a poem for my wife

little things turn out not to be.
in fact, they echo & bounce &
sweep you away in a wave, or
a dance, or a dream...

much of you remains a mystery --
always something new to discover,
revelations around each corner, hidden
in pockets, imbedded in words, letters
enveloped between sheets.

*
vision only gets you so far
as the eye is so easily fooled,
needs constant reassurance.

vision gets you so far--
lifting you to dream a dream, embodied
in each moment & hope with legs & skin,
envisioning each possible future. every
time this thought includes you.

a christmas wish

to friends and family both near and far, close or distant, in all your various circumstances - may you find peace and comfort this season, and may this coming year be one graced by a great love.

forgiveness

I

it was not at all
what I expected. nothing
really changed.
not then.

later, however –
later it was all
 
different. later,
there was recognition
of loss. the violence
of assumption
lost. something
we both took
from each other.

yours was the better bargain.


II

at that moment
all i felt was surprise.
that you didn’t stop
wouldn’t stop
when I asked, stop

i carried all that
unspoken
for years,
the weight
of that exchange
growing larger.
then forgotten.
or ignored.


III

i recognize the weight
of chains, what burdens
i carried forward.

i remember how sharp
the hook, how deeply
buried, sweetly disbursed.

this is how we share
and in this sharing
i carry it away.

all that waiting.

circling

ah, cavafy.
i must admit
to not liking you
too much --
all those feelings,
all that feeling
about feeling,
all that broad stroke talk
about Beauty.

beauty you say, and

i hear desire. no.
not desire: appetite. 

oh, cavafy.

such a consuming eye –
roving over all that young flesh;
the architecture of longing,
your Platonic lust,
the dust of loss covers
the furniture, the room
empty, the windows empty,
the cupboards bare.

no wonder this dance

tired you, the image
of an ideal lover looming
in your imagination,
held perfectly still
by memory,
pored over,
your heart
poured out
with nothing
to hold it.

untitled

wind

that magpie

chirp of squirrel

leaves rustling

my thoughts

tossed

wrestling

this quiet moment

close 

New Gods

New Gods

an experiment for Jack*

 

The moving hand appears!

 

          and scratches its way across the skin,
          etching its words in the flesh.
          behold. behold. behold.

 

The source gives us the irrevocable counsel!

 

          and now what shall we do?

          we hold that word in our small hands –

          it is too large for us,

          it does not fit in our mouths,

          we cannot compass it.

 

But it does not decide! The right of choice is ours! That is the life equation!

 

          such bombast! such proclamation!

          what pride encircles and draws us

          new gods made in the image of

          hopeful longing and fear.

 

Make us the door for him to enter – prepare for the word. 

          and is this word now a door?
          we are birthed through language,
          it adorns us and wounds us and wraps
          us in its embrace. shhh. wait.

Let your circuits carry the word – let it grow loud – until it reaches the winds of infinity!

          i shall. if i can bear the weight
          of promises. and prophecies. and singing.
          if exultation doesn’t shatter
          my voice, or break my hands.

          if I can have just one more day
          where your hand speaks to me.


* Jack Kirby, ground-breaking comic book artist for both Marvel and DC comics
      * lines 1-3 are from DC Comics’ New Gods #1
      * lines 4-5 are from DC Comics’ Forever People #1

 

cavafy, they said

they said to read cavafy,
that classicist, nostalgic and horny.
or lonely. or something.

there’s a restlessness there,
echoing yours    i think
it’s more a willful aimlessness,
a willingness to abandon
a train of thought, a history
filmed with dust, a longing
for something lost, something
with weight, shadowy gestures,
desire gained so rarely, and thinly.

ah, cavafy. you’re always on the edge
of saying something.
you meander amongst ruins,
burdened with longing, burdened.
tell me what you want.
is it really only beautiful bodies?
i am unconvinced. is it beauty?
are you being coy?
or merely guarded?

lovely wanderer, let’s stop playing games.
let me take your hand.
let us walk together. 

consider the lilies

consider the lilies.

