POEMS -- MAY
(Please send suggestions, feedback or commentary to timiimit@mockok.com )
May 27, 2012
READER'S HAMMOCK
Mound-rippled, pine and scrub oak rendezvous:
wind’s sighs of self-satisfaction blow
like Nature on a reed instrument
through yellow and green leaves.
Sounds like 'hang your hammock here' to me.
I imagine Ponderosas pleading their privilege
to cradle book laden human weight,
and peg them like two common thieves--
the eye hooks hold strong.
Sticky tears of incense dry quickly in the summer heat.
Hemp lines steel themselves to tug-of-war
with the gravity they serve to relieve.
Then the wind slows and allows me
to turn the white leaves without struggle.
Suspended here, every story breathes and moves--
midnight freight yard paint cans, markers twitching;
a dark corner crumpled by cans of beer;
writer assailed at Nairobi lake for an algebra lesson;
legs above back, choosing which triplet to sacrifice.
Eyes close now, stories continue.
Tim Van Ert -- "If You Live, Your Time Will Come"
May 9, 2012
FORGET SOME THINGS
I forget some warnings
in the presence of beauty.
Clematis' nursery instructions
remind of winter's freeze.
Cat's mole-prey dumped in root hole
need not be an omen.
But this December brought
such warm amnesia.
Hope directs knowledge vacuums
to draw in lush beliefs,
Such as how unpotted clematis roots,
finding perfect placement,
Respond like young Olympians: sprinting
fragrant, flowered vines.
If only bathroom's metal pipework
alone had frozen,
Sweet clematis would not have withered black,
dropping curled leaves.
But fingering green buds on twining limbs in spring
redeems challenged faith:
Clematis will bloom again
through summer and fall.
--if you live, your time will come
May 29, 2011
The Lady Bug
The day our daughter gets into college
a lady bug flies straight toward our bed
and lands on my pillow. Head down,
it trudges along rapidly, its
furled wings sticking out the back
from under the red shell. I wet
my thumb in tea, it mounts the thumb,
I hold still, as when first nursing,
breathing evenly. After
a while it drips to the pillowcase
and noses like a scenter. I touch some tea
to the taut percale and the lady bug
kneels in cow's milk and tannic acid, then a
joint buckles and it's lying on its rim
lapping souchong. I fetch a plate
and a leaf, wistful to build it a cage,
raise it to reproductive age
and then raise its babies. But it draws back,
lifting its feet up sharply from the icy
floral porcelain. Then I remember
it's a carnivore, I get the swatter
and go hunting for it, stun a fly, half-
crush it and set it down. The lady bug
rears up, fondles the wings,
rubs the fondle up its forearms, then
takes a tour of the whole creature
three times its size, licks the leg barbs,
noses into the anus, treads across the
bulbs of the eyes. I lean over, and remember
the first days of our daughter's life
when I bent double over her cradle
as she slept, my tears odd, wild,
tropical spots on the cot-sheet,
I swore to her I'd raise her until in her strength she could leave me.
--Sharon Olds
(THE WELLSPRING)
May 14, 2011
It is Born
Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
--Pablo Neruda
(in ON THE BLUE SHORE OF SILENCE)
May 8,2011
The Simple Truth
I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
lung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat," she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stay in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
--Philip Levine
(from THE SIMPLE TRUTH -- winner, Pulitzer Prize)
May 31, 2010
Absent with Official Leave
The lights are beginning to go out in the barracks.
They persist or return, as the wakeful hollow,
But only for a moment; then the windows blacken
For all the hours of the soldier's life.
It is life into which he composes his body.
He covers his ears with his pillow, and begins to drift
(Like the plumes the barracks trail into the sky)
Past the laughs, the quarrels, and the breath of others
To the ignorant countries where civilians die
Inefficiently, in their spare time, for nothing...
The curved roads hopping through the aimless green
Dismay him, and the cottages where people cry
For themselves and, sometimes, for the absent soldier--
Who inches through hedges where the hunters sprawl
For birds, for birds; who turns in ecstasy
Before the slow small fires the women light
His charmed limbs, all endearing from the tub.
He dozes, and the washed locks trail like flax
Down the dark face; the unaccusing eyes
That even the dream's eyes are averted from
See the wind puff down the chimney, warm the hands
White with the blossoms it pretends are snow...
He moans like a bear in his enchanted sleep,
And the grave mysterious beings of his years--
The causes who mourn above his agony like trees--
Are moved for their child, and bend across his limbs
The one face opening for his life, the eyes
That look without shame even into his.
And the man awakes, and sees around his life
The night that is never silent, broken with the sighs
And patient breathing of the dark companions
With whom he labors, sleeps, and dies.
--Randall Jarrell
(published in RANDALL JARRELL SELECTED POEMS)
May 30, 2010
In Maceio
She gave me the flowers--
two armfuls of red Iris backed with
fern fronds and this red, red of
parrot feathers, red
of a death shout, of any heart's
last breath. She
gave me the flowers.
I said what are they called in
Portuguese? She
smiled , shook her head and no one else
knew either. But she wanted
me to know, she was giving me
the flowers. Not just
decoration on the table behind which
I stood to tell the night students
about poetry in America. They
were dying, these flowers, in the heat of
my English flowing over the tired students,
some of whom had driven three hours to
get there, students with
red eyes, eyes that had worked all day and
studied all night. "But they're
stupid, these students," Eduardo said,
Eduardo who spent his nights
with them and had to
do it, though he meant to love them and
did, working two jobs himself--a professor
on strike at the University, needing more
pay, making it up with these
night students, these ones who he said wanted
more and who came stupid and mostly stayed
stupid while they got an education.
But she gave me the flowers,
picked them up in her two arms
as we started to move from the lecture room
to leave them behind to be thrown out
with the trash. She gave me
the flowers and I said did you
understand what I said? and she said "yes,"
maybe the only English she knew and she
put the red flowers with no name
into my arms and I walked out of there.
