Monday, December 29, 2008

To the One Upstairs By Charles Simic










Boss of all bosses of the universe.
Mr. know-it-all, wheeler-dealer, wire-puller,
And whatever else you're good at.
Go ahead, shuffle your zeros tonight.
Dip in ink the comets' tails.
Staple the night with starlight.

You'd be better off reading coffee dregs,
Thumbing the pages of the Farmer's Almanac.
But no! You love to put on airs,
And cultivate your famous serenity
While you sit behind your big desk
With zilch in your in-tray, zilch
In your out-tray,
And all of eternity spread around you.

Doesn't it give you the creeps
To hear them begging you on their knees,
Sputtering endearments,
As if you were an inflatable, life-size doll?
Tell them to button up and go to bed.
Stop pretending you're too busy to take notice.

Your hands are empty and so are your eyes.
There's nothing to put your signature to,
Even if you knew your own name,
Or believed the ones I keep inventing,
As I scribble this note to you in the dark.
Eyes Fastened With Pins
By Charles Simic

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.


The World Doesn't End

by Charles Simic

We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. “These are dark and evil days,” the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.

*

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

In Passing

by Ted Kooser

From a half block off I see you coming,
walking briskly along, carrying parcels,
furtively glancing up into the faces
of people approaching, looking for someone
you know, holding your smile in your mouth
like a pebble, keeping it moist and ready,
being careful not to swallow.

I know that hope so open on your face,
know how your heart would lift to see just one
among us who remembered. If only someone
would call out your name, would smile,
so happy to see you again. You shift
your heavy parcels, hunch up your shoulders,
and press ahead into the moment.

From a few feet away, you recognize me,
or think you do. I see you preparing your face,
getting your greeting ready. Do I know you?
Both of us wonder. Swiftly we meet and pass,
averting our eyes, close enough to touch,
but not touching. I could not let you know
that I've forgotten, and yet you know.

Friday, December 26, 2008

The world in the year 2000

by Marge Piercy

It will be covered to a depth of seven
inches by the little white plastic
chips at once soft and repellent
to the touch and with the ability
to bounce like baby beach balls
under the table and under the radiator.
They come in boxes with toasters,
with vitamin pills, with whatever
you order, as packing material : they
will conquer the world. They are
doing it already beginning
with my kitchen.

Monday, December 22, 2008

the mother

By Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

a certain kind of calculus

sitting at a party, chatted with an older woman about nothing in particular. except i noticed she acted like a much younger, shallower woman than she really was. i moved on to smoke and my place was taken by another. later, i was chatting with that other and the older woman came up as the other went away. you're my favorite she said to him. she turned to me and said:

"you were my first favorite, but you're so inaccessible."


sitting at a table at a bar with my friend and her two friends. one of her friends was telling me all about herself. they were an odd pair of partners, these two friends. the acted like they had their own private universe. she does conceptual art. she takes notes on conversations while they happen. i asked her about her art and she said:

"you wouldn't understand."


Saturday, December 20, 2008

The Young
By Roddy Lumsden

You bastards! It’s all sherbet, and folly
makes you laugh like mules. Chances
dance off your wrists, each day ready,

sprites in your bones and spite not yet
swollen, not yet set. You gather handful
after miracle handful, seeing straight,

reaching the lighthouse in record time,
pockets brim with scimitar things. Now
is not a pinpoint but a sprawling realm.

Bewilderment and thrill are whip-quick
twins, carried on your backs, each vow
new to touch and each mistake a broken

biscuit. I was you. Sea robber boarding
the won galleon. Roaring trees. Machines
without levers, easy in bowel and lung.

One cartwheel over the quicksand curve
of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone,
summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

Friday, December 19, 2008

What Became

by Wesley McNair

What became of the dear
strands of hair pressed
against the perspiration
of your lover's brow
after lovemaking as you gazed
into the world of those eyes,
now only yours?

What became of any afternoon
that was so vivid you forgot
the present was up to its old
trick of pretending
it would be there
always?

What became of the one
who believed so deeply
in this moment he memorized
everything in it and left
it for you?

“A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about...”

by Claudia Rankine

A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it.

Worry 1. A dog’s action of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure or kill it, spec., a hound’s worrying of its quarry; an instance of this. 2. A state or feeling of mental unease or anxiety regarding or arising from one’s cares or responsibilities, uncertainty about the future, fear of failure, etc.; anxious concern, anxiety. Also, an instance or cause of this.

