at 9:48 PM  Anonymous said...

so much to enjoy again and again, allen,
thank you.
martha

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II.6.3



We're back again, with poems from across time and around the world.

I was just thinking that when I started this, I had intended it to be mostly about poetry, but also about other things I liked.

There hasn't been much time or space for "other things" over the past months, but I did finally get to the movies last week and saw the cleverly diabolic Mr. Brooks. Great, bloody fun, I recommend it, with the understanding that for some the fun may occasionally be too bloody.

Now, back to the poetry.







We begin with this piece from our friend Dave Ruslander, a poet from rural Virginia. The poem is from his book Voices In My Head.


Sweetboy

I saw him, bright red chestnut
with two white feet,
seventeen hands and a tapered
white blaze.

He burst from the barn dancing,
flying lead changes around the ring
on springs, nostrils flared, snorting steam.
His bronze coat reflected the early light.

He was a watch spring wound tight
about to burst from his coat.
His thick neck bowed,
chin drawn up beneath its mass,
shoulders sifting and wide eyes darting,
knees pumping like pistons as he trotted,
coat radiating the sheen of a new copper
penny.

Seized by impulse, I was going
to greet this thousand pound
lightening bolt.

Slowly I approached, spoke in soft tones
Easy Big Red, I'm coming in here now;
you behave big boy. Come on down now.

As though greeting an old friend, he
walked up with a poised and playful nature
and sniffed my outstretched hand.
His wild musk lay in the saddle of my palm,
he was inside me.

I embraced him, whispering

I love you big boy.

He let loose a massive sigh
from somewhere deep inside.

I'll take him, I said, looking over my
shoulder at the owner.





Now, we have this portrait from Gwendolyn Brooks.


Mrs. Small

Mrs. Small went to the kitchen for her pocketbook
And came back to the living room with a peculiar look
And the coffee pot.
Pocketbook. Pot
Pot. Pocketbook.

The insurance man was waiting there
With superb and cared-for hair.
His face did not have much time.
He did not glance with sublime
Love upon the little plump tan woman
With the half-opened mouth and the half-mad eyes
And the smile half-human
Who stood in the middle of the living-room floor planning
      apple pies
And graciously offering him a steaming coffee pot.
Pocketbook. Pot.

"Oh!" Mrs. Small came to her senses,
Peered earnestly through thick lenses,
Jumped terribly. This, too, was a mistake,
Unforgivable no matter how much she had to bake.
For there can be no whiter whiteness than this one:
An insurance man's shirt on its morning run.
This Mrs. Small all now soiled
With a pair of brown
Spurts (just recently boiled)
Of the "very best coffee in town."

"The best coffee in town is what you make, Delphine! There is
      none dandier!"
Those were the words of the pleased Jim Small -
Who was no bandier of words at all.
Jim Small was likely to give a good swat
When he was not
Pleased. He was, absolutely, no bandier.

"I don't know where my mind is this morning,"
Said Mrs. Small, scorning
Apologies! For there was so much
For which to apologize! Oh such
Mountains of things, she'd never get anything done
If she begged forgiveness for each one.

She paid him.

But apologies and her hurry would not mix.
The six
Daughters were a yell, a scramble, in the hall The four
Sons (horrors) could not be heard any more.
No.
The insurance man would have to glare
Idiotically into her own sterile stare
A moment - then depart,
Leaving her to release her heart
and dizziness

And silence her six
And mix
Here spices and core
And slice her apples, and find her four.
Continuing her part
Of the world's business.





Painting by Rachael Gonzales


I wrote this about a week ago.


facing change is an integral part of successful living

bought new boots
yesterday
down at Sears,
high top
lace-ups,
the kind you'd
wear
for some un-
serious
hiking
while trying to look like
you're just fooling around,
taking
a break after
crossing
the Kilimanjaro
or some deep
African
jungle

they were on sale
which makes them
look pretty good
even though they're
tight,
stiff and
unyielding
and pinch my toes
like briar-thorn
socks

but
wore
them all day
anyway

breaking them in

cause
that's what you
gotta
do with change
in all aspects of your life

face it

stare it down

make change your
friend....

bullshit

my feet hurt







Now, this poem, from the book Forbidden Words by Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade.


Song with Seagulls of Bermeo


Is it March or April?
It's a day of sun
close to the sea,
it's a day
in which all my blood
turns to caresses and dew.

What color did you wear?
The light of dawn or lemon?
What clouds are you looking at,
what high hills,
while turning your face
from the words I write,
standing here, demanding
your love?

Is it a day in May?
It's a day in which I stumble
on the air
in search of the blue of your eyes,
in which your voice,
within me, asks,
insists:
Se te fue melancolia,
amigo mio del alma?

Is it June? Is it September?
It's a day
in which I am laden full with you
or with fruits,
and I stumble through the light, like a blindman,
in search of you.

(Translated by Alexis Levitin)







Martha Galphin is with us for the first time. She was born and raised in Kentucky and now lives in New York. She is an actress, an English language teacher, and a writer. She says she is delighted to be here, just as we are delighted to have her.


exhilaration, then and now

sweltering summer:
muscles taut, straining to run
whack, fling, scramble, go!
girl playing with the big boys
wets her pants on second base.

classroom fluorescence:
toothsome teacher listens laughs
sweats dances claps asks,
time disappears; suddenly,
"Excuse - ladies room - be back."







This next poem is by California poet and entrepreneur Charles Entrekin. It is from his book In This Hour, published in 1989.


Letting Go

Yes. Best of all is the water, flat,
skipping stones on the surface. Empty
evening light. Yes. It was perfect.
We made love and napped in the firelight.
Outside, the gray breath of a storm.
I remember bluegill, fish large
as your hand, swimming like leaves,
and my grandfather's bottom land, his
swamps and creeks. Yes,
your breasts remember me, and
my fingers remember you,
soft as chrysanthemums, wet.
Yes. All right. But afterwards
when I said never mind the old man
in the restaurant with money,
never mind the cold incoming fog,
it made no difference.
Yes. I know each evening
brings the chance of being wrong,
but tonight the water's smooth, and
even in December the sea birds are here,
arriving in a vague and brittle white
across the sea shore; they are on time
and alive inside their own complex
of reasons and joy.







Apprentice religious scholar Alice Folkart on prayer. I think she's for it.


The Illusion of Prayer

Our father
which art in heaven
lead us, hey,
read us a bedtime story
in the valley
of the shadow.
Make us to lie down
in the begonia beds,
visions of sugarplums
dancing, romancing
the stone alone.
Hallowed, hallows,
gallows humor
when our cup runneth over
and we are in clover
up to our toils,
anointed with oils
which we'll fight for,
our backs at the door
in the rocket's red glare.
I swear, but I shall not want
unless I haunt the still waters.
my only need, as I sit 'mong the reeds,
is to restore my soul,
make it whole with thy rod and thy staff.
Lead me,
deliver me, all aquiver to my love.
Oh, comfort me
when thy Kingdom comes,
don't let some dumb ass
screw it up, just pass that cup
and butter my daily bread.
Shirley! Send Goodness and Mercy
over to our table,
for mine is the kinkdom
and the power and the story,
maybe never.







Across State Lines is a book I found at a second hand book store several months ago and have used it here several times. The book is a collection of fifty poems, each one representing one of the fifty states of the United States, written by a range of poets including the likes of Willa Cather, Billie Collins, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and others. This poem from the book was selected to represent Minnesota and was written by Pulitzer Prize winner James Wright.


A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into that pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
The ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.







This poem came out of one of my late night walks, reminded by a passing airplane of my father, which still happens often though he's been dead 27 years now. I guess that never stops.

