POEMS -- OCTOBER
(Please
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October 15, 2012
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--"if you live, your time will come"
Ocotober 1, 2012
A Ritual to Read to
Each Other
--for Liz
If you don’t know
the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the
kind of person you are
a pattern that
others made may prevail in the world
and following the
wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a
small betrayal in the mind,
A shrug that lets
the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts
the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play
through the broken dike.
And as elephants
parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders
the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and
maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs
but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a
voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important
region in all who talk:
though we could fool
each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of
our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important
that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line
may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we
give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the
darkness around us is deep.
--William Stafford
October 28, 2010
The Very Old
The very old are forever
hurting themselves,
burning their fingers
on skillets, falling
loosely as trees
and breaking their hips
with muffled explosions of bone.
Down the block
they are wheeled in
out of our sight
for years at a time.
To make conversation,
the neighbors ask
if they are still alive.
Then, early one morning,
through our kitchen windows
we see them again,
first one and then another,
out in their gardens
on crutches and canes,
perennial,
checking their gauges for rain.
--Ted Kooser
(published in SUTURED WORDS)
October 27, 2010
Near the Old People's Home
The people on the avenue at noon,
Sharing the sparrows and the wintry sun,
The turned-off fountain with its basin drained
And cement benches etched with checkerboards,
Are old and poor, most every one of them
Wearing some decoration of his damage,
Bandage or crutch or cane; and some are blind,
Or nearly, tap-tapping along with white wands.
When they open their mouths, there are no teeth.
All the same, they keep on talking to themselves
Even while bending to hawk up spit or blood
In gutters that will be there when they are gone.
Some have the habit of getting hit by cars
Three times a year; the ambulance comes up
And away they go mumbling even in shock
The many secret names they have for God.
--Howard Nemerov
(published in SUTURED WORDS)
October 24, 2010
The Gleam of Silver Wings
After Darren's jet fell spinning
out of the Asian sky,
I learned the myth of perfect flight,
all of us Icarus, birds of a feather,
accident-prone ground pounders
riding throttled fire.
I had seen airplanes in movies
tumbling and spouting smoke
and flames from under,
but not real flesh, like Darren,
the first I knew overseas
who vanished
out of blue skies far from home,
no parachute open,
ten thousand pounds of thrust
and one of us reduced
to this, a silver matchstick
tossed indifferently away.
Walter McDonald
(pub'd in COUNTING SURVIVORS)
October 23, 2010
The Rose
The senses whirl
and dance to the side
of passion, whirl
to the right then take
the direction of an exit--
the closing of eyes,
pursing of lips.
Yes, it is all there
like a dream come true.
Hands process a prayer, then
darkness...
A DEEP BREATH...
then off the rose like a bee.
--Mark Shedd
(pub'd in LONG NIGHT AHEAD)
October 21, 2010
"Aluminum Chlorohydrate" (1997)
Am I then to understand
that with every matins' sociable embalming of the armpit
molecular aluminum insinuates itself, through sheared follicles,
bright fleck by bright fleck, into the tiny tender kinks
of capillaries? slides along their permeable wisps
into the jostling rivers of depleted scarlet doughnuts and white ghosts,
into a hectic Amazon, through endlessly wrung chambers,
out the roaring wide aorta, rising blandly through the neck
by ever subtler pulses toward the tingling gray curd
all flushed with its matted electrical storms? and lays
a glinting finger on one sparked synaptic mouth
that hushes. Whose voice may never be missed.
A number, a name, the Latin for greed,
clopping upstairs that March day in Florence with brand-new clogs,
the blister they raised. But supposing senility
takes the brain in its soft retriever's mouth
and carries it to be gutted, supposing all
the recent layers plucked away and memory's microscopic doors flung wide
for the oldest to come forth: Would third-grade Ruth be missing
and unmissed, or Mary or Brenda, with random trivial comrades,
or would the whole host stagger out, one missing legs, another clothes,
with synthetic pearls for eyes or carrot noses?
Or would each corridor dead-end on a scaly tinfoil mirror
showing nothing but the scowling smear
of some old unfamiliar woman's face?
--Sarah Lindsay
(published http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/lauren.kiefer/Composition/aluminum.htm)
October 20, 2010
Inducement
Having nothing or
not knowing what to say
he dropped a grain of sand
into his eye
which slammed shut
and watered.
The other eye, still open,
registered nothing or
rather the blizzard
of nothing and, of course,
watered like an infant bawling
in a roomful of other infants bawling
unappeasably just because.
So there arose a great unhappiness
and this is the story that goes along
like when you're on a train
that begins to move and you think
it's the landscape moving
this is the story that goes along
to make things better
because someone cried out
something large and invisible
has been passed down
out loud in secret.