It achieved nothing, all his worrying. Things worked out or they didn’t work out and now here he was, an old man, an old man who each year of his life bit or shook doubt as if to injure if not to kill, an old man with a good-looking son who resembles his deceased mother. It is uncanny how she rests there, as plain as day, in their boy's face.

Worry 8. Cause mental distress or agitation to (a person, oneself); make anxious and ill at ease. 9. Give way to anxiety, unease, or disquietude: allow one’s mind to dwell on difficulties or troubles.

He waits for his father’s death. His father has been taken off the ventilator and clearly will not be able to breathe for himself much longer. Earlier in the day the nurse mentioned something about an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain waves in the cerebral hemispheres, the parts of the brain that deal with speech and memory. But his brain stem is damaged; it seems now the test will not be necessary. The son expects an almost silent, hollow gasp to come from the old man’s open mouth. Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind. The release is jerky and convulsive. There is never the rasp or the choke the son expects, though one meaning of worry is to be choked on, to choke on.

Harlem

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
frankly, i wouldn't be upset or surprised
if someone or something came along
and took all of this away.
everything.
i wouldn't have to worry so much
about things i can't control.
i would know where i stand.
finally.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

MY BOTTLE OPENER IS M I A

Jeffrey Miller

my bottle opener is M I A & I’m searching
the beer is lined up on the table & it’s not american
beer which can be opened with a soft american twist
no this is Mexican Beer in thick brown bottles
if a whore smashed a GI in the face with one of these
blood would splash out maybe his eye would hang
he could show his grandkids the scar & say get me a beer
if it was american beer the kid could open the bottle
but this is Mexican Beer & i’m in my kitchen, a jungle,
searching, because you need an opener for these babies
they’re like hand grenades without a pin to pull
& I’m no pacifist i’m just on my own side


HANDCUFFED TO THE ONE I LOVE

Jeffrey Miller

Which came first, the chicken
or The Shake & Bake? It’s a rough job
being a poet during these modern times, folderol
it’s a snap, Exhibit A: me. Each day, stepping
into nothing like it was my pants, I’m tickled
pink, a dog about to piss the length
of The Great Wall of China. We’re buddies,
me and the huge terrier. We boat calm as tourists along
the captured and monotonous ocean.
Like heroin down a motel toilet


DEPRESSED & HORNY

Jeffrey Miller

Behind every car wreck there’s a beautiful dish
& buying her drinks is smashing your head on the windshield
such a long throat, what a curve
swallowing me up foot first. I didn’t wanna go
out of the house but it was so quiet & violent (like a tree)
& I need a liquid light on my teeth, cool white
cue ball, parlor games. If you feel mixed up
you should try and drive a 52 Ford Station Wagon 50 miles
an hour down the road to my house. That will set
you straight to pursue the things in life that interest me
were you ever driving at 3 in the morning down some 2 lane road in upstate new york & it was raining & the only thing you can get on the radio is some station out of memphis or someplace which comes in perfectly clear & plays great music like life is but a dream du wop du wop & you just turn it up & say to yourself “what the fuck, what the fuck?” well that’s how I feel walking to the post office.
—Jeffrey Miller, The First One’s Free

Monday, December 15, 2008

Elizabeth’s War with the Christmas Bear

by Norman Dubie

The bears are kept by hundreds within fences, are fed cracked
Eggs; the weakest are
Slaughtered and fed to the others after being scented
With the blood of deer brought to the pastures by Elizabeth’s
Men—the blood spills from deep pails with bottoms of slate.

The balding Queen had bear gardens in London and in the country.
The bear is baited: the nostrils
Are blown full with pepper, the Irish wolf dogs
Are starved, then, emptied, made crazy with fermented barley:

And the bear’s hind leg is chained to a stake, the bear
Is blinded and whipped, kneeling in his own blood and slaver, he is
Almost instantly worried by the dogs. At the very moment that
Elizabeth took Essex’s head, a giant brown bear
Stood in the gardens with dogs hanging from his fur. . .
He took away the sun, took
A wolfhound in his mouth, and tossed it into
The white lap of Elizabeth I—arrows and staves rained

On his chest, and standing, he, then, stood even taller, seeing
Into the Queen’s private boxes—he grinned
Into her battered eggshell face.
Another volley of arrows and poles, and opening his mouth
He showered
Blood all over Elizabeth and her Privy Council.

The very next evening, a cool evening, the Queen demanded
Thirteen bears and the justice of 113 dogs: she slept

All that Sunday night and much of the next morning.
Some said she was guilty of this and that.
The Protestant Queen gave the defeated bear
A grave in a Catholic cemetery. The marker said:
Peter, a Solstice Bear, a gift of the Tsarevitch to Elizabeth.

