POEMS -- SEPTEMBER
(Please send suggestions, feedback or commentary to timiimit@mockok.com )
September 15, 2013
February 3, 2012
Today I turn eighty-three and I am experiencing
Something I could not foresee,
The freedom to be me.
My path is clear as never before.
It’s up to me to make this tour
Meaningful, memorable, and fun galore.
With great success, I tell myself
To place my insecurities on the shelf
And sally forth with glee to be an aging elf.
I prioritize, exercise, empathize, sympathize,
Cherish each and every day
That God gives me to play.
The power of humor cannot be overstated
Nor can I overlook the benefits of laughter
In my remaining time before the hereafter.
Family, friends, good health, warm hearth
Are blessings I appreciate,
An appreciation I amply demonstrate.
To summarize: Life is good as it can be
And I will make the most of
Being eighty-three.
--Jerry Gonsalves
September 1, 2013
Labor Day
WHAT WORK IS
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.
--Philip Levine
September 16, 2012
ON MACKSBURG ROAD
Soft paw thumps play our roof--
white cat under midnight light--
as dog barks form a music
they've always heard.Undisturbed by fleeting car noise,
the FatherMother makes faces
with its cover of clouds,
and a stillness stretches.Now heartbeats can be heard--
two child's
for mother's every one--
as we fall into sleep together,not hearing the moon
depart behind clouds
or a cat landing
on the lawn.--if you live, your time will come
September 1, 2012
HUMANS BEINGwalking quickly down the sidewalk intentthe man, with his disheveled hairstepped to my right to pass himdirty clothingHe stepped to his leftbare feet, ambling toward meI looked over his shoulder, and stepped to the leftmeeting a professor for lunchhe stepped to the righthuman sweat smellStartled“Look at me”I did as he directedlight hazel eyes“I’m a human being”stepped aside, and let me passShall we all dance?
--if you live, your time will come
September 29, 2010
A Noiseless Patient Spider
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
--Walt Whitman
September 27, 2010
What Zimmer Would Be
When asked, I used to say,
"I want to be a doctor."
Which is the same thing
As a child saying,
"I want to be a priest,"
Or
"I want to be a magician,"
Which is the laying
Of hands, the vibrations,
The rabbit in the hat,
Or the body in the cup,
The curing of the sick
And the raising of the dead.
"Fix and fix, you're all better,"
I would say
To the neighborhood wounded
As we fought the world war
Through the vacant lots of Ohio.
"Fix and fix, you're all better,"
And they would rise
To fight again.
But then
I saw my aunt die slowly of cancer
And a man struck down by a car.
All along I had really
Wanted to be a poet,
Which is, you see, almost
The same thing as saying,
"I want to be a doctor,"
"I want to be a priest,"
Or
"I want to be a magician."
All along, without realizing it,
I had wanted to be a poet.
Fix and fix, you're all better.
--Paul Zimmer
(published in FAMILY REUNION)
September 26, 2010
“The Foot”
Our improbable support, erected
on the osseus architecture
of the calcaneous, talus, cuboid,
navicular, cuneiforms, metatarsals,
phalanges, a plethora of hinges,
all strung together by gliding
tendons, covered by the pearly
plantar fascia, then fat-padded
to form the sole, humble surface
of our contact with earth.
Here's the body's broadest tendon
anchors the heel's fleshy base,
the finely wrinkled skin stretches
forward across the capillaried arch,
to the ball, a balance point.
A wide web of flexor tendons
And branched veins maps the dorsum,
Fades into the stub-laden bone
splay, the stuffed sausage sacks
of toes, each with a tuft
of proximal hairs to introduce
the distal nail, whose useless
curve remembers an ancestor,
The vanished creature's wild and necessary claw.
--Alice Jones.
(published in ZYZZYVA)
September 24, 2010
Checking the horses
Every night at nine
my father put on
cowboy boots and barn jacket
and took the lantern style flashlight
to check the horses:
filled water buckets
adjusted wool blankets
ensured no snake
had settled in.