The poem is included in Seven Beats a Second


stories my father told me

I walk tonight under a sky
cool and dry for september
with scattered clouds
lit a milky white by city lights,
soft on the edges,
like marshmallows half melted
in a cup of dark hot chocolate

a plane passes overhead,
a jet whisper in the quiet night,
a military plane of some kind,
not unusual here between
several nearby military air bases
with steady air traffic of all kinds

what a sight, the huge craft
coming in overhead, so big,
like an office building aloft,
and so slow and quiet, hanging,
it seemed, right over me,
just out of reach of a good stretch

I wonder what my father
would have made of them

he told me the story
of the day when he was a child
and one of the great Zeppelins
flew over his little town
and how all the town people
left their shops and all the ranchers
put aside their pasture clearing
and fence building and tried to follow
the great balloon in its slow journey,
a parade of model T's and wagons
across the Texas hill country, until
it left the road and went cross-country
on its way from San Antonio to Dallas

it seems strange today; but that sight
that vision of lighter-than-air grace,
was the closest he ever came to flying

so many things like that he never did

the sky begins to cloud
and I return home,
the marshmallow clumps melting,
the night closing in with me thinking
of my father again, as I do often now,
at the age his life ended,
another lifetime for me since then,
making another me he never knew,
like all the lives he lived I never knew,
except for the stories he told,
some true, some just in passing







Now a piece from Alaskan meatcutter, bookkeeper, teacher and poet, Arlitia Jones.


The Man Who Lived There...

1.
Gone. Never heard from again.
Not that we'd heard from him
when he was there (unfriendly
bastard). He built that cabin

in one day - more like a shack -
rough-cut with so many cracks
and gaps you could throw a cat
through the wall anywhere. Looked

like Charles Manson - not all
there. I waved at him once - hell,
he put his head down like
never even seen me.

Pulled crab post for a livin' off
Kodiak, out in the Gulf.
Crabbers make good money, but
you couldn't pay me enough

to go out in that water,
winter storms - guys lost over-
board and the captain doesn't
even know it. Gone! Cabbers

don't live long. Probably what
happened to Ol' Manson. Got
tangled in the lines and yanked
off deck - five hundred-pound pot

pullin' him to the bottom
like a dropped anchor. Nothin'
a guy can do 'less he had
a knife. I'd have knives tucked in

my ass if I ever worked
on a crab boat - chance to cut
yourself loose maybe. Better
that than endin' up fishfood.

Wonder if that's where Manson
ended up? Could be he found
a nicer place. I always
wondered what would make a man

take a bunch of perfectly
good wood and fuck it up like
that. Shack leans more every year.
That guy was a real low life.

2.
He lived his own kind of life.
Alone, stretched out in his loft.
I think he reads books all day
till dusk, then, in what was left

of the light, he cooked his dinner.
No electricity, or phones.
He chopped birch for his stove.
From our bay window each morning

I could tell when he stoked
it. Through the trees, twists of smoke
rolling uphill like raw wool
through a comb. What does it take,

I wonder, to make a man
live in a one-room cabin
no bigger than the crab pots
they say he hauled each season -

rusted cage baited with
the one small morsel of truth
a man learns about himself
and throws down into the depths

of an ice-clogged northern sea
(that unknown and murky place
where scavengers pinch, grapple
and are easily enticed

through the trap door). What sharp-clawed
thing dropped in on him to feed?
It must have been something because,
one day he disappeared.

No trace, Think his name was Karl,
and I know he liked to walk.
I remember one winter
I came across the small tracks

of a hare zigzagging
a field of snow. They only went
for a few yards before they
stopped at the spot where two wings

brushed the ground. Could be one
night - hungry moon on the wind -
he walked out in the open
under a bright eye honed

                            and

                                      dropping.


I meant to do only one Jones poem. But this immediately followed the one above and it's short and I like it, so here it is.


Sign On A Cabin In The Caribou Hills

This cabin belongs to Eileen Black.
My husband and Marvel and I built it
by hand in 1957. Friends
are welcome to use it: Perly and his
gang, Johnny Pete, Mike Klink, Bob Eber-
hard and Bob Jackovik, Diego Ron and
Steve Redmon, George & Maria, Margie
and Marty and the kids if they're along.
Donny Shelikov can come in and
Karl and Tony if he ever comes back.
Ed Greeley, keep out.
          If you're lost and need a place
to get in, you can spend the night. I left
Sanka and dry goods. Help yourself.
Please clean up. Don't attract bears.
Leave it the way you found it - woodpile
stocked and kindling dry. Remember, close
the door tight and leave it unlocked.







Here, from California, is our friend Alice Folkart writing about the drought in her area. We usually have more dry years than wet here in San Antonio, so I know exactly the desperation and disappointment she talks about in her poem.


Three Gray Days

Three
gray
days

sky
as low
as a hung over,
sorry
drunk

every
leaf,
blade
of grass,
twig,

quivering
as if
the
impossible
were about
to happen,

a storm

to end
the drought.

But no,

rain
and sun

both
have
forsaken us.







I stopped in at a used book store when I was in Austin this week and picked up several books, including bum rush the page, edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivea. The book is a proudly radical compilation of new and exciting poets.

The poem below, from the book, is by Gary Johnston poet, publisher of Blind Beggar Press and coeditor of New Rain.


Blood is the Argument

All he wanted
For Christmas
Was a fly girl
In a red dress,
Forty ounces &
A blunt.
Rap music
Coming out
The side of
His mouth,
A smile across
His dark face.

He was Tupac,
Biggie Smalls.
A legend
In his own mind.
End & means,
Product of all
The wrong things
Done by all
The wrong people
At all the
Wrong times.
He was blood
In the argument,
Lesson of what
A generation
Forgot to teach.

Fred Hampton
Murdered
in a Chicago
Rooming house,
Bobby Seale
Hog-tied in
The name of justice,
Assata running
For her life,
Geronimo Pratt
Thirty years
In the penal colony,
Huey mind drugged,
Strung out,
Dead on a Revolution that
Was more rhetoric
Than action.

Somehow
We have
Forgotten the
Lessons of our
Past, fine
Line between
Thought & deed,
Preaching to
Congregations,
Half-stepping
Their way
To oblivion,
The twenty-first century.
The dead & dying
Among us call our
For more than
A whisper,
A rap line
Thrown down
Home girls
Weighted down
By the size
Of their earrings.

Ghosts &
Murderers
Are the sum
Of our Memory.
They stumble over us
As dead men
Pressed between
the pages of a book
& those not crushed
are born again,
waiting on Jesus
for the last revolution.

Small pockets
Of resistance
Left over
From the sixties
Still plot
Insurrection
Yet know we talk
A good game,
That we've
Been played
& are still
Our best, worst enemy.
The nightmare
Of our lives
Is to live
Each day
Remembering
Talk is cheap
Life is fragile
Commodity on
History's shore,
Reminiscing:

...if you hear any noise
it's just me and the boys
making like revolution.







Here's one of my drought poems, from a couple of summers ago when it seemed finding water on Mars was more likely than finding water on my backyard.


bzzzzz zap

I think
there must be
a great rain-zapper
high in the sky
over this city,
circling this city

like the bug
zapper
on your patio,
drawing in
all the pesky
insects
that whine
in your ear
and bite
at your arms
and neck,
drawing
big itchy bumps
that turn red
and infected
the next day
after you scratch
scratch scratch
all night
until
bzzzzz zap
and there's a
little purple flash
and a tiny puff of
cremated insect
smoke
that drifts away
in the wafting
summer breezes

bzzzzz zap

rain clouds
surround us,
piling black
and scowling
all around us
and you can see
the rain fall
in great washes
and sheets of wet
all around

then stopping
like all the little
raindrops
have been
zapped away
in a neat circle
around the city
and it is
dry
dry
dry
and grass
turns brown
and ugly
and sapless
trees crash
to the ground
in the slightest
wind and their
leaves curl
into dry little
cocoon-like
husks
on their branches
and even the cactus
begins to wilt

bzzzzz zap

there is no other
explanation







Selecting again this week from Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, we have these short poems from Lance Henson.

Henson is a Cheyenne, born in 1944 and raised near Calumet Oklahoma. He is the poet in residence for more than three hundred schools in Oklahoma and other states. He has published six books of poetry, including In a Dark Mist which is the first major collection from Cheyenne into English by a Native American.


