national poetry month, day five: meghan o'rourke

The Window at Arles

Even the moon set him going, with its blank stare;
even the walls of the café, which seemed to tilt
and sway as he watched them, green with absinthe.
"It is a wonderful thing to draw a human being."
All night, Van Gogh painted, and then scraped paint from the easel;
the stiff sound of palette knife on canvas,
scratching, made him think of a hungry animal.
Women came and posed.
"It is a wonderful thing to paint a human being, something
that lives," he told Theo; "it is confoundedly difficult,
but after all it is splendid."
When the money for models ran out,
he bought plaster casts of hands and hung them
from the crossbeams of his room,
and woke to the sound of their knocking in the wind.

*
One night Van Gogh sat in a chair, staring.
Brush in one hand, milk saucer in the other.
The tea was weak. Nothing came. In the morning,
one of his models brought bread and cheese
and made him eat. That afternoon,
he broke the plaster casts, banging hand into hand
until he stood in a storm of dust, coughing.

*
When he worked he felt a scratch at his calf,
a scarlet wound, a whoop of blood. He was hungry;
even his eyes were hungry.
All he saw was red: red snow, red legs of women
in the village rues, red pinwheels of hay.
"It is a wonderful thing
to hurt a human being, something
that lives. It is confoundedly difficult, but after all it is splendid."

Beyond the shadow, a cave opened
in the trees and led into emptiness,
a yellow you couldn't quite see an end to.
Van Gogh walked into it,
and his body began to shake. It was a color-riot.
He could hear, somewhere, a dog
thumping its tail in the dark.
"How splendid yellow is!" he said.

*
Color was electricity, it turned you blind
if you got hold of it.
It turned you blind if something cold
got hold of you and blistered.
Walls falling toward you.
When you turn color into a weapon,
something gets left over:
a charred body.
What you must do is take the plaster
and turn it to praise
as light turns grass in the evening
into fear gone blind into the hunt.

O'Rourke, Meghan "The Window at Arles" The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition. Pinsky, Robert, ed. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2013. 170-1.

national poetry month, day four: jan zwicky

You Must Believe In Spring

Because it is the garden. What is left to us.
Because silence is not silence without sound.
Because you have let the out, and then in, and then out, and then in, and then
     out, and then in, and then out, and then in, and then out, and then in,
     enough.
Because otherwise their precision at the blue line would mean nothing.
Because otherwise death would mean nothing.
Because the light says so.
Because a human being can gladly eat only so much cabbage.
Because the pockets of your overcoat need mending.
Because it's easy not to.
Because your sweaters smell.
Because Gregory of Nazianzen said geometry has no place in mourning, by which
     he meant despair presumes too much.
Because it ain't over 'til it's over. - Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson. Satchel Paige.
Because Kant was wrong, and Socrates, Descartes and all the rest. Because it is
     the body thinking and Newt Gingrich would like you not to.
Because the signs are not wrong: you are here.
Because I love you. Or you love someone. Because someone is loved.
Because under the sun, everything is new.
Because the wet snow in the trees is clotted light.
Because in 1841 it took six cords of wood to get through winter in one room at
     Harvard and two-thirds of Maine used to be open country as a result.
Because sleeping is not death.
Because although an asshole was practising his Elvis Presley imitation, full
     voice, Sunday morning, April 23rd at Spectacle Lake Provincial Park, the
     winter wren simply moved 200 yards down the trail.
Because the wren's voice is moss in sunlight, because it is a stream in sunlight
     over stones.
Because Beethoven titled the sonata.
I mean: would Bill Evans and Frank Morgan lie to you?
Because even sorrow has a source.
For, though it cannot fly, the heart is an excellent clamberer.

Zwicky, Jan. "You Must Believe in Spring" Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets. Queyras, Sina, ed. New York: Persea Books, 2005. 232-3.

national poetry month, day three: john donlan

Wire

Making choices, we flex risk like a muscle,
launch out over the near-absolute zero
between solitudes. Another day, another
universe to feed like an insatiable child

who forgets the last time he was full.
His attention wanders like a searchlight,
hates shut doors more than a cat, barges in
with wet feet, sings as it flies

its spaceship into a de Kooning.
The figures of grace we shape in the air
are necessary. That they're performance too
makes them invitations to a brief

freedom from what most people consider
possible. After the show, let's have
a drink: let's have whatever the spruces are having
if it'll make us as wild as them.

Donlan, John "Wire" Poet to Poet. Roorda, Julie and Elana Wolff, eds. Toronto: Guernica Editions, Inc., 2012. 56.

national poetry month, day two: robert pinsky

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

Pinsky, Robert "Samurai Song" The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition. Pinsky, Robert, ed. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2013. 177.

national poetry month, day one: anne carson

Short Talk On Walking Backwards

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.


Short Talk On Reading

Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madam Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days, I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous? 


Short Talk On The Youth At Night

The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare.


Short Talk On the Truth To Be Had From Dreams

Seized by a sudden truth I started up at 4 a.m. The word grip pronounced ‘gripe’ is applied only to towns, cities and inhabitations; the word gripe pronounced ‘grip’ can be used of human beings. In my dream I saw the two parts of this truth connected by a three-mile long rope of women’s hair. And just at the moment all the questions of male and female soul murder, which were to be answered as soon as I pulled on the rope, broke away and fell in a chunk back down the rocky chasm where I had been asleep. We are the half and half again, we are the language stump.


Short Talk On The Sensation Of Aeroplane Takeoff
Well you know I wonder, it could be love running towards my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!

Carson, Anne. "The Moment" Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets. Queyras, Sina, ed. New York: Persea Books, 2005. 64-9.