--Tess Gallagher
(published in THE SEATTLE REVIEW)
May 29, 2010
Suzanne
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can
hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that
she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea
and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to
tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her
wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know
that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.
And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a
long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for
certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors
then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long
before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your
wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel
blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect
body with his mind.
Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to
the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows
you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in
the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for
love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know
that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.
--Leonard Cohen
May 28, 2010
For My Stepdaughter
When I show you I've replaced
the Aucuba japonica at the side
of the house, its tower of yellow-speckled
leaves like variegated galaxies turning
black with spider mites, you say,
"That's where Mom hid her wine bottles,"
green glass empty on the bank
of your childhood. You remember
the afternoons she drove
you home from school drunk,
the nights she passed out
on the carpet or driveway,
your sister shouting, "I hate you!"
at the dark.
Maybe that's why I garden,
to dig a deep hole
like in the native ritual
for pain, shout into it,
letting earth break it down.
Over every inch of our yard
I turn in compost and peat moss,
help clay become loam,
its minerals available to seedlings
and transplants, encourage roots,
like your and mine
to go deep.
--Paula Jones Gardiner
(published in THE SEATTLE REVIEW)
May 27, 2010
Dolphin Feeding
A shimmering sea, a moonlit beach
and a gathering of primal shapes...
They come in ones and twos--
a streak amidst the swirl of wave and foam,
shadows glinting silver in the moonlight--
metallic gray made shining hide.
Close enough for me to see old scars
each dolphin takes the fish quite gently from my hands,
then nudges more boldly for a second course,
a wet eye gleaming in anticipation...
This is a meeting of elements,
a mutual venturing forth.
I'm waist deep in their water
while they ride waves ever closer to my shore.
They seek what I offer.
I am pulled to what they are.
For a moment, as fish pass
from my hand to their mouth
we meet,
linked by this scaly offering
and our own separate hungers.
For a moment we are joined.
But the link cannot hold,
and we both know it.
The nudge of greeting
and the tug farewell are intertwined
as sea and land reclaim their own.
--Suzanne Graham
(published in POETSPEAK)
May 26, 2010
Banquet at the Tso Family Manor
The windy forest is checkered
By the light of the setting,
Waning moon. I tune the lute,
Its strings are moist with dew.
The brook flows in the darkness
Below the flower path. The thatched
Roof is crowned with constellations.
As we write the candles burn short.
Our wits grow sharp as swords while
The wind goes round. When the poem
Contest is ended, someone
Sings a song of the South. And
I think of my little boat,
And long to be on my way.
--TU FU
http://www.counterpunch.org/poems02202009.html
May 25, 2010
Iceman
You climbed high into that thin air
with straw stuffed into your leather tunic
the pouch of seeds
and flint weapons
because the wind called your name
or for a vision quest
to the bear spirit of the mountain
or an odyssey
to reach the legendary land
the old men spoke of.
Forgive this rude intrusion
of wrenching and chipping
the breaking of your parts.
There have been other instances
of their bumbling feet
and clumsy picks
priceless pieces lost, vessels broken
it's only their eagerness
driven, like you
by a rage to know.
--Arnold Perrin
(published in WINDOW)
May 24, 2010
Potter's Clay
A tiny fragment of the seasoned soil
Damp, dimpled, warming under your hand,
Color you can feel with your skin
Grainy like a starfish, fluid-solid.
All the here and now presses your forearms,
Pulling energy into your body to steer
The guiding hand, slick with slurry,
Searching for the shape of the soul.
Clasping clay, your hands find the way inside,
Tapping heart, gut, womb, unearthing
A longing for touch in corners long lost,
The smell of hope on your fingertips.
So familiar, the fragrant wet earth,
Filling your hand with my surrender.
--Linda F. Burghardt
(published in MEDICINAL PURPOSES)
May 23, 2010
Lament
Someone is dead.
Even the trees know it,
those poor old dancers who come on lewdly,
all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
I think...
I think I could have stopped it,
if I'd been as firm as a nurse
or noticed the neck of the driver
as he cheated the crosstown lights;
or later in the evening,
if I'd held my napkin over my mouth.
I think I could...
if I'd been different, or wise, or calm,
I think I could have charmed the table,
the stained dish or the hand of the dealer.
But it's done.
It's all used up.
There's no doubt about the trees
spreading their thin feet into the dry grass.
A Canada goose rides up,
spread out like a grey suede shirt,
honking his nose into the March wind.
In the entryway a cat breathes calmly
in her watery blue fur.
The supper dishes are over and the sun
unaccustomed to anything else
goes all the way down.
--Anne Sexton
(published in CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
Edited by Donald Hall, Second Edition)
May 22, 2010
Years in a Thought
Did you smell that smell that took you back in time?
Perhaps it was a place where you once were.
Perhaps it was a feeling in your heart.
Like an invisible cluster of bubbles, it bursts for you alone.
You look around. I love that person, that place.
How strong and tender and fragrant. The heart ached.
The things we love and fear never disappear.
Like the light and heat from a candle flame,
if the fire is extinguished, we hold the image of the flame,
we know how it feels
and the odor of the smoldering wick,
that armor-piercing smell.
--Dennis Muong
(published in FIREWEED)
May 21, 2010
Youth Sunday
Your long fingers reached for the sermon
as the preacher passed out parts.
I was left with the Lord's Prayer
and the benediction
Saturday night the group went out for pizza,
shared stories from last semester.
I had a boyfriend back on campus,
you were engaged.
The hair curling around your ears was dark,
the hair on your arms, darker. You toyed
with a pepperoni, then leaned toward me
and whispered, Let's get out of here.
We drove to the beach in your beat-up Chevy.
I abandoned my shoes. The wind lifted
the hair from my neck and my skirt swirled
around my legs. Your fingers pressed my arm.