After a long winter she had the grave opened. The bear’s skeleton
Was cleared with lye, she placed it at her bedside,
Put a candle inside behind the sockets of the eyes, and, then
She spoke to it:

You were a Christmas bear—behind your eyes
I see the walls of a snow cave where you are a cub still smelling
Of your mother’s blood which has dried in your hair; you have
Troubled a Queen who was afraid
When seated in shade which, standing,
You had created! A Queen who often wakes with a dream
Of you at night—
Now, you’ll stand by my bed in your long white bones; alone, you
Will frighten away at night all visions of bear, and all day
You will be in this cold room—your constant grin,
You’ll stand in the long, white prodigy of your bones, and you are,

Every inch of you, a terrible vision, not bear, but virgin!

I feel sorry

by Marin Sorescu

I feel sorry for the butterflies
When I turn off the light,
And for the bats
When I switch it on...
Can’t I take a single step
Without offending someone?

So many odd things happen
That I want to hold
My head in my hands,
But an anchor thrown from the sky
Pulls them down...

It’s not time yet
To tear up the sails.
Let things be.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

What is this about losing respect?

by Mark Rudman

What is this about losing respect?

Do I have to talk about it?
He said he feared what I might
write about him when he was gone,
and I told him not to worry.

He worried about the “streak of morbidity” in your work.

He was a man of God, not of imagination.

And it wasn’t his fault if he got the shakes.
It was a familial tremor, not nerves.

And it first happened at a gravesite.

Near where Brigham Young did his number—“this is the place.”

He called him Friggin Young.

Well, during his bleak tenure in Greenville,
his congregants would tell nigger jokes
and he would force a smile—afraid now to rock the boat—
a mere exercise in stretching
the corners of his lips—
a fake grin he would have noted
on another face—false faces being
one of the things we loved
to laugh about when together we observed congregants’ idiosyncracies,
their ruses, their guises,

like one temple president, the son
of the “richest Jew in Salt Lake”
who, seated in the pulpit’s other red velvet wing chair,
would expose the holes in the soles of his shoes
while he batted his eyelashes to
wake himself up—

(though I owe him one: “Rosencavalier”
didn’t turn me in for copying
the wrong answers from Mary Weinstein
on our “final exam” in Sunday
school prior to confirmation.

He was ashamed for me,
young Rosencavalier.

He could hardly disguise
the curled lips and downcast eyes
of his contempt
for this lawless “Rabbi’s son”
whether or not my name
was Strome or Rudman,

but where teaching Judaism was concerned
his plodding methodical
reading to keep up each week
was a pathetic substitution
for Sidney’s well-wrought, impromptu riffs.

So there!)

Marty was ashamed of me.
I left town.

As night was falling?


*

In Utah you can drive at fifteen so by age
fourteen a lot of our talk
was hard core car talk

and somehow the word
Volkswagen came up
after confirmation class

(it was no GTO but you could drive
so far on so little gas...)
and Marty’s father—a redhead like his son—

made his way up the driveway’s ice,
smoke billowing from the exhaust
of whatever sleek black foreign car he drove.

Pulling on his elegant pigskin gloves
he announced he’d “never buy a Kraut car.”
I was bewildered

(what, hold against a country now
something that happened so long ago?)
and he held my gaze

and I shivered inside the shiver I felt
from the cold I thought he would
transmogrify into a southern sheriff

and ask “what kind of Jew are you boy”
but he didn’t have to say
another word.


*

In other words you were ready to leave town.

I’d had it with Utah.

But you wanted to stay in the west, against your father’s wishes?

Yes.

Unequivocally?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

But you did submit to psychiatrists and interviews with the heads of schools
during your sojourn in the east that summer?

Yes. I didn’t say I wasn’t ambivalent and/or confused.

Nothing more, your honor.


*

This was around the time, was it not, that a certain “Penny,” from Los
Angeles, a family friend of your grandfather’s, came to dinner in Salt Lake
City...

She was a small woman, slightly hunchbacked, who spoke in a low
voice. She was one of my mother’s major confidantes. My mother had a
great respect for her because she was the buyer for I. Magnin’s. When
the subject of my father came up, as it always did, Penny, fueled by
several Scotches, seemed to retract her head into her chest and when it
reemerged she spat out this sentence about Charles: “Why he’d stick his
prick into anything!”

I blanched. My features stiffened with rage. Sensual and tormented man
that he was, whatever he was, what right did they have to tear him down
in front of me! She put her leathered multi-braceleted hand on my hand
and said, “It’s all right, dahlink.” I said, “I’ve never seen him do any-
thing like that.” And they continued. “Well he used to screw the maid,”
my mother threw in wearily.