--Jack Myers
(AS LONG AS YOU'RE HAPPY)
October 19, 2010
Performance
I starred last night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,
a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was busters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouettes, falls of blazing paint,
pare-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!
As usual after any triumph, I was
of course inconsolable.
--Les Murray
(SUBHUMAN REDNECK POEMS)
October 18, 2010
Name of Horses
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
--Donald Hall
October 17, 2010
Mother of Nothing
Sister, the stars have no children.
The stars pecking at each night's darkness
above your trailer would shine back at themselves
in its metal, but they are too far away.
The stones lining your path to the goats
know themselves only as speechless, flat,
gray-in-the-sun.
What begins and ends in the self
without continuance in any other.
You who stand at preschool fences
watching the endless tumble and slide,
who answer the mothers' Which one is yours?
with blotted murmur and turning away,
listen. Any lack carried
too close to the heart
grows teeth, nibbles off
corners. I heard one say
she had no talent,
another, no time, and there were many
without beauty all those years,
and all of them shrinking.
What sinks to the bottom of the pond
comes up with new colors, or not at all.
We sank, and there was purple,
voluptuous merging of purple and blue,
a new silence living
in the houses of our bodies.
Those who wanted and never received,
who were born without hands,
who had and then lost; the Turkish mother
after the earthquake
and five silent children lined before her,
the women of Beirut
bearing water to their bombed-out rooms,
the fathers in offices
with framed photographs of children on their desks,
and their own private knowledge
of all the hard words.
And we held trees differently
then, and dried plates differently,
because waiting dulls the senses
and when you are no longer waiting,
something wakes up. My cousin said
It's not children, it's matter of making
life. And I saw the streets opening into the future,
children waving out the rear window,
keeping count of all who waved back,
and would we lift our hearts and answer them,
and when we did, what would we say?
And the old preposterous stories of nothing
and everything finally equalling one another
returned in the night. And like relatives,
knew where the secret key was hidden
and let themselves in.
--Naomi Shihab Nye
(published in WORDS UNDER THE WORDS)
October 15, 2010
All through the Rains
That mare stood in the field--
A big pine-tree and a shed,
But she stayed in the open
Ass to the wind, splash wet.
I tried to catch her April
For a bareback ride,
She kicked and bolted
Later grazing fresh shoots
In the shade of the down
Eucalyptus on the hill.
--Gary Snyder
(published in CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY)
edited by Donald Hall)
October 14, 2010
The Bones
It takes a long time to hear what the sands
Seem to be saying, with the wind nudging them,
And then you cannot put it in words nor tell
Why these things should have a voice. All kinds
Of objects come in over the tide-wastes
In the course of a year, with a throaty
Rattle: weeds, driftwood, the bodies of birds
And of fish, shells. For years I had hardly
Considered shells as being bones, maybe
Because of the sound they could still make, though
I knew a man once who could raise a kind
O wailing tune out of a flute he had,
Made from a fibula: it was much the same
Register as the shells'; the tune did not
Go on when his breath stopped, though you thought it would.
Then that morning, coming on the wreck,
I saw the kinship. No recent disaster
But an old ghost from under a green buoy,
Brought in by the last storm, or one from which
The big wind had peeled back the sand grave
To show what was still left: the bleached, chewed-off
Timbers like the ribs of a man or the jaw-bone
Of some extinct beast. Far down the sands its
Broken cage leaned out, casting no shadow
In the veiled light. There was a man sitting beside it
Eating out of a paper, littering the beach
With the bones of a few more fish, while the hulk
Cupped its empty hand high over him. Only he
And I had come to those sands knowing
That they were there. The rest was bones, whatever
Tunes they made. The bones of things; and of men too
And of man's endeavours whose ribs he had set
Between himself and the shapeless tides. Then
I saw how the sand was shifting like water,
That once could walk. Shells were to shut out the sea,
The bones of birds were built for floating
On air and water, and those of fish were devised
For their feeding depths, while a man's bones were framed
For what? For knowing the sands are here,
And coming to hear them a long time; for giving
Shapes to the sprawled sea, weight to its winds,
And wrecks to plead for its sands. These things are not
Limitless: we know there is somewhere
An end to them, though every way you look
They extend farther than a man can see.
--W. S. Merwin
(published in CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
edited by Donald hall)
October 13, 2010
Pumkin Pie
I love pumkin pie, yes I do!
Who oh who loves pumkin pie?
I'm sure you do!
It's so delicious, so nutritious!
I just can't keep my hands off!
It is so soft, why, "Yes," I say,
My mom used to say "okay."
I'll make pumkin pie today!
And that prove I love
pumkin pie.
--Sevyn Corbin
October 12, 2010
In Paris with You
Don't talk to me of love. I've had an earful
And I get tearful when I've downed a drink or two.
