Poem of the Day

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.

I found this one in 180 More (surprise!) and I thought I’d post it because it’s been raining here for several days and is supposed to keep raining all week. I can’t say that I’ve spent any time outside brooding over my sucky life, though. (ha ha ha)

Why it Often Rains in the Movies
By Lawrence Raab

Because so much consequential thinking
happens in the rain. A steady mist
to recall departures, a bitter downpour
for betrayal. As if the first thing
a man wants to do when he learns his wife
is sleeping with his best friend, and has been
for years, the very first thing
is not to make a drink, and drink it,
and make another, but to walk outside
into bad weather. It’s true
that the way we look doesn’t always
reveal our feelings. Which is a problem
for the movies. And why somebody has to smash
a mirror, for example, to show he’s angry
and full of self-hate, whereas actual people
rarely do this. And rarely sit on benches
in the pouring rain to weep. Is he wondering
why he didn’t see it long ago? Is he wondering
if in fact he did, and lied to himself?
And perhaps she also saw the many ways
he’d allowed himself to be deceived. In this city
it will rain all night. So the three of them
return to their houses, and the wife
and her lover go upstairs to bed
while the husband takes a small black pistol
from a drawer, turns it over in his hands,
the puts it back. Thus demonstrating
his inability to respond to passion
with passion. But we don’t want him
to shoot his wife, or his friend, or himself.
And we’ve begun to suspect
that none of this is going to work out,
that we’ll leave the theater feeling
vaguely cheated, just as the movie,
turning away from the husband’s sorrow,
leaves him to be a man who must continue,
day after day, to walk outside into the rain,
outside and back again, since now there can be
nowhere in this world for him to rest.

I read this one in 180 More. As a big Johnny Cash fan, I was intrigued by the title. Here’s a link to the Hurt video on YouTube. The song lyrics (among others) are alluded to in this poem. If you haven’t listened to much of Johnny Cash’s music, I can’t recommend it enough! Whatever you’re interested in, it’s possible he’s done something that will appeal to you: rockabilly, Gospel, country, folk, etc.

To Roanoke with Johnny Cash
By Bob Hicok

Mist became rain became fog was mist
reborn every few miles on a road
made of s and z, of switchback

and falling into mountains of night
would have been easy and who
would have known until flames

and nobody, even then. I played his life
over and over, not so much song
as moan of a needle and the bite,

the hole it eats through the arm
and drove faster to the murmur
of this dead and crow-dressed man,

voice of prison and heroin and the bible
as turned by murdering hands.
And the road was the color of him

and the night was blind but the mist
turned blaze in headlights as I haunted
myself with one of the last songs

he sang, about what else, about pain
and death and regret and the fall
that was the soul of the man.

I’ve been on hiatus for so long, that I feel I need to share poems from my favorites, so here’s one from NSN.

Alone
By Naomi Shihab Nye

He grows used to the sound of the floor
Not yet   Not yet   each evening
right before the news comes on.

Then the killing and the stabbing
and the beating and the crashing.
Turn it off. There’s a smudge on the wall,
a Jesus with a blazing heart.

His coffee cup waits
upside down on its plate.
The shape of dinner tastes upside down.
He eats whatever the nurse-lady left him,
the hamburger in its three-day shirt.
Sometimes he doesn’t know the name
of what he eats.

He hauls his body to the porch,
sinks his eyes into the weeds.
A hose curls in the lilies.
If he could reach it,
make it down
those three crooked steps…

When his wife died he was very quiet
for one day. Then he smiled
and smiled with his two teeth
for the bad time they had
that was over.

His tongue could sound Soledad or Solamente
for his bones and his blood and his few good hairs.

When the drop of water on the white sink
meets the next drop and they are joining,
he thinks of other ways to spend this life
that he didn’t do. He would like to meet them.

This one was shared by a poetry buddy from GoodReads. I like the idea of used books, but I will confess that sometimes I don’t really enjoy the odors associated with them. I like to think of the different people that may have read the book, though.

Used Books
By Sarah Jane Sloat

I like them dog-eared and lawnsoft,
and savor the character of winestain
and thumbsmudge,

the tear-warp between pages,
scrawl lolling down margins,

x’s, question and check marks
scratched out as anchors.

They kindle affinity with readers
who’ve leafed through before, house

a kinship of signatures, conjuring towns
and streets in states I’ll never visit.

They preach the economy of timber
and purses, while scribbled dates

evoke evenings spent couch-lounging
through past springs and winters.

Though they come off the press crisp
and unsullied, I like them used

for the gust of tinder and sawdust,
the waft of feathers adrift in a hayloft.

