Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father's, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks 'til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn't blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion's perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn't happen.
I dare you.
Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper’s bullet.
I don’t know what made the grass
sway seconds before the Viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet
against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman’s wild colors,
causing some dark bird’s love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks
for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we played some deadly
game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarch
writhing on a single thread
tied to a farmer’s gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. Maybe the hills
grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud
hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I’m still
falling through its silence.
I don’t know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something
stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved.
Tonight I walked,
lost in my own meditation,
and was afraid,
not of the labyrinth
that I have made of love and self
but of the dark and faraway.
I walked, hearing the wind in the trees,
feeling the cold against my skin,
but what I dwelled on
were the stars blazing
in the immense arc of sky.
Jessica, it is so much easier
to think of our lives,
as we move under the brief luster of leaves,
loving what we have,
than to think of how it is
such small beings as we
travel in the dark
with no visible way
or end in sight.
Yet there were times I remember
under the same sky
when the body's bones became light
and the wound of the skull
opened to receive
the cold rays of the cosmos,
and were, for an instant,
themselves the cosmos,
there were times when I could believe
we were the children of stars
and our words were made of the same
dust that flames in space,
times when I could feel in the lightness of breath
the weight of a whole day
come to rest.
But tonight
it is different.
Afraid of the dark
in which we drift or vanish altogether,
I imagine a light
that would not let us stray too far apart,
a secret moon or mirror,
a sheet of paper,
something you could carry
in the dark
when I am away.
My Son
by Mark Strand
My son
my only son,
the one I never had,
would be a man today.
He moves
in the wind,
fleshless, nameless.
Sometimes
he comes
and leans his head,
lighter than air
against my shoulder
and I ask him,
Son,
where do you stay,
where do you hide?
And he answers me
with a cold breath,
You never noticed
though I called
and called
and keep on calling
from a place
beyond,
beyond love,
where nothing,
everything,
wants to be born.
The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter
by Mark Strand
It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.
Nothing hurts but the foot is insistent
The foot seeps The foot has never healed
The foot pierced and swollen will not be hidden
The foot will at all costs be included
The foot will unburden The foot will rule
waking and sleep until it’s attended
Attention The foot has something to say
but no way of speaking The foot is sealed
and drums the ground in coded unvocable
syllables The foot has a story
the foot can’t tell The foot draws near
to weeping to the silver abundance
of stacked fish to fire to amputations
to the trading of copper cocoa and tin
to the spraying of passersby with rounds
of ammunition to the transfer of deeds
to the spewing of muttered words from the tried
and vanished to notices of eviction
to braids of rawhide with salt-stiff handles
to turkey and cranberry suppers to
the holds of ships to forcings on rooftops
and on pine needles to quahogs and muskets
to blocks of auction and execution
The foot pats the dirt garbled growing
tired but not resting The foot continues
Christian Wiman reading "And I Was Alive": https://onbeing.org/blog/and-i-was-alive/
Christian Wiman on translating Mandelstam: http://www.fsgpoetry.com/fsg/2011/04/christian-wiman-on-translating-osip-mandelstam.html
Mounds of Human Heads by Osip Mandelstam (translated by Christian Wiman)
Mounds of human heads and mine
Among them, unseen, unmarked, unmourned.
But look: in lines as cherished as a lover’s scars,
In screams of children who play at wars,
I rise with my hands of wind, my tongue of sun.
And I Was Alive by Osip Mandelstam (translated by Christian Wiman)
And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird–cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self–shattering
power,
And it was all aimed at me.
What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?
Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.
On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients' chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst's couch, at the end,
like the infant's headstone that was added near the foot
of my father's grave. And it was hot, with the almost
laughing satire of a fire's heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises-
I wanted the doctor to turn it off
but I couldn't seem to ask, so I just
stared, but it did not budge. The doctor
turned his heavy, soft palm
outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I
said, "If you're cold-are you cold? But if it's on
for me..." He held his palm out toward me,
I tried to ask, but I only muttered,
but he said, "Of course," as if I had asked,
and he stood up and approached the heater, and then
stood on one foot, and threw himself
toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand
reached down, behind the couch, to pull
the plug out. I looked away,
I had not known he would have to bend
like that. And I was so moved, that he
would act undignified, to help me,
that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if
the moans made sentences which bore
some human message. If he would cast himself toward the
outlet for me, as if bending with me in my old
shame and horror, then I would rest
on his art-and the heater purred, like a creature
or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,
the father of a child, the spirit of a father,
the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,
the heat of vision, the power of heat,
the pleasure of power.