I'm one of your talking wounded.
I'm a hostage. I'm maroonded.
Yes I'm angry at the way I've been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess that I've been through.
I admit I'm on the rebound
And I don't care where are we bound.
I'm in Paris with you.
Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre,
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,
If we skip the Champs Elysees
And remain here in this sleazy
Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learning who you are,
Learning what I am.
Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris,
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There's that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I'm in Paris with you.
Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris.
I'm in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I'm in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I'm in Paris with...all points south.
Am I embarrassing you?
I'm in Paris with you.
--James Fenton
(published in OUT OF DANGER)
October 11, 2010
Pets
There once was a cat named Earl
He had a friend named Pearl
Then he had a fright
In the middle of the night
Then Pearl went to see Earl.
--Larissa Van Ert
October 10, 2010
Love Poem
I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other
--Linda Pastan
(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/love-poem-4/)
October 5, 2010
The Player Piano
I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House
Run by a lady my age. She was gay.
When I told her I came from Pasadena
She laughed and said, "I lived in Pasadena
When Fatty Arbuckle drove the El Molino bus."
I felt that I had met someone from home.
No, not Pasadena, Fatty Arbuckle.
Who's that? Oh, something that we had in common
Like--like--the false armistice. Piano rolls.
She told me her house was the first Pancake House
East of the Mississippi, and I showed her
a picture of my grandson. Going home--
Home to the hotel--I began to hum,
"Smile a while, I bid you sad adieu,
When the clouds roll back I'll come to you."
Lets' brush our hair before we go to bed,
I say to the old friend who lives in my mirror.
I remember how I'd brush my mother's hair
Before she bobbed it. How long has it been
Since i hit my funnybone? had a scab on my knee?
Here are Mother and Father in a photograph,
Father's holding me...They both look so young.
I'm so much older that they are. Look at them,
Two babies with their baby. I don't blame you,
You weren't old enough to know any better;
If I could go back, sit down by you both,
And sign our true armistice: you weren't to blame.
I shut my eyes and there's our living room.
The piano's playing something by Chopin,
And Mother and Father and their little girl
Listen. Look, the keys go down by themselves!
O go over, hold my hands out, play I play--
If only, somehow, I had learned to live!
The three of us sit watching, as my waltz
Plays itself out a half-inch from my fingers.
--Randall Jarrell (1965, posthumous)
(published in RANDALL JARRELL SELECTED POEMS)
October 4, 2010
Anonymous Drawing
A delicate young Negro stands
With the reins of a horse clutched loosely in his hands;
So delicate, indeed, that we wonder if he can hold the spirited creature
beside him
Until the master shall arrive to ride him.
Already the animal's nostrils widen with rage or fear.
But if we imagine him snorting, about to rear,
This boy, who should know about such things better than we,
Only stands smiling, passive and ornamental, in a fantastic livery
Of ruffles and puffed breeches,
Watching the artist, apparently, as he sketches.
Meanwhile the petty lord who must have paid
For the artist's trip up from Perugia, for the horse, for the boy, for
everything here, in fact, has been delayed,
Kept too long by his steward, perhaps, discussing
Some business concerning the estate, or fussing
Over the details of his impeccable toilet
With a manservant whose opinion is that any alteration at all would spoila it.
However fast he should come hurrying now
Over this vast greensward, mopping his brow
Clear of the sweat of the fine Renaissance morning, it would be too late:
The artist will have had his revenge for being made to wait,
A revenge not only necessary but right and clever --
Simply to leave him out of the scene forever.
--
Donald Justice
October 2, 2010
The Red Poppy
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
--Louise Gluck
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15604
October 1, 2010
Stopping Near Highway 80
We are not going to steal the water-tower
in Malcolm, Iowa,
just stop for a picnic right under it.
Nor need they have removed the lightbulb
in the city park
nor locked the toilet doors.
We are at peace, just eating and drinking
our poco vino in Malcolm, Iowa,
which evidently once had a band
to go with its bandstand.
We walk down the street, wondering how
it must be to live behind the shades
in Malcolm, Iowa, to peer out,
to remember the town as it was before
the expressway discovered
it, subtracted what would flow
on its river eastwards and westwards.
We are at peace, but when we go into the bar
to Malcolm, Iowa, we find that the aunts
and uncles drinking beer have become
monsters and want to hurt us and we do
not know how they could have ever
taken out the giant breasts
of childhood or cooked the fine biscuits
or lifted us up high on the table
or have told us anything at all
we'd ever want to know
for living lives as gentle as we can.
--David Ray
(published in GATHERING FIREWOOD)
October 31, 2009
The Raven
 |
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and
weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of
some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some
visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and
nothing more.'
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak
December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the
floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For
the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless
here for evermore.