I turn the yellow hem of the pages,
a hue half neon, half tubercular,

like the wallpaper of a motel
nicotine-thick with confessions

where with the fray, I find repose
under covers well plumbed
and sepulchral.

I found this one in 180 More. Not all of Sharon Olds’ poems appeal to me because they can be a bit blunt and/or graphic for my tastes. I found this one interesting, though.

First Hour
By Sharon Olds

That hour, I was most myself. I had shrugged
my mother slowly off, I lay there
taking my first breaths, as if
the air of the room was blowing me
like a bubble. All I had to do
was go out along the line of my gaze and back,
feeling gravity, silk, the
pressure of the air a caress, smelling on
myself her creamy blood. The air
was softly touching my skin and mouth,
entering me and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine.
I was not afraid. I lay in the quiet
and looked, and did the wordless thought,
my mind was getting its oxygen
direct, the rich mix by mouth.
I hated no one. I gazed and gazed,
and everything was interesting, I was
free, not yet in love, I did not
belong to anyone, I had drunk
no milk yet—no one had
my heart. I was not very human. I did not
know there was anyone else. I lay
like a god, for an hour, then they came for me
and took me to my mother.

This one is from 180 More, which I’m still reading through. I’m rather amused by it and hadn’t really thought of pregnancy in this way before.

The Alien
By Greg Delanty

I’m back again scrutinising the Milky Way
   of your ultrasound, scanning the dark
      matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say
   is chockablock with quarks & squarks,
gravitons & gravitini, photons & photinos. Our sprout,

who art there inside the spacecraft
   of your Ma, the time capsule of this printout,
      hurling & whirling towards us, it’s all daft
   on this earth. Our alien who art in the heavens,
our Martian, our little green man, we’re anxious

to make contact, to ask divers questions
   about the heavendom you hail from, to discuss
      the whole shebang of the beginning&end,
   the pre-big-bang untime before you forget the why
and lie of thy first place. And, our friend,

to say Welcome, that we mean no harm, we’d die
   for you even, that we pray you’re not here
      to subdue us, that we’d put away
   our ray guns, missiles, attitude and share
our world with you, little big head, if only you stay.

I got this one from I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. The next couple weeks are going to be a bit hectic and I’m considering a PotD hiatus. We will see. I don’t like not posting, but it’s quite difficult when my time is not my own.

We Say
By Reginald Gibbons

We say a heart breaks—like
a stick, maybe, or a bottle
or a wave. But it seems, too,
like the consuming flame
of a moment, the field clump
that crackles upward from a match
and collapses, grass filaments
glowing in the ash-dust
then going out. Today
I take myself down by steps,
one at a time, into the sadness
I admit I can’t always reach.
There should be a room
at the bottom of the black stairway,
my friends sitting with strangers,
waiting, but there’s no one,
only the memory, when
the pale air flickers as if
it were an invisible flame,
of my aunt in her hospital bed
and beside her, about to be left
alone—the last sister, and so soon—
my mother, bent over
the purse in her lap, eyes closed.
I can see the patent leather gloss
and the shiny clasp that until
just now she had been
snapping open and shut, till—
just now—it broke. That breaking—
like a voice that cracks, cursing
or crying, or the song that falls,
out of thinking too far ahead,
into a smoldering loneliness—
was that the sound of the heart?

I apologize for the hiatus. Last week really took its toll on me and I’m still trying to recover. I chose this poem tonight for two reasons: 1) I just read (and enjoyed) Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins, sent by my poetry buddy, and various poets including Eliot are mentioned; and 2) it’s a very windy night here.

Rhapsody on a Windy Night
By T.S. Eliot

Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.”

The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”

The last twist of the knife.

I just realized that it’s been quite a while since I posted a poem from NSN.

Fundamentalism
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Because the eye has a short shadow or
it is hard to see over heads in the crowd?

If everyone else seems smarter
but you need your own secret?

If mystery was never your friend?

If one way could satisfy
the infinite heart of the heavens?

If you liked the king on his golden throne
more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons?

If you wanted to be sure
his guards would admit you to the party?

     The boy with the broken pencil
     scrapes his little knife against the lead
     turning and turning it as a point
     emerges from the wood again

     If he would believe his life is like that
     he would not follow his father into war

I found this one in 180 More.

A Jacquard Shawl
By Ted Kooser

A pattern of curly acanthus leaves,
and woven into one corner
in blue block letters half an inch tall:
MADE FROM WOOL FROM SHEEP
KILLED BY DOGS. 1778.
As it is with jacquards,
the design reverses to gray on blue
when you turn it over,
and the words run backward
into the past. The rest of the story
lies somewhere between one side
and the other, woven into
the plane where the colors reverse:
the circling dogs, the terrified sheep,
the meadow stippled with blood,
and the weaver by lamplight
feeding what wool she was able to save
into the faintly bleating, barking loom.