How did they know so much about him, this shadow, this spectre?

Everyone knew.

There she was, this tiny hunchback, almost a dwarf—this was how she
conceived of loyalty to my mother. In reality, it was another patronizing
blow, as if my mother had to hear the worst in order not to feel that the
failure of the marriage might have been her failure.

And while they sat there tearing him down the phone rang and it was—
guess who. Your mother handed the phone over to Sidney who, geared for
battle, bourbon happy, quarreled with your father about the precise details
as to where you should go when you “left town.” They had come to an
impasse in the conversation when it seems your father said something like
“you can’t talk to Charles K. Rudman that way” and Sidney said—because
this you overheard—“what does the ‘K’ stand for”—and your father said—
according to Sidney—“cocksucker.”

And Sidney howled. He would rag him till the end of his days. “Is this
Charles K. Rudman?”

I didn’t call you a cocksucker, Sidney said,
but since you said it i
heard you were a cocksucker.

I didn’t say it!

"I am,” your father was rumored to have said, probably (possibly?) not
meaning it literally, but more within the vernacular of street language,
curse-words meaning “sonofabitch,” not someone who literally “sucked
cocks.”

I think so.

Your heart went out to your poor father at that moment, didn’t it? Sidney
had a way of miscalculating the effect of these shots on you. You knew your
father was writhing in an agony of frustration.

Yes.

But Sidney was running with it, relishing Charles’ self-hatred, his masoch
-ism which erupted at that moment out of frustration...And for years he
loved to tell the story of how Charles “called himself a cocksucker,” always
underscoring the anecdote by absolving himself, by making it clear that it
wasn’t he who first used the word.

He really rubbed it in.

Can you forgive him?


*

Only now that he’s dead can I let myself feel
how good we were at leaving each other alone.

Clouds Gathering

by Charles Simic

It seemed the kind of life we wanted.
Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.
Sunlight in every room.
The two of us walking by the sea naked.

Some evenings, however, we found ourselves
Unsure of what comes next.
Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,
With birds circling over our heads,
The dark pines strangely still,
Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

We were back on our terrace sipping wine.
Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?
Clouds of almost human appearance
Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely
With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.

The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.
You lighting a candle, carrying it naked
Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.
The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

"I am the last . . ."

by Charles Simic

I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It's almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don't even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Lost in Translation

by Peter Pereira

Before devising, your chicken you do not have to count.
As for the penny which is rescued it is the penny which is obtained.
The girl and the spice has become entirely from the splendid sugar.
The boy has consisted of the tail of the slug and the snail and the puppy.
As for the place of the woman there is a house.
One basket your egg everything does not have to be made.
The idiot hurries being about you fear because the angel steps on.
Your cake cannot do possessing and is eaten thing.
There is no wastefulness, unless so is, we want.
The safe which is better than regrettable.
Living, you have lived, permit.

Holy Shit

by Peter Pereira

It used to be more private—just the
immediate family gathered after mass,
the baptismal font at the rear
of the church tiny as a bird bath.
The priest would ladle a few teaspoons’
tepid holy water on the bundled baby’s
forehead, make a crack about the halo
being too tight as the new soul wailed.
We’d go home to pancakes and eggs.

These days it’s a big Holy-wood production—
midmass, the giant altar rolls back to reveal
a Jacuzzi tub surrounded by potted palms.
The priest hikes up his chasuble, steps
barefoot out of his black leather loafers
and wades in like a newfangled John as
organ music swells and the baby-bearing families
line up like jumbo jets ready for takeoff.

But when the godparents handed my niece’s newborn
naked to their parish priest, and he dunked her
into the Jacuzzi’s bath-warm holy water,
her little one grew so calm and blissful she
pooped—not a smelly three-days’ worth, explosive
diaper load, but enough to notice. As the godparents
scooped the turds with a handkerchief,
the savvy priest pretended he hadn’t seen,
swept through the fouled water with his palm
before the next baby in line was submerged.

After mass, my niece sat speechless,
red-faced, not knowing what to say—
or whether—as church ladies, friends, and
family members presented one by one to
the tub where the babies had been
baptized. As they knelt and bowed
and dipped their fingers in,
and blessed themselves.

Anagrammer

By Peter Pereira

If you believe in the magic of language,
then Elvis really Lives
and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin.

If you believe the letters themselves
contain a power within them,
then you understand
what makes outside tedious,
how desperation becomes a rope ends it.

The circular logic that allows senator to become treason,
and treason to become atoners.

