009: The Continuous Life, Mark Strand

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:08:57 -0400

The Continuous Life
Mark Strand

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

A year ago today: An old story, Bob Hicok
Two years ago: you can’t be a star in the sky without holy fire, Frank X. Gaspar
Three years ago: For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu, A.M. Klein
Four years ago: Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem,
Bob Hicok

April 15, 2009: A Blessing, James Wright

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:16:11 -0400

A Blessing
James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

[James Wright is the father of yesterday’s poet, Franz Wright.]

A year ago today: New York, New York, David Berman
Two years ago: Waste Land Limericks, Wendy Cope
Three years ago: There Are Two Worlds, Larry Levis
Four years ago: America, Allen Ginsberg

April 14, 2009: The Poem, Franz Wright

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:00:21 -0400

The Poem
Franz Wright

It was like getting a love letter from a tree

Eyes closed forever to find you—

There is a life which
if I could have it
I would have chosen for myself from the beginning

[From the fantastic Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. More excellent poems by Franz Wright: Letter; The Only Animal; Publication Date]

A year ago today: Morning Poem, Robin Becker
Two years ago: Supple Cord, Naomi Shihab Nye
Three years ago: Wish For a Young Wife, Theodore Roethke
Four years ago: The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy, Jeffrey McDaniel

April 13, 2009: The Bear-Boy of Lithuania, Amy Gerstler

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:39:24 -0400

The Bear-Boy of Lithuania
Amy Gerstler

Girls, take my advice, marry an animal. A wooly one is most consoling. Find a fur man, born midwinter. Reared in the mountains. Fond of boxing. Make sure he has black rubbery lips, and a sticky sweet mouth. A winter sleeper. Pick one who likes to tussle, who clowns around the kitchen, juggles hot baked potatoes, gnaws playfully on a corner of your apron. Not one mocked by his lumbering instincts, or who’s forever wrestling with himself, tainted with shame, itchy with chagrin, but a good-tempered beast who plunges in greedily, grinning and roaring. His backslapping manner makes him popular with the neighbors, till he digs up and eats their Dutch tulip bulbs. Then you see just how stuffy human beings can be. On Sundays his buddies come over to play watermelon football. When they finally get tired, they collapse on heaps of dried grass and leaves, scratching themselves elaborately, while I hand out big hunks of honeycomb. They’ve no problem swallowing dead bees stuck in the honey.

A bear boy likes to stretch out on the floor and be roughly brushed with a broom. Never tease him about his small tail, which is much like a chipmunk’s. If you do, he’ll withdraw to the hollow of some tree, as my husband has done whenever offended since he first left the broad-leafed woodlands to live in this city, which is so difficult for him. Let him be happy in his own way; filling the bathtub with huckleberries, or packing dark, earthwormy dirt under the sofa. Don’t mention the clawmarks on the refrigerator. (You know he can’t retract them.) Nothing pleases him more than a violent change in climate, especially if it snows while he’s asleep and he wakes to find the landscape blanketed. Then his teeth chatter with delight. He stamps and paws the air for joy. Exuberance is a bear’s inheritance. He likes northern light. Excuse me, please. His bellow summons me.

Let me start again. True, his speech is shaggy music. But by such gruff instruction, I come to know love. It’s difficult to hear the story of his forest years with dry eyes. He always snuffs damply at my hand before kissing it. My fingers tingle at the thought of that sensitive, mobile nose. You’ve no idea how long his tongue is. At night, I get into bed, pajama pockets full of walnuts. He rides me around the garden in the wheelbarrow now that I’m getting heavy with his cubs. I hope our sons will be much like their father, but not suffer so much discomfort wearing shoes.

[Because one poem about bears this month just wasn’t enough. I like how this plays with the line between whimsical and transgressive. See also: The Sheep-Child, James Dickey and Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry, Howard Nemerov

If you like this, you might also be into Kelly Link’s book of short stories, Stranger Things Happen.]

A year ago today: Today’s News, David Tucker
Two years ago: All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann, Leonard Cohen
Three years ago: Gamin, Frank O’Hara
Four years ago: [this is what you love: more people. you remember], D.A. Powell

April 12, 2009: The Rider, Naomi Shihab Nye

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 15:20:00 -0400

The Rider
Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

A year ago today: from Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, John Berryman
Two years ago: This Heavy Craft, P.K. Page
Three years ago: Late Ripeness, Czeslaw Milosz
Four years ago: A Martian Sends A Postcard Home, Craig Raine

April 11, 2009: Death, The Last Visit, Marie Howe

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 09:30:29 -0400

Death, The Last Visit
Marie Howe

Hearing a low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started.
It has nothing to ask you. It has only something to say, and
it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arms around you, it will hold you as long
as you ever wanted.
Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go.
Burying your face in its dark shoulder, you’ll smell mud and hair
and water.

You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock
and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with.
Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you
as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face,
or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me give it to me
until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard.
At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled
the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever
come undone.
Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,
you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt
this good.

A year ago today: Animals, Frank O’Hara
Two years ago: Johnny Cash in the Afterlife, Bronwen Densmore
Three years ago: Anne Hathaway, Carol Ann Duffy
Four years ago: Sleep Positions, Lola Haskins