consider that somehow they aren’t overwhelming.
consider that they don’t assault the senses,
that they aren’t garish – like old ladies
wearing too much make-up;
that they don’t season every breath
with their sickly sweet smell,
like flesh rotting.

consider painting them instead.
consider how that hides
our sense of the body.
makes it pleasant, even.

a new(ish) poem

as this moment
this moment you hold

as this moment passes
you hold it bright & shimmering pulse

how to invest?
in eternity?

how to hold it tender’d cradle
breathly deeping

 

national poetry month, day thirty: edward van vliet

The sky is beautiful tonight.
Or not the sky, really. The stars?
Not that either.

Somewhere a father is
putting his children to bed,
kissing them on their foreheads;
somewhere a young girl is saying her prayers;
somewhere a baby is crying,
someone is having an argument about who to blame.
Somewhere a young couple
is passionately making love for the first time,
a couple with many years under their belts
is relaxing in the usual habits,
or balancing the budget,
or planning a vacation.
Somewhere music is playing,
and a young man is fingering the frets of his guitar,
a young woman is exploring the edges of her voice.

Maybe it’s the silence
(though I don’t really enjoy silence).
Maybe it’s that there is stillness,
and that there is no regret right now,
only memories.
I taste them again,
roll them around my mouth,
tonguing their surfaces,
smoothing out the ridges.

I, too, have been someone
acquainted with the night.
I used it as a veil,
cultivated secrets – hidden exchanges.

I have taken to my bed beautiful women,
and less beautiful women;
I have embraced beautiful boys
and used them according to my own desires.
Though it really wasn’t about desire.
Nor beauty. Nor loneliness
(though I know you were thinking it).

I spent many nights
dancing under lights, or not.
I was content to dance alone;
enjoying the sensation of my body
moving through space,
the presence of other bodies,
the sweat and voices –
how to marry impulse and gesture,
the call and response, calculated displays.

Some nights I sat in my living room or on my bed,
high, and wept.
Some nights I wandered aimlessly along the city streets.
Some nights I was held a prisoner of hope –
mine or others’
- grasping at dreams or rumours,
looking for purchase.
Sometimes I crawled, or leapt –
I stumbled more often than I would care to admit.

I learned this:
all things are under pressure.
Sometimes they hold firm.
Sometimes they crumble.
All you can do is wipe your hands
- hopefully they will come clean –
and just keep moving.

That is comforting,
if not beautiful.

 

April 2014

national poetry month, day twenty-nine: robert currie

For a Poet Facing the End

You live in a narrow bed and wait for death
while I lift and work with your limp left arm
and listen to your steady, rasping breath,
the ventilator easing our alarm.
Your right arm in turn, your legs, your feet
I life, rotate and rub--it's exercise
or passes for that in one who once was fleet
in mind and body, though now your thighs
are shrunken to a fraction of your mind,
which rails and shakes like any frantic child
who rages at his parents--dumb and blind--
and needs only half a chance to run wild,
but you, your voice silenced, a final drought,
you mourn for every poem you can't get out.

Currie, Robert. "For a Poet Facing the End" Poet to Poet. Roorda, Julie and Elana Wolff, eds. Toronto: Guernica Editions, Inc., 2012. 137.

national poetry month, day twenty-eight: w. s. merwin

A Calling

My father is telling me the story of Samuel
not for the first time and yet he is not quite repeating
nor rehearsing nor insisting he goes on telling me
in the empty green church smelling of carpet and late dust
where he calls to mind words of the prophets to mumble in a remote language
and the prophets are quoting the Lord who is someone they know
who has been talking to them my father tells what the Lord
said to them and Samuel listened and heard someone calling someone
and Samuel answered Here I am and my father is saying
that is the answer that should be given he is telling me
that someone is calling and that is the right answer
he is telling me a story he wants me to believe
telling me the right answer and the way in which it was spoken
in that story he wants to believe in which someone is calling

Merwin, W. S. "A Calling". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 441.

national poetry month, day twenty-seven: stanley kunitz

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
                     and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Kunitz, Stanley "Touch Me" The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition. Pinsky, Robert, ed. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2013. 134-5.

national poetry month, day twenty-six: marvin bell

Marco Polo

1.