--Carol Frischman
(published in POET SPEAK)
September 22, 2010
Holding the Mirror Up to Nature
Some shapes cannot be seen in a glass,
those are the ones the heart breaks at.
They will never become valentines
or crucifixes, never. Night clouds
go on insanely as themselves
though metaphors would be prettier;
and when I see them massed at that edge
of the globe, neither weasel nor whale,
as though this world were, after all,
non-representational, I know
a truth that cannot be told, although
I try to tell you, 'We are alone,
we know nothing, nothing, we shall die
frightened in our freedom, the one
who survives will change his name
to evade the vengeance for love....'
Meanwhile the clouds go on clowning
over our heads in the floodlight of
a moon who is known to be Artemis
and Cynthia but sails away anyhow
beyond the serious poets with their
crazy ladies and cloudy histories,
their heroes in whose idiot dreams
the buzzard like a clock.
-- Howard Nemerov
(published in THE WINTER LIGHTNING)
September 21, 2010
Young
Before time had a name, when win
or lose were the same, in a forsaken
town I lived unnoticed, blessed.
Remember when shadows played
because there were leaves in the wind?
And people came to our door from a land
where stories were real?
Barefoot, we traveled the roads
all summer. At night we drew pictures
of home with smoke from the chimney.
And we frowned when we read,
so we could understand.
After the years came true, but before
their cost, I played in that big world, too,
and often won: this face was known;
gold came into these hands.
But unwieldy hours overwhelmed
my time. All I intended blew away.
The best of my roads went wrong,
no matter my age, no matter
how long I tried.
It was far, it was dim,
toward the last. And nobody knew how
heavy it was by the end,
for that same being who lived back then.
Don't you see how it was, for a child?
Don't you understand?
-- William Stafford
(published in THE WAY IT IS)
September 20, 2010
Little Things
After she's gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl's breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son's sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have--as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.
--Sharon Olds
(published in THE GOLD CELL)
September 19, 2010
Long Night Ahead
Long night ahead.
Time passes by.
A subway train comes to a stop.
As I pick up my quarter
next to me is a man
playing his guitar.
Every day I come to the same spot
where I hear the music.
One day a man came up to me.
He said, "I'm looking for a challenge.
I want to be the best
at what I do." I looked at him
and said, "What do you do?"
"I fix watches," he said.
"I've been fixing watches
for the past twenty years,
and now I'm homeless."
I turned to this man,
who was in his fifties, and said,
"I can put you back in business--
just fix my watch."
Time passed by. Every day
I gave him a watch to fix.
Then one day I met a friend
who said he could the homeless man a job.
Long night ahead.
Time passes by.
A subway train comes to a stop.
As I pick up my quarter
next to me is a man
playing his guitar.
Every day I come to the same spot
where I hear the music.
One day a woman came up to me.
She said, "I'm looking for a home.
I've been in many institutions.
I want to fly to the moon.
I want to be the president of the United States.
I want to be free."
I looked at her. She walked away.
I never saw her again.
Long night ahead.
Time passes by.
A subway train comes to a stop.
As I pick up my quarter
next to me is a man
playing his guitar.
Every day I come to the same spot
where I hear the music.
--Ruth Cohen
(published in LONG NIGHT AHEAD)
September 18, 2010
Searching
I'm lost in my own mind
Searching, but I can't find
The answers that I know are there
But I know not where
If I find them, I'll make it out okay
But there's a part of me that wants to stay
I have no responsibilities here
No anger and no fear
Here the only pain comes from my own memories
Those I can handle with ease
No one expects anything of me
And my thoughts can roam free.
--Naomi Wolf
(published athttp://www.helium.com/items/794586-poetry-suicide)
September 16, 2010
Marina
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the stye of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger--
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
--T.S. Eliot
(published in THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS)
September 15, 2010
Talking Back
--for Brady
The basketball's wet side smacks
a moon-shaped kiss
as he carries the ball to his hip,
shoulder, wishes it off
the plywood board and through the net
that rattles like chain mail.