Solitary

on a cold night
i forget the story of my birth

i forget the long fingers of sleep
the magic of names

to go alone

i begin by asking the winds
forgiveness


Day Song

perhaps on a sunday
like today
under the sound of a lone bell

perhaps in the brightest snow of the year
or in autumn
while the leaves are in their last clothes

someone will lie down
feeling in his blood a singing wind
that in all his days
he has witnessed
only once

when dust stopped on the shivering road
and looked into the mirror


Grandfather

("Grandfather" is Lance Henson's translation of the Cheyenne poem "Nam Shim")

grandfather
my heart looks toward you
red sage of sunset
evening star
the night hawk sings
your name


At Chadwick's Bar and Grill

a sky the color of a wren's breath
hangs over red clouds
hint of rain
and home is dirt underfoot
tu fu and li po have
forgiven nothing
not waking drunk under any moon
or the incessant calling
of a loon
so waiting is the roses own
signature
the spider catches the fly
at morning
whether i am there
or not


coyote fragments

I
he is rust
      in moonlight

2
when the roadman paused
      we heard our brother's voice

3
one track
      in snow

4
eight without ears
hang upside down from fence posts
near hammon oklahoma

5
the moonlight splashes
      in their eyes


splitting wood near morris, oklahoma
on robbie and lesa mcmurty's farm

a gray heron flies past
mixes its wings with the stark
winter limbs of trees
splitting wood this morning with my brother's ax
i trace the seam through a red elm
it splits clean with one strike
the sound crosses the water of a small pond
and dissipates in a circle around me
later stacking the wood
the smell of resin strong in the air
i raise a small piece of oak to my mouth
chewing the sweet dry heart
i face east
in the mist of this new day
and ask for something from the wind
something bright and clean
to carry forward
and leave behind







We are cheated, most of us, at least, in never knowing a night unbroken by the artificial light of man, never knowing the fullness of a "starry, starry night." In writing this poem, I tried to imagine myself one of the early people who lived every night under a bright starlite sky.

I wrote the poem six or seven years ago and used it in Seven Beats a Second.


star bright

imagine the stars
on cold desert nights,
spread across the wide black sky,
beyond the desert and high mesas,
past prairies where trickster coyote calls,
past the land of mortal men
to the place where no man goes,
the place where spirits hunt
ghosts of buffalo

imagine sleeping
with this blaze of night around you,
black stars bright
with cold unchallenged light

imagine
how you must feat the starless night,
when clouds close the sky around you
and bind you prisoner to the dark.







This poem, a macabre piece by essayist, novelist and expressionist poet Gottfried Benn, might deserve a "parental warning."

Benn, born 1886 was a doctor of medicine and an early admirer, and later a critic, of the National Socialist revolution.

Benn started as an expressionist author before World War I when he published a small collection of poems concerned with the physical decay of the flesh.

Benn enlisted in the military in 1914, spent a brief period on the Belgian front, and then served as a military doctor in Brussels. He worked as a physician in an army brothel, then moved to Berlin and practiced as a dermatology and venereal disease specialist.

Hostile to the Weimar Republic, and rejecting Marxism and Americanism, Benn began to sympathize with the Nazis as a revolutionary force. Appalled by the Night of the Long Knives and ultimately disillusioned by National Socialism he abandoned his support for the Nazi movement. In 1938 the National Socialist authors' association banned Benn from further writing.

During World War II, Benn was posted to garrisons in eastern Germany where he wrote poems and essays. After the war, his work was banned by the Allies because of his initial support for Hitler.

He died in West Berlin in 1956, and was buried in Dahlem Waldfriedhof, Berlin.

I pulled this poem from an anthology of German expressionist poems called Music while drowning. It originally appeared in Benn's first poetry collection, Morgue and other Poems.


Happy Youth

The mouth of a girl who had lain a long time in
      the rushes
looked so nibbled away.
The breasts broken open, the feed-pipe so full of
      holes.
Finally in a copse under the diaphragm
was discovered a nest of young rats.
On sister ratlet lay dead.
The others lived off liver and kidneys,
drank the cold blood and had
spent a happy youth here.
And short and sweet their death was too:
The whole pack were thrown into the water.
Oh! how the little snouts squeaked!

(Translated by R.J. Kavanaugh)





Painting by Rachael Gonzales


Speaking of expressionism, here's a poem by San Antonio's Jason Rubalcaba who might feel right at home with the expressionists.


Zampano

Zampano,
if only you were still alive.
But we are immersed in comedies,
so much easier then beach scenes
where we lose it amidst the sands,
and the tides,
that know no pity.
Oh, but they don't make them
like they used to.
And I am left with ashes
and a memory of a woman
who played a battered trumpet,
beautifully,
before benign nuns
who know only love
and our turmoil
that we struggle to let lose
or hold within.







The next poem is by Robert Hayden, an underestimated poet for most of his life.


Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in blueblack cold.,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?







We haven't seen Alan Addotto in a while. So, here he is again, with a few observations from WalMart.


Ramblin' through WalMart gets you to thinking...


You ever notice how much some people remind us of food?
Being a slightly overweight individual (being double my "approved"
size) I do.

Politicians, for instance,,,,,they remind me of potted meat.
Yes, and lawyers too.
I mean it's a sort of metaphoric equivalency here.
Like the meatmoosh in the little pop top cans
that is technically something a person could possibly eat
the politicians and lawyers are technically human
but still pretty much made up out of some "mystery meat."
at least morally anyway.

Doesn't pay to read the contents label neither.
because sure as hell you won't want anything to do with either
That is if they even admit to their makeup in the first place!

Potted meat people!
Yesssssssss that's what they are
some chewed up extruded ersatz crap
that passes for what it certainly is not
or......at best.......is only nominally so.
I have met several (both the "squashed tube steak" varieties
and the two legged variety and believe me........I know.

And religious fundamentalist evangelists
that’s another group of winners........
cheap wieners......I mean really cheap chicken wieners
......The thirty nine cents a pack kind
stuck in the back of the cold display rack
that look a strange shade of pink.
And yes....before you ask....I mean all religions
and all sects first to last
and yes, also I do intend the Freudian phallic image
and limp weenie sex.
I'm not eveeeeeeen going to go into what I think
of religious sick
fundamentalist/political/social change
fanatics
whatever the nationality or race.


What's the point of all this?
No point really.







I wrote this poem several years ago after going to one of my son's gigs when he was with a ska band here ini San Antonio. Great band, I still miss them.

The poem is included in Seven Beats a Second.


gotta dance

shirt off
chest glistening
sweat-wet hair long
swinging as he dances
atop the amp rack
twenty feet in the air
arms pumping feet pumping
skanking
lost in the island beat
oblivious
to the bouncers
sweeping across tghe room
like an ebony tide
converging on him
when he jumps down
and breaks for the door
smothering him
like a black cloud
on a sunny day

it's the music
he says
can't you hear it

gotta dance
man







In this poem from her book On The Bus With Rosa Parks, Rita Dove salutes her library.


Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967

For a fifteen-year-old there was plenty
to do: Browse the magazines,
slip into the Adult Section to see
what vast tristesse was born of rush-hour traffic,
decolletes, and the plague of too much money.
There was so much to discover - how to
lay out a road, the language of flowers,
and place of women in the tribe of Moost.
There were equations elegant as a French twist,
fractal geometry's unwinding maple leaf;

I could follow, step-by-step, the slow disclosure
of a pineapple Jell-O mold - or take
the path of Harold's purple crayon through
the bedroom window and onto a lavender
spill of stars. Oh, I could walk any aisle
and smell wisdom, put a hand out to touch
the harsh parchment of dreams.

As for the improbable librarian
with her salt and paprika upsweep,
her British accent and sweater clip
(mom of a kid I knew from school) -
I'd go up to her desk and ask for help
on bareback rodeo or binary codes,
phonics, Gestalt theory,
lead poisoning in the Late Roman Empire,
the play of light in Dutch Renaissance painting;
I would claim to be researching
pre-Columbian pottery or Chinese foot-binding
but all I wanted to know was:
Tell me what you've read that keeps
that half smile afloat
above the collar of you impeccable blouse.

So I read Gone with the Wind because
it was big, and haiku because they were small.
I studied history for its rhapsody of dates,
lingered over Cubist art for the way
it showed all sides of a guitar at once.
All the time in the in the world was there, and sometimes
all the world on a single page.
As much as I could hold
on my plastic card's imprint I took,

greedily: six books, six volumes of bliss,
the stuff we humans are made of:
words and sighs and silence,
ink and whips, Brahma and cosine,
corsets and poetry and blood sugar levels -
I carried it home, past five blocks of aluminum siding
and the old garage where, on its boarded-up doors,
some has scrawled:

I CAN EAT AN ELEPHANT
IF I TAKE SMALL BITES.

yes, I said, to no one in particular: That's
what I'm gonna do!