That eleven plus two is twelve plus one,
and an admirer is also married.

That if you could just rearrange things the right way
you’d find your true life,
the right path, the answer to your questions:
you’d understand how the Titanic
turns into that ice tin,
and debit card becomes bad credit.

How listen is the same as silent,
and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

The Pieces That Fall To Earth

By Kay Ryan

One could
almost wish
they wouldn't;
they are so
far apart,
so random.
One cannot
wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding
way they matter.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

A Poem Without a Single Bird in It

by Jack Spicer

What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not even know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

I Would Like to Describe

by Zbigniew Herbert

I would like to describe the simplest emotion
joy or sadness
but not as others do
reaching for shafts of rain or sun

I would like to describe a light
which is being born in me
but I know it does not resemble
any star
for it is not so bright
not so pure
and is uncertain

I would like to describe courage
without dragging behind me a dusty lion
and also anxiety
without shaking a glass full of water

to put it another way
I would give all metaphors
in return for one word
drawn out of my breast like a rib
for one word
contained within the boundaries
of my skin

but apparently this is not possible

and just to say—I love
I run around like mad
picking up handfuls of birds
and my tenderness
which after all is not made of water
asks the water for a face

and anger
different from fire
borrows from it
a loquacious tongue

so is blurred
so is blurred
in me
what white-haired gentlemen
separated once and for all
and said
this is the subject
and this is the object

we fall asleep
with one hand under our head
and with the other in a mound of planets

our feet abandon us
and taste the earth
with their tiny roots
which next morning
we tear out painfully


Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

Sunday, November 23, 2008

More Blues and the Abstract Truth

By C. D. Wright

I back the car over a soft, large object;
hair appears on my chest in dreams.
The paperboy comes to collect
with a pit bull. Call Grandmother
and she says, Well you know
death is death and none other.

In the mornings we’re in the dark;
even at the end of June
the zucchini keep on the sill.
Ring Grandmother for advice
and she says, O you know
I used to grow so many things.

Then there’s the frequent bleeding,
the tender nipples, and the rot
under the floormat. If I’m not seeing
a cold-eyed doctor it is
another gouging mechanic.
Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs
and Eileen Briscoe’s elms
the house keeps cool.

Well. Then. You say Grandmother
let me just ask you this:
How does a body rise up again and rinse
her mouth from the tap. And how
does a body put in a plum tree
or lie again on top of another body
or string a trellis. Or go on drying
the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile.
Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes,
how does the cat continue
to lick itself from toenail to tailhole.
And how does a body break
bread with the word when the word
has broken. Again. And. Again.
With the wine. And the loaf.
And the excellent glass
of the body. And she says,
Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling.
My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.

Friday, November 21, 2008

"I am the last . . ."

by Charles Simic

I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It's almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don't even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

They eat out

by Margaret Atwood

In restaurants we argue
over which of us will pay for your funeral

though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal.

At the moment only I
can do it and so

I raise the magic fork
over the plate of beef fried rice

and plunge it into your heart.
There is a faint pop, a sizzle

and through your own split head
you rise up glowing;

the ceiling opens
a voice sings Love Is A Many

Splendoured Thing
you hang suspended above the city

in blue tights and a red cape,
your eyes flashing in unison.

The other diners regard you
some with awe, some only with boredom:

they cannot decide if you are a new weapon
or only a new advertisement.

As for me, I continue eating;
I liked you better they way you were,
but you were always ambitious.

Monday, November 17, 2008

gathered and stacked, out back, behind the house, against that tree
neatly, like cord wood. soon a home for moss and mice.
perhaps a blue tarp covers it all

dusted and peeled, fit, tightly, in a crisp paper box
labeled and filed, stored in the attic among the chairs and sewing machines
neat handwriting on neat labels

tossed and flung, with eyes shut, into the fireplace
lit, turning to ash, smoke and fire, into the earth and into the air
maybe we'll have a bar-b-que and the coals will mix

left and forgotten, casually, lost and unremembered somewhere
unnoticed, the combination to 20 year old lock, neither here nor there
they join the lost socks and things as important as toe nail clippings

we stack our bones, we burn them, we bury them amongst our detritus
cuddle them, make uncomfortable beds from them
sleep on those beds and clutch the discomfort they give us

it is that discomfort, like a scratchy pillow, like a sneaker that fits,
but doesn't
that brings the bones to their place

cast them away with lint
with fliers advertising window tinting
and the bones, though molding, stored, burnt, unremembered

they make and increase our foundation
that supports the ever growing house called our lives
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Saturday, November 15, 2008

1. Doctor Drink

by J. V. Cunningham

In the thirtieth year of life
I took my heart to be my wife,

And as I turn in bed by night
I have my heart for my delight.