He lands without thinking, hops,
squares to the hoop, picks the brown answer
to his mother's cry for a clean room.
The rattling chains are his response
to his father's complaints about math
scores, the left hand put-back his reply
when his sister asks for the phone.
Each new move, the sudden head fake,
the spin off the two foot stop,
the crossover, start him back to square.
He lands facing, senses his spot,
takes it home.
--Kevin Miller
(published in THE LIGHT THAT WHISPERS MORNING)
September 14, 2010
The Jar with the Dry Rim
The mind is an ocean...and so many worlds
are rolling there, mysterious, dimly seen!
And our bodies? Our body is a cup, floating
on the ocean; soon it will fill, and sink...
Not even one bubble will show where it went down.
The spirit is so near that you can't see it!
But reach for it...don't be a jar
full of water, whose rim is always dry.
Don't be the rider who gallops all night
and never sees the horse that is beneath him.
--Rumi
(published in WHEN GRAPES TURN TO WINE
translated by Robert Bly)
September 13, 2010
Convalescence
And we, who are going to live after all,
got up from our day beds, chaise lounges, settees,
pull off the twisted linen, brush our hair back
into bright bands, and smoothe the color,
lipstick, back into our cheeks. How well
we look! How clearly we are the portrait
of well-being, gathering ourselves as the pond's
edge and spreading out our blankets; so
sun-enamored we hardly recognize this future,
so brownly we burn, so whitely our secret parts
shine, as if these two tones were our own
invention and not the Nature's that saves us
as a gift for Eros--you know him--the Hungry One.
--Lynne McMahon
(published in AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW)
September 12, 2010
Cartagena
Rain and thunder beat down and flooded the streets
We danced with Indian girls in a bar,
water half-way to our knees,
The youngest one slipped down her dress and danced
bare to the waist,
The big negro deckhand made out with his girl on his lap
in a chair her dress over her eyes
Coca-cola and rum, and rainwater all over the floor.
In the glittering light I got drunk and reeled through
the rooms,
And cried, "Cartagena! swamp of unholy loves!"
And wept for the Indian whores who were younger than me,
and I was eighteen,
And splashed after the crew down the streets wearing
sandals bought at a stall
And got back to the ship, dawn came,
we were far out at sea.
Colombia 1948--Arabia 1958
--Gary Snyder
(published in RIPRAP, & COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS)
September 10, 2010
A Display of Mackerel
They lie in parallel rows, on ice, head to tail, each a foot of luminosity
barred with black bands, which divide the scales' radiant section
like seams of lead in a Tiffany window. Iridescent, watery
prismatics: think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere,
think sun on gasoline. Splendor, and splendor, and not a one in any way
distinguished from the other --nothing about them of individuality. Instead
they're all exact expressions of one soul, each a perfect fulfillment
of heaven's template, mackerel essence. As if, after a lifetime arriving
at this enameling, the jeweler's made uncountable examples, each as intricate
in its oily fabulation as the one before. Suppose we could iridesce,
like these, and lose ourselves entirely in the universe of shimmer--would you want
to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost? They'd prefer,
plainly, to be flashing participants, multitudinous. Even now they seem to be bolting
forward, heedless of stasis. They don't care they're dead and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably, they didn't care that they were living: all, all for all,
the rainbowed school and its acres of brilliant classrooms, in which no verb is singular,
or every one is. How happy they seem, even on ice, to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming.
--Mark Doty
(published at www.poets.org)
September 9, 2010
Downfall Enters
through a crack in wet ashes
like nacreous light
like an ethnic Albanian vampire
like unrest in Indonesia
the wild juice of language begins to melt
under the heavy construction of glare
we are covered
as if with a gun
as if with water
as if with moonlight
as if with angels
as if with hair
we mark our progress with a trail
of dead condoms like bread crumbs
we volunteer to be the subjects
of vast experiments involving weather
as snow touches them
the trees stop singing
--Richard Shelton
(published in THE LAST PERSON TO HEAR YOUR VOICE)
September 8, 2010
June
A single swallow glides in the air above the water. Next to
it something hovers, thin and white. It flies too--or is it
floating? It vanishes. It appears again, a little smaller than
the bird.
