Poem of the Day

When I read today’s poem in 180 More, I was reminded of this poem about dolls. Stephen Dunn has nothing on Margaret Atwood in the creepy doll contest, but that’s probably a good thing.

The Arm
By Stephen Dunn

A doll’s pink, broken-off arm
was floating in a pond
the man had come to with his dog.
The arm had no sad child nearby
to say it was hers, no parent to rescue it
with a stick or branch,

and this pleased the man to whom
absence always felt like opportunity.
He imagined a girl furious
at her younger sister, taking it out on her
one limb at a time.

Yet the sun was glancing off
the arm’s little pink fingers,
and the pond’s heart-shaped lily pads
seemed to accentuate an oddness,
which he thought beautiful.

When he and the dog looked for
the doll’s body but couldn’t find it,
a different image came to him,
of a father who hated the fact
that his son liked dolls.
What was floating there
was a punishment that didn’t work,
for the boy had come to love
his one-armed doll even more.
The man was struck once again
by how much misery
the human spirit can absorb.

His dog wanted to move on,
enough of this already.
But the man was creating little waves
with his hands, and the arm, this thing
his wife was sure to question,
was slowly bobbing toward him.

This poem reminds me of a quote by Willa Cather from O Pioneers:

And now the old story has begun to write itself over there,” said Carl softly. “Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.
—Part II, Chapter IV

To Juan at the Winter Solstice
By Robert Graves

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether are learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right she crooks a finger smiling,
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses
There is one story and one story only.

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.

Yikes! Due to various visitors, craziness at work, and general exhaustion, I seem to have fallen off the wagon. Now I’m back to having my dog as sole companion and it’s nearly the weekend, so hopefully I can get back in the swing of things… Langston Hughes is a poet I don’t know much about, though I’ve read a number of his poems. Thus, I was interested to hear him read some of his poems on Poetry on Record. I hadn’t posted this poem before, but it sounded familiar so maybe I’ve read it. Incredibly, Hughes said it was one of the first poems he wrote, when he was right out of high school, inspired by crossing the Mississippi. I think it’s wonderful, and I was surprised that Hughes’s reading didn’t spark any emotion. It’s not that he read it badly, but it sounded so impersonal. A poem like this seems as if it sprang from deep in his soul and I guess I expected his voice to convey that. At any rate, I like the poem a lot.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers
By Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
   flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
nbsp;  went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
nbsp;  bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I read this one in 180 More and it really amused me.

Blurbs
By Julianne Baggott

I don’t want to be a national treasure,
too old-codgery, something wheeled out
of a closet to cut ribbon. I prefer
resident genius, or for the genius
to be at least undeniable.
I’d like to steer away from the declaration
by far her best. Too easily I read,
and predecessors were weary immigrant stock.
The same goes for working at the height
of her powers, as if it’s obvious
I’m teetering on the edge of senility.
I don’t want to have to look things up:
lapidary style? I’d prefer not to be a talent;
as if my mother has dressed me
in a spangled leotard, tap shoes,
my hair in Bo-Peep curls.
But I like sexy, even if unearned.
I like elegance, bite. I want someone
to confess they’ve fallen in love with me
and another to say, No, she’s mine.
And a third to just come out with it:
she will go directly to heaven.

It’s not January (obviously), but I can relate to being alone with a pumpkin. In fact, I’m baking bourbon pumpkin pecan bread right now.

Solitude
By Kerry Hardie

It was January,
I’d hardly seen anyone for days, you understand.
The sheep were all sitting separate and silent,
a hard wind was coming in over the hill,
a white moon floated.

I’d bought the pumpkin for soup.
My arms had dropped with the weight of it,
dropped and come back, like the bounce back up into air
after the deep of the river.
I’d hefted it in from the car,
set it down on the table.
It was smaller and fiercer and redder than I’d expected.

I was out on the hill for the sake of the moon
and the ash trees, raking the way with shadow.
Where the road ran high the fields slid into the valley.
Cloud covered the slopes of the mountains,
laying down snow.
I carried the color, red fire on the dark of the table,
the color would bear me through till his return.