Sunday morning, our eyes meet over the altar
as organ notes rolled in my gut. I prayed
over a sea of bowed heads and remembered
how the cold waves woke us.
--Ann Campanella
(published in MAIN STREET RAG)
May 20, 2010
Redeeming the Thistle
As Claire and my mother climb stone steps
in our garden, they recapture names I might
have called my children in a fairy tale:
Lithodora, Penstemon, Coreopsis Moonbeam.
They stare at my neighbors' front yard:
morning glory around roses, blackberries ripe
in the plum tree, quack grass bursting
through concrete, a few seeds on bent
dandelion stems. Worst of all, the thistle.
Grab a paper bag and get over there. Cover
those flowers before they go to seed.
Chop the bottom and cart that thistle away!
They nod and look at me.
Later, I pull my own crabgrass,
dandelions, a little oxalis. No thistles.
I remember my neighbors work long hours,
sometimes sleep at their office, afraid
their microfilm company will fail.
I cross the street to inspect the pariah:
tall...needle-spiked.
Brown flowers like bristles. Soft
purple down at the tip.
--Phyllis Mannan
(published in FIREWEED)
May 19, 2010
MRI of a Poet's Brain
In this image
of your brain
I see each curve
in the corpus callosum,
curlicues of gyri,
folding of fissures,
sinuous sulci,
mammillary bodies,
arcuate fasciculus,
angular gyrus,
tracts and nuclei,
eyes and ears,
tongue and pharynx,
but not even
a single syllable
of one
tiny
poem.
--Vernon Rowe
(published in BLOOD & BONE, POEMS BY PHYSICIANS)
May 18, 2010
Flying at Night
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
--Ted Kooser
(published at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/flying-at-night)
May 16, 2010
Bernard and Sarah
"Hang them where they'll do some good," my grandfather
said, as he placed the dusty photograph
in my father's hands. My father and I stared
at two old people posed stiffly side by side--
my great-great-great-grandparents, in the days
when photography was young, and they were not.
My father thought it out as we drove home.
Deciding that they might do the most good
somewhere out of sight, my father drove
a nail into the back wall of his closet;
they have hung there ever since, brought out
only on such occasions as the marriage
of one of his own children. "I think you ought
to know the stock you're joining with," he says.
The back they go to the closet, where they hang
keeping their counsel until it is called for.
Yet, through walls, over miles of fields and woods
that flourish still around the farm they cleared,
their eyes light up the closet of my brain
to draw me toward the place I started from,
and when I have come home, they take me in.
--Henry Taylor
(published in VITAL SIGNS, CONTEMPORARY POETRY
FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESSES--ed. Ronald Wallace)
May 15, 2010
Crane Moon
Five o'clock,
corn twisted like iron,
dry glazed oaks,
the sandhill cranes filling the fields
of northwest Indiana.
Beneath the broken clouds,
the washed lines of reddening light,
a pair leafs out
broadwinged against the sun.
Long hollow bones, the upward flick
of a feathered wrist.
Rust-stained,
they pick at the earth,
and dance,
bowing low and leaping
open-sailed
throwing leaves over their red crowns
bouncing like loose planets
beside the bleached grass.
It's dark now
under the crane moon.
There's nothing on the road to Indianapolis.
And nothing in the car,
but a blue robe in a suitcase
and magazines full of shining animals.
--Henry Hughes
(published in MEN HOLDING EGGS)
May 14, 2010
Gleaning
When I was a girl in Los Angeles we'd go gleaning.
Coming home from Sunday picnics in the canyons,
Driving through orange groves, we would stop at fields
Of lima beans, already harvested, and glean.
We children would pick a few lima beans in play,
But the old ones, bending to them, gleaned seriously
Like a picture in my Bible story book.
So, now, I glean seriously,
Bending to pick the beans that are left.
I am resigned to gleaning. If my heart is heavy,
It is with the weight of all it's held.
How many times I've lain
At midnight with the young men in the field!
At noon the lord of the field has spread his skirt
Over me, his handmaid. "What else do you want?"
I ask myself, exasperated at myself.
But inside me something hopeful and insatiable--
A girl, a gown-up, giggling, gray-haired girl--
Gasps: "More, more!" I can't help hoping,
I can't help expecting
A last man, black, gleaning,
To come to me, at sunset, in the field.
In the last light we lie there alone:
My hands spill the last things they hold,
The days are crushed beneath my dying body
By the body crushing me. As I bend
To my soup spoon, here at the fireside, I can feel
And not feel the body crushing me, as I go gleaning.
--Randall Jarrell
(published in RANDALL JARRELL, SELECTED POEMS)
May 13, 2010
Dust and Memory
A small unshaven man, perhaps fifty,
with a peaked cap pulled sideways
to hide his features. He bowed his head
to the ground, groaned, rose to thrust
his head back in abandon, and flung
his body forward again. A supplicant
on his knees to what? The earth and sea
that had misused him? The power of pain?
The female God-face painted on the prow
of the fishing boat whose shade he hid in?
When the cap fell away I recognized a man
I passed each evening coming home at dusk,
a near neighbor to whom I'd never spoken
and never would. After dark I did not
steal back to find him gone or to hear
the sea, moonless, itself only a word
without consonants, repeated invisibly
inside my head.
What is this about?
Wherever you are now there is earth
somewhere beneath you waiting to take
the little you leave. This morning I rose
before dawn, dressed in the cold, washed
my face, ran a comb through my hair
and felt my skull underneath, unrelenting,
soon the home of nothing. The wind
that swirled the sand that day years ago
had a name that will outlast mine
by a thousand years, though made of air,
which is what I too shall become, hope-
fully, air that says quietly in your ear,
"I'm dust and memory, your two neighbors
on this cold star." That wind, the Levante,
will howl through the sockets of my skull
to make a peculiar music. When you hear it,
remember it's me, singing, gone but here,
warm still in the fire of your care.