My uncle’s mother passed away last week. She was (great-great, great-) grandmother by blood to many, but also grandmother to so many others as well. She and her husband were great friends of my grandparents (and all four were delighted when my aunt and uncle married, over 50 years ago). She was full of joy and love and the world was lucky to have her for the last 90+ years.

That doesn’t really have a lot to do with this poem, other than that someone dear to me has passed. This one’s been in my file for a while and every time I read it, I feel like my heart has been ripped out. (My kind of poem!)

When a friend dies
By Marge Piercy

When a friend dies
the salmon run no fatter.
The wheat harvest will feed no more bellies.
Nothing is won by endurance
but endurance.
A hunger sucks at the mind
for gone color after the last bronze
chrysanthemum is withered by frost.
A hunger drains the day,
a homely sore gap
after a tooth is pulled,
a red giant gone nova,
an empty place in the sky
sliding down the arch
after Orion in night as wide
as a sleepless staring eye.
When pain and fatigue wrestle
fatigue wins. The eye shuts.
Then the pain rises again at dawn.
At first you can stare at it,
Then it blinds you.

I decided to check out Sonnet Central because I haven’t posted a sonnet in a while. Craik is the author of one of my favorite poems.

Dante to Beatrice
By Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

I see thee, gliding towards me with slow pace
Across the azure fields of Paradise,
Where thine each footstep makes a star arise.
So from this heart’s once void but infinite space
Each strange sweet touch of thy celestial grace
In the old mortal life, struck out some spark
To light the world, though all my heaven lay dark.
O Beatrice, cypresses enlace
My laurels: none have grown save tear-bedewed—
Salt tears that sank into the earth unviewed,
And sprang up green to form a crown of bays.
Take it! At thy dear feet I lay my all,
What men my honors, virtues, glories, call:
I lived, loved, suffered, sung—for thy sole praise.

Here is another one my poetry buddy sent me.

The Light Wraps You
By Pablo Neruda

The light wraps you in its mortal flame.
Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of the twilight
that revolves around you.

Speechless, my friend,
alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day.

A bough of fruit falls from the sun on your dark garment.
The great roots of night
grow suddenly from your soul,
and the things that hide in you come out again
so that a blue and palled people
your newly born, takes nourishment.

Oh magnificent and fecund and magnetic slave
of the circle that moves in turn through black and gold:
rise, lead and possess a creation
so rich in life that its flowers perish
and it is full of sadness.

I was going through old comments and came across this one, recommended by a reader.

The Horses
By Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
“They’ll molder away and be like other loam.”
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.

And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.

We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.

We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.

Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

This poet is a correspondent of my poetry pals. I was glad to come across his work at American Life in Poetry.

I stand alone at the foot
By William Kloefkorn

I stand alone at the foot
Of my father’s grave,
Trembling to tell:
The door to the granary is open,
Sir,
And someone lost the bucket
To the well.

Today I was reminded of Ted Kooser’s wonderful blog, American Life in Poetry, which I used to read often, but which had fallen off my radar a while ago. It would be a shame if it wasn’t so cool that I have a whole treasure trove of poems to read now. Here’s the source of today’s. I like it for its descriptions, even though green tea is not my favorite. (Shockingly, I’m not even drinking tea right now; I’m drinking hot chocolate.)

Green Tea
By Dale Ritterbusch

There is this tea
I have sometimes,
Pan Long Ying Hao,
so tightly curled
it looks like tiny roots
gnarled, a greenish-gray.
When it steeps, it opens
the way you woke this morning,
stretching, your hands behind
your head, back arched,
toes pointing, a smile steeped
in ceremony, a celebration,
the reaching of your arms.

This one comes from (of course) 180 More. I want to post it tonight because I’ve had a successful night in the kitchen. I had two very ripe bananas so I made banana walnut crumb muffins, which are fabulous. Then I made oven “fried” chicken and mashed potatoes with fresh chives. YUM!

Acceptance Speech
By Lynn Powell

The radio’s replaying last night’s winners
and the gratitude of the glamorous,
everyone thanking everybody for making everything
so possible, until I want to shush
the faucet, dry my hands, join in right here
at the cluttered podium of the sink, and thank

my mother for teaching me the true meaning of okra,
my children for putting back the growl in hunger,
my husband, primo uomo of dinner, for not
begrudging me this starring role—

without all of them, I know this soup
would not be here tonight.

And let me just add that I could not
have made it without the marrow bone, that blood-
brother to the broth, and the tomatoes
who opened up their hearts, and the self-effacing limas,
the blonde sorority of corn, the cayenne
and oregano who dashed in
in the nick of time.