When I got home the phone was ringing,
I had the key in the door but it wouldn’t turn.
I heard the phone cease in the empty house.
And the dogs milled about.
And the pumpkin stared out at the moon.

Though I haven’t read a great deal of Stevens’s poems, some of what I have read really intrigues me. Also, one of my poetry pals is really inspired by him. This poem, read by the author, was included in Poetry on Record. I’ve never been all that into art because for me, words speak more than pictures. I don’t really want to invent a story about a painting or sculpture. I want someone else to do it for me. Perhaps for that reason, I quite like poems about art. Some examples that spring to mind are: Manet’s Olympia by Margaret Atwood, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams, and Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden.

So and So Reclining on Her Couch
By Wallace Stevens

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in the air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her head there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final projection, C.

The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye,
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

I absolutely can’t believe I’ve never posted this poem. Granted, it’s not my favorite and I think its excessive usage around graduation is a little scary. Perhaps I always assumed I’d posted it? Anyway, when I can successfully remove all thoughts of trite greeting cards and read the poem, I do think it’s quite lovely.

The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

All I can really say about this poem is WOW.

To be a Jew in the twentieth century
By Muriel Rukeyser

To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist; and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages.
The gift is torment. Not alone the still
Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.

For Christmas my dear sister made me a gift of Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006. I have listened to a track here and there, but didn’t want to immerse myself until I had time to really savor. Perhaps I just needed to make time. I’m feeling lazy and it’s cold outside so I’m holing up to enjoy the poems. So far I’ve made it to tracks 5 & 6 on disc 1, and I have to post the PotD already. I may have mentioned how I love Yeats’s poetry (ha!), but I am blown away to hear him express his poems. I don’t merely say read because he gave an introduction, in which he said that he’s deliberately not reading them as prose because it was very hard to get what he wanted to say into verse form. There are recordings of The Lake Isle of Innisfree and the one below. His renditions are somewhere between speaking and singing and are really quite amazing, to me. I feel like I’ve taken something new and different from these poems now. I want to hear him read (only for lack of a better descriptor) all his poems!

The Song of the Old Mother
By William Butler Yeats

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
And the young lie long and dream in their bed
Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,
And their days go over in idleness,
And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress:
While I must work because I am old,
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.

I’m currently reading Anna Karenina for book club. Perhaps the Russian influence made me look for an Akhmatova poem. This one reminds me of Mrs. Lot by Vassar Miller.

Lot’s Wife
By Anna Akhmatova

And the just man trailed God’s shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
“It’s not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.”
A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound…
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

I read this one in I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. I know I’ve probably said it before, but Linda Pastan is amazing. Ever since a wonderful conversation with my poetry pals, I’ve thought about what actually constitutes a poem. In the conventional sense, it’s something someone has written down. But maybe it can also be an object or an event. I like Pastan’s take on it.

Elegy
By Linda Pastan

Somewhere a poem
is waiting for me
to write it: in the jewelry box,
coiled into an old ring
or stopping the hands
of a watch;
in the vanishing barn, risen
to the top of the pail
to be skimmed off;
or in the tree outside
engraved in green ink
on the underside of a leaf.

In my old room
the white curtains blow
like ghosts of themselves
over the sill;
under the bed misplaced words gather
to grab my helpless ankle.
It is a poem
the child I was hides
in the ear of the woman
I have become: a poem
whose lines were the lines
of my father’s face.

This one was shared by a poetry buddy.

Crush
By Ada Limón

Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons. You can’t
really eat them. Or you
wouldn’t want to. If you grab
the soft side with your fist
it somehow feels funny,
like you’ve been here
before and uncomfortable,
too, like you’d rather
squish it between your teeth
impatiently, before spitting
the soft parts back up
to linger on the tongue like
burnt sugar or guilt.
For starters, it was all
an accident, you cut
the right branch
and a sort of light
woke up underneath,
and the indelible fruit
grew dark and needy.
Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.

I read this one in (shockingly) 180 More. I couldn’t get past the first line just now, but I’m going to post it and then head right to bed.

What I Want
By George Bilgere

          for my marriage, 1996-2000

I want a good night’s sleep.
I want to get up without feeling
That to waken is to plunge through a trap door.

