A very bad boy was little Tater:
He stuck an air hose in Sis’s mouth
and proceeded to inflate her.
Tater tied her to a string
And floated her to cloud height;
She drifted with the passing breeze,
A cute little pigtailed kite.
When mater looked up and saw her daughter
Drifting as light as a feather,
She cupped her hands and gave a shout,
“Watch out now for inclement weather.”
Vegetable Swallow
by Tristan Tzara
two smiles meet towards
the child-wheel of my zeal
the bloody baggage of creatures
made flesh in physical legends-lives
the nimble stags storms cloud over
rain falls under the scissors of
the dark hairdresser-furiously
swimming under the clashing arpeggios
in the machine's sap grass
grows around with sharp eyes
here the share of our caresses
dead and departed with the waves
gives itself up to the judgment of time
parted by the meridian of hairs
non strikes in our hands
the spices of human pleasures
She came from Planet Claire
I knew she came from there
She drove a Plymouth Satellite
A-faster than the speed of light
Planet Claire has pink air
All the trees are red
No one ever dies there
No one has a head
Some say she's from Mars
Or one of the seven stars that shine after three-thirty in the morning
Well, she isn't!
She came from Planet Claire
She came from Planet Claire
She came from Planet Claire
Though winged, he walks
on water.
Skates between elements,
skitters like thought
through the cattails.
A snake slips unseen through the underbrush.
The forest shifts and sighs, once again
won't speak its secret.
Between the trees, my father glides
through sunlight, then shadow.
Surface tension:
the strider rows forward
with middle legs, steers with back legs,
grasps with forelegs the
insect
on which he feeds.
Leaning into my reflection,
my arched body is the fulcrum
on which
all of this turns. The sun hollows the air, burns
it of all but the most essential sound.
Mud-slurp and leaf-stir.
And there, a contrail over the Cascades, the quick
stroke of a master's hand,
and through the high hush, the vessel itself
an insect-spark
on the burnt-in blue.
The cow pasture and starlings
that settle all at once like a blanket,
dark raisins over the cows' heads,
*
lone goose, flying down river
third violin, does it hope to catch up
*
did it not notice the gathering,
others heaving themselves from the pond?
*
third violin in the shadow of
the violas, who would like to be a viola
*
rich-voiced as a blue-tick coonhound.
*
In February, sun edges the tree trunks
like a talent still to show itself,
maybe the third violin would slide into
the seconds,
*
the adolescent in "Personal Use Typing"
realize she could slow down and make no mistakes,
*
an acceptable skill
for the world of work.
*
When a new chicken was introduced
she was first boss of the flock but now they all
get along: scrutinize my boots,
mittened hand reaching into the grain pail,
*
the radius of a white bowl.
*
To see them together is to forget
one was the boss, one ate a mouse,
one was intent on finding seeds
*
in the curved wrists of the maple roots.
*
The latch on the front door opens
as you bring in firewood, blows open
the back door
*
sends cats up the walls of the mudroom
to cling to the shelf
with its faded bottle of soap bubbles,
*
an empty wand, frozen, open-mouthed,
*
March, all that deceptive light
but no fruits yet.
From
FIELD
Spring 2018
http://www2.oberlin.edu/ocpress/
Because I’d done wrong I was sent to hell,
down black steps to the airless tombs
of mothballed contraptions and broken tools.
Piled on a shelf every daffodil bulb
was an animal skull or shrunken head,
every drawer a seed-tray of mildew and rust.
In its alcove shrine a bottle of meths
stood corked and purple like a pickled saint.
I inched ahead, pushed the door of the furthest crypt
where starlight broke in through shuttered vents
and there were the shears, balanced on two nails,
hanging cruciform on the white-washed wall.
And because I’d done wrong I was sent
to the end of the garden to cut the hedge,
that dividing line between moor and lawn
gone haywire that summer, all stem and stalk
where there should have been contour and form.
The shears were a crude beast, lumpen, pre-war,
rolling-pin handles on iron-age swords,
an oiled rivet that rolled like a slow eye,
jaws that opened to the tips of its wings
then closed with an executioner’s lisp.
I snipped and prodded at first, pecked at strands,
then cropped and hacked watching spiders scuttle
for tunnels and bolt-holes of woven silk,
and found further in an abandoned nest
like a begging bowl or a pauper’s wreath,
till two hours on the hedge stood scalped
and fleeced, raw-looking, stripped of its green,
my hands blistered, my feet in a litter
of broken arrows and arrowhead leaves.