That's all for now. Back in a week.

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Happy Trails   Saturday, June 09, 2007

Number II.6.2


I've been haunting the used book stores again and found some poets for this week I'd never heard of and others I'd heard of, but never read. I hope you find them as interesting and fresh as I did.

After six months, I finally got around to changing out the photos and poems on the main 7beats site. There's a link at the top, if you would like to check it out.

It was never my intention to leave that site static as long as I did this time, but got pushed aside as I concentrated on "Here and Now," which has turned out to take much more time than I had ever imagined. I'm having fun with it though, which makes it worth the time I'm spending on it, hoping, of course, that others are enjoying it as well.

For the last two months we've had more than a thousand visits per month (1,110 in April and 1,300 in May). This is the result of a continuing increase every month in the number of people stopping by. I don't know how that rates on other people's good-bad meter, but it's great on mine. I'm always happy to have more visits/visitors, so, if you like what you see, pass it on.

Self-promo done, let's move on to the good stuff.







We begin this week with a poet new to me, Ishle Yi Park. Of Korean American heritage, she was born in New York in 1977.

A recipient of a fiction grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including New American Writing, Best American Writers of All Colors 2001, and The Best American Poetry of 2003. She has performed in the United States, Cuba and Korea, and was a featured poet on HBO's Def Poetry Jam.

I like her very much.

This poem is from her book The Temperature of This Water.


Marine Rules
    - for David

Don't shoot a parachuter in air, but paratroopers are fair game.
When you capture a P.O.W., follow the 6 s's: search secure silence
segregate safeguard and speed them to the rear.

Stick together against Army & Navy punks.
Bless equipment men and commanding officers with bigger plates
    at mess hall.
Smoke only in steam-filled showers.
Wash at least twice a week; pay particular attention to body creases.

Don't turn your head at "Yankee go home."
Don't think about your girl getting her back dug out by the next
    man in Queens,
don't remember your titi Margie cooking up a pot of fried wings
    for your departure,
how you both cried for an hour at her kitchen table.

Memorize Biggie's Ready to Die, unlike the rosaries you always forgot,
along with this is my rifle, there are many like it, but only this one is mine,
along with the dirt-hill chant, '57 Chevy with a tankful of gas,
got a mouthful of pussy and a handful of ass . Sound off - one...two.
Sound off - three...four. Sound off - one...two...three...four...

Remember - it matters where you die. In combat, a hero; in Brooklyn
    a statistic.
Stop waiting for her letters, which grow scarcer than war rations.
Don't give a fuck about no one cuz they don't give a fuck about you -
Fuck the sergeant's wife on Guantanamo Beach,
remember her thick haunches against wet rock, the crashing foam,
    the darkness...
Don't cry where they can see you. Don't give up don't give up don't
    give up -
just two more years - do not go home a punk...

Remember you are an American fighting man: amphibious force-in-
    readiness,
the word marine, coming from the Latin marinus, meaning "related
    to the sea," amphibious from the Greek amphibion, literally,
    "living a double life."
Name things exactly - Civilian. Combatant, Officer, Wife., Man.
    P.O.W. Enemy.


Meat Trucks

When I cannot look at your face,
I look at your back
curled away from me in sleep,
half buried in polyester sheets.

I know it supports you
under wooden crates of packed beef
hauled off loading trucks
on lamplit streets. It's almost geometric
in its tight bend, hoist, pull
that cranks you through the mornings.

In these strange lights,
its ridges are reptilian and fierce,
but when my fingers graze your spine,
it shudders like a quiet earthquake.







Our friend, Alice Folkart, shares with us recent moving experiences.


Displaced

Real Estate refugee,
my knapsack on my back
sensible shoes, insensible blues.

I painted the door today,
the one we'll walk through
when we leave for good.

The neighborhood knows,
and grows cozy and nosy.
Night whispers like

bats flap round the house
in the dark, like a lark, singing
out of tune, or the moon

not coming up, or a cup of cold tea.
Ah me, I can see the long road.
I shoulder my load, to walk on.







I wrote this poem about 2001-2002, as I was beginning to learn to trust my readers, learning that, not only was it not necessary to spell everything out, it was usually better if you held back and let the readers discover things not said. This poem, particularly, was a revelation to me as I saw the deeper I cut the deeper and darker it became. My own opinion is that I have never done this better than I did it here.

Later, in 2005, I used it in my book Seven Beats a Second.


the cruelty of cats at play

her black smile
cut like a dagger through the dark
      unseen
      slicing cleanly to the heart

"I have something to tell you,"
      she whispered







Here are tributes to two tall mountains in the hills and valleys that make up American art, Whitman, the poet, and Alberta Hunter, the seminal jazz singer and song writer.

The Whitman tribute was written by California poet Larry Lewis, while the poem to Alberta Hunter was written by Lyn Lifshin, author of 100 books and editor of four books dedicated to American women writers.


Whitman:

                      I say we had better look our nation searchingly
                      in the face, like a physician diagnosing some
                      deep disease.

                                 - Democratic Vistas


                      Look for me under your bootsoles.

On Long Island, they moved my clapboard house
Across a turnpike, & then felt so guilty they
Named a shopping center after me!

Now that I'm required reading in your high schools,
Teenagers call me a fool.
Now what I sang stops breathing.

And yet
It was only when everyone stopped believing in me
That I began to live again -
First in the thin whine of Montana fence wire,
Then in the transparent, cast-off garments hung
In the windows of the poorest families,
Then in the glad music of Charlie Parker.
At times now,
I even come back to watch you
From the eyes of a taciturn boy at Malibu,
Across the counter at the beach concession stand,
I sell you hot dogs, Pepsis, cigarettes -
My blond hair long, greasy, & swept back.
In a vain old ducktail, deliciously
Out of style.
And no one notices.
Once, I even came back as me,
An aging homosexual who ran the Tilt-a-Whirl
At county fairs, the chilled paint on each gondola
Changing color as it picked up speed,
and a Mardi Gras tattoo on my left shoulder.
A few of you must have seen my photographs.
For when you looked back
I thought you caught the meaning of my stare:

Still water,
Merciless.

A Kosmos. One of the roughs.

And Charlie Parker's grave outside Kansas City
Covered with weeds.

Leave me alone.
A father who's outlived his only child.

To find me now will cost you everything.


Alberta Hunter

you could hear
Bessie Smith
from here to
49th St.

I've got the first
record I made
on Black Swam      ran

away from home
away from Beale St.
working at a night
club called Dream
land    brother Louis
Armstrong up to
play 2nd trumpet
his first wife
collapsed     died
at her husband's
funeral    I love

church but until
they put that sand
and dirt in my face
ladies and gentle
man I've had enough







Our New Zealand friend and frequent contributor, Thane Zander takes us for a walk around town to see sights.


Allentown

I'm driving around Allentown,
dusty summers day
where winds are wafting,
children stick figures
on a pavement sweating.

Broomsticks walk behind the kids
carrying shopping bags
the pedestrian crossing
wheelbarrows carrying
the days produce.

I see the black sandbox
of a Police Cruiser keeping the peace,
the vagabonds disguised as trees
in the park resounding to a stereo
supplanted in a clock tower.

The Tonka toy of my Mercedes Benz
cruises middle Lifelessness Avenue
skirting sideshows
clowns on stilts laughing
the dinner sets on the post boxes, glowing.

Arthur the Butcher, shop open
stands like an overgrown Sausage
selling his wares, and his ways
dreaming of surfboard days
the tar seal melting under summer sun.

Moody Ladies of the Seventh Day Adventist
pass out words of wisdom
pass out in the heat
pamper each other with Lovey Dovey cloths,
Reverend Greengauge passes, discerning.

Stick figures of humanity, walking
wandering, stagnant
the day set to the tune of the clock rock
the chime of the Eleventh Hour
as old soldiers bow their heads in remembrance.