--Philip Levine
(published in THE SIMPLE TRUTH)
May 12, 2010
Mayakovsky In New York: A Found Poem
New York: You take a train that rips through versts.
It feels as if the trains were running over your ears.
For many hours the train flies along the banks
of the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops,
passengers run out, buy up bunches of celery,
and run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.
Bridges leap over the train with increasing frequency.
At each stop an additional story grows
onto the roofs. Finally houses with squares
and dots of windows rise up. No matter how far
you throw back your head, there are no tops.
Time and again, the telegraph poles are made
of wood. Maybe it only seems that way.
In the narrow canyons between the buildings, a sort
of adventurer-wind howls and runs away
along the versts of the ten avenues. Below
flows a solid human mass. Only their yellow
waterproof slickers hiss like samovars and blaze.
The construction rises and with it the crane, as if
the building were being lifted up off the ground
by its pigtail. It is hard to take it seriously.
The buildings are glowing with electricity; their evenly
cut-out windows are like a stencil. Under awnings
the papers lie in heaps, delivered by trucks.
It is impossible to tear oneself away from this spectacle.
At midnight those leaving the theaters drink a last soda.
Puddles of rain stand cooling. Poor people scavenge
bones. In all directions is a labyrinth of trains
suffocated by vaults. There is no hope, your eyes
are not accustomed to seeing such things.
They are starting to evolve an American gait out
of the cautious steps of the Indians on the paths of empty
Manhattan. Maybe it only seems that way.
--Annie Dillard
(published in THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY)
May 11, 2010
--Ed Skoog
(published in NARATIVE MAGAZINE)
May 10, 2010
A Blessing
"Freely chosen, discipline
is absolute freedom."
--Ron Serino
1.
The blue shadow of dawn settles
its awkward silks into the enamelled kitchen
and soon you will wake with me into the long
discipline of light and day--the morning sky
startled and starred with returning birds.
You have-whisper, half-sigh, "This will never stop."
And I say, "Look at the constellations
our keys and coins make, there,
on the polished sky of the dresser top."2.
From what sometimes seems an arbitrary
form or discipline often come two words
that rhyme and in the rhyming fully marry
the world of spoons and sheets and common birds
to another world that we have always known
where the waterfall of dawn does not drown
even the haloed gnat; where we are shown
how to find and hold the pale day moon, round
and blessed in the silver lake of a coffee spoon.
--Mekeel McBride
(published in VITAL SIGNS, CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN
POETRY FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESSES)
May 9, 2010
Only One Mother
Hundreds of stars in the pretty sky,
Hundreds of shells on the shore together,
Hundreds of birds that go singing by,
Hundreds of lambs in the sunny weather.
Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn,
Hundreds of bees in the purple clover,
Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn,
But only one mother the wide world over.
--George Cooper
(published on worldwideweb)
May 8, 2010
Spotting
when you were a girl, was a technique
learned patiently
in a warm dance studio
with a speckled linoleum floor
and a humming fan.
Focus. Focus on one spot
at eye level,
as you chaine', pique', pirouette.
Whip your head around! Bobbie pins fly
from the bun your mother twisted and sprayed
with VO-5 after she renewed the errant elastic
of your pink slipper.
Find your spot
or you will be too dizzy
to complete the dance.
Now, spotting is a horror
discovered
in a ladies' room--
speckled panties and a rattling fan.
You should be telling yourself something: Focus
on one red spot, one red spot,
life pouring out of you,
plans falling through, joy
you shared with your mother,
and others, now bleeding out of you
as you search in your purse
for your doctor's number.
You will have to send someone
to find your husband at your table in the crowded
room. Focus
as the dance is interrupted.
Never been more focussed.
Never more dizzy.
--Suzanne Baldwin Leitner
(published in MAIN STREET RAG)
May 7, 2010
Reluctance
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the ills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question "Whither?"
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
--Robert Frost
(published in A BOY'S WILL)
May 6, 2010
El Curandero
I am bathing. All my greyness--
The hospital, the incurable illnesses,
This headache--is slowly given over
To bathwater, deepening it to where
I lose sight of my limbs. The fragrance,
Twenty different herbs at first (dill, spices
From the Caribbean, aloe vera)
Settles, and becomes the single, warm air
Of my sweat, of the warmth deep in my hair--
I recognize it, it's the smell of my pillow
And of my sheets, the closest things to me.
Now one with the bathroom, every oily tile
A different picture of me, every square
One in which I'm given the power of curves,
Distorted, captured in some less shallow
Dimension--now I can pray. I can cry, and he'll
Come. He is my shoulder, maybe, above
The grey water. He is in the steam,
So he can touch my face. Rafael,
He says, I am your saint. So I paint
For him the story of the day: the wife
Whose husband beat purples into her skin,
The jaundiced man (who calls me Ralph, still,
Because that's more American), faint
Yellows, his eyes especially--then,
Still crying, the bright red a collision
Brought out of its perfect vessel, this girl,
This life attached to, working, the wrong thing
Of a tricycle. I saw pain--
Primitive, I could see it, through her split
Chest, in her crushed ribs--white-hot. Now,
I can stop. He has listened, he is silent.
When he finally speaks, touching my face,
It sounds herbal, or African, like drums
Or the pure, tiny bells her child's cries
Must have been made of. Then, somehow,
I'm carried to my bed, the pillow, the sheets
Fragrant, infinite, cool, and I recognize
His voice. In the end, just as sleep takes
The world away, I know it is my own.
--Rafael Campo
(published in BLOOD & BONES, POEMS BY PHYSICIANS)
May 5, 2010
Colored Pencils
Dashing, limitless color
shades kindergarten yellow;
Spanking hands of time--
growing up, growing old.
Youthful orange--
ripening anticipation,
breaks no bounds rebellion.
Blue streams,
heartbreak tears,
Love lost--
Disguise shaped
defense.
Experimental years weave in
and out
purpleish haze.
Traces faded jaded memories,
etched into scars.