Now the bird approaches land. Now it is over the beach
itself. The floating object is also the beach. A feather!
The swallow snaps the feather from the air and holds it in
its beak while it takes three or four rapid strokes forward.
Then it lets the feather go, and dives away.
The feather pauses on the updraft, then begins to descend.
The bird turns, flows back, glides above and beneath it.
The feather tumbles erratically. With a plunge the swallow
snaps it from the air and flies on, and then, again, lets it go.
All of this is repeated maybe a dozen times. Finally the
swallow ignores the feather, which drifts toward the berms
of wild roses, between the dunes and the sea. The swallow
climbs higher into the air, blue shoulders pumping hard.
Then it swings, glides, turns toward the sea, is gone.
--Mary Oliver
(published in OWLS AND OTHER FANTASIES)
September 7, 2010
You Have to Be Careful
You have to be careful telling things.
Some ears are tunnels.
Your words will go in and get lost in the dark.
Some ears are flat pans like the miners used
looking for gold.
What you say will be washed out with the stones.
You look a long time till you find the right ears.
Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to,
a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles,
and the slow, gradually growing possibility
that when you find such ears,
they already know.
--Naomi Shihab Nye
(published in YELLOW GLOVE)
September 30, 2009
Retread
Trucker's retread carcass
nose-down on the road--
a tired armadillo
unable to make it south
out of Oregon.
--Tim Van Ert
September 29, 2009
Thanks Given
Lord, we don't need the sight of yellow leaves
falling to pile with the scarlet and orange
to signal another end of long summer days.
The same frost that melts to a black tar
last month's brilliant morning glory blossoms
has us huddled here before the hearth.
You know it's not our nature
to give thanks during the hotter days--
long, cold nights slow our hearts down to pray.
Seeing summer's sugars stored
on branches bare but for buds
waiting the winter to be next spring's blooms,
our hearts bulge in booming thanks
for the reserves of energy you provide us
through faith, family and friends.
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE, YOUR TIME WILL COME)
September 28, 2009
Waiting For You
Under a half moon
my mouth moves round,
empty as the night
before devouring the light
from your full mouth.
--Tim Van Ert
September 27, 2009
Ground Zero
"I felt a great shriek in nature"
--Edward Munch
He knew how everything, at extremes, is the same:
how heat freezes, joy pains;
how the most unbearable sound is silence;
how a scream turns even the firm world liquid,
a sea beyond human keening;
how the bell of the skull starts vibrating out
into the great heart of the sky;
how the dull hands are clapped
like dogs' ears to the head;
how we'd pull that head off, if only
the lake weren't its mouth,
the sky its skinned eyelids,
the night oozing in oily and woozy.
Why was it given him to hear this?
This scream of the possum-faced preener,
the simian seductress,
the sweetheart that turns all men green;
this scream of the papery matron
draped in a greatcoat of syphilis,
her raw hands mittened in flesh,
basting her naked child;
this scream of the white house drowning
in bloodfire, the gray face rolling off
of the terrified canvas,
the long tongue of the road
breaking up in intemperate paint;
this scream of lopped limbs and two-headed man
in all their ludicrous, formal dress,
as if no one must ever lose face,
as if no one were incomplete;
this scream of the murderer's
thick hands and wrists, as he twists
slightly sideways, and toward us.
Ground zero. Hairless and legless. The scream
of this whole goddamned universe squirms into us.
While somewhere above us,
safe on their bridge into space,
two blue friends walk off the deaf canvas,
as if at a certain distance,
as if in an obdurate silence,
as if toward some not unimaginable bright town.
--Ronald Wallace
(published in VITAL SIGNS an Anthology edited by Ronald Wallace (1989))
September 26, 2009
The Facts of Life
She wonders how people get babies.
Suddenly vague and distracted,
we talk about "making love."
She's six and unsatisfied, finds
our limp answers unpersuasive.
