Poem of the Day

I still have quite a few of Marge Piercy’s poems in my file…

Waiting outside
By Marge Piercy

All day you have been on my mind,
a seagull perched on an old wharf
piling by the steely grip of its claws,
shrieking when any other comes too near,
waiting for fish or what the tide brings,
shaking out its long white wings like laundry.

All day you have been on my mind,
a thrift store glamour hat that doesn’t fit
with a perky veil scratching my cheek,
with a feather hanging down like a broken
tail tickling my neck, settling its
big dome over my ears muffling sounds.

All day you have been on my mind,
a beauty shop hair dryer blowing sirocco,
wind off the Sahara bearing bad
news and sand that stifles, roaring
through my head thrust in the lion’s hot mouth,
a helmet that clamps me here to bake.

All day you have been on my mind,
a steam iron pressing the convolutions
from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying
cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable
with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow
furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.

I finally have time to go back to my beloved Civil War memoirs. I just started Walter H. Taylor’s General Lee: His Campaigns in Virginia 1861-1865 with Personal Reminiscences. Of course, the Chickahominy has been mentioned already.

Leafless Trees, Chickahominy Swamp
By Dave Smith

Humorless, hundreds of trunks, gray in the blue expanse
where dusk leaves them hacked like a breastwork,
stripped like pikes planted to impale, the knots
of vines at each groin appearing placed by makers
schooled in grotesque campaigns. Mathew Brady’s
plates show them as they are, the ageless stumps,
timed-sanded solitaries, some clumped in squads
we might imagine veterans, except they’re only wood,
and nothing in the world seems more dead than these.

Stopped by the lanes filled with homebound taillights,
we haven’t seen the rumored Eagle we hoped to watch,
only a clutch of buzzards ferrying sticks for a nest.
In this history, that we want the unchanged, useless
spines out there to thrust in our faces the human
qualities we covet? We read this place like generals
whose promised recruits don’t show, who can’t press on:
we feel the languor of battle, troops unable to tell
themselves from the enemy, and a file-hard fear gone

indifferent in the mortaring sun that will leave all
night after night standing in the same cold planes
of water. It never blooms or greens. It merely stinks.
Why can’t we admit this is death’s gift, the scummy
scene of our pride, blown brainpans of a century ago?
Why do we sit and sniff the rank hours inside words
blunt as ground that only stares off our question: what
happened? Leaf-light in our heads, don’t we mean why
these grisly emblems, the slime that won’t swell to hope?

The rapacious odor of swamps all over the earth bubbles
sometimes to mist, fetid flesh we can’t see but know,
just cells composing, decomposing, a heart’s illusions.
God knows what we’d do in there, we say, easing back
on the blacktop. Once we heard a whistling. Harmonicas?
But who’d listen? Surely all was green once, fragile
as a truce, words braiding sun and water, as on a lake
where families sang. What else would we hope for, do
in the dead miles nothing explains or changes or relieves?

I love learning new words. I came across this poem in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and it had the following note from the author regarding the title: “A cobble of stone laid on steep slick rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains”.

Riprap
By Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
        placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
        in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
        riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
        straying planets,
These poems, people,
        lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
        and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
        four-dimensional
Game of Go.
        ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
        a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
        with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
        all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

I’ve had this one in the file for a whle, from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Bereft
By Thomas Hardy

     In the black winter morning
No light will be struck near my eyes
While the clock in the stairway is warning
For five, when he used to rise.
          Leave the door unbarred,
          The clock unwound,
          Make my lone bed hard—
          Would ’twere underground!

     When the summer dawns clearly,
And the appletree-tops seem alight,
Who will undraw the curtain and cheerly
Call out that the morning is bright?

     When I tarry at market
No form will cross Durnover Lea
In the gathering darkness, to hark at
Grey’s Bridge for the pit-pat o’ me.

     When the supper crock’s steaming,
And the time is the time of his tread,
I shall sit by the fire and wait dreaming
In a silence as of the dead.
          Leave the door unbarred,
          The clock unwound,
          Make my lone bed hard—
          Would ’twere underground!

Being the book nerd that I am, I love literary references in poetry!

The Dacca Gauzes
By Agha Shahid Ali

… for a whole year he sought
to accumulate the most exquisite
Dacca gauzes.
—Oscar Wilde / The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. “No one
now knows,” my grandmother says,

“what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.” She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.

