Poem of the Day

Here’s one shared by my poetry buddy. I’m sorry to say that the PotD will be on hiatus until the last week in April because I will be on vacation in England. The last time I went I posted a U.K. edition, but I just don’t want to have to worry about having internet access while traipsing about the English countryside. (hee hee) There are plenty of goodies in the archives if you miss your daily dose of poems!

Implications of One Plus One
By Marge Piercy

Sometimes we collide, tectonic plates merging,
continents shoving, crumpling down into the molten
veins of fire deep in the earth and raising
tons of rock into jagged crests of Sierra.

Sometimes your hands drift on me, milkweed’s
airy silk, wingtip’s feathery caresses,
our lips grazing, a drift of desires gathering
like fog over warm water, thickening to rain.

Sometimes we go to it heartily, digging,
burrowing, grunting, tossing up covers
like loose earth, nosing into the other’s
flesh with hot nozzles and wallowing there.

Sometimes we are kids making out, silly
in the quilt, tickling the xylophone spine,
blowing wet jokes, loud as a whole
slumber party bouncing till the bed breaks.

I go round and round you sometimes, scouting,
blundering, seeking a way in, the high boxwood
maze I penetrate running lungs bursting
toward the fountain of green fire at the heart.

Sometimes you open wide as cathedral doors
and yank me inside. Sometimes you slither
into me like a snake into its burrow.
Sometimes you march in with a brass band.

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.
It is more and less than love: timing,
chemistry, magic and will and luck.

One plus one equal one, unknowable except
in the moment, not convertible into words,
not explicable or philosophically interesting.
But it is. And it is. And it is. Amen.

Current Tea: honey vanilla chamomile

I think this poem appeals to me more now that I live in the country than it might otherwise. I read it as sentences, deliberately not pausing at the end of each line. I don’t have a wagon, but I’ve seen storm clouds rolling in across the fields and rushed to get back to the house (usually while walking my dog). I particularly like the question at the end of the poem because I don’t know the answer. Also, bonus points for the use of the word agon, which I had to look up.

A Crosstown Breeze
By Henry Taylor

A drift of wind
when August wheeled
brought back to mind
an alfalfa field

where green windrows
bleached down to hay
while storm clouds rose
and rolled our way.

With lighthearted strain
in our pastoral agon
we raced the rain
with baler and wagon,

driving each other
to hold the turn
out of the weather
and into the barn.

A nostalgic pause
claims we saved it all,
but I’ve known the loss
of the lifelong haul;

now gray concrete
and electric light
wear on my feet
and dull my sight.

So I keep asking,
as I stand here,
my cheek still basking
in that trick of air,

would I live that life
if I had the chance,
or is it enough
to have been there once?

I did laundry tonight. I like the comparisons between laundry and life in this poem. I hope that tomorrow begins in new skin because I’d like to leave today far behind me.

Laundry
By Ruth Moose

All our life
so much laundry;
each day’s doing or not
comes clean,
flows off and away
to blend with other sins
of this world. Each day
begins in new skin,
blessed by the elements
charged to take us
out again to do or undo
what’s been assigned.
From socks to shirts
the selves we shed
lift off the line
as if they own
a life apart
from the one we offer.
There is joy in clean laundry.
All is forgiven in water, sun
and air. We offer our day’s deeds
to the blue-eyed sky, with soap and prayer,
our arms up, then lowered in supplication.

My poetry buddy must know when I’m grasping at straws. I’m exhausted and hadn’t done anything about a poem for today, and this appeared in my inbox. Thanks! It’s dreadfully sad and made me think (again) about the importance of being close to the ones you love. You never know what can happen…

Mid-term Break
By Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At ten o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were ’sorry for my trouble.’
Whispers informed strangers that I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside. I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple.
He lay in a four foot box, as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Ah, Macbeth, my favorite play…

The Race of Banquo
By Robert Southey

Fly, son of Banquo! Fleance, fly!
Leave thy guilty sire to die.
O’er the heath the stripling fled,
The wild storm howling round his head.
Fear mightier thro’ the shades of night
Urged his feet, and wing’d his flight;
And still he heard his father cry
Fly, son of Banquo! Fleance, fly.

Fly, son of Banquo! Fleance, fly
Leave thy guilty sire to die.
On every blast was heard the moan
The anguish’d shriek, the death-fraught groan;
Loathly night-hags join the yell
And see—the midnight rites of Hell.

Forms of magic! spare my life!
Shield me from the murderer’s knife!
Before me dim in lurid light
Float the phantoms of the night—
Behind I hear my Father cry,
Fly, son of Banquo—Fleance, fly!

Parent of the sceptred race,
Fearless tread the circled space:
Fearless Fleance venture near—
Sire of monarchs—spurn at fear.

Sisters with prophetic breath
Pour we now the dirge of Death!