Fast forward--falling fatally
into finish.
Tired hands, tired feet;
white anguish--
pursue on.
Leaving color behind.
--Jessica Talmon
(published in NORTHWEST PASSAGE)
May 4, 2010
I Look Like Ogden Nash
Her new face having grown out of her other one,
I knew her at once when I saw her again,
but her dilated eyes and haywire hair belonged
in a place miles away where she had been
cleaning electric rooms full of static dust
that clogged her vacuum, blistered her skin.
What she had witnessed there, she could not list.
What it meant to her, she could not begin
to say, but across the landscape drying on the line,
her stare summarized everything she had seen:
an actual-size disaster with television newscasts trying
to be real. Beneath us, still, the grass was green,
the overcast sky above us, white as ash.
Printed on the shirt she was wearing, a cartoon
character announced, I Look Like Ogden Nash.
But she didn't. She looked as distant as the moon,
as if she might have fallen out of night,
rubbed through thickening air until it flashed
and left her standing here, unlucky satellite.
--Joseph Green
(published in DELUXE MOTEL)
May 3, 2010
My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing
Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.
Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.
A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.
Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.
Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.
--John Frederick Nims
May 2, 2010
Presence
All's a foretelling of you.
Sun in its glory ascending,
Soon you will follow, I hope.
Into the garden you walk,
Rose of the roses you are,
Lily of lilies as well.
When you but move in the dance,
All of the stars are in motion
With you and round where you move.
Night! just let the night come!
Now you outshine the attractive
Delicate glow of the moon.
Delicate, fetching you are,
Flowers, the moon, and the stars
Celebrate, sun, only you.
Sun! be such to me too,
Creator of days in a glory;
Life and eternity--thus.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(published in SELECTED POEMS, ed. Christopher Middleton
trans. by Michael Hamburger, David Luke, Christopher Middleton,
John Frederick Nims, Vernon Watkins)
May 1, 2010
This Is An Ant
Do you still wake up amazed, sad
that the only world is in your head? A sparrow picks bread,
lindens breathe, and that small brown spider
has webbed the porch again. Spider? What does it matter
if you see her suck enough of Sunday's blood
to shed and lay eggs? She can't think you.
Hunger's in the kitchen now--coffee, toast, a leftover donut--and, oh, ants
but from where? Think of moist places, a neighbor jogging,
then stare out the window
draped with onion skins. Cells, a teacher once said, scraping her
cheek,
while farmer ants tunneled between glass. Smash it,
you thought for a second, eating macaroni & cheese.
You think of it now as they type into the house,
single notes lettered from a stuck key across the counter,
tracking a journey made small enough
to understand. Understand? Does the queen understand it's spring?
Glossy calendar guarding combs of light. Monday--nothing will happen
to change this, Tuesday--you might die
or have sex with a friend, Wednesday--you will remember
the death of a child. You always wake, piss, eat,
read something that could be heard in another voice.
Newspapers on the porch,
the Science Times. You look at pictures and think this is an ant,
but not the one walking the wall, the one you can
scoop up and throw into the web.
--Henry Hughes
(published in MEN HOLDING EGGS)
May 31, 2009
HINTERHOF
Stay near to me and I'll stay near to you--
As near as you are dear to me will do,
Near as the rainbow to the rain,
The west wind to the windowpane,
As fire to the hearth, as dawn to dew.
Stay true to me and I'll stay true to you--
As true as you are new to me will do,
New as the rainbow in the spray,
Utterly new in every way,
New in the way that what you say is true.
Stay near to me, stay true to me. I'll stay
As near, as true to you as heart could pray.
Heart never hoped that one might be
Half of the things you are to me--
The dawn, the fire, the rainbow and the day.
--James Fenton
(published in Out of Danger)
May 30, 2009
THE MAN WHO HATED TREES
When he started blaming robberies
on trees, you knew for sure
something was wrong.
This man who clipped hair,
who spent years shaving the necks
of cafeteria managers,
sweeping lost curls down drains,
this man who said, "It is always better
to cut off a little too much..."
You could say he transferred
one thing to another when he came home,
hair to leaves, only this time
he was cutting down whole bodies,
from the feet up, he wanted
to make those customers stumps.
One tree dropped purple balls
on the roof of his car.
One tree touched the rain gutter.
He didn't like blossoms, too much mess.
"Trees take up the sky.
It's my light, why share it?"
He said thieves struck more
on blocks where there were trees.
"The shade, you know. They like the dark."
You lived for days with the buzz of his chain saw
searing off the last little branches of neighborly affection.
It was planting season in the rest of the town
but your street received a crew cut.
Two pecan trees that had taken half a century to rise
now stood like Mohawk Indians, shorn.
He gloated on his porch surrounded by amputations.
You caught him staring greedily
at the loose branches swinging over your roof.
Tomorrow, when everything was cut, what then?
He joked about running over cats
as the last chinaberry crashed,
as the truck came to gather arms and legs
waggling their last farewell.
What stories did he tell himself,
this patriot of springtime,
and how did it feel to drive down sprouting boulevards
with his bald, bald heart?
--Naomi Shihab Nye
(published in Yellow Glove)
May 29, 2009
BETWEEN
Oh, do you remember--
when we were young?
We just had fun...
And, now, remember
as we get older,
we're just that much bolder.
Oh, but that damned
stuck between--
our souls seethed mean!
--Tim Van Ert
(from A First Collection of Hai-Choo--Little Sneezes of
Profound Dittycism)
May 28, 2009
NOT TONIGHT
Sun settles his day labor chin-up--
jutting coastal Oregon's
stubbled silhouette. Dark, live firs
streaked with fire-whitened sticks
give him the tired look of the aging.
Above him floats a cloud bear cub
whose four soft paws stretch in play
and get a pink fur glow
from waning Cinco de Mayo sun.
Turning down their drive, she carries--
cub in right brain, stubble in left--
a balanced vision to their bedroom
where rusty beard barely shakes
out her lover's, Not tonight, honey.