He was heroic, fugitive, in love with the machinery
of the sea, and every song he sang was of the sea.

His smile was golden, and a skeleton's grimace
in the earth, for every smile ends up in a grimace.

In his famous hands, a chisel could whistle,
and in hands such as his, an insect might sing.

He whose chances rode the foaming oceans
toward ivory-hued dresses of a new substance.

This, among ashes, a scrawny angel may sing,
from a naked belly, of a delicate emptiness.

2.

When Marco Polo set his compass for gold
and ivory, and his dictionary for Chinese,

when Marco Polo set his chisel for a smooth bow
(to stir the waves to foam) and a stern like ice,

when Marco Polo fixed his stare on silky dresses
and the porcelain look of China, and when he had

sailed his scrawny machine to a fugitive corner
of the globe, and the faces of his crew were ashen,

and even the rigging grimaced like a skeleton, why
then Marco Polo landed, and the caged insects sang!

3.

With a chisel, he found his gold. And ivory, and ashes.
With a borrowed dictionary, he talked and he sang. 

With machinery, foam. With machinery, the fugitive.
With machinery, a grimace. With machinery, insects.

With machinery, a skeleton. With scrawny rigging,
a belly of ashes in a fugitive skeleton. With a chisel,

the gold for engines to carry the burnished dresses
to England, though he himself sang mainly of the gold.

He was the Marco Polo of tea and gunpowder,
devoured by the Oriental machinery of the silkworm.

Bell, Marvin. "Marco Polo". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 43-4.

national poetry month, day twenty-five: czeslaw milosz

Report

O Most High, you willed to create me a poet and now it is time for me to present a report.

My heart is full of gratitude though I got acquainted with the miseries of that profession.

By practicing it, we learn too much about the bizarre nature of man.

 

Who, every hour, every day and every year is possessed by self-delusion.

A self-delusion when building sandcastles, collecting postage stamps, admiring oneself in a mirror.

Assigning oneself first place in sport, power, love, and the getting of money.

All the while on the very border, on the fragile border beyond which there is a province of mumblings and wails.

For in every one of us a mad rabbit thrashes and a wolf pack howls, so that we are afraid it will be heard by others.

Out of self-delusion comes poetry and poetry confesses to its flaw.

Though only by remembering poems once written is their author able to see the whole shame of it.

And yet he cannot bear another poet nearby, if he suspects him of being better than himself and envies him every scrap of praise.

Ready not only to kill him but smash him and obliterate him from the surface of the earth.

So that he remains alone, magnanimous and kind toward his subjects, who chase after their small self-delusions.

How does it happen then that such low beginnings lead to the splendor of the word?

I gathered books of poets from various countries, now I sit reading them and am astonished.

It is sweet to think that I was a companion in an expedition that never ceases, though centuries pass away.

An expedition not in search of the golden fleece of a perfect form but as necessary as love.

Under the compulsion of the desire for the essence of the oak, of the mountain peak, of the wasp and of the flower of nasturtium.
 

So that they last, and confirm our hymnic song against death.

And our tender thought about all who lived, strived, and never succeeded in naming.

For to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.

Fraternally, we help each other, forgetting our grievances, translating each other into other tongues, members, indeed, of a wandering crew.

How then could I not be grateful, if early I was called and the incomprehensible contradiction has not diminished my wonder?

At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.