Embarrassed, we stiffen, and try again,
this time exposing the stark, naked words:
penis, vagina, sperm, womb, and egg.
She thinks we're pulling her leg.
We decide that it's time
to get passionate and insist.
But she's angry, disgusted.
Why do we always make fun of her?
Why do we lie?
We sigh, try cabbages, storks.
She smiles. That's more like it.
We talk on into the night, trying
magic seeds, good fairies, God...
--Ronald Wallace
(published in VITAL SIGNS an anthology edited by Ronald Wallace)
September 25, 2009
When Death Comes
When death
comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the
bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder
blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and
a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider
eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field
daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as
all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to
the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride
married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made
of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself
sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
--Mary Oliver
September 24, 2009
Healer
Some battle shakes your bones.
Still the bombs fall, though now
You've dug a place to crawl.
Quiver under cover--
Lung, brain or adrenal.
Hard to sleep in trenches:
Seizing bladder, tic eye,
Pounding heart, numb left side.
Muster control before
Fall's more painful wrenches.
Clocks shock you to the time
For a host of habits.
Body performs antics
At the buzzing party
To tug your babbling mind.
Yogis live in learning
Rhythms of breath and heart.
Start subtlety from here
To master nerve and thought.
Yogi, you are in training.
Fearlessly share visions
With friends, self--and hope.
Pick up my stethoscope,
Hear the diagnosis.
Now, be your own healer.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in SEEDS ON A WIND RIDE)
September 23, 2009
I Shall Believe
Apples smile before the first bite,
cry sweet tears to their end.
Baboons kiss their babes
as fingers comb coarse hair.
Chrysanthemums thirst for dew--
hoping to finish their make-up.
Diamonds lie in dark anguish
each time your skin closes to light.
Escalators keep on climbing
to gain momentum for flight.
Ferns lay in wait for me
on my final wandering.
Girls turn their glances down
until ready.
Honey was invented through God
offering a taste-sampler of heaven.
Insects scour the earth
for life's raw materials.
Jaguars jump only when
the full moon hides behind clouds.
Keys grow heavier in my hand
by their repeated plots to disappear.
Larks sing long
as a matter of life.
Masked actor paces backstage
devising his own plots.
Nickels gather in pockets
warmed by thighs in motion.
Orchids don't have to care
what we think of them.
Praiseworthy tales will find me by the fire,
snuggle close through my sleep.
Quasars never really existed
before the Hubble telescope was fixed.
Rhubarb is not a poisonous plant
for nothing.
Swaying was initiated by seaweed
so we land-dwellers would not forget.
Time is an unnatural warp of space--
Einstein got that one all wrong.
Uvulas hand in suspended welcome
to the wandering tongue.
Viceroy butterflies are born
knowing where the nectar is sweetest.
Woman bears the pain of life
man does all he can to disperse.
Xenon is an inert gas
in the minds of the unimaginative.
Yo-yos respond readily
when palms are wide and loose.
In the rebirthing gifts
sleep hides among the zzzzzzzzs.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in SEEDS ON A WIND RIDE)
September 22, 2009
SUNDAY OLYMPICS
Sunday--once the Lord's day, now mine to find Olympic Hot Springs.
Through six years I rummage the map from memory's glovebox:
catch a sharp curve turn-off across from the country store,
pay at the gate, then head straight past the alder grove
until the creek running rounded-stone shallow
leads past the abandoned ranger's house and tower
through oak and pine to a parking lot (fuller this time.)
Curved hiking trail leads me to unwind and anticipate
each sunny mud-slide bank, wash-out and fallen fir.
Still think those crumbling asphalt curbs were put there in the 30s!
Mumble the same 'howdydo' to each hiker passed
and take no false turns--straight to the upper-most pool
the lower ones lured me away from hundreds of Sundays before.
Zinnias and glads smile down their creamy oranges, yellows and pinks
from a shoulder high bank of moss to that first-formed hot pool.
I guessed they weren't placed there by the hippie teens ooohing their delight.