As her right hand seizes it,
he's covered with their pink blanket
while rolling over to light a cigarette.
Slowly cooling to steel, she's braced
for another red light night.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in Seeds On a Wind Ride)
May 27, 2009
BEDROCK
1.
The stout-hearted quake with fear to beg.
Must I always seek you between lives
like a stranger walking city alleys?
Just whisper me one more myth
before the pillage
of another full moon.
2.
In pants your sharp perfume escapes
tight lips; utterance like muscle
strung taut on bone.
I fail to feel a midwife's moist touch --
rather the friction of molecules shoved
by bulging heart pumping flesh.
3.
Glassy round roll your oaths, turned
in my clutch to black onyx beads.
Their dark power now defunct,
you toss them like trinkets
in your tourist carton from Khartoum
(coffin of failed cures for boredom.)
4.
You, whose every night crawls away in a cuddle,
once said I was your fifty-dog boyfriend
and I believed you. If I get up and walk
out of your bed beyond your room,
it's a sleep-walking drive programmed
in the twisted circuitry of my genes.
5.
I will own up to my personal penchants,
but the rest smells of slop thrown
to pigs at the farm where you retreat
with the wake-walking of someone
kicking a shiny rock to curse the topsoil --
one who won't examine bedrock for ore.
--Tim Van Ert
(from Nothing Else Matters)
May 26, 2009
AT HOME IN THE LABORS OF LOVE
As they tumble to the fore in play
sun's rays awaken my love with kisses.
Our fluid bed is mud and brine
dredged each day for treasures
local natives know lie therein.
Submerged we wear only oceans
suited for a birth revisited
by aquanauts in ecstasy
panting unlike shored fish
more like water buffalo
at home in the labors of love.
As my passions surface
your radiance races--
brilliant rising bubbles--
to be the first to break
through dawn's solar swells
which lift, threatening,
then let down smoothly,
tugging to ask, "Again?"
--Tim Van Ert
(from Nothing Else Matters)
May 25, 2009
HUMMINGBIRD PAUSES AT THE TRUMPET VINE
Who doesn't love
roses, and who
love the likes
of the black ponds
floating like flocks
of tiny swans,
and of course the flaming
trumpet vine
where the hummingbird comes
like a small green angel, to soak
his dark tongue
in happiness--
and who doesn't want
to live with the brisk
motor of his heart
singing
like a Schubert,
and his eyes
working and working like those days of rapture,
by van Gogh, in Arles?
Look! for the most of the world
is waiting
or remembering--
most of the world is time
when we're not here,
not born yet, or died--
a slow fire
under the earth with all
our dumb wild blind cousins
who also
can't even remember anymore
their own happiness--
Look! and then we will be
like the pale cool
stones, that last almosst
forever.
--Mary Oliver
(published in New and Selected Poems)
May 24, 2009
GOSPEL
Halfway to nowhere--
I thought I heard
Church bells ringing,
The blind man on the corner
Call out my name.
--Charles Simic
(published in The World Doesn't End)
May 23, 2009
ROCKS AND FOG
(for another poet)
You bite my heart--as a surgeon
sticks his scalpel to save a life!
Let me see through your dreaming
eyes while I'm awake...
Your songs of stones as suns
in rice bowls filled with water.
Your chant of the bear who ran
from a circus to perform.
Your moan of an old woman searching
her pillow snowfields
for sons and daughters.
Your crowds of sideshows, druids,
narrowly-escaped Intensive Cares.
We trees try to stay standing in your wind.
--Ron Linder
(published in Dancer Stay Out!)
May 22, 2009
ALL ELSE FOLLOWS
Having been born, death follows immediately
with its dogged inevitability.
All fall.
What's unknown is when and how we will die
(not if or why).
Left to us are our attitudes and actions.
All else follows.
--Tim Van Ert
May 21, 2009
JOHN LENNON
If you don't look
what do you see?
If you don't try
when do you succeed?
AND
If you don't laugh
how can you cry?
BUT
If you don't love
you just don't love.
--Tim Van Ert
(from Collected Words)
May 20, 2009
WOMB
As the first rays of hall lights
meet waves of wake-up bustle
I awaken to alight
this foreign floor.
Where the night before there was cloud cover
a saffron sliver of moon drifts disrobed.
Resonating my assent
I step into the shower.
These cool ablutions
the marbled stairs grant my feet
mingle with rekindled warmth
from the kitchen's hearth.
From femme and feline sensations swirl:
yeasts, purrs, convections, mute hues, caresses.
Phillipe and I, encompassed,
sit sipping this sustenance.
Once hushed, grandma now hovers
between her English and French
mumbling train schedules and times--
then turns silent.
--Tim Van Ert
(from Create That Love That Love Creates)
May 19, 2009
SEPTEMBER TWENTY-FIRST
Evening darkness is peppered
by a neighbor's yard light:
dried corn stalks exposed dancing--
or quaking?--in warm wind.
I leave them up for times like this,
to hear what the dead have to say.
The same hot, dry summer
which left limbs holding cobs
pocked with missing kernels,
provided many nights
without cloud cover to obscure
our local galaxy's dimming glow.
As my cat's life-or-death yowls
interrupt crickets' balmy cadence,
I harbor conflicted worries,
Is it his brother, or a raccoon?
And, Will I leave life too soon,
or be left in a parched body too long?
I imagine some Milky Way force
providing our bodies energy
to shake and quake messages--
never mind unripe fruits.
--Tim Van Ert
(from If You Live, Your Time Will Come)
May18, 2009
BE HERE WOW
All my tomorrows fly up to kiss me
singing softly that they would not miss me.
Cumulus clouds billow down to meet me
wobbling to the day heaven would greet me.