When I first read this poem I didn’t really absorb it because my focus was drawn to the rhymes. After rereading it, I’m rather surprised that I like the sentiment, given my penchant for dark and depressing poems. I guess I could stand to be reminded that “the darts of toil and sorrow” will not always triumph!

As Winds That Blow Against a Star
By Joyce Kilmer

(For Aline)

Now by what whim of wanton chance
Do radiant eyes know sombre days?
And feet that shod in light should dance
Walk weary and laborious ways?

But rays from Heaven, white and whole,
May penetrate the gloom of earth;
And tears but nourish, in your soul,
The glory of celestial mirth.

The darts of toil and sorrow, sent
Against your peaceful beauty, are
As foolish and as impotent
As winds that blow against a star.

Ack! I was sitting down to find a poem when a friend called. Now it’s past my bedtime! Of course, the title of this poem is fabulous and original. I also liked the experience of seeing the rose-breasted grosbeak being one of the great things of his life. The birds around here are finally starting to get their bright spring colors and I like watching them. The segue from the great thing to the alien starlings (one of which managed to find its way into my woodstove last night) was abrupt and effective at grabbing my attention.

Gic to Har
By Kenneth Rexroth

It is late at night, cold and damp
The air is filled with tobacco smoke.
My brain is worried and tired.
I pick up the encyclopedia,
The volume GIC to HAR,
It seems I have read everything in it,
So many other nights like this.
I sit staring empty-headed at the article Grosbeak,
Listening to the long rattle and pound
Of freight cars and switch engines in the distance.
Suddenly I remember
Coming home from swimming
In Ten Mile Creek,
Over the long moraine in the early summer evening,
My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud.
I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,
And instantly and clearly the revelation
Of a song of incredible purity and joy,
My first rose-breasted grosbeak,
Facing the low sun, his body
Suffused with light.
I was motionless and cold in the hot evening
Until he flew away, and I went on knowing
In my twelfth year one of the great things
Of my life had happened.
Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek.
On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.
And I am on the other side of the continent
Ten years in an unfriendly city.

I’m surprised that I haven’t searched for more of Mark Strand’s poems until now. Since Eating Poetry has become one of my favorite poems, it’s hard to think anything could live up to it. That one still remains at the top of my list, but I like this one because it restores a little hope. I think I needed to be reminded that it’s never too late for something wonderful to happen and I think the phrase “the coming of light” could give hope to anyone.

The Coming of Light
By Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

As an incurable bookworm, this poem really appeals to me. I know that I will never be able to read all the books I want to and, though I do maintain a list, I think it’s wonderful to get new recommendations and stumble across books from unlikely sources. As OCD and obsessed with lists as I am, my book list is not written in stone.

The List
By Naomi Shihab Nye

A man told me he had calculated
the exact number of books
he would be able to read before he died
by figuring the average number
of books he read per month
and his probable earth span,
(averaging how long
his dad and grandpa had lived,
adding on a few years since he
exercised more than they did).
Then he made a list of necessary books,
nonfiction mostly, history, philosophy,
fiction, and poetry from different time periods
so there wouldn’t be large gaps in his mind.
He had given up frivolous reading entirely.
There are only so many days.

Oh, I felt sad to hear such an organized plan.
What about the books that aren’t written yet,
the books his friends might recommend
that aren’t on the list,
the yummy magazine that might fall
into his hand at a silly moment after all?
What about the mystery search
through the delectable library shelves?
I felt the heartbeat of forgotten precious books
calling for his hand.

I love poems about historical subjects. It’s so interested to see what may have been going on in someone’s mind, especially someone gifted/heroic/inspirational/great. Beethoven may not have been all those things, but I don’t think it can be argued that he was passionate and created some beautiful music. I like Dove’s insight in this poem. P.S. This one was in my daily e-mail from poets.org for National Poetry Month. I feel like a cheater for posting it, but I really liked it.

Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Return to Vienna
By Rita Dove

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me…
The Heiligenstadt Testament

Three miles from my adopted city
lies a village where I came to peace.
The world there was a calm place,
even the great Danube no more
than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl’s careless hand. Into this stillness

I had been ordered to recover.
The hills were gold with late summer;
my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen,
situated upstairs in the back of a cottage
at the end of the Herrengasse.
From my window I could see onto the courtyard
where a linden tree twined skyward—
leafy umbilicus canted toward light,
warped in the very act of yearning—
and I would feed on the sun as if that alone
would dismantle the silence around me.

At first I raged. Then music raged in me,
rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough
to ease the roiling. I would stop
to light a lamp, and whatever I’d missed—
larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd’s
home-toward-evening song—rushed in, and I
would rage again.

I am by nature a conflagration;
I would rather leap
than sit and be looked at.
So when my proud city spread
her gypsy skirts, I reentered,
burning towards her greater, constant light.