He came from the house to inspect the work,
didn’t speak, ran his eye over the levelled crown
and the shorn flanks. Then for no reason except
for the sense that comes from doing a thing
for its own sake, he lifted me up in his arms
and laid me down on the top of the hedge,
just lowered me onto that bed of twigs,
and I floated there, cushioned and buoyed
by a million matchwood fingertips,
held by nothing but needling spokes and spikes,
released to the universe, buried in sky.
Yannis Ritsos
By Kazim Ali
"Athens was welcoming to those who had come from the sea."
Mahmoud Darwish
Yannis, you held him in the glare of the diamonded sea,
unteaching him his practical mantra of liberation,
seeing in him a son to take care of you in your loneliness,
loneliness varnished by your detention
in the house made of flower stems that thrust
through the rocks in the prison-yard, its roof made
of the unscannable lines of rain. You revealed to him
the sound of the rusty-hinged door, how it would swing
sadly open and reveal no homeland beyond at all.
He came from the sea dragging his anklets of keys.
Did you teach him then how the old locks and houses
of his hometown were already all broken?
Yannis, in the end he rinsed the last of the coast road's
dust from his body after a lifetime of pressing his language
into lines of poetry and prayer and prestidigitation,
tired of praising mosques in which he could not pray.
The same morning I was forbidden by the guard to pray
at the Mosque of Cordoba, he woke up in Houston,
Texas and went to a mall food court to meet for the first and last time
his translator. The words they spoke to one another
were the same as those I saw in stone fragments
on the floor of the archeological dig at Madinat az-Zahra,
the ruined capital of the West looking East toward
the cities left behind. That city had remained buried
in a field for a thousand years. The palace and throne room
had been torn apart, the rubble of the mosaics
now being painstakingly reassembled piece by piece,
unlike the villages of Palestine, disassembled down to stone.
Yannis, what did you say to him that blue afternoon when the stone
canoe landed and he arrived in another place that would be home and
not-home? In Cordoba, meanwhile, the story of his death flashed
across the morning news, scrolling along the screen from clay to nothing.
But let's let the sea have the last word, the sea he crossed to come
to you, or the one that sparkled off the coast of Chile when he,
in Neruda's house, remembered you or the sea that rained
lightly down as the poet and his translator huddled together
over cheap mall coffee to converse, in Texas of all places,
though it could have been Athens, or Palestine, or Neruda's house,
at least as good as any mosque in the world,
so long as there was coffee and poetry and the sound of rain,
rain in the shape of the river, rain in the shape of a broken lock,
rain in the shape of long-since written verses, while the translator
of lost homelands makes from the sound of butterfly wings
rain in the shape of the dark furnace of days.
From Inquisition (2018)
Wesleyan University Press
The Horse Fell Off the Poem
By Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Fady Joudah
The horse fell off the poem
and the Galilean women were wet
with butterflies and dew,
dancing above chrysanthemum
The two absent ones: you and I
you and I are the two absent ones
A pair of white doves
chatting on the branches of a holm oak
No love, but I love ancient
love poems that guard
the sick moon from smoke
I attack and retreat, like the violin in quatrains
I get far from my time when I am near
the topography of place ...
There is no margin in modern language left
to celebrate what we love,
because all that will be ... was
The horse fell bloodied
with my poem
and I fell bloodied
with the horse’s blood ...
In our hands we hold the shadow of our hands.
The night is kind―the others do not see us holding our shadow.
We reinforce the night. We watch ourselves.
So we think better of others.
The sea still seeks our eyes and we are not there.
A young girl buttons up her love in her breast
and we look away smiling at the great distance.
Perhaps high up, in the starlight, a skylight opens up
that looks out on the sea, the olive trees and the burnt houses—
We listen to the butterfly gyrating in the glass of All Souls’ Day,
and the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee-
grinder.
Published in August-September 1970 issue of Poetry Magazine
We must not be afraid to buy the bananas in the street,
the yellow bananas with the black splotches,
the bananas hawked by sellers with unseemly
yet beautiful voices, the bananas that have captured
the entire morning’s sun in their electric skins.
Even if the eyes of the seller do not meet our eyes
in the way we think they should, even if the scales
read a little high, we must buy the bananas.
For what else is there? And if our voices break
when we ask the price, if we change our minds
picking first this bunch, then that one, then let us fall
perfectly, with bananas in our hands, yellow bananas
with black splotches, and the sun swinging
at the ends of our arms as we walk.