I wrote this piece about the same time I wrote the cruelty of cats thing, maybe several weeks after. It was another of my attempts at saying more with less. I included the poem in my book Seven Beats a Second.


while a bald man burns

three gulls circle
while
a bald man burns
in the fierce island sun
while
I trace gargoyles
in the sand
with my toe
while
you pretend to study
the book in your hand
while
three gulls circle
in the fierce island sun







Going back a few years, about three millennia, in fact, here are two short poems from the Rigveda, an ancient Indian religious book. It is a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns dedicated to Rigvedic deities. It is counted among the four Hindu sacred texts known as the Vedas, said to be composed between 1700-1100 BC.


Hymn To Night

So vast our Goddess Night, she rises,
star-eyes gazing everywhere.
all her finery of dress displayed.
Space high and low she fills, Eternal Night,
her beauty driving out the dark
Close on the heels of sister Day
she treads. Let darkness run ...
As you draw near; we turn for home
like birds that wing to nest.
Life everywhere retreats: man, beast
and bird. Even the soaring hawk
returns to seek out rest.
Night, shield us from the wolf and thief.
Throughout your hours let there be calm.
Pitch dark has brought a shroud for me.
Dawn, drive it, like my debts, away.
Child of Day, to you, as to a calf,
my Hun is offered. Receive it now
as paean to a conqueror.

(Translated by Edwin Gerow and Peter Dent)


May The Wind Blow Sweetness!

May the wind blow sweetness,
the rivers flow sweetness,
the herbs grow sweetness,
for the Man of Truth!

Sweet be the night,
sweet the dawn,
sweet the earth's fragrance,
sweet Father Heaven!

May the tree afford us sweetness,
the sun shine sweetness,
our cows yield sweetness -
milk in plenty!

(Translated by Rainmundo Panikkar)







Our friend Patricia Cresswell describes herself as a reclusive poet with a temperamental muse who keeps wandering off at the oddest times. She says she's been published here and there both online and in print.

The last poem we looked at, May The Wind Blow Sweetness is a simple poem. Sometimes that's all we want, a simple poem, part of a simple life, as Patricia explains.


today

I don't want to suck hard
to mine the marrow of your words
let me be a water walker
and skim the placid surface
later laid back, lazy, I will cogitate

too hot today
my mind all muzzy with
dragon fly wings and lemon drop
sunsplashes on newly minted leaves,
save depth for November.







Most of my poems include some element of humor and many include some level of social commentary.

Like this one, also included in Seven Beats a Second.


my kind of people

fat girls
need not apply

no skinny
bucktoothed boys
who masturbate
while reading historical
romance novels

no krinkly, wrinkly
old people,
drooly-chinned
babies
with foul smelling
diapers
no bankers
who count their money
in dark little rooms
at midnight

no judges, no fire chiefs,
no social workers,
no grocery store clerks,
barbers, bakers,
or used car salesmen

also, no candlestick makers
if they're still around

none of them either

no blonds
with dimples
and no swathy skinned
men with mustaches

no baldheaded men
with beards
nor women
with brittle hair
piled higher than
six and one half inches

none too short
none too tall
none too big
and none to small

and none too
in-between

no men in tangerine
bermuda shorts
and no women
in pedal pushers
(any color)

no arabs, no blacks,
no wops or jews

no russians, maldavians,
limeys frogs, krauts,
poles, czechs, hunkies,
greeks, swedes,
irish sots
nor tightfisted scots

they just need not apply

and no chinamen, either,
and none of their oriental
cousins

no africans
no egyptians
and damn sure no syrians

no mexicans,
peruvians, Chileans,
panamanians,
pomeranians,
argentineans,
and canadians, too

and kansans, californians,
new yorkers, iowa
porkers, nevadans
or any of the rest

all of them
just need not apply,
all that riffraff
just need not apply
cause now we're
getting down to
the right kind of people

my kind of people

me

and, maybe,
you







From ancient Indian hymns we travel upstream in time to a modern Indian poet, Sudeep Sen.

Sen was born in New Delhi in 1964 and studied literature there and in the US. As an Inlake Scholar he completed an MS from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. His poetry collections include The Lunar Visitations, New York Times, and Dali's Twisted Hands, and the book the following two poems are taken from, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems. At the time this book was published ten years ago, he had another one in the works, Blue Nude, which presumably been published, along with an unknown number of other titles.

He is widely published and, as an invited speaker, has read his work around the world. During 1992/1993, he was the international poet-in-residence at The Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and, in 1995, a visiting scholar at Harvard University. He works as an editor in publishing and, was living in London and New Delhi at the time this book was published.

I bought the book at a used book store in San Antonio. It is signed by the poet with a dedication, written in 2000, to the book's original purchaser "Ray." My copy includes the original sales slip. None of that is particularly important, but, still, a little back story which I always enjoy.

Here are the two poems from the book.


Trossachs

   The highland
road rolls

   and meanders,
wrapping around

   the belly
of the Trossachs,

   like a belt
of tarmac ribbon.


(Scotland)


Fragmented Feathers And Transparent Bones

In the rowdy noise of an unknown cafe, you
        lost a bag with three books - three books you
treasured, bought at a familiar bookstall outside a concert hall,
where some new jazz continued improvising itself all
        night. All of a sudden unannounced Carnatic strains
        were heard, M S Subalakshmi on stage
                sung in formal scales, tones unlike
the chords you are familiar with, heard at a dinner last night.

When you hold a mirror to the sun,
        you get blinded not by its light, but
in the heat that scorches the pupils
and chokes all speech, stammer-still.
        If you hold a mirror to an arc-light, you get
        blinded by its very core, the overheated tungsten
                reflection that coils and recoils -
while other orbiting particles

swimming innocuously, refract, fracturing
        the white into colour, in darkness. Appearing
gradually, blossoming in this black, the colour of
a loved person's eyes sparkle, dreaming of
        Java, or some unmapped archipelago,
        searching blue and red and yellow
                fish. As the city dies, the night deepens, the
fusion fades, and the rhythm of the classical and the

blues slowly plays itself out - the concert
        finally ends - the people long departed, doors shut.
But in this empty hall - the stage
curtains will remain drawn, stretched
        out to the wings, as does the shaft of a lone spotlight,
        that too remains lit, unswitched - perhaps an oversight
                of the overseer. But in this light
appears another sight,

an unusual theater - a large superimposed image
        of a bird - many birds - covering the entire stage,
their stories softly unfolding in flighted metaphors -
fragmented feathers,
        beaks and bones -
        transparent skeleton, hollow fossil forms
                finely sketched, etched permanently,
written with quiet wisdom, in ancient Persian calligraphy.







To me, science and poetry are two sides of the same coin, each, at its heart, about mystery and investigation, understanding and explaining. As Muriel Rukeyser said, "I care very much about that meeting place of science and poetry."

That's what draws me to the weekly New York Times science section. I find lots of good ideas for poems there. This particular poem came from a story in the Times about two galaxies in the middle of a million year process of collision. It is also included in Seven Beats a Second.


meanwhile, in the Hydra constellation

a storm of stars
passes soundless through the void,
crossing unimaginable distances
to meet, to crash in a flash
of exploding suns and primordial fire
stretching across a billion years,
a furnace unlike any
since the first great eruption
that came from less than nothing
to blast a cosmos into being

and around these speeding suns,
orbiters like our own earth home,
and on some of them, creatures
like ourselves, product of an evolutionary
trail from muck to self-discovered glory,
inventions of their own histories, periods dark
and light, times of cruelty, death and genius flowering,
people like we are people, struggling through life,
seeking grace, forgiveness, the salvation of love,
seeking honorable life and an honorable end

that end comes to them now, across the void
in a storm of stars colliding, an end ablaze
with the light of creation deconstructing







From the anthology From Totems to Hip-Hop, Edited by Ishmael Reed, there is this poem by Josephine Miles.

Miles was born in 1911 in Chicago and grew up in Southern California. She began writing as a child and was first published, as a child, in St. Nicholas, a children's magazine. Her first book of poetry was Trial Balance, published in 1935, followed by nine other books, including Lines at Intersection, in 1939, Civil Poems in 1966, Coming to Terms in 1979 and Collected Poems 1930-1983.