I want to ride my motorcycle
In late spring through the Elysian Fields
Of the Rocky Mountains

And lie once more with Cecelia
In the summer of 1985
On a blanket in the backyard of our house

In Denver and watch the clouds expand.
And it would be great to see my mother
Alive again, at the stove, frying a pan of noodles

Into the peculiar carbonized disc that has never been replicated.
I would like for my ex-wife to get leprosy,
Her beauty falling away in little chunks

To the disgust of everyone in the chic café
Where she exercises her gift
For doing absolutely nothing.

*   *    *

I want world peace.
I want to come home one evening
And find Julia, the new assistant professor

In the history department,
Has let herself into my apartment
For the express purpose of lecturing me

On the history of lingerie.
I don’t ask for much: a good merlot.
An afternoon thunderstorm cooling off

The city as I sit listening to Ella
Sing “Spring is Here,” so the air goes lyrical
And perhaps a stray bolt of lightening

Strikes my ex-wife as she steps from her car,
Setting her on fire, to the unqualified delight
Of the friends she has come to visit,

Who are thoroughly sick of her self-aggrandizing stories.
I want to spark a bowl of Maui Wowie
And spend the entire afternoon in my dorm room

*   *    *

With Corrine Spellman, trying to remember
What we were talking about, wondering
Whether, in fact, we had had sex yet.

I’d like to sit at the little outdoor restaurant
By the lake in Forest Park, talking with my aunt
In the humid summer twilight, as the hot

St. Louis day expires upon the water
And the moth-eaten Chinese lanterns
Glow like faded Kodachrome.

We would argue about the great tenor voices
Of the century, or causes for the dearth
Of poetry about the Gulf War,

Or why my father drank himself into an elegy
We never stop revising,
While couples on their paddleboats come in

From the darkening lake, as they’ve done
Since the beginning of time, and children
Call each other across the shadowy fields.

*   *    *

Yes, that would be nice.
I want a good woman
With a sweet bosom

And a wicked sense of humor.
I want to wake up in London on a spring morning
And read in the paper that my ex-wife

Has received a lethal injection, courtesy of the state
Of Ohio, as part of a citywide program aimed
At improving the civic pride of Cleveland,

But something went terribly wrong
And she’s been left in a persistent
Vegetative state

Which everyone agrees
Is nonetheless an improvement.
And it would be wonderful

To sit down with Maria
At our favorite restaurant in Madrid
With some good red wine

*   *    *

And listen to her Spanish
Caress the evening.
I want to read that a new manuscript

Of poetry by James Wright
Has been discovered in someone’s attic,
And someone I haven’t yet met,

In some future I have yet to despoil
Has bought it for my birthday,
And after the kids are asleep

We sit out in the backyard,
A little drunk, and read it
Aloud to each other,

Something we often do
In summer, before climbing upstairs to the bedroom
In the big old house we love so much.

This poem had me at the first line.

To Stammering
By Kenneth Koch

Where did you come from, lamentable quality?
Before I had a life you were about to ruin my life.
The mystery of this stays with me.
“Don’t brood about things,” my elders said.
I hadn’t any other experience of enemies from inside.
They were all from outside–big boys
Who cursed me and hit me; motorists; falling trees.
All these you were as bad as, yet inside. When I spoke, you were there.
I could avoid you by singing or acting.
I acted in school plays but was no good at singing.
Immediately after the play you were there again.
You ruined the cast party.
You were not a sign of confidence.
You were not a sign of manliness.
You were stronger than good luck and bad; you survived them both.
You were slowly edged out of my throat by psychoanalysis
You who had been brought in, it seems, like a hired thug
To beat up both sides and distract them
From the main issue: oedipal love. You were horrible!
Tell them, now that you’re back in your thug country,
That you don’t have to be so rough next time you’re called in
But can be milder and have the same effect–unhappiness and pain.

I read this one in 180 More and I was wildly amused. When I read a poem like this, I like to think the author just saw one little incident (someone spray-painting a message, or just the message) and invented a whole backstory. I think it’s wonderfully creative.