Milosz, Czeslaw. "Report". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 460-1.

national poetry month, day twenty-four: edward hirsch

Tristan Tzara

There is no such thing as a dada lecture
a manifesto is addressed to the whole world
I am opposed to every system except one
love is irrational and you are the reason

a manifesto is addressed to the whole world
but bells ring out for no reason at all
love is irrational and you are the reason
I am a bridge harboring your darkness

but bells ring out for no reason at all
you are a fresh wind assaulted by sails
I am a bridge harboring your darkness
let's not lash ourselves to the flagpoles

you are a fresh wind assaulted by sails
I am a wound that sprays your salt
let's not lash ourselves to the flagpoles
let's not swim to the music of sailors

I am a wound that sprays your salt
ambassadors of sentiment hate our chorus
let's not swim to the music of sailors
we cast our anchors into the distance

ambassadors of sentiment hate our chorus
they can't pollute our smokiest feelings
we cast our anchors into the distance
we sail our boats for the netherworld

they can't pollute our smokiest feelings
each of us has a thousand virginities
we sail our boats for the netherworld
I'm giving you all my nothingness

each of us has a thousand virginities
we still consider ourselves charming
I'm giving you all my nothingness
I have doubted everything but this

we still consider ourselves charming
there is no such thing as a dada lecture
I have doubted everything but this
I am opposed to every system except one

Hirsch, Edward. "Tristan Tzara". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 260-1.

national poetry month, day twenty-three: stephen dobyns

Allegorical Matters

Let’s say you are a man (some of you are)
and susceptible to the charms of women
(some of you must be) and you are sitting
on a park bench. (It is a sunny afternoon
in early May and the peonies are in flower.)
A beautiful woman approaches. (Clearly,
we each have his or her own idea of beauty
but let’s say she is beautiful to all.) She smiles,
then removes her halter top, baring her breasts
which you find yourself comparing to ripe fruit.
(Let’s say you are an admirer of bare breasts.)
Gently she presses her breasts against your eyes
and forehead, moving them across your face.
You can’t get over your good fortune. Eagerly,
you embrace her but then you learn the horror
because while her front is is young and vital,
her back is rotting flesh which breaks away
in your fingers with a smell of decay. Here
we pause and invite in a trio of experts.
The first says, This is clearly a projection
of the author’s sexual anxieties. The second says,
Such fantasies derive from the empowerment
of women and the author’s fear of emasculation.
The third says, The author is manipulating sexual
stereotypes to achieve imaginative dominance
over the reader—basically, he must be a bully.
The author sits in front of the trio of experts.
He leans forward with his elbows on his knees.
He scratches his neck and looks at the floor
where a fat ant is dragging a crumb. He begins
to step on the ant but then he thinks: Better not.
The cool stares of the experts make him uneasy
and he would like to be elsewhere, perhaps home
with a book or taking a walk. My idea, he says,
concerned the seductive qualities of my country,
how it encourages us to engage in all fantasies,
how it lets us imagine we are lucky to be here,
how it creates the illusion of an eternal present.
But don’t we become blind to the world around us?
Isn’t what we see as progress just a delusion?
Isn’t our country death and what it touches death?
The trio of experts begin to clear their throats.
They recross their legs and their chairs creak.
The author feels the weight of their disapproval.
But never mind, he says, Perhaps I’m mistaken;
let’s forget I spoke. The author lowers his head.
He scratches under his arm and suppresses a belch.
He considers the difficulties of communication
and the ruthless necessities of art. Once again
he looks for the ant but it’s gone. Lucky ant.
Next time he wouldn’t let it escape so easily.

Dobyns, Stephen. "Allegorical Matters". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 142-3.

national poetry month, day twenty-two: louise gluck

Aubade

The world was very large. Then
the world was small. O
very small, small enough
to fit in a brain.

It had no color, it was all
interior space: nothing
got in or out. But time
seeped in anyway, that
was the tragic dimension.

I took time very seriously in those years,
if I remember accurately.

A room with a chair, a window.
A small window, filled with the patters light makes.
In its emptiness the world

was whole always, not
a chip of something, with
the self at the center.

And at the center of the self,
grief I thought I couldn’t survive.

A room with a bed, a table. Flashes
of light on the naked surfaces.

I had two desires: desire
to be safe and desire to feel. As though

the world were making
a decision against white
because it disdained potential
and wanted in its place substance:

panels
of golf where the light struck.
In the window, reddish
leaves of the copper beech tree.