Lasky reading her poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56427/monsters
Interview from which the excerpt is taken: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/interview-dorothea-lasky/
Lasky giving presentation about how poetry makes us human: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DCIkBx64DU&t=1288s
Monsters
by Dorothea Lasky
This is a world where there are monsters
There are monsters everywhere, racoons and skunks
There are possums outside, there are monsters in my bed.
There is one monster. He is my little one.
I talk to my little monster.
I give my little monster some bacon but that does not satisfy him.
I tell him, ssh ssh, don’t growl little monster!
And he growls, oh boy does he growl!
And he wants something from me,
He wants my soul.
And finally giving in, I give him my gleaming soul
And as he eats my gleaming soul, I am one with him
And stare out his eyepits and I see nothing but white
And then I see nothing but fog and the white I had seen before was nothing but fog
And there is nothing but fog out the eyes of monsters.
Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.
Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.
Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.
Zapruder reading the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb_KwZXLjt8
Schwinn
by Matthew Zapruder
I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,
and I’d like to quit the committee
for naming tornadoes. Do you remember
how easy and sad it was to be young
and defined by our bicycles? My first
was yellow, and though it was no Black
Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity
I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone,
chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods
with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear
family in a television show totally unaffected
by a distant war. Then we returned
to the green living room to watch the No Names
hold our Over the Hill Gang under
the monotinted chromatic defeated Super
Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly
caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building
on K Street NW where a few minor law firms
mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers
and Meat Cutters. A black hand
already visits my father in sleep, moving
up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.
Trojan Poetry is created by John Waite and Mike Melie, teachers at North High School in Downers Grove. Follow us on twitter @TrojanPoetrydgn.
Frog-Hopping Gravestones
After Bert Hardy
The schoolboys in the cemetery look happily busy, playing what looks like the last
game of tag on earth—one in which the rules are reversed & almost all of them
get to be It. The photographer has caught them rushing between the gravestones,
a swarm of prim haircuts, tailored pants, & recently polished shoes now getting
sullied. This uniformed, many-armed It chases while one lone boy has scurried up
a tree, his arms & knees hugging tight the bark, the darkest part of the picture.
Or maybe this is the wrong song, the tree-climbing & graveyard-running unrelated,
the schoolboys forming separate scenes. For what to make of the boy, a bit older
perhaps, who’s just standing, staring at a gravestone? Does he recognize the name?
For what to make of the boy frog-hopping a gravestone? He’s the sole hopper, & yet
it’s his action that gives the photograph its name, gives this playground at the end
of the world its loudest life: one boy pushing off the top of a gravestone with both
hands, one boy’s legs kicking out, one boy flying, flinging himself in an impossible
direction, a future outside the photograph--
Hear Chen Chen read the poem at this site: http://foggedclarity.com/article/west-of-schenectady/
Chen Chen Interview:https://youtu.be/zcEpHI-Wsag
Chen Chen reading: https://youtu.be/Z12amGb1lLw
Trojan Poetry is created by John Waite and Mike Melie, teachers at North High School in Downers Grove. Follow us on twitter @TrojanPoetrydgn.
West of Schenectady
By Chen Chen
The sun sets like a whispered regret behind the hills or is that a mountain.
Moths come to the screen door as if that was what they were made for.
Moth for screen door. & vice versa.
I don’t have time for their secrets tonight.
I am making my loneliness small. So small it fits on a postcard
a baby rabbit could eat.
The sun sets like an expensive fragrance. Like the memory of a neck.
The coyotes come but don’t they know I’ve named that rabbit, stay away.
Stay far.
The sun sets like a new regret like a flute I am learning to play
& I’m bad at it. Progress is slow.
It’s like saying tapioca pudding into the phone.
& the phone doesn’t work, I just want its weight pressed against my ear
until my ear is sticky.
I’m in the mood for facts.
Big globs of them. Big adult rabbits of science.
There’s a town in Upstate New York called Esperance where the gravity
works fine.
Esperance, NY as if “hope” in French is a higher quality hope.
Made of jewels & brie.
The sun sets like a science special I hated once.
Trojan Poetry is created by John Waite and Mike Melie, teachers at North High School in Downers Grove. Follow us on twitter @TrojanPoetrydgn.