No other heart may mine estrange
For my heart changes as I change,

And it is bound, and I am free,
And with my death it dies with me.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Shame

by C. K. Williams

A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed,
offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at
first she'd found me—
I can't remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable,
out-of-things—
she'd decided that I was after all all right…twelve years later she comes back to me
from nowhere
and I realize that it wasn't my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want
she meant,
which, when we'd been introduced, I'd naturally aimed at her and which she'd
easily deflected,
but that she'd thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted,
what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible
humiliation.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Lucky

by Tony Hoagland

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.

Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.

Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.

Some nights, sitting by her bed
book open in my lap
while I listened to the air
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music,

amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.

And once I held her dripping wet
in the uncomfortable air
between the wheelchair and the tub,
and she begged me like a child

to stop,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
was the ancient irresistible rejoicing
of power over weakness.

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy

because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The Patience of Ordinary Things

by Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

Lessons

by Pat Schneider

I have learned
that life goes on,
or doesn't.
That days are measured out
in tiny increments
as a woman in a kitchen
measures teaspoons
of cinnamon, vanilla,
or half a cup of sugar
into a bowl.

I have learned
that moments are as precious as nutmeg,
and it has occurred to me
that busy interruptions
are like tiny grain moths,
or mice.
They nibble, pee, and poop,
or make their little worms and webs
until you have to throw out the good stuff
with the bad.

It took two deaths
and coming close myself
for me to learn
that there is not an infinite supply
of good things in the pantry.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

The Dental Hygienist

by Tom C. Hunley

She said "open up,"
so I showed her my teeth,
a chipped-white fence
that keeps my tongue penned in.

She rinsed my mouth.
She suctioned my cheek.

She said "How do you like this town?"
so I said "Mmpllff"
though I meant "More every day,"

and she said "Gorgeous weather!"
so I said "Mmpllff"
though I meant "In my mouth?"

and she didn't say anything,
so I said "Mmpllff" and "Mmpllff"
though I'm not sure what I meant,
and she took me to mean
"Would you like to go out tonight?"
and "to an expensive restaurant?"

When I arrived with a bouquet of roses,
she stuffed them in my mouth.

She told me all about her feelings:
how she feels about fillings,
how she feels about failures.

She said "open up."
She said "It's like pulling teeth
trying to get men to talk about their feelings."

So I said "Mmpllff"
though I meant "You smell prettier than the flowers in my mouth,"
and I said "Mmpllff"
she thought I meant "I'm afraid of dying alone."

She said I was a good conversationalist
and showed me her perfect teeth.
I felt an ache in my jaw.
I felt drool crawling down my chin.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Welcome Home, Children

by David Shumate

In the early spring I get together with all the people I've been
in my past lives. We sit around the table at my grandfather's
farmhouse—mashed potatoes, creamed peas, cornbread. There's
the Confederate colonel with his mustache and battlefield odor.
The medieval peasant from Portugal with insects in her hair. The
Irish boy who died from the fever at nine. There's the patient wife
of the fishmonger. The petty thief from Cathay who's already
stuffed his pockets with my grandmother's paperweights. My
favorite is the Hindu monk. His orange robes. The sacred paint
across his forehead. He's never reconciled his lust for women and
steals glances at the dancer from Babylon—my first life. Her long
dark hair. The thin veils draped over her shoulders. She loves
to lean across the table for the marmalade, exposing her breasts
for him to see. After dinner she excuses herself and walks into
the garden. He follows. I'm not sure if it's just a natural kind of
thing… One incarnation of mine seducing another…Or an act
so vile even Narcissus would have gagged.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Dog Music

by Paul Zimmer

Amongst dogs are listeners and singers.
My big dog sang with me so purely,
puckering her ruffled lips into an O,
beginning with small, swallowing sounds
like Coltrane musing, then rising to power
and resonance, gulping air to continue—
her passion and sense of flawless form—
singing not with me, but for the art of dogs.
We joined in many fine songs—"Stardust,"
"Naima," "The Trout," "My Rosary," "Perdido."
She was a great master and died young,
leaving me with unrelieved grief,
her talents known to only a few.

Now I have a small dog who does not sing,
but listens with discernment, requiring
skill and spirit in my falsetto voice.
I sing her name and words of love
andante, con brio, vivace, adagio.
Sometimes she is so moved she turns
to place a paw across her snout,
closes her eyes, sighing like a girl
I held and danced with years ago.