The chatter of little people
Breaks on my purpose
Like the water-drops which slowly wear the rocks to powder.
And while I laugh
My spirit crumbles at their teasing touch.
I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.
What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.
That the moon causes tides
seems too witchy to be science.
The sea purging sheet iron,
jeans, a jewel-eyed
alabaster goat. Is that
why I'm here? Everyone
needs kudos, from newborns
to saviors. Nora, nearly three,
draws sunlight in golden bars,
not unlike an Impressionist painter.
I like to think of light this way,
dispensed in attache cases
to illuminate as needed.
The famous poet said write
by the light of your wounds.
A drunk flies over his bicycle handlebars,
crumples by the side of the road.
Performed pain is still pain.
Some people born before the Model T
lived to see man walk on the moon.
To be strapped like that
to the masthead of history
would make me frantic.
At parties I'd shout
I'm frantic, and you? Like a fire,
hungry and resisting containment,
I'd pound at the windows, my
mouth full of hors d'oeuvres.
Outside -- sweeping plains
of green flora and service stations.
Odd, for an apocalypse
to announce itself with such bounty.
I hear crickets chirp and think
of my weaker heart, the tiny one
sewn behind the one that beats (unhumble
birth, error of the blood). It lives there,
made entirely of watery pink light,
flapping at dawn like a baby's cheek.
It doesn't take much, to love a saint
like me. On a gravel road,
the soft tissues of my eye detect
a snake curling around a tree
branch. Because I am here
each of these things has a name.
The Waitress by Tori Amos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5CQoqD2YcE
The Landlady
By Margaret Atwood
This is the lair of the landlady
She is
a raw voice
loose in the rooms beneath me.
the continuous henyard
squabble going on below
thought in this house like
the bicker of blood through the head.
She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells
that bulge in under my doorsill;
she presides over my
meagre eating, generates
the light for eyestrain.
From her I rent my time:
she slams
my days like doors.
Nothing is mine.
and when I dream images
of daring escapes through the snow
I find myself walking
always over a vast face
which is the land-
lady's, and wake up shouting.
She is a bulk, a knot
swollen in a space. Though I have tried
to find some way around
her, my senses
are cluttered by perception
and can't see through her.
She stands there, a raucous fact
blocking my way:
immutable, a slab
of what is real.
When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—
that I've cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial—a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother's rocker,
a dead dog's toy—valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother's souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.
Driving in the Downpour
By Kim Hyesoon
Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi
My chest has dried up like a mummy’s so that I have no energy to drink sorrow,
even the smell of water is unbearable.
While the cars speed over the puddles of water leaving their elongated red tail lights
behind them, why am I going over the Andes alone under the blazing sun? Why are the
birds flying out from the flaming hat of the western sky? Why is the face of the mummy
in the Lima Museum wet even though it’s dead?
Even at night my car’s windshield wipers place a cold wet towel on my forehead, and
yet why am I still going over the Andes where not even a single patch of green can
grow because it is too high up here? Why is this mountain range endless even when I
keep going over it again and again? Why does the mummy still clasp its dried-up chest
with its arms? Why are the mummy’s fingers wet like clay being kneaded on the potter’s
wheel that has momentarily stopped spinning?
Why is the car at a standstill like a toppled water glass as the raindrops on top of its hood
quickly bloom then break apart and rise again like a crown made of water? Why did the
car stop moving and stand idly at the street corner? Why did the mummy turn its head
sideways and keep still in the middle of going over the Andes where the hot snowfall
never gets turned off?
Why am I breathing like a lungfish, opening and closing my mouth, why have I lived so
long in the same body, am I sighing under my heavy dress, are my eyes open or closed,
in a night of a heavy rainfall why does the vast Andes appear in front of me again
and again?
white dove—found outside Don Teriyaki’s
by Juan Felipe Herrera
On
Cedar & Herndon going nowhere brought her home
bought her seeds a rabbit cage & carried her out
everyday & let her fly in the room next to my bedroom
I was concerned about her—I asked myself
what can I do
she is not happy she is not free she dances when
I take the cage outside & set it on the angular table
in the breezeway then the sun waves through
and the trees sway before noon when the sister doves
Blue Jays call & peck at the seeds she spills
she steps to one side to the other and back
and forth she peers at me through the wires
I take her in
she purrs she calls—if I release her she is going to
stumble then Jack Hawk will shred her so
I’ll keep her in the cage—I tell myself
I begin
to talk to violets.