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each
purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never
felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood
repeating
`'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it
is, and nothing more,'
Presently my soul grew stronger;
hesitating then no longer,
`Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your
forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently
you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my
chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened
wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.
Deep into
that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
But
the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the
only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'
This I
whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'
Merely this
and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul
within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than
before.
`Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window
lattice;
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the
wind and nothing more!'
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with
many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the
saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute
stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above
my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber
door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony
bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern
decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and
shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient
raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name
is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;
For we
cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed
with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast above the
sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as
`Nevermore.'
But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust,
spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did
outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he
fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have
flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown
before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore.'
Startled at the
stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what
it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy
master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster
till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his hope that
melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'
But the raven
still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a
cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the
velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking
what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly,
gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the
fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more
I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's
velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet
violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall
press, ah, nevermore!
Then, methought, the air grew denser,
perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls
tinkled on the tufted floor.
`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent
thee - by these angels he has sent thee
Respite - respite and
nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind
nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'
`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or
devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here
ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there
- is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'
`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil!
- prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us
- by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if,
within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the
angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the
angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'
`Be that
word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy
beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth
the raven, `Nevermore.'
And the raven, never flitting, still is
sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my
chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is
dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on
the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the
floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!
Edgar Allan Poe
[First published in 1845] |
|
|
|
|
October 30, 2009
Poem In Three Parts
I
Oh, on an early morning I think I shall
live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of
green.
II
Rising from a bed, where I dreamt
Of long rides past castles and hot coals,
The sun lies happily on my knees;
I have suffered and survived the night,
Bathed in dark water, like any blade of
grass.
III
The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,
Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe,
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust.
--Robert Bly
(published in COMTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY)
October 29, 2009
Mouse Turds
They paw and crinkle through attic
anterooms as prelude to my dreams
the way cartoons used to come
before the main attraction.
But tonight they are vinegar
dribbled on a love-sated palate
as their intimate intrusion summons
Dylan Thomas's pitifully repugnant
lament of the foul mouse hole.
Hired-gun thoughts of traps, warfarin
nibble noisily in my mind.
Obsessed, I charge the attic.
Finding nothing else, I finger
tiny turds from fecund invaders.
These torment with memories
of mummies picked up in the past:
bloated behind the polished rice,
clan parched beneath the stove,
leathery loner under the couch.
Why do they torment me--
and leave no ripples on my
wife's unconscious waters?
It's only when your' home still,
quiet, I hear you grumble.
It's true, I can stay away
or keep the volume way up high--
then there is no nibbling.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in NOTHING ELSE MATTERS)
October 28, 2009
Don't Whine, Wino
Where do you go,
you of the meso-muscular mind
(traipsed through pre-dawn)
after coming upon empty--
where to reach
when squalling infant mouth
slips from calming nipple?
Drag down in your boots,
churn through cockerels thigh deep
to kick open vaults
of last year's Merlot--
end artery spurting memories
on trial repeatedly
with hung juries.
At the end of your tether
(bobbing erratic as lightning)
there is the struggle,
the tussle with learning.
Your yearning is like dreaming--
seeming too real, too cruel.
So, follow the sun down
to another day's blackout--
or ten, eleven, twelve steps
to a hight power.
There, back on the ranch,
hundreds of people are clapping
to welcome you home.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in NOTHING ELSE MATTERS)
October 27, 2009
Teachher
I felt there were things I'd
Experienced
That I just had to teach to you.
I felt there were things you
Had always known
That you could not help but give me.
Who are you?
You who are who
I've felt I've felt?
Release me!
I've got the key--
God, who knows me?
--Tim Van Ert
(from COLLECTED WORDS)
October 26, 2009
Stay at Bay
Warm skips orange
bouncing from shattered rock
to eye of shattered
being
bounced further from all
light sources.
Warm moves blue
penetrating pulsatile flesh
through heart tattered
blowing
gushed beyond reasonable
bounds
Shroud covers love
hiding in animate fear
beyond the many calls
biting
thrust upon deefenseles
s elves
Dark permeates all
exposing the many cells
to each others'
building
touched about, within or
out
Bright breezes sun
sailing its tireless rockets
over the water body
bidding
return to endless
self.
--Tim Van Ert
(from COLLECTED WORDS)
October 25, 2009
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In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from
Cemetery Road.
I'm coming! Don't move!
Once again
it is April.
Today is the day
we would have been married
twenty-six years.
I finished with April
halfway
through March.
You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.
Then they stay dead.
Will
Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and
complain?
In April the blue
mountain revises
from
white to green.
The Boston Red Sox win
a hundred
straight games.
The mouse rips
the throat of the lion
and the dead return.