I snagged this one from the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

Faith Healing
By Philip Larkin

Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice—

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

I love that Levertov mentions other poets, who have obviously meant something to her. My favorite thing about this poem is the sadness, yet how there is some hope and not total despair. I think the end of the poem can be read in different ways, but I choose to focus on how we will keep going, and while we will miss the old ones, their words and presence, we still have their words and their example from which to learn. (I don’t know why I switched to “we” when I don’t write poetry…)

September 1961
By Denise Levertov

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. “It looks like dying”—Williams: “I can’t
describe to you what has been

happening to me”—
H. D. “unable to speak.”
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can’t reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don’t
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea…

Current Tea: chocolate rum (black tea with chocolate and rum flavoring)

I needed a little nostalgia today. I never actually ate grass, but I did have a “horse” that I rode around. Mine was a stick with a corduroy horse head that my mom made for me.

The Centaur
By May Swenson

The summer that I was ten—
Can it be there was only one
summer that I was ten? It must

have been a long one then—
each day I’d go out to choose
a fresh horse from my stable

which was a willow grove
down by the old canal.
I’d go on my two bare feet.

But when, with my brother’s jack-knife,
I had cut me a long limber horse
with a good thick knob for a head,

and peeled him slick and clean
except a few leaves for the tail,
and cinched my brother’s belt

around his head for a rein,
I’d straddle and canter him fast
up the grass bank to the path,

trot along in the lovely dust
that talcumed over his hoofs,
hiding my toes, and turning

his feet to swift half-moons.
The willow knob with the strap
jouncing between my thighs

was the pommel and yet the poll
of my nickering pony’s head.
My head and my neck were mine,

yet they were shaped like a horse.
My hair flopped to the side
like the mane of a horse in the wind.

My forelock swung in my eyes,
my neck arched and I snorted.
I shied and skittered and reared,

stopped and raised my knees,
pawed at the ground and quivered.
My teeth bared as we wheeled

and swished through the dust again.
I was the horse and the rider,
and the leather I slapped to his rump

spanked my own behind.
Doubled, my two hoofs beat
a gallop along the bank,

the wind twanged my mane,
my mouth squared to the bit.
And yet I sat on my steed

quiet, negligent riding,
my toes standing the stirrups,
my thighs hugging his ribs.

At a walk we drew up at the porch.
I tethered him to a paling.
Dismounting, I smoothed my skirt

and entered the dusky hall.
My feet on the clean linoleum
left ghostly toes in the hall.

Where have you been? said my mother.
Been riding, I said from the sink,
and filled me a glass of water.

What’s that in your pocket? she said.
Just my knife. It weighed my pocket
and stretched my dress awry.

Go tie back your hair, said my mother
and Why is your mouth all green?
Rob Roy, he pulled some clover
as we crossed the field, I told her.

Though I’ve been reading a lot of the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, this one is a holdover from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

What Are Years?
By Marianne Moore

   What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
   naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,—
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
      encourages others
      and in its defeat, stirs

   the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
   accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
      in its surrendering
      finds its continuing.

   So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
   grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
      This is mortality,
      this is eternity.

Current Tea: Honey Bee tea (black tea with sweet honey flavor from honey bee pollen)

This had me absolutely cracking up last night, so I thought we could have a nice light-hearted poem today. As I read it, I could just picture a overzealous inventor showing off with a smug smile on his face. I imagine this one would be stellar if read aloud.

