Trojan Poetry 102: "Field of Skulls" by Mary Karr

Field of Skulls

By Mary Karr

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,  

and if you're predisposed to dark—let’s say  

the window you’ve picked is a black

postage stamp you spend hours at,

sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love  

Lucy reruns have gone off—stare

like your eyes have force, and behind

any night’s taut scrim will come the forms  

you expect pressing from the other side.  

For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws

and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.  

They’re plain once you think to look.

You know such fields exist, for criminals

roam your very block, and even history lists  

monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe

who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters  

unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps  

that disgruntled mail clerk from your job

has already scratched your name on a bullet—that’s him  

rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought,

for it proves there’s no better spot for you

than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing  

the bad news piped steady from your head. The night  

is black. You stare and furious stare,

confident there are no gods out there. In this way,  

you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine  

and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all  

your remembered loves. If the skulls are there—

let’s say they do press toward you

against night’s scrim—could they not stare

with slack jawed envy at the fine flesh

that covers your scalp, the numbered hairs,  

at the force your hands hold?

Mary Karr, “Field of Skulls” from Viper Rum. Copyright © 1998 by Mary Karr.

Source: The Devil's Tour (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)

Trojan Poetry 101: "All Hallows' Eve" by Dorothea Tanning

All Hallows’ Eve

By Dorothea Tanning

Be perfect, make it otherwise.

Yesterday is torn in shreds.

Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes

Rip apart the breathing beds.

Hear bones crack and pulverize.

Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Countless overwrought housewives,

Minds unraveling like threads,

Try lipstick shades to tranquilize

Fears of age and general dreads.

Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,

Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.

Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise

You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

Dorothea Tanning, “All Hallows’ Eve” from Coming to That.

Copyright © 2011 by Dorothea Tanning.

Source: Coming to That (Graywolf Press, 2011)

Trojan Poetry 100: "When You Saw the Lightning" by Frank X. Gaspar

When You Saw the Lightning

by Frank X. Gaspar

When I was a fish—in that time when no one

walked the long tangled banks of the pond in

those deep woods unscarred by roads—oh, you should

have seen me, my long fish body one muscle, and

my will narrowed to the fine essentials!  You would

have cried out for my beauty when I leapt into the

sun and air and you saw the rainbows and lightning

on my stippled back.  And I would have made you

jump.  Your breath would have caught above your

heart, and you would have loved me in that certain

way that we love things beyond any need for them,

but desiring them senselessly.  Yes, the buzz of the

dragonflies, and then my killing heart in the shade

of the lilies, in the black water with all its treasures,

and my wicked teeth, and how the green leaves on

the trees shuddered when I rose and struck!  That was

when I was a fish.  I would never lie to you about that. 

I don’t know why I would tell you this now.  I don’t

know why you would even listen to anything in a poem

except that it might stop you for a moment, it might

make you lift your head and look around in just that

lonely hour of the day or night when the world isn’t

quite enough.  Oh, yes, I was a power—I razed that

hidden world with splendor and terror, and if you

only could have seen me, your breast would have been

filled with rapture, I’m sure of it.  Along those wild

shores, along that gloss of water, among the sweet

greens of summer—where were you? 

Resources:

https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-onlin...

http://srivilasicatimes.blogspot.com/...

http://www.frankgaspar.com/bio.html

“The Olive Trees”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_1EW...

Q&A with students about writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUNP5...

Trojan Poetry 99:"To the Dead in the Graveyard . . ." by Adelaide Crapsey

To The Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window

By Adelaide Crapsey

Written in A Moment of Exasperation

How can you lie so still? All day I watch

And never a blade of all the green sod moves

To show where restlessly you toss and turn,

And fling a desperate arm or draw up knees

Stiffened and aching from their long disuse;

I watch all night and not one ghost comes forth

To take its freedom of the midnight hour.

Oh, have you no rebellion in your bones?

The very worms must scorn you where you lie,

A pallid mouldering acquiescent folk,

Meek habitants of unresented graves.

Why are you there in your straight row on row

Where I must ever see you from my bed

That in your mere dumb presence iterate

The text so weary in my ears: "Lie still

And rest; be patient and lie still and rest."

I'll not be patient! I will not lie still!

There is a brown road runs between the pines,

And further on the purple woodlands lie,

And still beyond blue mountains lift and loom;

And I would walk the road and I would be

Deep in the wooded shade and I would reach

The windy mountain tops that touch the clouds.

My eyes may follow but my feet are held.

Recumbent as you others must I too

Submit? Be mimic of your movelessness

With pillow and counterpane for stone and sod?

And if the many sayings of the wise

Teach of submission I will not submit

But with a spirit all unreconciled

Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.

Better it is to walk, to run, to dance,

Better it is to laugh and leap and sing,

To know the open skies of dawn and night,

To move untrammeled down the flaming noon,

And I will clamour it through weary days

Keeping the edge of deprivation sharp,

Nor with the pliant speaking on my lips

Of resignation, sister to defeat.

I'll not be patient. I will not lie still.

And in ironic quietude who is

The despot of our days and lord of dust

Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop

Grim casual comment on rebellion's end;

"Yes, yes . . Wilful and petulant but now

As dead and quiet as the others are."

And this each body and ghost of you hath heard

That in your graves do therefore lie so still.

Trojan Poetry 98: "Stray Crow" by Ned Balbo

Stray Crow

By Ned Balbo

Once, long ago, I played the rescuer

to your lost kin, stray crow. Not ten years old,

I found a soaked near-drowned bird in the filter

of our pool. Is water memory,

the flood that bears us, stunned, into what's next?

If so, then I'm surprised that we're so calm,

one of us having flown, somehow, through time:

some cosmic rip intangible, yet near—

It must be you, because I'm all grown up

and you're still black, bright black, like polished stone

layered, engraved. You're grounded, but alive,

and if you had the power of speech, would you

bring news of that boy or, perhaps, his father

who removed you, saved, till you took flight?

                              •

Today, I find you, tail askew, successor

or original, where you took shelter

after storms, now hobbled. Stairwell dweller

towel-caught, eyeing movement through the weave

and basket lid, you glimpse my wife (she drives

us to the Rescue in her stalwart Saturn,

having traveled time to be with me

and save you, too). What joins us is some pattern

no one knows, that prints its secret text

upon our lives... And when the sign appears,

a flaming phoenix, nailed to a post,

I know I'm in the present, not the past

from which you flew, stray crow, the ride uphill,

sun-crossed, leaf-shaded, heading into light.

From Upcycling Paumanok

Measure Press

Copyright © 2016 by Ned Balbo

All rights reserved.

Trojan Poetry 97: A Sandwich and "While Eating a Pear" by Billy Collins

http://www.eatthispoem.com/

While Eating a Pear

By Billy Collins

After we have finished here,

the world will continue its quiet turning,

and the years will still transpire,

but now without their numbers,

and the days and months will pass

without the names of Norse and Roman gods.

Time will go by the way it did

before history, pure and unnoticed,

a mystery that arose between the sun and moon

before there was a word

for dawn or noon or midnight,

before there were names for the earth’s

uncountable things,

when fruit hung anonymously

from scattered groves of trees,

light on the smooth green side,

shadow on the other.