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly—I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it… It is impossible

to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I’ve named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can’t you see that I’m deaf?—
I also cannot stop listening.

Saved by my poetry buddy again! I must say that the bevelled bit of my bathroom mirror drives me nuts. I’m always seeing flashes of something in it. Of course, I’m usually startled and would never describe my experience the way Beard does in this poem. The last two stanzas blew me away. Wow.

Old Love
By Francesca Beard

In the glance of a mirror, I saw a timid shape
standing in the bevelled bit,
the thin prismatic strip on the edge of the frame
and thought it was a ghost of you.

What are you doing here?
You can’t just appear, without warning,
like we were used to it being.
You seemed blurry, like the first and the last time.
In between, how huge you were.
The shadow you cast let much sleep beneath its shade.
You wavered in the air, vanishing.
How I wanted to hold out my hand,
so that your sad ghost
could crawl into a friendly cradle.
Of course it was nothing—a trick of the light
and a splinter in the eye
of a hair gummed across the heart.

No, you are frozen where you were that last time,
deaf and dumb,
a wax-work in the pin-hole museum,
while your tiny, passionate soul,
marooned in the middle of nowhere,
cries and stretches out its arms.

Meanwhile, on my own rock,
on the other side of the world,
I think of you, blind and stumbling in the dark,
while the rescuers throw the beams of their torches
into the wrong cave.

I just realized I hadn’t posted a poem yet today. Oops! This one was passed along by my dear Valerie. I really love the parts about laughter being “life’s bread” and the lovers being the “greatest wealth”. However, the cynical part of me thinks that’s far easier to say on paper…

Poverty
By Pablo Neruda

Ah you don’t want to,
you’re scared
of poverty,
you don’t want
to go to the market with worn-out shoes
and come back with the same old dress.

My love, we are not fond
as the rich would like us to be,
of misery. We
shall extract it like an evil tooth
that up to now has bitten the heart of man.

But I don’t want
you to fear it.
If through my fault it comes to your dwelling,
if poverty drives away
your golden shoes,
let it not drive away your laughter which is my life’s bread.
If you can’t pay the rent
go off to work with a proud step,
and remember, my love, that I am watching you
and together we are the greatest wealth
that was ever gathered upon the earth.

I like this poem because I can’t decide if it’s tongue-in-cheek, or if it’s mostly true. It’s the kind of poem that makes me laugh on the first reading, but makes me think afterward. It also makes me wonder that if a person is happy at one point in his/her life, that the sad things that happened in the past don’t matter so much.

Autobiographia Literaria
By Frank O’Hara

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out “I am
an orphan.”

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

I like how Tuckerman used such lovely language to describe a scene of desolation. Were it not for the line “Absent of beauty as a broken heart”, I think the red house would be a place I’d like to visit.

Under the mountain, as when first I knew
By Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Under the mountain, as when first I knew
Its low dark roof, and chimney creeper-twined,
The red house stands; and yet my footsteps find
Vague in the walks, waste balm and fever few.
But they are gone: no soft-eyed sisters trip
Across the porch or lintels; where, behind,
The mother sat,—sat knitting with pursed lip.
The house stands vacant in its green recess,
Absent of beauty as a broken heart;
The wild rain enters, and the sunset wind
Sighs in the chambers of their loveliness,
Or shakes the pane; and in the silent noons,
The glass falls from the window, part by part,
And ringeth faintly in the grassy stones.

I found this poem because I was intrigued by the title. I was not disappointed when I read the poem. I’ve always thought I’d like to know more about the constellations and spend more time star-gazing, but I’ve never actually done anything to further my knowledge. At least I can pick out Orion, and perhaps I’d consider myself an amateur of heaven. I can’t really describe why I like this poem so much, but the language makes me want to read it many times. I’m drawn to phrases like “idiot majesty” and “ancestral eyes”.

Amateurs of Heaven
By Howard Nemerov

Two lovers to a midnight meadow came
High in the hills, to lie there hand and hand
Like effigies and look up at the stars,
The never-setting ones set in the North
To circle the Pole in idiot majesty,
And wonder what was given them to wonder.

Being amateurs, they knew some of the names
By rote, and could attach the names to stars
And draw the lines invisible between
That humbled all the heavenly things to farm
And forest things and even kitchen things,
A bear, a wagon, a long handled ladle;

Could wonder at the shadow of the world
That brought those lights to light, could wonder too
At the ancestral eyes and the dark mind
Behind them that had reached the length of light
To name the stars and draw the animals
And other stuff that dangled in the height,

Or was it the deep? Did they look in
Or out, the lovers? till they grew bored
As even lovers will, and got up to go,
But drunken now, with staggering and dizziness,
Because the spell of earth had moved them so,
Hallucinating that the heavens moved.