Girls, Look Out For Todd Bernstein
By Jason Bredle

Because after sitting out for a spell
he’s back with a degree in accounting and a high
paying position in one of the leading pharma-
ceutical corporations in the country
and aspirations of owning that exotic
yellow sports car, license plate
EVIL. And like Dennis Meng at Sycamore
Chevrolet stakes his reputation
on his fully reconditioned used cars,
I stake my reputation on telling you
Todd Bernstein means business this time,
girls. No more of this being passed
over for abusive alcoholic football
stars. He’s got a velour shirt now.
No more of your excuses—if he wants you,
you’re there. None of this I’m washing
my hair Friday night nonsense—come on,
you think Todd Bernstein’s going to fall
for that? He knows you’re not studying, not
busy working on some local political
campaign, not having the guy who played
Cockroach on The Cosby Show over
for dinner, not writing any great American
novel. He’s seen your stuff for God’s sake,
and it’s simply nothing more than mediocre,
long prose poems with titles like
“The Falling” and “Crucible” and “Waking
to Death” that force impossible metaphors,
despairing about love and womanhood
and how bad your life is even though
you grew up happily in suburban America,
or at least as happily as anyone can grow up
in suburban America, which normally, you know,
consists of the appearance of happiness while
your dad is doing three secretaries
on the side and your mom pretends not to know
and brags to the entire town about how you’re
an actress about to star in a sitcom about the mis-
adventures of a cable TV repairperson
who, while out on a routine installation
one day, accidentally electrically blasts
herself into the living room of a family
of barbarian warloads on a planet near
Alpha Centauri who force her into slavery
before sending her on a pillage mission
to a planet of cloxnors who capture her
and place her in a torture institution
where she meets a vulnerable meeb whom
she convinces, because of her cable TV
repairperson skills, to let her become nanny
to its impressionable meeblets just before
it’s about to rip off her limbs with its ferocious
abnons and devour her. The results,
according to your mom, are hilarious, but
come on, you and I both know the story is
just so predictable. And Todd knows damn well
your writing doesn’t pull off
any metaphors for the happiness that was
taken from you by some dude who played
bass and called himself a musician
when all he could really do was play
a couple of chords and sing about true love
and alligators and how the alligator
represents true love which somehow
explains why somebody cut open
an alligator one time in Florida
and found a golfer. There’s just no fooling
Todd. Sure, he’ll act like he’s interested,
that’s Todd Bernstein, and he’ll make
remote claims that he too has written
or been artistic at some point in his life,
but Todd Bernstein knows all you girls
really want is a piece of good old
Todd Bernstein. No longer will any
strange auras enter the bedroom
during sex and keep him from maintaining
an erection, no longer will any women
walk out on him repulsed. If anybody’s
walking out after sex, it’ll be
Todd Bernstein, I can assure you.
He won’t be humiliating himself by falling
down a flight of stairs in front of a group
of Japanese tourists anymore, but rather
coaxing entire masses of women into his bed-
room. Because that’s Todd Bernstein. He’s on
the move. And he wants you to know, girls,
that he’s well aware you certainly can’t learn
Korean sitting around here which is why
he’s out there right now, preparing
for the slew of women just beyond his sexual
horizon, spray-painting GIRLS, LOOK OUT
FOR TODD BERNSTEIN on the side
of a Village Pantry.

I never really thought about Chapter One this way. I’m so impatient that often I just want to get on with things. I think I may have a new appreciation after reading this poem. I usually love books which totally involve me emotionally, but they can be tiring. Chapter One is often comfortable.

Chapter One
By Mark Aiello

I love how books begin; those passages
that lead us by the hand across
the luxurious lawns, that portage us
gently up the gravel drive,
toward the manor house.

The author is still a kind host here,
anxious that we mingle
with the other weekend guests, that we note
how even the banisters are polished for us,
that we feel free to walk out
with the lady of the house and smoke
a cigarette, down the grand alley of elms.

We’re not expected to have things down pat
yet, like the family tree, or the route to the old Abbey.
Nothing really happens now,
beyond the delivery of breakfast trays.
It’s not scheduled to rain
for two more chapters, and no one
who matters to us has died yet.

I realized when posting yesterday’s poem that I had never posted this one. Sorry about the white chickens, indeed!