Notes on the Peanut
By June Jordan

For the Poet David Henderson

Hi there. My name is George
Washington
Carver.
If you will bear with me
for a few minutes I
will share with you
a few
of the 30,117 uses to which
the lowly peanut has been put
by me
since yesterday afternoon.
If you will look at my feet you will notice
my sensible shoelaces made from unadulterated
peanut leaf composition that is biodegradable
in the extreme.
To your left you can observe the lovely Renoir
masterpiece reproduction that I have cleverly
pieced together from several million peanut
shell chips painted painstakingly so as to
accurately represent the colors of the original!
Overhead you will spot a squadron of Peanut B-52
Bombers flying due west.
I would extend my hands to greet you
at this time
except for the fact that I am holding a reserve
supply of high energy dry roasted peanuts
guaranteed to accelerate protein assimilation
precisely documented by my pocket peanut calculator;
Mai I ask when did you last contemplate the relationship
between the expanding peanut products’ industry
and the development of post-Marxian economic theory
which (Let me emphasize) need not exclude moral attrition
of prepuberty
polymorphic
prehensible skills with the population age sectors
of 8 to 15?
I hope you will excuse me if I appear to be staring at you
through these functional yet high fashion and prescriptive
peanut contact lenses providing the most
minute observation of your physical response to all of this
ultimately nutritional information.
Peanut butter peanut soap peanut margarine peanut
brick houses and house and field peanuts per se well
illustrate the diversified
potential of this lowly leguminous plant
to which you may correctly refer
also
as the goober the pindar the groundnut
and ground pea/let me
interrupt to take your name down on my
pocket peanut writing pad complete with matching
peanut pencil that only 3 or 4
chewing motions of the jaws will sharpen
into pyrotechnical utility
and no sweat.
Please:
Speak right into the peanut!

Your name?

Current Tea: chocolate rum (black tea with chocolate and rum flavoring)

I found quite a few poems by Sylvia Plath that I liked in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. I’ve posted some poems by her before, but I think in general when I’ve read her work in the past, I must not have been ready for it because many of her poems didn’t appeal to me at all. Not so this time. This poem got its title from a painting by Giorgio de Chirico.

The Disquieting Muses
By Sylvia Plath

Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like daring-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always
Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
Whether you saw them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bead,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.

In the hurricane, when father’s twelve
Study windows bellied in
Like bubbles about to break, you fed
My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir:
‘Thor is angry: boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don’t care!’
But those ladies broke the panes.

When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlights like fireflies
And singing the glowworm song, I could
Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside
In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
Godmothers, and you cried and cried:
And the shadows stretched, the lights went out.

Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
And praised my arabesques and thrills
Although each teacher found my touch
Oddly wooden in spite of scales
And the hours of practicing, my ear
Tone-deaf and yes, I learned elsewhere,
From muses unhired by you, dear mother.

I woke one day to see you, mother,
Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million
Never, never, found anywhere.
But the little planet bobbed away
Like a soap-bubble as you called; Come here!
And I faced my traveling companions.

Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was born,
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.
And this is the kingdom you bore me to,
Mother, mother. But no frown of mine
Will betray the company I keep.

I’ve been reading the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and thought I’d post this poem to go with yesterday’s.

The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital
By Delmore Schwartz

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.

“Call us what you will: we are made such by love.”
We are such studs as dreams are made on, and
Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.

Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,
After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze?
                              For it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell,
And it is not only heart, at harp o’clock,
It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread
Toward Arcturus—and returning as suddenly…

Current Tea: cream Earl Grey (high grown black tea from Sri Lanka flavored with vanilla and bergamot)

I love it when readers suggest poems! This is a great spring poem, though spring arrived some time ago in Austin.

To Arcturus Returning
By Sara Teasdale

Arcturus, with the spring returning.
I love you best; I cannot tell
Why, save that your recurrent burning
Is spring’s most punctual miracle.

You bring with you all longed-for things,
Birds with their song, leaves with their stir,
And you, beyond all other stars,
Have been man’s comforter.

Current Tea: chocolate almond cookies (black tea, orange peels, cocoa, coconut, almond bits, peanut bits, rose blossoms, flavoring)

I really liked this poem when I read it in an anthology. I especially think the title is fantastic.

The Motive for Metaphor
By Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon—

The obscure moon lighting and obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The muddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flesh,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

The variety in my file of poems is rapidly decreasing, but I see that we haven’t heard from Miss Emily in a while, so here you go.

I taste a liquor never brewed—
By Emily Dickinson

I taste a liquor never brewed—
From Tankards scooped in Pearl—
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling—thro endless summer days—
From inns of Molten Blue—

When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door—
When Butterflies—renounce their “drams”—
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats—
And Saints—to windows run—
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the—Sun—

I’m not going to do another MacSpaunday quartet of poems, but I wanted to share this one by MacNeice because I’m going to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center with Ryan today.

The Sunlight on the Garden
By Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Here is a cycle of poems about Orpheus and Eurydice by Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: 1976-1986.

Orpheus (1)
By Margaret Atwood

You walked in front of me,
pulling me back out
to the green light that had once
grown fangs and killed me.