Gnome, stooped to show his white beard nearly as close to his feet
as his stringy white hair, empties a plastic flower bucket,
sits in the tub's corner offering a direct view of the two teens'
kinky blonde hair and thin, tattooed, pierced young bodies.
Undressing and slipping into water they each light up.
They ask if I want some coconut-flavored rum.
"Sure," I say, and ask if they'd camped there.
"Yeah, last night--and people keep it very clean, too!"
Old man says he grew the flowers himself,
"from Sequim--come here every Sunday."
"A nice way to go to church," I offer.
"Yeah, and a nice place to get kisses from young ladies.
And I get lots of them. Don't get nothing if you don't ask."
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE, YOUR TIME WILL COME)
September 21, 2009
If I never try
guess I may's well die.
When I think about dying
is when I feel like crying.
But think about trying--
I just end up sighing.
--Tim Van Ert
September 20, 2009
Poems
They've come every day this month.
Once I said I wrote them because
I didn't have time for anything
else. Meaning, of course, better
things--things other than mere
poems and verses. Now I'm writing
them because I want to.
More than anything because
this is February
when normally not much of anything
happens. Tub this month
the larches have blossomed,
and the sun has come out
every day. It's true my lungs
have heated up like ovens.
And so what if some people
are waiting for the other shoe
to drop, where I'm concerned.
Well, here it is then. Go ahead.
Put it on. I hope it fits
like a shoe.
Close enough, yes, but supple
so the foot has room to breathe
a little. Stand up. Walk
around. Feel it? It will go
where you're going, and be there
with you at the end of your trip.
But for now, stay barefoot. Go
outside for a while, and play.
--Raymond Carver
(published in A NEW PATH TO THE WATERFALL)
September 19, 2009
Learning the Signs of the Zodiac
It's reasonable to be afraid of dying, but love has more courage
than reason. A stone is not so
frightened of rain as a clod is.
This is the fifth scroll of the Mathnawi. I can help you
find your way like the stars in the sign of the Zodiac.
But only a mariner who studies the stars and knows the directions
they lead can use them. To others there's nothing but looking at them.
From darkfall to daybreak make yourself familiar with these stars.
Each one is boiling naphtha poured down on demons.
Scorpions to them; to you, good companions.
The Sagittarian bow attacks your enemies. The Aquarian bucket
pours water for your crops. The Piscean fish wrecks
the wandering boat. The truthful Bull
helps with plowing. The Sun-Lion tears the night
to shreds and brings the honor of a glowing
redness.
Every existence is poison to some and spirit-sweetness to others.
Be the Friend. Then you can eat from a poison jar
and taste only clear discrimination.
--Rumi
(published in OPEN SECRET, VERSIONS OF RUMI)
September 18, 2009
Ode to Summer
Summer, red violin,
bright cloud,
a buzzing
of saw
and cicada
precedes you,
your sky
is vaulted,
smooth and shining as
an eye,
and beneath its gaze,
summer,
fish of the
infinite sky,
pleasing elytron,
lazy,
lethargic,
rounded bee's
belly,
fiendish
sun,
terrible, paternal sun,
sweaty as a
laboring ox,
parched sun
pounding on your head
like an unexpected
climbing
across the sand,
summer,
desert sea.
The sulphur
miner
drips
yellow sweat;
ray by ray
the pilot
flies
the celestial sun;
black
sweat
slides
down a forehead
into eyes
in the mine
at Lota,
the miner
wipes
his black
forehead,
sowed fields
blaze,
wheat
rustles,
blue
insects
seek
shade,
touch
coolness,
dip
their heads
in a diamond.
Abudnant
summer,
wagon
of
ripe
apples,
strawberry
mouth
in the greenness, lips
of wild plums,
roads
of soft dust
layered
on dust,
midday,
red
copper drum,
and in the afternoon
the air
makes clover
dance, invades
the desert furnace,
a cool
star
rises
in the somber
sky,
in the crackling
though unscorched
summer
night.
--Pablo Neruda
(published in SELECTED ODES OF PABLO NERUDA)
September 17, 2009
SHOELESS JOE