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.