--Donald
Hall
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October 24, 2009
The Old Must Watch Us
The old must watch us as we walk the streets,
And ghosts of flesh must summon in their brains
The autumns of a fallen past,
The lovers' wood in which no tree remains.
And then the memory of bits of leaf
Caught in the loosened hair; by heavy seas
The wind that rasped across their skin,
And all the body's changing cruelties,
Must make them hate us as we walk the streets,
Hand in hand and brushing hip to thigh,
And they must think we love, and know
That they can only watch and wait to die.
When skin hangs loose upon your shaken limbs,
Remember love you feared when you were young.
Then read this on a weary night,
And roll these vowels on a shrunken tongue.
--Donald Hall
(published in SUTURED WORDS contemporary poetry about medicine)
October 23, 2009
Sailing Stones
Ever since then I try to find one
the size and weight of a silver dollar--
twenty something bounces
across Lake Shasta after Grandpa hunches,
cocks his arm and delivers
that silver '21 Flying Eagle.
But they never fly like that one:
mostly one hop and a flop right dab
in the middle of its own little ripple.
Still it's worth it. I can't resist the urge.
Bent forward with my simple missile
I stare at the orange setting sun,
picture a direct hit on that big, burning rock.
Heart races its red rivers to overflow
in salty streams to sting eyes and cool cheeks.
On adrenaline rushes my aging body
backslides to ten years old--an unrivalled ride
once life has become more complicated
than playing, eating and doing chores.
On the bay shore a nautilus shell
hints of the sea world program
that impressed the image of a soft creature
growing larger and older
to make its shell stronger and more striking.
I pocket it for a souvenir--
it wasn't made for skipping, anyway.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in NORTHWEST PASSAGE)
October
22, 2009
Flowering
Creative warden
of mind garden;
you've gotta tend it,
you'll need to mend it--
but in the end it
will get grown
with a life of its own.
--Tim Van Ert
(from A FIRST EDITION OF HAI-CHOO:
little sneezes of profound dittycism)
October 21, 2009
Midnight Musings
A music carolled favourably low,
The voice I love floated, easily airborne
Upon the pre-dawn's smouldering glow.
Her warm voice fanned ears blazed as with coal
As I savored the art work of her lips
Etching love's lithographs on my soul.
I'd come in my post-modern mythic way
To be at this incongruous wooded desk
Seduced by hopes a muse would light and stay.
Surely stationed at this midnight's table
Vulnerable to dark forces of the night,
A sentry at that frontier of fable.
I've guests enough not to be caught unawares
With a great storm introduced through displays
Of billows, flashes, claps and attendant airs.
Hearing no footsteps fall, nor signal call
To announce visitation from this spirit
Whose soft embraces hold my soul enthralled.
Yet I hear your pleas sing out in chorus,
Breathy vespers of the breeze: cooing, mourning
Doves perched on moaning boughs in the forest.
Speak, speak now while the clouds have cleared
Before the morning's glaring light intrudes
To show illusions have disappeared.
The refrain, "Let not fear give you flight"
Echoes your words pouring in to melt me:
"Stay, allow this dark to yield light!"
--Tim Van Ert
(from CREATE THAT LOVE THAT LOVE CREATES)
October 20, 2009
Eye Speak Easy
I
seek
to grow
to know
what need
t o f e e
d
I R E E
K !
A
I
squeak
speak
or rumble
of forces
d o n' t m u m b l e
of c o u r s es
be s t r o n g be s o n g not shown, yet
known
W H A T C H E E K !! D O
S E E K ! !
--Tim Van Ert
(from COLLECTED WORDS)
October 19, 2009
She Elves
Our selves:
they're like shelves
full of things,
full of things,
full of wings...
--Tim Van Ert
(from CREATE
THAT LOVE THAT LOVE CREATES)
October 18, 2009
Fear of Gray's Anatomy
I will not look in it again.
There the heart in section is a gas mask,
its windows gone, its hoses severed.
The spinal cord is a zipper
& the lower digestive tract
has been squeezed from a tube like toothpaste.
All my life I had hoped someday to own
at least myself, only to find I am
Flood's ligaments, the areola of Mamma,
& the zonule of Zinn, Ruffini's endings
end in me, & the band of Gennari lies near
the island of Reil. Though I am a geography
greater than even I surmised, containing as I do
spaces & systems, promontories & at least
one reservoir, pits, tunnels, crescents,
demilunes & a daughter star, how can I celebrate
my incomplete fissures, my hippocampus &
inferior mental processes, my depressions
& internal extremities? I encompass also
ploughshare and gladiolus, iris & wing,
and the bird's nest of my cerebellum,
yet wherever I go I bear the crypts of Lieberkuhn,
& among the possible malfunctionaries,
floating ribs & wandering cells, Pott's fracture,
mottles, abductors, lachrymal bones & aberrant ducts.
