Trojan Poetry 61: Mark Strand "For Jessica, My Daughter," "My Son," and "The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter"

For Jessica, My Daughter
by Mark Strand

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.

Trojan Poetry 60: "Democracy" by Suzanne Gardinier

Democracy
By Suzanne Gardinier

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

Trojan Poetry 59: Osip Mandelstam, translated by Christian Wiman

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.

Trojan Poetry 58: "The Space Heater" by Sharon Olds

The Space Heater
by Sharon Olds

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.

Trojan Poetry 57: "Monsters" by Dorothea Lasky

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.

Trojan Poetry 56: "Late Echo" by John Ashbery

Late Echo
by John Ashbery

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.

Trojan Poetry 55: "Schwinn" and "Why Poetry" by Matthew Zapruder

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.