Out of the stasis, facts, objects
blurred or knitted together: somewhere

time stirring, time
crying to be touched, to be
palpable,

the polished wood
shimmering with distinctions—

and then I was once more
a child in the presence of riches
and I didn’t know what the riches were made of.

Gluck, Louise. "Aubade". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 201-2.

national poetry month, day twenty-one: rita dove

All Souls

Starting up behind them,
all the voices of those they had named:
mink, gander, and marmoset,
crow and cockatiel.
Even the duck-billed platypus,
of late so quiet in its bed,
sent out a feeble cry signifying
grief and confusion, et cetera.

Of course the world had changed
for good. As it would from now on
every day, with every twitch and blink.
Now that change was de rigueur,
man would discover desire, then yearn
for what he would learn to call
distraction. This was the true loss.
And yet in that first

unchanging instant,
the two souls
standing outside the gates
(no more than a break in the hedge;
how had they missed it?) were not
thinking. Already the din was fading.
Before them, a silence
larger than all their ignorance

yawned, and this they walked into
until it was all they knew. In time
they hunkered down to business,
filling the world with sighs—
these anonymous, pompous creatures,
heads tilted as if straining
to make out the words to a song
played long ago, in a foreign land.  
 
Dove, Rita. "All Souls'" The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition. Pinsky, Robert, ed. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2013. 68-9.

national poetry month, day twenty: e. e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

national poetry month, day nineteen: marie howe

Prayer

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage
I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here
among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.
The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?
My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.
Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

Howe, Marie. "Prayer" The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. 27.

national poetry month, day eighteen: dean young

No Forgiveness Ode

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,
but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud.
Night after night Tybalt’s stabbed
so the lovers are ground in mechanical
aftermath. Think of the gunk that never
comes off the roasting pan, the goofs
of a diamond cutter. But wasn’t it
electricity’s blunder into inert clay
that started this whole mess, the I-
echo in the head, a marriage begun
with a fender bender, a sneeze,
a mutation, a raid, an irrevocable
fuckup. So in the meantime: epoxy,
the dog barking at who knows what,
signals mixed up like a dumped-out tray
of printer’s type. Some piece of you
stays in me and I’ll never give it back.
The heart hoards its thorns
just as the rose profligates.
Just because you’ve had enough
doesn’t mean you wanted too much.

Young, Dean "No Forgiveness Ode" The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition. Pinsky, Robert, ed. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2013. 244.

national poetry month, day seventeen: michael fraser

Personals

Some days I play soccer in my suit,
insinuating myself into pick-up games
fresh from work. I prefer the furnaced heat
of summer. I hate Wednesdays. I've spent half
my life looking for the perfect poem. I love a
bird who makes her nest in Toronto. I thought
I found the one, but thorns survived the snow. She left.
I have many regrets. I once owned a pet iguana.
He died in a fire in 1993. I lost everything,
but found myself. It's cliché, but true.
I discovered photograph ashes make me cry.
I spend my time walking through biographies.
Time scented on paper. I see my life as a movie.
Will Smith could play my part. My favourite colours
are chocolate brown and sky blue. These days,
I wear what fits. I need to lose two bowling balls
to be at my high school weight. The high point
of my life was jumping out an airplane. What
I loved most was the green silence. They now
say the universe will expand forever.
Everything moving away from everything else.
I can explain later, If you'd like to meet.

Fraser, Michael. "Personals" Poet to Poet. Roorda, Julie and Elana Wolff, eds. Toronto: Guernica Editions, Inc., 2012. 152.

national poetry month, day sixteen: donald hall

Prophecy

I will strike down wooden houses; I will burn aluminum
clapboard skin; I will strike down garages
where crimson Toyotas sleep side by side; I will explode
palaces of gold, silver, and alabaster: — the summer
great house and its folly together. Where shopping malls
spread plywood and plaster out, and roadhouses
serve steak and potatoskins beside Alaska King Crab;
where triangular flags proclaim tribes of identical campers;
where airplanes nose to tail exhale kerosene,
weeds and ashes will drowse in continual twilight.
 
