Grasshoppers
This year they are exactly the size
of the pencil stub my grandfather kept
to mark off the days since rain,
and precisely the color of dust, of the roads
leading back across the dying fields
into the ’30s. Walking the cracked lane
past the empty barn, the empty silo,
you hear them tinkering with irony,
slapping the grass like drops of rain.
– Ted Kooser
Hell is Graduated
When I was employed at Cooperative Fashions, in spite of the dark, ugly old maid, I tried to steal some garters. I was pursued down the superb staircases, not for the theft, but for my laziness at work and for my hatred of the innocent finery. Descend, you are pursued. The staircases are less beautiful in the offices than in the part open to the public. The staircases are less beautiful in the “service” quarters than in the offices. The staircases are still less beautiful in the cellar! But what can I say of the marsh where I arrived? What can I say of the laughter? Of the animals that brushed by me, and of the whisperings of the unseen creatures? Water gave place to fire, to fear, to unconsciousness; when I came to myself I was in the hands of silent and nameless surgeons.
– Max Jacob, translated by Elizabeth Bishop
(excerpt from) Mayakovsky
4.
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
– Frank O’Hara
Self Portrait as a Meadow
There is a chair
the heart of which
is wooden
split five ways
and grass pressed flat
where we kissed
where others later kissed
on the same mattress
and solemn nothing
happening under a canopy—
Have you forgotten me?
I will go down wonderfully
as was told in proverbs
though for a long time I thought
I should not go.
Here are things that have
no Latin names
or none
that men would know.
–Linda Norton
I Love You More Than All the Windows in New York City
The day turned into the city
and the city turned into the mind
and the moving trucks trumbled along
like loud worries speaking over
the bicycle’s idea
which wove between
the more armored vehicles of expression
and over planks left by the construction workers
on a holiday morning when no work was being done
because no matter the day, we tend towards
remaking parts of it — what we said
or did, or how we looked —
and the buildings were like faces
lining the banks of a parade
obstructing and highlighting each other
defining height and width for each other
offsetting grace and function
like Audrey Hepburn from
Jesse Owens, and the hearty pigeons collaborate
with wrought iron fences
and become recurring choruses of memory
reassembling around benches
we sat in once, while seagulls wheel
like immigrating thoughts, and never-leaving
chickadees hop bared hedges and low trees
like commas and semicolons, landing
where needed, separating
subjects from adjectives, stringing along
the long ideas, showing how the cage
has no door, and the lights changed
so the tide of sound ebbed and returned
like our own breath
and when I knew everything
was going to look the same as the mind
I stopped at a lively corner
where the signs themselves were like
perpendicular dialects in conversation and
I put both my feet on the ground
took the bag from the basket
so pleased it had not been crushed
by the mightiness of all else
that goes on and gave you the sentence inside.
–Jessica Greenbaum
This poem is killing me. Killing me.
A Lover
If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly
I could see to write you a letter.
–Amy Lowell
(This poem was published in 1917. My GOD.)
Detail of the Woods
I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.
Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.
–Richard Siken
I searched for another Emily Dickinson poem and found that I had, in fact, posted it before, but today I’m just going to link to it so you can a) read it, and b) read the comments where gclark says he hates Emily Dickinson. In fact, he refers to her as an “ol’ bat.”
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
I might’ve posted this one before — why don’t one of you smart alecks search for it and tell me all about it? — but tonight it seemed apt. Old Aint Emily isn’t suggesting that we slant the truth so much that it’s a lie. I think she’s saying that some of us do better with hearing a sweeter version, or maybe the gist before we hear all the gory details. As a fellow introvert, I suspect she’s also saying that not only is it better to HEAR things in this manner, it is also better to TELL things in this manner. Tell a little, see the reaction, tell a little more.
Thanks, Old Aint Emily!
Update: I haven’t posted this before.
Anathema
The entire household suffered.
My wife, myself, the two children, and the dog
whose puppies were born dead.
Our affairs, such as they were, withered.
My wife was dropped by her lover,
the one-armed teacher of music who was
her only contact with the outside world
and the things of the mind.