Special thanks, as always, to the salt—
you know who you are—and to the knife,
who revealed the ripe beneath the rind,
the clean truth underneath the dirty peel.

—I hope I’ve not forgotten anyone—
oh, yes, to the celery and the parsnip,
those bit players only there to swell the scene,
let me just say: sometimes I know exactly how you feel.

But not tonight, not when it’s all
coming to something and the heat is on and
I’m basking in another round
of blue applause.

This is another one from 180 More. I’m reminded of Permanently by Kenneth Koch. I like this one because, despite my love of poetry, I’m a very reason-oriented person and like for things to be 1) explainable and 2) ordered. I’m amused by the personification of these “ornaments of speech”.

“Even Ornaments of Speech are Forms of Deceit”
                                        HISTORY OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY
By Ron Koertge

It’s 1667. Reason is everywhere, saving
for the future, ordering a small glass of wine.
Cause, arm in arm with Effect, strolls by
in sturdy shoes.

Of course, there are those who venture
out under cover of darkness to buy a bag
of metaphors or even some personification
from Italy, primo and uncut.

But for the most part, poets like Roderigo
stroll the boulevards in their normal hats.
When he thinks of his beloved, he opens
his notebook with a flourish.

“Your lips,” he writes, “are like
lips.”

I found this one in 180 More, and I’m not surprised that it appealed to me. I’ve really enjoyed reading Koch’s work.

To My Twenties
By Kenneth Koch

How lucky that I ran into you
When everything was possible
For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart
And so happy to see any woman—
O woman! O my twentieth year!
Basking in you, you
Oasis from both growing and decay
Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis
A palm tree, hey! And then another
And another—and water!
I’m still very impressed by you. Whither,
Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow,
Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable
For the moment in any case, do you live now?
From my window I drop a nickel
By mistake. With
You I race down to get it
But I find there on
The street instead, a good friend,
X— N—, who says to me
Kenneth do you have a minute?
And I say yes! I am in my twenties!
I have plenty of time! In you I marry,
In you I first go to France; I make my best friends
In you, and a few enemies. I
Write a lot and am living all the time
And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you
After my teens and before my thirties.
You three together in a bar
I always preferred you because you were midmost
Most lustrous apparently strongest
Although now that I look back on you
What part have you played?
You never, ever, were stingy.
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how best to use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back.

After 10.5 hours in the car yesterday and the excitement of arriving at my destination, I didn’t get around to posting a poem yesterday. This one was sent by my poetry buddy.

Haute Cuisine
By Paul Otremba

The pig couldn’t know it was a pig,
not because it lacked a conspicuous
preference for truffles over the few
rotten turnips set aside for the trash,

but because when I looked, there was
a thin slit of a smile across its throat,
which explained the pig’s patience
with the cooks. One punched holes

his friend filled with garlic, each twist
of the blade loosening the meat
from a word rising in my own throat,
as I scoured dishes in the sink,

an orange slither of oil inscribed
on the surface. But the pig couldn’t
know it was a pig. No hooves
hammered against steel counters,

there was no last leap onto the stove.
The cooks, too, had only a slim
notion: one sang along with the radio,
the other wiped his hands on his shirt.

This is another one suggested by a reader. I’m going out of town for the holiday weekend, but will still try to post a PotD.

And did those feet in ancient time
By William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

It’s a good thing that my poetry buddy keeps me supplied with poems for times like this when I’m lazy and would rather lie on my hammock reading a book all evening than look for a poem.

All I Want To Say
By Linda Pastan

“A painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.” —Edouard Manet

When I pass you this bowl
of Winesaps, do I want to say:
here are some rosy spheres
of love, or lust—emblems
of all the moments after Eden
when a pinch of the forbidden
was like spice on that first apple?
Or do I simply mean: I’m sorry,
I was busy today; fruit is all
there is for dessert.

And when you picked
a single bloom from the fading bush
outside our window,
were you saying that I am somehow
like a flower, or deserving of flowers?
Were you saying
anything flowery at all?
Or simply: here is the last rose
of November, please
put it in water.

As for clouds,
as for those white, voluptuous
abstractions floating overhead,
they are not camels or pillows
or even the snowy peaks
of half-imagined mountains.
They are the pure shapes
of silence, and they are
saying exactly
what I want to say.

This one was recommended by a reader.

Full fathom five
FROM THE TEMPEST, ACT I, SCENE II
By William Shakespeare

Full fathom five thy father lies;
   Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
   Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
      Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

This was contributed by a poetry buddy. I didn’t have a chance to finish reading 180 More over the weekend or add the bookmarked poems to my file. Alas!

Scars
By William Stafford

They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can’t reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.