I reject the old house and the new car; I reject
Tory and Whig together; I reject the argument
that modesty of ambition is sensible because the bigger
they are the harder they fall; I reject Waterford;
I reject the five-and-dime; I reject Romulus and Remus;
I reject Martha's Vineyard and the slamdunk contest;
I reject leaded panes; I reject the appointment made
at the tennis net or on the seventeenth green; I reject
the Professional Bowling Tour; I reject matchboxes;
I reject purple bathrooms with purple soap in them.
 
Men who lie awake worrying about taxes, vomiting
at dawn, whose hands shake as they administer Valium, —
skin will peel from the meat of their thighs.
Armies that march all day with elephants past pyramids
and roll pulling missiles past Generals weary of saluting
and past President-Emperors splendid in cloth-of-gold, —
soft rumps of armies will dissipate in rain. Where square
miles of corn waver in Minnesota, where tobacco ripens
in Carolina and apples in New Hampshire, where wheat
turns Kansas green, where pulpmills stink in Oregon, —

dust will blow in the darkness and cactus die
before it flowers. Where skiers wait for chairlifts,
wearing money, low raspberries will part rib-bones.
Where the drive-in church raises a chromium cross,
dandelions and milkweed will straggle through blacktop.
I will strike from the ocean with waves afire;
I will strike from the hill with rainclouds of lava;
I will strike from the darkened air
with melanoma in the shape of decorative hexagonals.
I will strike down embezzlers and eaters of snails.
 
I reject Japanese smoked oysters, potted chrysanthemums
allowed to die, Tupperware parties, Ronald McDonald,
Kaposi's sarcoma, the Taj Mahal, Holsteins wearing
electronic necklaces, the Algonquin, Tunisian aqueducts,
Phi Beta Kappa keys, the Hyatt Embarcadero, carpenters
jogging on the median, and betrayal that engorges
the corrupt heart longing for criminal surrender.
I reject shadows in the corner of the atrium
where Phyllis or Phoebe speaks with Billy or Marc
who says that afternoons are best although not reliable.
 
Your children will wander looting the shopping malls
for forty years, suffering for your idleness,
until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot.
I will strike down lobbies and restaurants in motels
carpeted with shaggy petrochemicals
from Maine to Hilton Head, from the Skagit to Tucson.
I will strike down hang gliders, wiry adventurous boys;
their thigh bones will snap, their brains
slide from their skulls. I will strike down
families cooking wildboar in New Mexico backyards.
 
Then landscape will clutter with incapable machinery,
acres of vacant airplanes and schoolbuses, ploughs
with seedlings sprouting and turning brown through colters.
Unlettered dwarves will burrow for warmth and shelter
in the caves of dynamos and Plymouths, dying
of old age at seventeen. Tribes wandering
in the wilderness of their ignorant desolation,
who suffer from your idleness, will burn your illuminated
missals to warm their rickety bodies.
Terrorists assemble plutonium because you are idle
 
and industrious. The whip-poor-will shrivels and the pickerel
chokes under the government of self-love. Vacancy burns
air so that you strangle without oxygen like rats
in a biologist's bell jar. The living god sharpens
the scythe of my prophecy to strike down red poppies
and blue cornflowers. When priests and policemen
strike my body's match, Jehovah will flame out;
Jehovah will suck air from the vents of bombshelters.
Therefore let the Buick swell until it explodes;
therefore let anorexia starve and bulimia engorge.
 
When Elzira leaves the house wearing her tennis dress
and drives her black Porsche to meet Abraham,
quarrels, returns to husband and children, and sobs
asleep, drunk, unable to choose among them, —
lawns and carpets will turn into tar together
with lovers, husbands, and children.
Fat will boil in the sacs of children's clear skin.
I will strike down the nations, astronauts and judges;
I will strike down Babylon, I will strike acrobats,
I will strike algae and the white birches.
 