She was a member of the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley from 1938 to 1978, for many years the only tenured woman in the English Department. Afer she retired as professor emeritus, The Berkeley Poetry Review dedicated a special issue to her and her work.

Josephine Miles died in 1985.


Doll

Though the willows bent down to shelter us where we played
House n the sandy acres, through our dolls,
Especially Lillian, weathered all the action,
I kept getting so much earlier home to rest
That medical consultation led to cast
From head to toe. It was a surprise for my parents
And so for me also, and I railed
Flat out in the back seat on the long trip home
In which three tires blew on our trusty Mitchell.
Home, in a slight roughhouse of my brothers,
It turned out Lillian had been knocked to the floor and broken
Across the face. Good, said my mother
In her John Deweyan constructive way,
Now you and Lillian can be mended together.
We made a special trip to the doll hospital
To pick her up. But, they can't fix her after all, my father
   said
You'll just have to tend her with her broken cheek.
I was very willing. We opened the box, and she lay
In shards mixed among tissue paper. Only her eyes
Set loose on a metal stick so they would open
And close, opened and closed, and I grew seasick.

A friend of the family sent me a kewpie doll.
Later Miss Babcox the sitter,
Afer many repetitious card games,
Said, We must talk about bad things.
Let me tell you
Some of the bad things I have known in my life.
She did not ask me mine. I could not have told her.
Among the bad things in my life, she said,
Have been many good people, good but without troubles;
Her various stories tended
To end with transmigrations of one sort of another,
Dishonest riches to honest poverty; kings and queens
To indians over an adequate space of time.
Take this cat comin g along here, she said,
A glossy black cat whom she fed her wages in salmon,
He is a wise one, about to become a person.
Come to think of it, possibly Lillian
Is about to become a cat.

She will different eyes then, I said,
Obviously. Slanted, and what is more,
Able to see in the dark.

(During her childhood, Josephine Miles became severely disabled by rheumatoid arthritis and spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.)







The more I write, the easier it has become for me to slip into my own natural style and rhythms. That means short lines, with stanza breaks more like paragraphing than tied to any specific form. Some readers don't like this, but to me this structure adds impetus to the poem as it trickles down the page. I liken it to being slightly off balance as you descent a flight of stairs, pushing you to the next step before quite ready for it, but never falling, finally reaching the bottom with a sense of completion and restored balance. It's an example of what Bukowski said about wanting to write the way people read. I think people more naturally read down the page than across it, and that by minimizing the time spent reading across I can be more in tune with what reders most naturally want to do.

Works for me.

Here's an example I wrote a week or so ago.


morning glory

creek side
remained unmowed
through the rainy months
so that wildflowers
could grow
to bloom
and spread seed
for next year

that rain
finished now,
the water flows
slow
and mossy green,
bordered
by levees
of brilliant gold,
tall,
up to my waist,
sunflowers
catching every glint
of the rising sun, pushing
their own yellow light
ahead
of the sun,
exploding
bright
as the day
begins

only a few days
left to us until
the blooms
fade and droop
and the seeds drop,
lie dormant
through the blaze
of summer
and winter ice,
leaving us
bereft
of this morning
glory
until the rising
of new spring days
return to renew us
again







Born in 1913, Muriel Rukeyser was a poet, literary translator and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism.

Though her first book of poetry, Poetry & the Ages, was treated harshly by the critics, she continued to write and publish and was eventually described as the greatest poet of her "exact generation."

Muriel Rukeyser died in 1980.

I found this poem in the anthology Contemporary American Poetry.


The Speed of Darkness


    I

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis
Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt
Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.

Resurrection    music. silence.    and surf.


    II

No longer speaking
Listening with the whole body
And with every drop of blood
Overtaken by silence

But this same silence is become speech
With the speed of darkness.


    III

Stillness during war, the lake.
The unmoving spruces.
Glints over the water.
Faces, voices.    You are far away.
A tree that trembles.

I am the tree that trembles and trembles.


    IV

After the lifting of the mist
after the lift of the heavy rains
and sky stands clear
and the cries of the city risen in day
I remember the buildings are space
walled, to let space be used for living
I mind this room is space
this drinking glass is space
whose boundary of glass
lets me give you drink and space to drink
your hand, my hand being space
containing skies and constellations
your ace
carries the reaches of air
I know I am space
my words are air.


    V

Between    between
the man : act    exact
woman : in curve    senses in their maze
frail orbits, green tries,    games of stars
shape of the body speaking its evidence


    VI

I look across the real
vulnerable    involved    and naked
devoted to the present of all I care for
the world of its history leading to this moment.


    VII

Life the announcer.
I assure you
There are many ways to have a child.
I bastard mother
promise you
there are many ways to be born.
They all come forth
in their own grace.


    VIII

Ends of the earth join tonight
with blazing stars upon their meeting

These sons,    these sons
fall burning into Asia


    IX

Time comes into it.
Say it.    Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.


    X

Lying
blazing beside me
you rear beautifully and up -
your thinking face -
erotic body reaching
in all its colors and lights -
your erotic face
colored and lit -
not colored body-and-face
but now entire,
colors    lights    the world thinking and reaching.


    XI

The river flows past the city.

Water goes down to tomorrow
making its children    I hear their unborn voices
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.


    XII

Big-boned man young and of my dream
Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat,
I am he am I?    Dreaming?
I am the bird am I?    I am the throat?

A bird with a curved beak
It could slit anything, the throat-bird.

Drawn up slowly.    The curved blades, not large.
Bird emerges    wet    being born
begins to sing.


    XIII

My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No.    of those hours,
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?







Muriel Rukeyser was a social activist almost all her life. She would have appreciated this poem by frequent "Here and Now" contributor Dan Cuddy.


The State of Yesterday's Nation

not
the owner of a House and Garden TV Mansion
more like the before than the after

not
the debonair hard-ab formally dressed couple
at galas with crystal chandeliers,
small talk pursed on lips like sips of champagne,
smiles as twitty as the hired trio's flute-player's
serendipity, contracted to wear tuxedo,
combed, cultivated five o'clock shadow,
accompanied by a black velvet-gowned
violinist, blonde, young, comparatively
good wholesome Juillard catalogue appearance,
and both accompanied by a tall Gaugin of a bass player,
who loves to rhythmically blump blump blump
to the titillating twitter and the saw of sweet
string sound reverberating in the glass halls
where the Charity Fund raiser picks pockets
and farts clandestinely in corners behind a potted palm

not
the A-type personalities
dressed in battleship gray boardroom business attire,
male or female, the same neutered appreciation
of humanity's depreciation, and the cold blue or brown
eyes that are opaque glass, vision obtained
through the willful fantasies in a very spare word head,
all speeches written by rote and read
interchangeably with a word here, a word there
altered, like the taking in or letting out of a suit,
a hem,ahem,hmm,umph,clearing the throat
before justifying another transfer of processes overseas,
another lopping off of debt-swilling mid-management
and those who stoke below

not
the near retirement age,winding down,nest-egg provided
silver-haired,carefree,waiting to visit children,
grandchildren,dogs,cats,canaries,and able to
lift fork in hand,bony,blue-veined hand, the slightest
morsel that will not pump up the rump,swell the legs,
roll grandma and grandpa to the emergency room,
red-faced,gasping,raspy voice,lungs nicotine-stained
like an oil spill, a Valdez valedictorian this senior
corporate slut and slug

not
the contented spiritual peace of 21st century America
working smarter, not harder for the upper crust,
the veneer of so well-to-do, oh
those with George W Bush eyebrows and Dick Cheney
leers,sneers, impeachable offenses ignored, like Putin's
pretty, petty putti politics---ah, the pickle-pepper
world of politics where what makes sense and to whom
is secreted behind big oak doors that children
better not mess with

not
a happy camper this couple with just a little
savings, a pay away from needing relief,
though always needing anti-acid inner tubes
to throw into litmus red water of turmoil,
of agitation beyond washing and Washington,
the rivet of high cholesterol-nerves sphinctering
like a throbbing hose of worry,
a slurry of instability, the economic chute
overburdened with debt and no other prospect
for a job, much less gold, this camper
with a patched tent in a rained-on field, the mice
floating like leaves past the huddled ones
inside that tent, they, the shivering humanity,
holding on to their three part pole joined together,
the father,the sun,the holy ghost,
but not a prayer for economic salvation
or better weather