My own girlfriend said she couldn’t stand it
anymore, and went back to her husband.
The water was shut off.
All that summer the house baked.
The peach trees were blasted.
Our little flower bed lay trampled.
The brakes went out in the car, and the battery
failed. The neighbors quit speaking
to us and closed the doors in our faces.
Checks flew back at us from merchants —
and then mail stopped being delivered
altogether. Only the sheriff got through
from time to time — with one or the other
of our children in the back seat,
pleading to be taken anywhere but here.
And then mice entered the house in droves.
Followed by a bull snake. My wife
found it sunning itself in the living room
next to the dead TV. How she dealt with it
is another matter. Chopped its head off
right there on the floor.
And then chopped it in two when it continued
to writhe. We saw we couldn’t hold out
any longer. We were beaten.
We wanted to get down on our knees
and say forgive us our sins, forgive us
our lives. But it was too late.
Too late. No one around would listen.
We had to watch as the house was pulled down,
the ground plowed up, and then
we were dispersed in four directions.
– Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water
Leave it to Raymond Carver to stop your pity party RIGHT in its MOTHERFUCKING TRACKS. I was all ready to tell you all about the various things that have been happening lately, a big old pile of stuff of things breaking and going wrong — hail damage, rotten sewer lines, raw sewage in the yard, bee stings, disappointments en masse — buuuuuuut I’m feeling pretty positive about the world at the moment after reading this poem. Is that a weird reaction? To be all “whoopededoo!” after “But it was too late. / Too late” ? I think it proves that despite my best efforts, I am an optimist. I mean, as gross as the raw sewage was, it wasn’t mice. My stepfather felt sorry for me and cleaned the bathtub with bleach, after all. (Later, it came up in the yard. There was a field of toilet paper that I ended up raking up into a pile and shoveling into a garbage bag … as a school bus drove by.) (But I would take being a “toilet farmer,” as gorjus called it, over bad brakes/no water/bad checks/sad everyone/broken everything/”Too late.”)
I forgot it was National Poetry Month! That should tell you what kind of a life I’ve been having lately. Don’t worry, I’ll pester you with poems this month, but for now, watch this from my good friend Frank O’Hara:
Edited a few days later to add: while I love Frank O’Hara, you know what I don’t love? Listening to poets read their poems. I just can’t stand that poetry cadence. And when a poet is reading aloud, you know what I’m thinking? “You think you’re such a GENIUS with your WORDS, don’t you?” When I read a poem to myself I think, “God, this person is a genius.” It makes a difference.
Morning at the Window
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Hanging despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
–T.S. Eliot
Bright Copper Kettles
Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces —
this is one of my favorite things.
I like it so much I sleep all the time.
Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed
deep in the dreams where they appear.
In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,
before the empress with the melting face, under
the towering plane tree, they just show up.
“It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.”
They are diffident and polite.
(Who knew the dead were so polite?)
They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes.
They don’t want to steal my body
and possess the earth and wreak vengeance.
They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides,
why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it.
One of them shyly offers me a pencil.
The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster.
Through the intercom of the house where for so long ther was no music,
the right Reverend Al Green is singing,
“I could never see tomorrow.
I was never told about the sorrow.”
–Vijay Seshadri
Poetry, December 2010, p. 236
Your Hair of Snakes and Flowers
When I saw one of those men touch your hair,
I heard for the first time in many a year
the ancient battle trumpets and I saw
the banners of an army winding off to war
and felt that blind power urging me to knock
him out with one punch, send him tumbling to the floor.
If nobody had held me back, stopped me,
I would — God help me — have killed him on the spot,
stomped out his blood, and spit in it. I’m sorry,
but you must be aware your winding hair
is different now, a hornets’ nest, a snakes’ lair!
Yes, like a ball of snakes in a flower basket, dear.
–Hakan Sandell, translated from the Swedish by Bill Coyle
Poetry,April 2008, p 4
I read a whole book of Robert Lowell poems this morning and decided I only liked these two lines. So here they are.
Flight to New York
I. Plane-Ticket
The London damp comes in, its smell so fertile
trees grow in my room.