Because Professors of Law teach ethics in dumbshow,
let the Colonel become President; because Chief Executive
Officers and Commissars collect down for pillows,
let the injustice of cities burn city and suburb;
let the countryside burn; let the pineforests of Maine
explode like a kitchenmatch and the Book of Kells turn
ash in a microsecond; let oxen and athletes
flash into grease: — I return to Appalachian rocks;
I shall eat bread; I shall prophesy through millennia
of Jehovah's day until the sky reddens over cities:
 
Then houses will burn, even houses of alabaster;
the sky will disappear like a scroll rolled up
and hidden in a cave from the industries of idleness.
Mountains will erupt and vanish, becoming deserts,
and the sea wash over the sea's lost islands
and the earth split open like a corpse's gassy
stomach and the sun turn as black as a widow's skirt
and the full moon grow red with blood swollen inside it
and stars fall from the sky like wind-blown apples, —
while Babylon's managers burn in the rage of the Lamb.

Hall, Donald "Prophecy" The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition. Pinsky, Robert, ed. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2013. 91-4.

national poetry month, day fifteen: bp nichol

love song 2

just once to say ‘i love you’ all the feeling felt
to dwell inside the words as they are spoken
(not broken on the tongue by my intent
conscious or otherwise
to hold back in speech each feeling
behind the syntax of my own attention
naming song what never sings
but is a circling in my tension round you)
that desire to ‘say’ totally
in gesture as in word
all that i do feel for you
locked up in hesitations i give you as poems

Nichol, bp. "love song 2" Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets. Queyras, Sina, ed. New York: Persea Books, 2005. 183.

national poetry month, day fourteen: christian bok

from Chapter E
(for René Crevel)

Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech. The
text deletes selected letters. We see the revered exegete
reject metred verse: the sestet, the tercet – even les
scènes élevées en grec. He rebels. He sets new precedents.
He lets cleverness exceed decent levels. He eschews the
esteemed genres, the expected themes – even les belles
lettres en vers. He prefers the perverse French esthetes:
Verne, Péret, Genet, Perec – hence, he pens fervent
screeds, then enters the street, where he sells these let-
terpress newsletters, three cents per sheet. He engen-
ders perfect newness wherever we need fresh terms.

from Chapter I
(for Dick Higgins)

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks – impish
hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib?
Isn’t it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits,
writing shtick which might instill priggish misgiv-
ings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nit-
picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I
bitch; I kibitz – griping whilst criticizing dimwits,
sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplis-
tic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.

from Chapter O
(for Yoko Ono)

Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books.
Books form cocoons of comfort – tombs to hold book-
worms. Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-
docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth. Dons who
work for proctors or provosts do not fob off school to
work on crosswords, nor do dons go off to dorm
rooms to loll on cots. Dons go crosstown to look for
bookshops known to stock lots of top-notch goods:
cookbooks, workbooks – room on room of how-to
books for jocks (how to jog, how to box), books on
pro sports: golf or polo. Old colophons on school-
books from schoolrooms sport two sorts of logo: ob-
long whorls, rococo scrolls – both on worn morocco.

Bok, Christian. "The Moment" Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets. Queyras, Sina, ed. New York: Persea Books, 2005. 24, 26, 28.

national poetry month, day thirteen: gerard manley hopkins

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. "God's Grandeur". Essential Pleasures. Pinsky, Robert, Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 368.

 

Pied Beauty

 

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. "Pied Beauty". Essential Pleasures. Pinsky, Robert, Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 368-9.