--Tim Van Ert
(from A First Collection of Hai-Choo--Little Sneezes of
Profound Dittycism)
May 17, 2009
CROWS
If you let go of life before I do,
if eager death rushes to fill those
vacancies I cannot touch, I will
close your eyes. I will feather
my fingers over your lids. I will
not let the crows have your eyes.
I will bathe you with sweet water
from the spring or damp leaves or
even my tongue if the world is dry.
And I, left to fend for myself, when
my time comes, will scoop with my
bare hands a shallow mask in the
damp soil, will lie on my belly,
my face looking into the earth
from which I come, turned away
from all but the voices of crows.
--Scott Lubbock
(published in On the Way to Water)
May 16, 2009
NARCISSUS
Narcissus.
Your fragrance.
And the depth of the stream.
I would remain at your verge.
Flower of love.
Narcissus.
Over your white eyes flicker
shadows and sleeping fish.
Birds and butterflies
lacquer mine.
You so minute and I so tall.
Flower of love.
Narcissus.
How active the frogs are!
They will not leave alone
the glass which mirrors
your delirium and mine.
Narcissus.
My sorrow.
And my sorrow's self.
--Federico Garcia Lorca
translated by William Jay Smith
(published in The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca)
May 15, 2009
GETTING THE DAILY NEWS
No quarters jingle my pockets along
this morning's sloppy, wet-pant walk.
I follow deep, curved deer prints--
head bowed to read the world's forms:
mud serves weeds
that pop blossoms
to sun's mystery signal;
daffodils
bow brown heads down
as iris takes the stage;
birds swoop young,
lean plants then perch oaks
to sing their short stories.
Eyes raise, with corners of mouth,
as I get to the sports section--
squawked at and run out of the glade
by the nesting ring-necked pheasant's mate.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in Seeds On a Wind Ride)
May 14, 2009
POETS PLAYING
Never mind that my bridge is small,
that it crosses a stream of dry stones,
that it's painted Navajo red
--not orange-red as in Japanese gardens.
But when you suggest water lilies,
I offer Basho's frog. When you raise it
three koi, I up it one blue heron and,
over there by the native deer fern,
a golden full-moon maple. By now
we're laughing at this escalation,
our wives amused by poets playing,
freed for the moment of brooding concerns.
Never mind either that my pond
is a failed patch of sod, that the bridge
does not lead to meditation furrows
raked in fine gravel, but to compost bins
crouched behind an ancient cedar log
where the work of returning is under way.
An act of nature that I now see
as the exact metaphor for hope.
--John L. Wright, MD
(published in JAMA, December 22/29, 2004--Vol 292, No. 24)
May 13, 2009
SUMMER KNIGHTS
that empty coffee cup
those crumbs on the plate and
two butts in the tray
Directorless, a stage is set:
snaking sidewalk shedding
chuckholes
nonetheless charms
unwitting walk-ins.
Heat-seeking missiles,
these men's visages--
deftly maneuvered masks--
lock on target:
all (yet nothing) asked.
Tediously she bends her hackneyed props:
automated glance
off the limp left wrist,
too quick exhalations
of each suspenseful drag.
Somewhere on a Paris street her man
passes her with every stranger's footstep
while she sits shrouded in summer's fever
accompanied by the stillness of empty chairs' legs
and the incessant somersaulting of her watch's hands.
The stares come
in endless progression,
heavy--
like those she'd
be climbing up alone,
too soon.
--Tim Van Ert
(from Create That Love That Love Creates)
May 12, 2009
BUCKING
Poor young buck
runs away on my legs
turning his horned head
to show me your eyes.
--Tim Van Ert
(from A First Collection of Hai-Choo--Little Sneezes of
Profound Dittycism)
May 11, 2009
READING AT THE JAMBALAYA
Rising from worn-smooth chair
slow and awkward like an egret
called away from marsh duties,
Daniel wears a fading rose-tint cap
sparse and simple as his words.
His palm-warped spiral notebook
glowing the same off-mauve shade
as his upturned grinning lips
reminds me of a rapturous
color-coordinated choir boy
about to praise the Lord in song.
With imagery delicate as his thin body
and feelings pocked as the face
he hopes his knit cap can hide,
Daniel reminds us of elegance beyond sense.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in Seeds On a Wind Ride)
May 10, 2009
MARY'S SECOND CHILD
Then Joseph...took unto him his wife: and knew her not till she
had brought forth her first born son.
--Matthew
It's no miracle I'm what I am, believe me.
I was the harvest of a sweaty, human planting,
never far enough from the whine of father's saw.
No credulous beasts, no Eastern mystics
tired of gold or human boys heard my birth;
and where was I to find a winged heaven
to trumpet my entrance? I had no connections.
Mother worked to give my light,
her first curse my first lullaby.
If there was in her groaning a measure
of disappointment--even outrage--who could blame her?
The only men she knew before me or her husband
were angelic, everlasting and painless,
their bodies light as cloud.
Joseph grasped at what he couldn't comprehend,
shook his dusty hands at the sky, his lust
fed by the jeers of every young fool in town.
On the night he first touched her,
as much in anger as need, he told me later,
she lay looking at him as if she were
queen of heaven, and he grew soft as cloth.
But after what she'd been through
the first time, she was ready to see
in every pail of water drawn from the well
a shining dove hovering near her reflection,
in each wine cup or scrap of fish
an alien son, arrogant and cold.
Love held no more surprises for her.
When she died gray and confused
just before learning to fly
she looked at me, the image of her two lovers,
and called me "Jesus"--she's up there now
singing at him, most likely, beaming.
When you're conceived to walk with angels
can children of earth and flesh move you?
--David Citino
(published in Vital Signs, an Anthology Edited by Ronald Wallace)
May 9, 2009
THE SONG THE BLIND MAN SINGS
I am blind, you out there, that is a malediction,
an awful thing, a contradiction,
something heavy every day.
I lay my hand on the arm of the woman,
my gray hand on the gray of her gray,
and she leads me through empty spaces.