I will ask my wife to knit a jacket for this book,
& pretend it's a brick doorstop.
I will not open Gray's Anatomy again.
--Brendan Galvin
(published in SUTURED WORDS: contemporary poetry about medicine)
October 17, 2009
Piute Creek
One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small
creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded
and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
a huge moon on it all, is
too much.
The mind wanders. A
million
Summers, night air still
and the rocks
Warm. Sky over
endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with
being human
Drops away, hard rock
wavers
Even the heavy present
seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a
high ledge
Gone in the dry air.
A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we
are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.
--Gary Snyder
(published in RIPRAP, &
COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS)
October 16, 2009
DRUNKARD'S DREAM
Since life's alluring vices
Always command high prices
I'll state what my advice
is:
Store value some virtuous
way
So you can tender, you can
play
For escape from life's
rainy day!
--Tim Van Ert
October 15, 2009
LOVE
I go through
the motions—
She goes through
e motions:
WHERE?
--Tim Van Ert
Octtober 14, 2009
Alive In Order
I'm alive because I was born
into a universe whose order
I cannot fully fathom.
I live in order to
daily discover this universe
into which I've arrived.
In my life Being shapes
for me the arrow of Will, whose
bowstring is supplied by Ambition
with feathers gathered
from Moral valuse.
--Tim Van Ert
October 13, 2009
What You Hear
Without removing cap or gloves
I slump smooth in polythene chair.
From algal green and rust red gutter
stuffed with leaf litter and rain water
plastic plops and steady dribble
provide bass rhythm reminiscent
of a maddening means of torture.
Until spring peepers harmonize
to the wind-sprung chimes
and thistle-seed-cheered wrens.
Spring-promise symphony! I sing out
to my cats dry and dubious at the door.
Alfie braves puddles with one wet paw
held flexed, drawn more
by bird song than mine.
Peepers pause as currents still
to let down a drizzle of rain
and we both retreat. OK,
another soggy Oregon sunset, then!
--all irony wasted on those felines.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in NORTHWEST PASSAGE)
October 12, 2009
Respite
Whispers still paw with their feline lunacy.
Streamed behind the hired tugs
of life's masquerading fascinations
shredded feelings flap in vibrant array.
The need is not another world to run to:
a knoll's cool, green shawl of solace
where thick memory lifts, drifts and drips,
confusing sweat while forcing fibers of muscle,
bundles of nerves, to flatten in their fibrous sacs
(soiling infant soldiers drafted to action--
not missiles of innate heroism rushing headlong.)
Rather seek that seminary where wattles
are unwoven by longed-for discourses.
Feel damp marbled slabs,
smell the lime of molding mortar
and call out for the wrecking ball.
Or make limber mind and muscle
to move the manifold block
with the repetitive power
of meditative motion.
"Love me again and again,"
she whispered,
"Once is not enough."
She insisted,
"One life is not enough."
She purred,
"One night is not large enough;
who of us feels large enough?"
--Tim Van Ert
(published in NOTHING ELSE MATTERS)
October 11, 2009
Parable of the Dove
A dove lived in a village.
When it opened its mouth
sweetness came out, sound
like a silver light around
the cherry bough. But
the dove wasn't satisfied.
It saw the villagers
gathered to listen under
the blossoming tree.
It didn't think: I
am higher that they are.
It wanted to walk among them,
to experience the violence of human feeling,
in part for its song's sake.
So it became human.
It found passion, it found violence,
first conflated, then
as separate emotions
and these were not
contained by music. Thus
its song changed,
the sweet notes of its longing to become human
soured and flattened. Then
the world drew back; the mutant
fell from love
as from the cherry branch,
it fell stained with the bloody
fruit of the tree.
So it is true after all, not merely
a rule of art:
change your form and you change your nature.
And time does this to us.
--Louise Gluck
(published in MEDOWLANDS)
October 10, 2009
Paradise
I grew up in a village: now
it's almost a city.
People came from the city, wanting
something simple, something
better for the children.
Clean air; nearby
a little stable.
All the streets
named after sweethearts or girl children.
Our house was gray, the sort of place
you buy to raise a family.
My mother's still there, all alone.
When she's lonely, she watches television.
The houses get closer together,
the old trees die or get taken down.
In some ways, my father's
close, too; we call
a stone by his name.
Now, above his head, the grass blinks,
in spring, when the snow has melted.
Then the lilac blooms, heavy, like clusters of grapes.
They always said
I was like my father, the way he showed
contempt for emotion.
They're the emotional ones,
my sister and my mother.
More and more
my sister comes from the city,
weeds, tidies the garden. My mother
lets her take over: she's the one
who cares, the one who does the work.
To her, it looks like country--
the clipped lawns, strips of colored flowers.
She doesn't know what it once was.