I was obedient, but
numb, like an arm
gone to sleep; the return
to time was not my choice.

By then I was used to silence.
Though something stretched between us
like a whisper, like a rope:
my former name,
drawn tight.
You had your old leash
with you, love you might call it,
and your flesh voice.

Before your eyes you held steady
the image of what you wanted
me to become: living again.
It was this hope of yours that kept me following.

I was your hallucination, listening
and floral, and you were singing me:
already new skin was forming on me
within the luminous misty shroud
of my other body; already
there was dirt on my hands and I was thirsty.

I could see only the outline
of your head and shoulders,
black against the cave mouth,
and so could not see your face
at all, when you turned

and called to me because you had
already lost me. The last
I saw of you was a dark oval.
Though I knew how this failure
would hurt you, I had to
fold like a gray moth and let go.

You could not believe I was more than your echo.

Eurydice
By Margaret Atwood

He is here, come down to look for you.
It is the song that calls you back,
a song of joy and suffering
equally: a promise:
that things will be different up there
than they were last time.

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing,
emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace
of the deepest sea, which is easier
than the noise and flesh of the surface.

You are used to these blanched dim corridors,
you are used to the king
who passes you without speaking.

The other one is different
and you almost remember him.
He says he is singing to you
because he loves you,

not as you are now,
so chilled and minimal: moving and still
both, like a white curtain blowing
in the draft from a half-opened window
beside a chair on which nobody sits.

He wants you to be what he calls real.
He wants you to stop light.
He wants to feel himself thickening
like a treetrunk or a haunch
and see blood on his eyelids
when he closes them, and the sun beating.

This love of his is not something
he can do if you aren’t there,
but what you knew suddenly as you left your body
cooling and whitening on the lawn

was that you love him anywhere,
even in this land of no memory,
even in this domain of hunger.
You hold love in your hand, a red seed
you had forgotten you were holding.

He has come almost too far.
He cannot believe without seeing,
and it’s dark here.
Go back, you whisper,

but he wants to be fed again
by you. O handful of gauze, little
bandage, handful of cold
air, it is not through him
you will get your freedom.

Orpheus (2)
By Margaret Atwood

Whether he will go on singing
or not, knowing what he knows
of the horror of this world:

He was not wandering among meadows
all this time. He was down there
among the mouthless ones, among
those with no fingers, those
whose names are forbidden,
those washed up eaten into
among the gray stones
of the shore where nobody goes
through fear. Those with silence.

He has been trying to sing
love into existence again
and he has failed.

Yet he will continue
to sing, in the stadium
crowded with the already dead
who raise their eyeless faces
to listen to him; while the red flowers
grow up and splatter open
against the walls.

They have cut off both his hands
and soon they will tear
his head from his body in one burst
of furious refusal.
He foresees this. Yet he will go on
singing, and in praise.
To sing is either praise
or defiance. Praise is defiance.

Okay, so it’s neither high noon, nor is there snow here in Texas (in fact, it’s been absolutely gorgeous outside the last few days!), but I’m posting this poem (from the Texas Poetry Calendar 2008) anyway. I’m amused that Ryan arrived from NJ yesterday wearing a fleece (!!!). Here’s a link to the poet’s myspace page.

High Noon and Texas Beckons
By Laurie A. Guerrero

New England 2005

I collect the rocks from
beneath the snow. Their refusal
to freeze intrigues

and encourages me. Blue,
I question this northern sky
—breath coiled and scattered

by the lips of a god I’ve never known.
Frigid beads, in every brutal form,
slam my face and children.

This black noon, I remember
the fervor of the dripping sun:
childhood in bare feet,

watermelon on ice, tomatoes
off the vine; peach jelly melted
and swallowed by the thirsty white cotton

of my grandmother’s apron; the rousing
scent of brushfire in the barren roast
of my kind of season.

I carry her dry earth in my mouth.

Here’s another one by Claude McKay that I snagged from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

The Harlem Dancer
By Claude McKay

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curls
Luxuriously fell; and, tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze;
But, looking at her falsely-smiling face
I knew her self was not in that strange place.

Current Tea: (iced) Thai chai (green tea blended with coconut, ginger and lemongrass)

This is just depressing, but it still jumped out at me when I was going through the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

The Portrait
By Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

I need to hear from Naomi today.