You move and push and like to imagine
that your sound is not like the sound of stone on stone;
however, you are wrong: I am the only one
who lives and suffers and has a sound.
I have an endless scream in me,
and I don't know which is screaming, my heart
or my intestines.
Do you recognize my songs? You didn't sing them,
not quite with the stressing I use.
Every morning new light comes
warmly into the open house,
and you have a feeling that moves from face to face,
and that leads you astray to caring.
--Rainer Maria Rilke
(published in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by Robert Bly)
May 8, 2009
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.
--Tim Van Ert
(from If You Live, Your Time Will Come)
May 7, 2009
CARRIED AWAY
Moving through the shadows of the city
Feeling no sun within, nor rain without.
Moving toward something
Expecting nothing more.
I hear those voices lift my city soul
From its sidewalk beat
In this city bowing grass
At the chorus' feet.
Several stand strong singing
Voices of angels touching
Feet on the ground.
Making mountains
Moving mountains
Being mountain
Rocked and swayed.
These people I know not, but
Their words melt through me
As I am drawn to song
Being melting melody.
A pause to drink at mountain stream
Carried me gurgling to the valley
Visited only in dream.
I may not be carried this way again
Nor step back into the shadows of the city's pain.
--Tim Van Ert
(from Collected Words)
May 6, 2009
BREAKING THE CODE
She feared a physician's intrusion--
lung cancer terror voiced with still eyes.
I chose to assist her surgeon
with the neck-node biopsy;
was drafted to assist
her fate's savage bite.
Her sweat-spent face sagged
toward purpling right hand
as the gaping trench we dug
finally let loose her lump,
then fired back its red missiles.
Panic sparked through our guts
fueled by routine's dry tinder.
Unfair! my clenched teeth screamed
when I saw her dusky fist.
seize our sterile barrier.
Then, Flat line--stand back!
(from chest's spongy twitch
and sickening heavy bounce.)
Pus-filled lungs and clammy groin
were quickly invaded by blades,
needles and tubes--
while my mind grew thicker,
We gotta stick her...
She did not say goodbye
or where she wanted to go.
Death spills the suffering life contains.
This afternoon her pain passed on,
trenchant hours measured to me,
lifelong pangs for her children.
With quiet whispers the others
filed out beside me.
My heart wanted comfort of wailing--
tropical gusts to blow the chill
out of the now-dimmed surgical suite--
but I found no loved ones,
no beating of breasts.
Had Christ felt the blade placed
between his ribs with love?
I prayed that she ask Him,
and then for her children--
who had no chance to say goodbye.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in Archives of Family Medicine)
May 5, 2009
LUMPECTOMY
She arrives at the clinic feeling more
like a mole painted on a performer's skin
than a pigment allotted by providence
to begin her life with distinction.
Smoothly curved hillock offers
no camouflage nor landmaarks
for the unique imperfection
soon withdrawn under ether.
In resignation the assailed site
yawns toothless, soft, open:
a moist, impotent slouch not even
rubbery enough to rebound.
Don't yield so sedately
other pliable portions.
Close without trespass
private inlet to your being.
--Tim Van Ert
(from Nothing Else Matters)
May 4, 2009
WORD POWER
Point out particulars.
Divulge universals.
Convene word musicals.
Shoulder failure
with shrugs.
Carry success
in smiles.
Relish struggle
that breathes.
--Tim Van Ert
May 3, 2009
THE RULE OF THIRDS
Third, third, third--the rule I learned
about the stories of the ill.
A third get well--joints begin to move,
pain improves, depression's dull
embrace is eased. The villain leaves
without a trace and no one knows
the hero's name--doctor
or the patient, science or the grace.
A third grow crippled in the pain
of joints gone stone, their minds decline,
the villain takes the loot no matter what
your dour professor does, or you--
in the arrogance of youth--might try.
We learn by progress in our minds.
A third remain the same. They take
the villain in, they harbor him
until his tale is theirs and theirs is his.
They visualize their bodies with his eyes.
Our rule of thirds was not as kind
as love's compassion is,
nor as thunderous as an essay
on machines, but it spoke
the language of the body
in its genes.
--Jack Coulehan
(published in Blood & Bone, Poems by Physicians)
May 2, 2009
I SEE MY GIRL
When I see you off to camp, I see you
bending your neck to the weight of your cello, I
see your small torso under the
load of your heavy knapsack the way a
boulder would rest on the body of a child, and
suddenly I see your goodness, the weight of your
patient dogged goodness as you slog your
things to the plane, you like like a small-boned
old lady from darkest Europe
going toward steerage, carrying all the family goods.
Suddenly the whole airport is full of your goodness, your
thin hair looks whittled down by your goodness, your
pale face looks drained of blood, your
upward gaze looks like the look of
someone lying under a stone.
For so long I prayed you would be good,
prayed you would not be anything like Hitler as
I as a child feared I was like Hitler—but I
didn’t mean this, the oppression of goodness, the
deadness. You ask for something to eat
and my heart leaps up, I take off your backpack and we
lean your cello against a chair and
then I can sit and watch you eat chocolate pudding,
spoonful after careful spoonful, your
tongue moving slowly over the mixture
in deep pleasure, Oh it’s good, Mom,
it’s good, you beam, and the air around your face
shines with the dark divided shining of goodness.
--Sharon Olds
(published in The Gold Cell)
May 1, 2009
UPON AWAKENING
Remember
to put your kisses where they belong:
in springtime's
tender breezes--so soft and so strong.
There they fly
cooing, invisible mourning doves:
graceful wings
in rhythmic dances--the touch of love.
I await
as winds stir, skies darken and wonder:
will I be
blessed by your breath--before the thunder?
Or shall I
wrap me in dreams' receptive ether
to entice
your currents of nourishment hither?
Just feed me
your love fruits while I'm forced away;
I will feast
on the wind--til we make love some day.
--Tim Van Ert
(from Create That Love That Love Creates)