But I know. Like Adam,
I was the firstborn.
Believe me, you never heal,
you never forget the ache in your side,
the place where something was taken away
to make another person.
--Louise Gluck
(published in NEW AMERICAN POETS OF THE '90s)
October 9, 2009
Mississippi 1955 Confessional
It would have been, I think, summer--it
would have been August, I think,
Somewhere near midway between solstice and
equinox,
When the tractors move all daylight in
mirages of their own thrown dust
And the farmhands come in the back gate at
noon, empty, with jars in their hands.
Imagine yourself a child with a fever,
half delirious all that month,
And your sisters lift you in your white
wooden chair, carry you to the edge
Of a hayfield, set you down in hedgerow
shade and leave you
While they go into woods to turn, you
think, into swans--
They are so lovely, your sisters, in their
white sundresses
That appear and disappear all afternoon
among the dark trunks of trees.
None of this ever happened. But
remember the body-heat of the wind
As it came behind the tenant shack just
there on the eastern border
Of your vision to touch you with its
loving nigger hand? And there you are,
A white boy brought up believing the wind
isn't even human, the wind is happy
To live in its one wooden room with only
newspaper on the walls
To keep out what this metaphor won't let
me call the wind--
But don't worry about that, your sisters
in the woods are gathering
Beautiful fruit, you can hear it falling
into their hands,
And the big pistons of the tractors drive
thunderously home into cylinders
Steel-bright as the future. You are
five years old. What do you know?
Your fever is a European delicacy, it
burns in your flesh like fate,
A sign from God, cynosure, mortmain, the
intricate working out
Of history in the life of the chosen.
O listen, white boy, the wind
Has a mythic question only you can aswer:
If all men were brothers,
Would you want your sister to marry
one? Let me tell you, white boy, the wind
Is in the woods with its cornmeal and its
black iron skillet,
It's playing its blues harp in the poison
oak where your youngest sister,
The one with hair so blonde you think it
looks like a halo of rain,
Is about to take off her dress. You
sit there dreaming you mild fever dream.
You tap your foot to the haybaler's
squared rhythms. They've dressed you in linen
From the woods where your sisters lie
suddenly down, you burn, snow-white.
I've seen your face. i remember your
name. I prophesy something you can't imagine
Is coming to kiss you. And you
thought I was reaching back to you in words
To tell you something beautiful, like
wind.
--Terry Hummer
(published in NEW AMERICAN POETS OF THE
'90s)
October 8, 2009
At The Gulf
Your body lies under orange eyelid blanket
but needs setting sun's cool warmth to keep from freezing.
Two horses pound wet sand in stiff staccato.
Roused dog yips and your eyes open.
A spooked Morgan cuts sharply away from the mutt,
it's rider falls with the "plop" of a flat inner tube.
That's when your eyes come alive -- in pain.
Suddenly at his side, you ask if he can move his legs.
I notice sunset's horizon no larger than your outstretched arms
as my heart pounds out swells which break in fluid foppishness.
I smile to see thunderous downpour send you home
and mistake your tears for falling rain.
Now it's your yelps, nearly drowned in shower's patter,
send me sure-footed as a stag to your stairway.
Oh, up these stairs you stroll as if nothing is splitting wide between us.
"Up the stairs, upon airs -- up your stares!"
my rolled-up eyes scream
as I suspect you want to clip me from your night like some spinster
snipping coupons from the monthlies.
To meet you within your dusky doorway
where you may ask me to manifest my elastic scepter
like a wizard's wand to transform your storms,
I must breathe, must inflate, must picture myself
a Mary vision before the prostrate faithful.
We surge together impulsive as a wink.
Animated through liquid power to will,
muscles engorge with brackish red tide
as I grasp and fondle the littered shore of another sex.
Be a master, let go of my leg. Splash it out to sea.
Then grab handfuls of sand, hop aboard and ride again.
Salt water back harbors smell: warm and metallic.
White and red ooze from our bodies' horizon,
linear as he time of synchronous cries
too weak to echo shores held at watery bay.
--Tim Van Ert
(published in SEEDS ON A WIND RIDE)
October 7, 2009
Pine Woods
There is a pine woods in Paris
(where once there were pine forests)
in this quarter that, then, was not Paris.
Wrens and grosbeaks sing about it, out of sight,
while crows crowd black and silent as night.
Narrow, rusted train tracks lead in and vanish
under a snowfall of rose-dotted petals
a swirling May wind has quietly managed.
Modern, ancient city intrudes its auto voices
ignored by lovers, and others, with softer choices.
A domestic wolf-pup prances lean, nose to ground
past a balding gardener who takes a look, and a puff,
before starting to hoe his newly formed mound.
Seven brown pigeons glide through one of their passes
over two teen-aged girls calmly cutting math classes.