Not
asking what you want
or truly,truly,truly need
but what other sacrifice can you make
for this country while the rich get fewer,richer
marry incestuously,set up kingdoms in many emirates
and islands of this world, the turquoise sea
shining as if in a travel brochure, the couples,
if a little aged, or seasoned as they would say,
very bronze in skin,very thin, but muscle-tone hard,
even at eighty, tummy-tucked, female breast-boosted,
male appendage enlarged and at the bar boasted upon,
among colleagues, among cognoscenti in the
weigh ins and outs of the world

not
anything but
a sparse bank-account watching it evaporate
couple
certainly curtailing whatever dreams life provided
like a pimp
on their way down Via Condotti to the Spanish Steps
where they could reminisce about the Roman empire
and a country before George W Bush, like Nero, fiddled,faddled,
fuddled a nation's wealth and health into that good
I-slambic internecine feud food fight and oil
always boiling oil on this global temperature
nuclear proliferating stable globe

not
anything but lousy prospects ahead
two old folks unemployed,unemployable
pensions petered out into utility costs
food,medicine, cable TV

not
a life







I spend a lot of time sitting someplace, just looking and listening. This poem presented itself to me as I walked across a supermarket parking lot.

The poem is included in Seven Beats a Second.


Piggly Wiggly promenade

walking across the parking lot
in high heels and black capri pants
that drew attention to hips
going a little broad and ass
on the way to droop
and a white cotton blouse
tucked tight into her pants,
small breasts,
nipples round and hard as marbles,
nodding with every step

she struts as she passes me
and smiles and you know
she's having the time of her life,
giving all the little bag boys
mid-afternoon hard-ons,
free in this parking lot
for at least a while,
free at least until the groceries
are safely loaded into her Volvo
and she's on her way to pick up
little Brittany at ballet







Michael Van Walleghen is a professor of English at the University of Illinois. He has won many awards and fellowships. His first book was The Wichita Poems. This poem is from his third collection, Blue Tango.


Cat's Paw

The president is speaking
but I'm a long way off -

as far north apparently
as Labrador or Finland

some desperate latitude
where everything is wet

or frozen solid. A wet
black road, black trees

glittering with ice...
then a dead-still lake

a cottage leaking smoke.
Inside, the Muse herself -

dazed by too much television
lost in anchoritic gloom...

But now she's found at last.
It's spring! A cat's paw

ripples far, far out
across the lake. Then

the curtains move
and birdlike shadows

flutter in the mirror
where we undress...

Nevertheless, downstairs
all but forgotten

on the flickering tube
our uncanny president

turns suddenly passionate.
He wants to bomb something -

Libya, or maybe Finland...
It's hard to tell. Static

and other voices interfere.
It all sounds vaguely

like a bad war movie -
or maybe a motorcycle gang

getting stoned down there
impatient for their turn.

In any case, the Muse
is not amused. She thinks

I ought to do something -
her poor heart beating

like some exquisite bird
the cat might catch

a hummingbird, a finch
a toy still fluttering.







When all else fails, memory comes in handy.


attending to my social calendar in 1969

I was a year
there,
in a compound
on the desert,
worked rotating shifts,
changing every three days,
swings,
mids,
days,
then off three days,
a wasted three days
since we couldn't leave
the compound
because the people
outside the walls
didn't like us
anymore than
we liked them,
so
it was safer just
to stay close
and find something
to do, filling the time
by choosing from among
the activities available...
sleeping,
bowling,
watching movies,
of getting drunk

bowling was hard
with only two lanes
and the movies were
all two
or three year old
stuff we had seen
before we left the states
and sleeping during
the day when on
swings or mids
was impossible,
so usually we just
got drunk,
which was nice
because it offered
many more choices
than bowling
or the movies, like
drunk at the NCO club,
drunk at the pool,
drunk out by the wall
or just a solitary
I-don't-need-no-one-else
drunk in the barracks

bored,
a long way from home,
everlasting horny,
we figured we had
plenty
of good reasons to get
drunk,
plus nobody
was shooting at us,
the best
reason
of all to stay drunk
and happy






Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, writer and art critic born in 1880 in Italy to a Polish mother. Credited as one of the among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word "surrealism" and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tiresias, in 1917.

He suffered severe head wounds during World War I and died two years later at the age of 38 during the Spanish flue pandemic.

These short poems are from his book Alcools, translated by his great admirer Donald Revell.


Twilight

Brushed by shadows of the dead
At the lawn's end of the day
Columbine undresses entirely naked
And covets her reflection in the pool

A twilight street-magician
Touts tricks to be performed
The untinted sky is constellated
With astral milk

Harlequin the milk-faced magician
Welcomes his audience
Bohemian sorcerers
Fairies and conjurers

Having unhooked a star
He tames it in his arms
His orchestra is a hanged man
Playing the foot-cymbals

A blind man rocks a baby
And doe and fawns go by
A midget observes sadly
The giantism of Harlequin


Annie

On the coast of Texas
Between Mobile and Galveston there is
a big garden filled with roses
There is also a mansion
It is one big rose

A woman walks there often
Alone in the garden
When I cross the lime-tree road
We are face to face

Because she is Mennoite
Her roses and her clothing have no buttons
My jacket is missing two buttons
The lady and I ae almost one religion.


Marizibill

On High Street in Cologne
She came and went all night
Whoring her tiny her pretty
Bored in streetlight
Drunk in cellars

Rescued in Shanghai
En route from Formosa
Apprenticed to poverty
For love of a pimp
Who stank of garlic

I've known all kinds of people
Unequal to their fates
Uncertain as the fallen leaves
Eyes like dampened fires
Hearts like gaping doors


The Wind by Night

Oh! the pine tops grind as they collide
The wind is moaning from the southern places
From the river nearby triumphal voices
Of pixies laugh into the gusts
Attis Attis Attis bare breasted sexy
It is you the pixies ridicule
Your trees are falling in the gothic wind
Your forest panics like a primitive army
Whose lances of pine trees tremble in retreat
And now and now extincted villages muse
like virgin girls or poets or old men
They will never respond no matter what happens
Not even the vultures pounce on their pigeons


Gypsy

The gypsy foretold
Our two lives thwarted by the nights
We told her goodbye
And Hopefulness sprang from holes in the ground

Heavy as a circus bear
Love danced when we commanded
The bluebird lost its feathers
Mendicant friars lost their prayers

A person know damn well he's damned
But hope of loving along the way
Compels us to consider hand in hand
The words the gypsy meant to say







India is well-represented this week with, first ancient India, then with modern India and now this poem from our good friend Ellen Achilles, greeting the morning in and writing from India.


Morning Poem

With waking, the ache, right beneath
my shoulders on either side of my spine
where wings should grow but don't.
I am an ordinary woman
wiping the dust of days, serving omelets,
cracking eggs. It goes like this:
Get up, go, I tell myself
but my body only wants to lie in bed.
Poems, let go into air, take flight
on breath. I melt butter in a pan.
If only I could dissolve into day
step over the balcony's thick rail
and float into sun, morning-angled
to reveal a spider's web, woven
gossamer threads that spill from my gown
and hush, the sound of beating air.







Wendy Rose was born in 1948 in Okland, California of Hope and 'Me-wuk ancestry. She taught American Indian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley as well as at California State University Fresno. Currently she is coordinator of American Indian Studies at Fresno City College. She is the author of ten volumes of poetry and has contributed to more than fifty anthologies.

This poem is from one of those, Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry.


Truganinny

      "Truganinny, the last of the Tasmanians,
      had seen the stuffed and mounted body of
      her husband and it was her dying wish that
      she be buried in the outback or at sea for
      she did not wish her body to be subjected to
      the same indignities. Upon her death she
      was nevertheless stuffed and mounted and
      put on display for over eighty years"
        Paul Coe, Australian Aborigine
        Activist, 1972


You will need
to come closer
for little is left
of this tongue
and what I am saying
is important.

I am the last one.