The Red Wheelbarrow
By William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

This Is Just to Say is really the gift that keeps on giving…

An Apology
By F.J. Bergmann

Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.

It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.

I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.

Today I feel a need for brevity, so this poem suggested by a reader seems perfect!

The Lily
By William Blake

The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble sheep a threat’ning horn:
While the Lily white shall in love delight,
Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.

I read this one in 180 More. I LOVE IT! I’m a little bitter today so it seemed appropriate to post it. There are a number of people I feel like telling, “The goldfish of my genius hates you.” What does that even mean??? Exactly…

Hate Poem
By Julie Sheehan

I hate you truly. Truly I do.
Everything about me hates everything about you.
The flick of my wrist hates you.
The way I hold my pencil hates you.
The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the
   jaws of a moray eel hates you.
Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

The blue-green speck of sock lint I’m trying to dig from
   under my third toenail, left foot, hates you.
The history of this keychain hates you.
My sigh in the background as you pick out the cashews hates you.
The goldfish of my genius hates you.
My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors.

A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious
   symbol of how I hate you.

My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate.
My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.
My pleasant “good morning”: hate.
You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head under your
   arm? Hate.
The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit practices it.
My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you.
Layers of hate, a parfait.
Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate,
I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one
   individually and at leisure.
My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of
   my hate, which can never have enough of you,
Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.

This one was shared by one of my poetry pals. I don’t think I’ve read a poem by Linda Pastan that wasn’t amazing.

Gone Missing
By Linda Pastan

At the unmarked border
between sense
and senselessness
one boy steps over
the edge of the world
taking with him a blue
sweater, a razor, and
from the emptied pockets
of those he leaves behind
all certainty. The night

is very still, the only light
a cutting edge of moon.
He leaves his toothbrush,
the abstract letters of his name,
and a vision, photo perfect,
of what we fear the most:
our own loved children loosed
by stealth or by accident
into the beautiful
and unforgiving world.

I read this one in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Despite my penchant for dark poetry, I can only read Sylvia Plath in small doses because her work is so depressing and intense. I do find myself reading a poem of hers over many times in order to absorb it.

Edge
By Sylvia Plath

The woman is perfected
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Edna, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

Mist in the Valley
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

These hills, to hurt me more,
That am hurt already enough,—
Having left the sea behind,
Having turned suddenly and left the shore
That I had loved beyond all words, even a song’s words, to convey,

And built me a house on upland acres,
Sweet with the pinxter, bright and rough
With the rusty blackbird long before the winter’s done,
But smelling never of bayberry hot in the sun,
Nor ever loud with the pounding of the long white breakers,—

These hills, beneath the October moon,
Sit in the valley white with mist
Like islands in a quiet bay,

Jut out from shore into the mist,
Wooded with poplar dark as pine,
Like points of land into a quiet bay.

(Just in the way
The harbour met the bay)

Stricken too sore for tears,
I stand, remembering the Islands and the sea’s lost sound. . . .
Life at its best no longer than the sand-peep’s cry,
And I two years, two years,
Tilling an upland ground!

My apologies for missing yesterday. When you leave for work at 6am, rush home right afterward to walk your dog before heading 45 minutes away for book club, not to return home until 9pm… you go to bed instead of posting a poem. Anyway, I’ve gained a new appreciation for dogs after getting one a year ago (has it been a year???). My adorable little pooch is currently curled up in her bed. Alas that I have not the talent to paint her like the Dutch masters!

Update: You can read this poem and others on the poet’s website.

The Dogs in Dutch Paintings
By David Graham

How shall I not love them, snoozing
right through the Annunciation? They inhabit
the outskirts of every importance, sprawl
dead center in each oblivious household.

They’re digging at fleas or snapping at scraps,
dozing with noble abandon while a boy
bells their tails. Often they present their rumps
in the foreground of some martyrdom.

What Christ could lean so unconcernedly
against a table leg, the feast above continuing?
Could the Virgin in her joy match this grace
as a hound sagely ponders an upturned turtle?

No scholar at his huge book will capture
my eye so well as the skinny haunches,
the frazzled tails and serene optimism
of the least of these mutts, curled

in the corners of the world’s dazzlement.