Wonder with me in that voice unheard;
if you chose for just one Spring day,
would you float like petals, gardener or bird?
Boy-child wobbles on bike while mother hovers;
he still has time for all these--and how many others?
--Tim Van Ert
(published in SEEDS ON A WIND RIDE)
October 6, 2009
T Reach Her Us
After all these weeks
Embers
Just begin to show
Dimunition
In the hearth.
You
So many months ahead of
Me
In this cooling process
Must suppress a laugh of
Recognition
As I share my relief
At getting through
Another day without
Agony of
Painful love
Withdrawal.
Please
Share your secret,
Lighten my load;
I want so
Badly
To keep cool
This burning heart.
Don’t let me down:
Help take the sting, er, out.
The song is
Strong,
The audience
Gone.
Don’t let me drown:
Teach me to
Float,
To rise above it
All.
--Tim Van Ert
(from COLLECTED WORDS)
October 5, 2009
CIVIL WARS
My mind, closest friend,
plays traitor
as heart, masked stranger,
courts danger--
while my body
tugs to flight.
--Tim Van Ert
(from A FIRST EDITION OF HAI-CHOO: LITTLE SNEEZES
OF PROFOUND DITTYCISM)
Ocotber 4, 2009
The Invention of Comics
I am a soul in the world: in
the world of my soul the whirled
light / from the day
the sacked land
of my father.
In the world, the sad
nature of
myself. In myself
nature is sad. Small
prints of the day. Its
small dull fires. Its
sun, like a greyness
smeared on the dark.
The day of my soul, is
the nature of that
place. It is a landscape. Seen
from the top of a hill. A
grey expanse; dull fires
throbbing on its seas.
The man's soul, the complexion
of his life. The menace
of its greyness. The
fire, throbs, the sea
moves. Birds shoot
from the dark. The edge
of the waters lit
darkly for the moon.
And the moon, from the soul. Is
the world, of the man. The man
and his sea, and its moon, and
the soft fire throbbing. Kind
death. O,
my dark and sultry
love.
--Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
(published in THE PREMIER BOOK OF MAJOR POETS)
October 3, 2009
Toad's Poolhall
I'm tired of all this, I said.
While shutting one eye
And calculating the odds with the other.
In my mind already I was larger than life.
Fit for the screen
Of a drive-in movie in the desert.
I stood on the empty highway
With my thumb raised.
The sky over me
Was like a western star's dress
Strewn with sequins.
See how far you'll get,
The one we called the Theologian
Muttered behind my back.
He read the writings of Calvin
And savored their meanness.
Oh, but the June sunrise
In the back of a pickup truck!
The radio playing
Old-time fiddle music...
And then I missed the shot.
--Charles Simic
(published in WALKING THE BLACK CAT)
October 2, 2009
So Many Ants on the Melon
Door swish signals refuge from Portland's racket
in Powell's storehouse of printed pleasure packets
where I imagine scoring a small clutch of books
bearing odes to common medical afflictions.
My parking meter mind
thought me making a bee-line
through that scroll-strewn cave
where the dead still help us see.
An end-aisle display shows off yet another
from a favorite of mine, titled fuel : the cover
flashing enough orange flesh from a cut melon
to make a dry mouth (even insect eyes) water.
Man, ants all over that cut cantaloupe;
like me with a new book of verse, swarming with hope!
Having not found enough woeful odes, I'm pointed
"down 10th Street there" to the county library.
In the backwater town where I grew to love printed lines,
the county library was no shrine to the shining mind.
but Multnomah county library is a castle of stone:
high sculpted ceilings, sensuous marble, rich brown oak.
Computer lists but one volume--by Dr. Strauss.
I go to 811.5 to let eyes roam and fingers check it out.
Like a lover warming up to give a massage,
I'm already pleased--yet ready for surprise.
As fingers pull from its hundred hugging peers
V.H. Adair's Ants on the Melon, my heart cheers,
"There is some sweet mystery here
I plan to feast on all day long!"
--Tim Van Ert
(from IF YOU LIVE, YOUR TIME WILL COME)
Ocotber 1, 2009
Even As the Birds of the
Field
Eruptive ground swells to
bear me life anew
Offering a changed world of
things to do:
Pulling inside out of me.
Life there in wrenched fully
free
To love to help your own
dreams come true.
I've felt me a great reiver
flowing strongly;
Yet, viewed thus narrowly is
see so wrongly--
Now another streaming
mingles
Warming flow bringing what
it knows:
Vitality within and without
me.
Revelling in wonder at what
has begun,
Penetrate sweet mystery of
two merged one.
Come, dive in, float to the
sea.
Rise, vapor, to rain on me.
Explore our depths, feel the
currents run!
--Tim Van Ert
(from COLLECTED WORDS)