But I am a pretender to dog music.
The true strains rise only from
the rich, red chambers of a canine heart,
these melodies best when the moon is up,
listeners and singers together or
apart, beyond friendship and anger,
far from any human imposter—
ballads of long nights lifting
to starlight, songs of bones, turds,
conquests, hunts, smells, rankings,
things settled long before our birth.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

I want a dog named Nig

Benjamin Pantier

by Edgar Lee Masters

Together in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law,
And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend.
Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women,
Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone
With Nig for partner, bed-fellow, comrade in drink.
In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory.
Then she, who survives me, snared my soul
With a snare which bled me to death,
Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent,
Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office.
Under my jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig —
Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world!

Monday, October 13, 2008

Dog Experiences Best Day Of His Life For 400th Consecutive Day

October 13, 2004 | Issue 40•41

Warnings

by David Allen Sullivan

A can of self-defense pepper spray says it may
irritate the eyes, while a bathroom heater says it's
not to be used in bathrooms. I collect warnings
the way I used to collect philosophy quotes.

Wittgenstein's There's no such thing
as clear milk
rubs shoulders with a box
of rat poison which has been found
to cause cancer in laboratory mice
.

Levinas' Language is a battering ram—
a sign that says the very fact of saying
,
is as inscrutable as the laser pointer's advice:
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.

Last week I boxed up the solemn row
of philosophy tomes and carted them down
to the used bookstore. The dolly read:
Not to be used to transport humans.

Did lawyers insist that the 13-inch wheel
on the wheelbarrow proclaim it's
not intended for highway use? Or that the
Curling iron is for external use only?

Abram says that realists render material
to give the reader the illusion of the ordinary
.
What would he make of Shin pads cannot protect
any part of the body they do not cover
?

I load boxes of books onto the counter. Flip
to a yellow-highlighted passage in Aristotle:
Whiteness which lasts for a long time is no whiter
than whiteness which lasts only a day.


A.A.'ers talk about the blinding glare
of the obvious: Objects in the mirror
are actually behind you
, Electric cattle prod
only to be used on animals, Warning: Knives are sharp.

What would I have done without: Remove infant
before folding for storage, Do not use hair dryer
while sleeping, Eating pet rocks may lead to broken
teeth, Do not use deodorant intimately?


Goodbye to all those sentences that sought
to puncture the illusory world-like the warning
on the polyester Halloween outfit for my son:
Batman costume will not enable you to fly.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Sleeping

by Raymond Carver

He slept on his hands.
On a rock.
On his feet.
On someone else's feet.
He slept on buses, trains, in airplanes.
Slept on duty.
Slept beside the road.
Slept on a sack of apples.
He slept in a pay toilet.
In a hayloft.
In the Super Dome.
Slept in a Jaguar, and in the back of a pickup.
Slept in theaters.
In jail.
On boats.
He slept in line shacks and, once, in a castle.
Slept in the rain.
In blistering sun he slept.
On horseback.
He slept in chairs, churches, in fancy hotels.
He slept under strange roofs all his life.
Now he sleeps under the earth.
Sleeps on and on.
Like an old king.

Monday, October 6, 2008

The Scientist

by Jonathan Holden

Other fathers might cuss out a lawnmower
that wouldn't catch. Or kick the car.
Mine would simply stop. A physicist, he'd stop
and think awhile, his breath wheezing
through his nose-hiss and hiss, mechanical
until, abruptly, a solution clicked.
Then, step by step, arranging parts
in the sequence they'd come loose,
he'd direct at our lawnmower a logic
even that sullen machine could not refute.
Then, just as systematically, refit
each wrench upon its pegboard silhouette,
re-index every drill bit, every nail—
this small, half-German intellectual
who, although he'd own no gun himself,
let me wear twin Lone Ranger cap pistols
on each hip. You couldn't tell
just what he thought of you. Had he hated
us, he wouldn't have shown it. When,
in that reasoning, mildly troubled tone
of his that meant he might
be disappointed in his son, he once explained,
In war, people hurt with tools,
I shuddered. You couldn't imagine what
he might invent. He was a patient man.

I like this, but I'd like to know what it means.

The Virgin King

by John Ashbery

They know so much more, and so much less,

“innocent details” and other. It was time to

put up or shut up. Claymation is so over,

the king thought. The watercolor virus

sidetracked tens.

Something tells me you’ll be reading this on a train

stumbling through rural Georgia, wiping sleep

from your eyes as the conductor passes through

carrying a bun. We’re moving today,

today on the couch.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

my preferred translation, thanks Mr Lowell

To the Reader

Infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice

possess our souls and drain the body's force;

we spoonfeed our adorable remorse,

like whores or beggars nourishing their lice.