Changed
By Naomi Shihab Nye

They said something mean about me
and didn’t notice it was mean.

So my heart wandered
into the rainy night without them
and found a canopy
to hind under.

My eyes started
seeing through things.
Like gauze.
Old self through new self.
My flexible body
went backwards
and forwards
in time.

It’s hard to describe but true:
I grew another head
with better ideas
inside my old head.

Here’s another one by Jeffers from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. I think I’d like to start using the word enskyment in conversation…

Vulture
By Robinson Jeffers

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, ‘My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you.’ But how beautiful he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes—
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.

If you’re interested, you can read about Cassandra’s sad story.

Cassandra
By Louise Bogan

To me, one silly task is like another.
I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride.
This flesh will never give a child its mother,—
Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

Here’s another one by Hughes, from Moon-Whales and Other Poems.

Moon-Shadow Beggars
By Ted Hughes

Crossing the frontier from dark to light
You pass the shadows, some of which bite
Because they need your blood, some on one leg
Hobble beside you and merely beg.
You can’t hear what it is they want you to give—
I’ll tell you, it is the body in which you live.
They cling with fingers that have no strength,
They reach after you with arms of elastic length,
They screech, sob and suffer in a dreadful way.
Be resolute, pass they without delay.
For if you pity them, and pause, you will stay
Caught among them forever, they will pour
Into you through the wide open door
Of your eye-pupil, and fill you up
And you will be nothing but a skinful of shadows
Whispering shadow-talk and groping for
The well-known handle of your own front door
With fingers that cannot feel it.
It is a horrible state and nothing can heal it.

This is a short poem, but I think the imagery is very vivid.

Reapers
By Jean Toomer

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening their scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done.
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds.
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.
His belly close to the ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

The day seems to have gotten away from me. Here’s a short little one before I go to bed.

Oread
By H.D.

Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.

This one was in the Texas Poetry Calendar 2008. You may read more about the author here.

Los Muertos
By Nanette Guadiano-Campos

They wait for us to come
Perfectly still in their satin-lined boxes
Only the slightest creaking of bones
This is the day, they think,
Of paper roses,
Melting candle wax,
And the slight scent of canela
A day of singing,
Beautiful sound of babies cooing
And children laughing
Of leaves dancing overhead
The wonderful feel,
The oh-so-miraculous feel
Of saltwater tears,
Seeping through tierra
A salve on dry, dry bones

Here’s another Pessoa poem translated by Richard Zenith in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. This one was XXXIII in The Keeper of Sheep by Alberto Caeiro (one of Pessoa’s pseudonyms). It’s such a lovely short little poem.

Poor flowers in the flower beds of manicured gardens
By Fernando Pessoa

Poor flowers in the flower beds of manicured gardens.
They look like they’re afraid of the police…
But they’re so true that they bloom in the same way
And have the same ancient coloring
They had in their wild state for the first gaze of the first man,
Who was startled by the sight of them and touched them lightly
So that he would see them with his fingers too.

Time for something from Edna!

Gazing upon him now, severe and dead
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Gazing upon him now, severe and dead,
It seemed a curious thing that she had lain
Beside him many a night in that cold bed,
And that had been which would not be again.
From his desirous body the great heat
Was gone at last, it seemed, and the taut nerves
Loosened forever. Formally the sheet
Set forth for her today those heavy curves
And lengths familiar as the bedroom door.
She was one who enters, sly, and proud,
To where her husband speaks before a crowd,
And sees a man she never saw before—
The man who eats his victuals at her side,
Small, and absurd, and hers: for once, not hers, unclassified.

This is another from the Texas Poetry Calendar 2008, and one which I was lucky enough to hear the author read.

Texas Greater Fritillary
By Deborah A. Akers

a butterfly! a flash
of brown and bone
silver fritillary underwings
fanning light around my feet

i sit on paving stones
and watch it preen
dark antennae quivering
in examination of my flesh
pale hair-thin tube extending
to siphon up what moisture
could be found between my toes

an impulse to catch it
flits past, unused
instead, i watch till
wings and wind carry it away
in a perfect mix of curves and line
thinner than the finest paper
lighter than my breath
more delicate
than any word i know

Current Tea: captivating caramel (black tea with caramel flavoring)