Spell to Find Family
for Kundiman
I thirst for the starlight
that opens elephant skin.
I thirst for the raven
conjugated into riven
by summer storm.
My job is to trick adults
into knowing they have
hearts. My heart whose
irregular plural form is
Hermes. My Hermes
whose mouths are wings
& thieves, begging
the moon for a flood
of wolves, the reddest
honey. My job is to trick
myself into believing
there are new ways
to find impossible honey.
For I do not know all the faces
of my family, on this earth.
Perhaps it will take a lifetime
(or five) to discover every
sister, brother. Heartbeat
elephantine, serpentine,
opposite of saturnine.
I drive in the downpour,
the road conjugated
into uproar, by hearts
I do not know.
By the guttural & gargantuan
highway lion. The 18
-wheeler
whose shawl of mist is a mane
of newborn grandmothers.
Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.
An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion.
A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month;
to-night they are throwing you kisses.
An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a
cherry tree in his back yard.
The clocks say I must go—I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking
white thoughts you rain down.
Shine on, O moon,
Shake out more and more silver changes.
When the moon was full they came to the water.
some with pitchforks, some with rakes,
some with sieves and ladles,
and one with a silver cup.
And they fished til a traveler passed them and said,
"Fools,
to catch the moon you must let your women
spread their hair on the water --
even the wily moon will leap to that bobbing
net of shimmering threads,
gasp and flop till its silver scales
lie black and still at your feet."
And they fished with the hair of their women
till a traveler passed them and said,
"Fools,
do you think the moon is caught lightly,
with glitter and silk threads?
You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks
with those dark animals;
what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?"
And they fished with their tight, hot hearts
till a traveler passed them and said,
"Fools,
what good is the moon to a heartless man?
Put back your hearts and get on your knees
and drink as you never have,
until your throats are coated with silver
and your voices ring like bells."
And they fished with their lips and tongues
until the water was gone
and the moon had slipped away
in the soft, bottomless mud.
The girls turning double-dutch
bob & weave like boxers pulling
punches, shadowing each other,
sparring across the slack cord
casting parabolas in the air. They
whip quick as an infant’s pulse
and the jumper, before she
enters the winking, nods in time
as if she has a notion to share,
waiting her chance to speak. But she’s
anticipating the upbeat
like a bandleader counting off
the tune they are about to swing into.
The jumper stair-steps into mid-air
as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity,
training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment
long enough to fit a second thought in,
she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish
as she flutter-floats into motion
like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos
thumbed alive. Once inside,
the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods
who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch
acquired Manhattan. How she dances
patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing
its travels in scale before the hive. How
the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope
slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.
Her misted skin arranges the light
with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-
hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum
of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow
and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,
surfaces fracturing and reforming
like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.
She makes jewelry of herself and garlands
the ground with shadows.
One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn't know
the magic tree in Don Miguel's patio.
The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything,
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other's empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
Here is a link to Mary Oliver reading "Wild Geese": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4x... “This World” by Mary Oliver I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it nothing fancy. But it seems impossible. Whatever the subject, the morning sun glimmers it. The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star. The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark pinprick well of sweetness. As for the stones on the beach, forget it. Each one could be set in gold. So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds were singing. And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music out of their leaves. And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and beautiful silence as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too hurried to hear it. As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing. So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing. So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too, and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones, so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being locked up in gold. "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Time will say nothing but I told you so Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show, If we should stumble when musicians play, Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although, Because I love you more than I can say, If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, There must be reason why the leaves decay; Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow, The vision seriously intends to stay; If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go, And the brooks and soldiers run away; Will Time say nothing but I told you so? If I could tell you I would let you know.
even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
patience, I think,
my species
keep testing the spiny leaves
the spiny heart
All the Difficult Hours and Minutes
by Jane Hirshfield
All the difficult hours and minutes
are like salted plums in a jar.
Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,
they mutter something the color of sharkfins to the glass.
Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.
First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.
Life after life at nightfall
in houses I have loved
I see them now here at home
where I walk in shadow
through open doorways
from room to room
leaving the lights off
as I always loved to do
knowing beyond belief
echoes of no sound
from other times other ages
how did I ever find
my way to these rooms now
these shadows
one after the other
through all the loud flashing days
how could I have known
the ancient love of these shadows
with the lights on
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.
Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can't recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.
It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.
White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.