Our sins are mulish, our confessions lies;

we play to the grandstand with our promises,

we pray for tears to wash our filthiness;

importantly pissing hogwash through our styes.


The devil, watching by our sickbeds, hissed

old smut and folk-songs to our soul, until

the soft and precious metal of our will

boiled off in vapor for this scientist.


Each day his flattery makes us eat a toad,

and each step forward is a step to hell,

unmoved, through previous corpses and their smell

asphyxiate our progress on this road.


Like the poor lush who cannot satisfy,

we try to force our sex with counterfeits,

die drooling on the deliquescent tits,

mouthing the rotten orange we suck dry.


Gangs of demons are boozing in our brain—

ranked, swarming, like a million warrior-ants,

they drown and choke the cistern of our wants;

each time we breathe, we tear our lungs with pain.


If poison, arson, sex, narcotics, knives

have not yet ruined us and stitched their quick,

loud patterns on the canvas of our lives,

it is because our souls are still too sick.


Among the vermin, jackals, panthers, lice,

gorillas and tarantulas that suck

and snatch and scratch and defecate and fuck

in the disorderly circus of our vice,


there's one more ugly and abortive birth.

It makes no gestures, never beats its breast,

yet it would murder for a moment's rest,

and willingly annihilate the earth.


It's BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together.

You know it well, my Reader. This obscene

beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine—

you—hypocrite Reader—my double—my brother!


– Robert Lowell, tr.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Blowfly Grass

by Les Murray

The houses those suburbs could afford
were roofed with old savings books, and some
seeped gravy at stitches in their walls;

some were clipped as close as fury,
some grimed and corner-bashed by love
and the real estate, as it got more vacant,

grew blady grass and blowfly grass, so called
for the exquisite lanterns of its seed,
and the land sagged subtly to a low point,

it all inclined way out there to a pit
with burnt-looking cheap marble edges
and things and figures flew up from it

like the stones in the crusher Piers had
for making dusts of them for glazes:
flint, pyroclase, slickensides, quartz, schist,

snapping, refusing, and spitting high
till the steel teeth got gritty corners on them
and could grip them craw-chokingly to grind.

It’s their chance, a man with beerglass-cut arms
told me. Those hoppers got to keep filled. A girl,
edging in, bounced out cropped and wrong-coloured

like a chemist’s photo, crying. Who could blame her
among in-depth grabs and Bali flights and phones?
She was true, and got what truth gets.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Purring

by Coleman Barks

The internet says science is not sure
how cats purr, probably
a vibration of the whole larynx,
unlike what we do when we talk.

Less likely, a blood vessel
moving across the chest wall.

As a child I tried to make every cat I met
purr. That was one of the early miracles,
the stroking to perfection.

Here is something I have never heard:
a feline purrs in two conditions,
when deeply content and when
mortally wounded, to calm themselves,
readying for the death-opening.

The low frequency evidently helps
to strengthen bones and heal
damaged organs.

Say poetry is a human purr,
vessel mooring in the chest,
a closed-mouthed refuge, the feel
of a glide through dying.

One winter morning on a sunny chair,
inside this only body,
a far-off inboard motorboat
sings the empty room, urrrrrrrhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhh

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.
- Cary Grant

Thursday, September 25, 2008

When I Call

by John Brantingham

As I talk to her,
I like to think of
our paperback copy
of Thomas More's
Utopia sitting

on the phone table.
No one reads Utopia
No one has ever
read Utopia
No one has ever

wanted to read
Utopia, not
even Thomas More.
The only action
it will ever see

is when she absently
flips its pages while
she talks to me . When
I call, I like to
think of her doing that.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Sean Penn Anti-Ode

by Dean Young

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.
Just the pressure in his little finger alone
could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid
whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head
until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb
so he’d get the first whack at the piƱata?
He’s grown up to straighten us all out
about weapons of mass destruction
but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours.
Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat.
Somewhere a garbage truck beeps backing up
and in these circumstances counts as a triumph of sanity.
Sleet in the face, no toilet paper,
regrets over an argument, not investing wisely,
internment of the crazy mother, mistreatment
of laboratory animals.
Life, my friends, is ordinary crap.
Pineapple slices on tutu-wearing toothpicks.
Those puke bags in the seatback you might need.
The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch.
Some architectural details about Batman’s cape.
Music videos about hairdos, tattoos, implants and bling.
The crew cracking up over some actor’s flub.