Tears fall into my soup
and I drink them.
Sooner or later
everyone donates something.
I carry wood, stone, and
hay in my head.
The eyes of the violets
grow very wide.
At the end of the day
I reglue the broken foot
of the china shepherd
who has put up with me.
Next door, in the house
of the clock-repairer,
a hundred clocks tick
at once. He and his wife
go about their business
sleeping peacefully at night.
One woman brings her baby to work, walks with him between the aisles
of beds to be sure we are sleeping. She holds him close to her chest.
Sometimes, if the night is calm, she will reach down, touch my hand
as she passes, as if she has forgotten she does not believe I can sense it,
forgotten I was never anyone’s child.
Wrist: small flawless place on my body;
second home of my heartbeat.
Infant: planet of heat; flawless animal;
what I was meant to become.
Air: thing that changes temperature,
tells you when another body is near.
The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn’t blink a leaf
When we step from the house
Leads me to think
That beauty is natural, unremarkable
And not to be spoken of
Except in the course of things
The course of singing and worksharing
The course of squeezes and neighbors
The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out
And the course of course of me
Astonished at you
The way the world is not
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.
Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.
Poem
by Morgan Parker
October 16, 2012 (Painted Bride Quarterly)
I know it takes seven years for our cells to change
so I started last Thursday the train
was pregnant with stillness and groceries so
do you know what I thought? I wondered
and then I thought I would be sick
with the sound of your feet against hardwood
coming to sweep up twisted spine
with that thing you always say and the way you always
say it you say you’ll get it right next time
thinking it’s my fault so I read some June Jordan
poems caught you hiding in the margins begging
to be swallowed got off two stops early nauseous
later that night I’m so anxious I knit
two rows of a scarf it’s so ugly I fall asleep
To Be Continued:
by June Jordan
The partial mastectomy took a long time to execute
And left a huge raggedy scar
Healing from that partial mastectomy took even longer
And devolved into a psychological chasm 2 times the depth
And breadth of the physical scar from the mastectomy that was raggedy
And huge
Metastatic reactivation of the breast cancer requiring partial mastectomy
That left a huge raggedy scar in the first place now pounds
To pieces
A wound head-set fifty times more implacable and more intractable
Than the psychological chasm produced by the healing process
That was twice as enormously damaging as the surgery
Which left a huge raggedy scar
Whales fall slowly to the ocean floor
after dying and feed the vertical nation
for years. Like Christ, who feeds us still,
they say, though I don’t know.
But imagine it:
fish chasing through bones
or nibbling what’s left, the whale,
when it finally touches bottom,
an empty church.
Forget all that,
it’s intended to soften
the skin, like apricot seeds and mud, or boredom.
The drift of worlds in a given day
can turn a telephone to porcelain,
open graves in the sidewalk. So that
who knows why thinking about thinking
leads to new inventions of grace
that never take, never lead to , say, what to do
with Grandmother, who is determined to live
“beyond her usefulness,” which is fine,
but why won’t she relax and watch the sea with me?
I wish someone would intrude on all this.
People grow tired
explaining themselves to mirrors,
to clerks administering the awful perfume.
I ask a Liberace look-alike,
“Why do you dress that way?”
“What way?” he says,
and he’s right.
Who taught us to bow our heads
while waiting for trains? To touch
lumber without regret and sing privately
or not at all? To invest the season
with forgiveness and coax from it
A hopeful omen? Lord knows
the hope would heal this little fear.
But who taught us to fear?
Soon branches crackle in the windy heat
like something cooking too quickly,
dogwood lathering the empty woods
and everyone looking for a commitment
of permanence, from summer, from someone else.
Two deer the color of corn disappear
into an empty field, and I wait beside the road
for them to move. I want to see them again.
Oh no! I messed up. The other Jane Hirshfield episode is #37. #36 is really good too, though!
Video interview of Hirshfield mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4-UKzxrJvQ
This Morning, I Wanted Four Legs
by Jane Hirshfield
Nothing on two legs weighs much,
or can.
An elephant, a donkey, even a cookstove—
those legs, a person could stand on.
Two legs pitch you forward.
Two legs tire.
They look for another two legs to be with,
to move one set forward to music
while letting the other move back.
They want to carve into a tree trunk:
2gether 4ever.
Nothing on two legs can bark,
can whinny or chuff.
Tonight, though, everything’s different.
Tonight I want wheels.