national poetry month, day twelve: stephen dunn

What They Wanted

They wanted me to tell the truth,
so I said I’d lived among them,
for years, a spy,
but all that I wanted was love.
They said they couldn’t love a spy.
Couldn’t I tell them other truths?
I said I was emotionally bankrupt,
would turn any of them in for a kiss.
I told them how a kiss feels
when it’s especially undeserved;
I thought they’d understand.
They wanted me to say I was sorry,
so I told them I was sorry.
They didn’t like it that I laughed.
They asked what I’d seen them do,
and what I do with what I know.
I told them: find out who you are
before you die.
Tell us, they insisted, what you saw.
I saw the hawk kill a smaller bird.
I said like is one long leavetaking.
They wanted me to speak
like a journalism. I’ll try, I said.
I told them I could depict the end
of the world, and my hand wouldn’t tremble.
I said nothing’s serious except destruction.
They wanted to help me then.
They wanted me to share with them,
that was the word they used, share.
I said it’s bad taste
to want to agree with many people.
I told them I’ve tried to give
as often as I’ve betrayed.
They wanted to know my superiors,
to whom did I report?
I told them I accounted to no one,
that each of us is his own punishment.
If I love you, one of them cried out,
what would you give up?
There were others before you,
I wanted to say, and you’d be the one
before someone else. Everything, I said.

Dunn, Stephen. "What They Wanted". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 157-8.

national poetry month, day eleven: richard howard

Like Most Revelations

(after Morris Louis)

It is the movement that incites the form,
discovered as a downward rapture--yes,
it is the movement that delights the form,
sustained by its own velocity. And yet

it is the movement that delays the form
while darkness slows and encumbers; in fact
it is the movement that betrays the form,
baffled in such toils of ease, until

it is the movement that deceives the form,
beguiling our attention--we supposed
it is the movement that achieves the form.
Were we mistaken? What does it matter if

it is the movement that negates the form?
Even though we give (give up) ourselves
to this mortal process of continuing,
it is the movement that creates the form.

Howard, Richard "Like Most Revelations" The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition. Pinsky, Robert, ed. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2013. 119.

national poetry month, day ten: c. day lewis

The Tourists

Arriving was their passion.
Into the new place out of the blue
Flying, sailing, driving --
How well these veteran tourists knew
Each fashion of arriving.

Leaving a place behind them,
There was no sense of loss: they fed
Upon the act of leaving --
So hot their hearts for the land ahead --
As a kind of pre-conceiving.

Arrival has stern laws, though,
Condemning men to lose their eyes
If they have treated travel
As a brief necessary disease,
A pause before arrival.

And merciless the fate is
Of him who leaves nothing behind,
No hostage, no reversion:
He travels on, not only blind
But a stateless person.

Fleeing from love and hate,
Pursuing change, consumed by motion,
Such arrivistes, unseeing,
Forfeit through endless self-evasion
The estate of simple being.

Lewis, C. Day. "The Tourists" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: Penguin Books, 1999. 253-4.

national poetry month, day nine: robert haas

A Story about the Body

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity -- like music -- withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl -- she must have swept them from the corners of her studio -- was full of dead bees.

Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless arrant!

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If court and church reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates they live

Acting by others' action,

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending:

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honor how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favor how she falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in over-wiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and school reply,

Give arts and school the lie.

 

Tell faith it fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity;

Tell virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing,--

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing,--

Stab at thee, he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.

Read more at http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/the_lie.html#VpGrdcM6Yei9BiIC.99

Haas, Robert. "A Story about the Body". Essential Pleasures. Pinsky, Robert, Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 270.

national poetry month, day eight: sam hamill

What the Water Knows

What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.
A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.
Still, the heart is a river
pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.

It opens on a bay
and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,
it carries the cry of the loon and the salts
of the unutterably human.

A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river
salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide
upstream until he disappears
into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains.

Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow,
where shall I turn, drowning in sorrow?
Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience
of young maple or what the willows confess?

Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.
Listen to what the water says.
Wind, be a friend.
There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.

Hamill, Sam. "What the Water Knows". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 235.

national poetry month, day seven: a. r. ammons

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless arrant!

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If court and church reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates they live

Acting by others' action,

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending:

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honor how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favor how she falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in over-wiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and school reply,

Give arts and school the lie.

 

Tell faith it fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity;

Tell virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing,--

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing,--

Stab at thee, he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.

Read more at http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/the_lie.html#VpGrdcM6Yei9BiIC.99

Ammons, A. R.. "The City Limits". Essential Pleasures. Pinsky, Robert, Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 64.