I whose nipples wept
white mist
and saw so many
daughters dead
their mouths empty and round
their breathing stopped
their eyes gone gray.

Take my hand
black into black
as yellow clay
is a slow melt
to grass gold
of earth
and I am melting
back to the dream.

do not leave me
for I would speak,
I would sing
one more song.

They will take me.
Already they come
even as I breathe
they are waiting
for me to finish
my dying.
We old ones
take such
a long time.

Please
take my body
to the source of night,
to the great black desert
where Dreaming was born.
Put me under the bulk
of a mountain or in
the distant sea;

put me where
they will not
find me.







Haven't we all be in the position some time of feeling like we've inadvertently slipped into someone else's world, an almost empty room where an husband and wife fight, or a couple get very romantic, or two friends talk about personal problems in the most graphic way, all as if we were either invisible or just not there.

For our last piece this week, we have this from our California, soon to be Hawaii, friend Alice Folkart with her report on just such an event.


Couldn't Hide the Bride

All I wanted was some chopped liver on rye, a little extra onion, please. I'd missed lunch. The place was nearly empty and so the two waitresses felt free to shout to each other across the diner. The tall one, maybe 45 is getting married day after tomorrow in the diner. Going to wear a blue dress. Now that her mother had finally found her own place, a place that would take the dogs, she and Clive could finally be alone, make a home for themselves, and none too soon since who knew when one of them might die. Her mother had been cheated twice by the grim reaper. First husband died at 43, and second, only seven years later, seven, the magic number, at 52. No more husbands for her. Black Labs and Pugs, much more reliable.

But, she said, I'll wear a blue dress and the minister isn't charging us, isnt that sweet. She's a customer. We weren't surprised about my father's death. He'd been hit in the nose with a baseball bat when he was a kid, 128 stitches, right across his face. Quit school at 14 'cause they called him scarface. Probably built up pressure in his head and that's why he died so early. Just like my youngest son, bike accident, head injury, they told us he'd never walk or talk or nothin', but here he is, and only limps a little, of course there's the tic, but most people don't even notice. And everybody's invited on Friday, too bad about Harry's stroke. It'll be at 6:30. Do you think it's appropriate for my big brother to give me away? Do you think he could get here from Montana before Friday? Is a blue dress OK?

Couldn't hide the bride
stories rolled from her mouth
like slightly flat music from a piano







Beginning this month, we'll have two poetry events at Casa Chiapas.

Friday wasn't working too well for our Poetry Table, so instead we're switching to the second Thursday of every month.

That's next week, by the way, so those of you in San Antonio should mark your calendar to join us next Thursday evening at 7 pm at Casa Chiapas, 926 South Alamo, for our round table reading and discussion of poetry.

The fourth Thursday of each month will feature a new poetry event, "Heartbeat of the Soul," sponsored by art impresario and poetry supporter Le Lowry and hosted by San Antonio poet Jon Fuller. These Thursday night events will included featured poets as well as open mic readings.

Having come together on this new schedule, Le Lowry,Jon Fuller, Casa Chiapas' Eddie Martinez and I think these two regular Thursday night poetry events will compliment each other, providing two different ways to enjoy local poetry, while increasing attendance at each.

If you're around San Antonio on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, come on downtown and join us at either or both events.

Until next week.

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Morning Fog Slips Back To Sea   Saturday, June 02, 2007

Welcome to "Here and Now" number II.6.1.

Interesting stuff this time, everything from an Egyptian Pharaoh to a German expressionist, plus me and a couple of our friends.

Enjoy.







It is probably not good form to start with the same poet two weeks in a row, but I found this fine book of Sandburg poems in a used bookstore next to our hotel in Vancouver. And what a used bookstore it was, books in shelves ceiling high as well as stacks along both sides of every aisle so that, wherever you walked in the store, it was a one-way passage.

Plus, of course, I really love the old prairie populist. He, and others like Norman Thomas, Harry Golden, Eric Hoffer and an old Sociology and Ethics professor of mine, August Grusendorf, provide the emotional base to my politics, however old fashioned and passe it currently is.

Anyway, here he is, Carl Sandburg from Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems published by Gramercy Books in 1992.

Poems Done On A
Late Night Car

I. Chickens

I am The Great White Way of the city:
When you ask what is my desire, I answer:
"Girls fresh as country wild flowers,
With young faces tired of the cows and barns,
Eager in their eyes as the dawn to find new mysteries,
Slender supple girls with shapely legs,
Lure in the arch of their little shoulders
And wisdom from the prairies to cry softly at the
     ashes of my mysteries."


II. Used Up

Lines based on certain regrets that come with
rumination upon the painted faces of women
on North Clark Street, Chicago

Roses,
Red roses,
Crushed
In the rain and wind
Like mouths of women
Beaten by the fists of
Men using them.
O little roses
And broken leaves
And petal wisps:
You that so flung your crimson
To the sun
Only yesterday.


III. Home

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in
    the darkness







Here's a series of character sketches from me that I hope Sandburg might have found some affection for.


at Starbucks near the mission, 6 am

Smiley

no teeth

bushy gray
mustache
hanging over
his upper
and lower lips

jumps and dances
when he chews
like a squirrel
flicking his tail
in the crook
of a tree


Slick

short pants
and hiking boots,
straight gray hair
in a page boy
cut,
combed back
to end square
at the nape
of his neck

smoothes
his hair
and smiles

a lot


Grover

black man
in a tan
work shirt

sits
in a corner
by himself

and talks
about his mother
and the other women
who screwed him
over

never stops


Steamboat

also saw him
yesterday,
screaming
at people
as he passed

screamed
at me too
as I ate at a sidewalk cafe,
so close
I could see his eyes burn
and the spittle
from his mouth

fucking people
eating, he yelled

fucking people
always
fucking eating


Margie Marie

short
mid-fifties
I'd say,
though
where she's at
it's hard to tell

friendly sort

bums cigarettes
and talks to everyone,
even me

also
has no teeth,
so hard to understand,
but she smiles
and it makes you
want to smile
back


Doc

long hair,
almost to his waist,
thin,
so white it shines
like snow
in morning sun

looks like a
prophet
or a professor
of latin
studies

asks
everyone
he sees
for a cigarette


Bossman

large
muscular
black man,
like Joe Frazier,
that kind of hulking
big

stays out
on the sidewalk

calls others out
one at a time
to confer,
huddles
with each
outside

serious talk
but nothing
seems
to change


Lyndon

Larouche man

sits on the corner
at a table
with pamphlets

extolling
the wisdom
and virtue
of his inspiration

comes in
for coffee
the returns to his table

standing
his post

gonna
make some changes,
he whispers

gonna
be somebody
real soon

kill
all the motherfuckers
been keeping me
down


Patsy

college student
by appearance

assistant
to Lyndon,
but more ambitious

he glowers
as he pushes pamphlets
at people

she follows them
half way down the street,
pleading for dialogue

pleading for attention

validation


Javier

thin man
in a tee-shirt

says he does
specialty work

painting
dry wall
hangs
suspended ceiling
saw a board
drive a nail
wash your car
cut your grass
fuck your sister

(hee, hee,
he giggles
just seeing
if you were paying
attention, he says,
smiling)

but I can

I can do it
all
he says

cheap







And here's a poet Sandburg would have stood with on any line.

Born in Switzerland to a family of diplomats in 1955, Yang Lian returned with his family to China when he was a year old and was raised in Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent to the countryside to be "reeducated." He worked as a grave digger, beginning to write poetry in his free time. Later he was cofounder of Jintian, a literary magazine associated with the Beijing Spring. His work was banned in 1983 during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. Since 1989, the year of the Democracy Movement and the Tianamen Square massacre his books have been banned on the mainland again.

Later he took on a New Zealand citizenship and has lived and worked in Australia, Germany and the United States. He currently lives in London.

Collections of his poetry in English include Yi, In Symmetry with Death, Masks nd Crocodile, Where the Sea Stands Still, Notes of a Blissful Ghost, and The Dead in Exile.


An Ancient Children's Tale
(From the Poem Cycle "Bell on the Frozen Lake")

How should I savor these bright memories,
their glowing gold, shining jade, their tender radiance like
silk that washed over me at birth?
All around me were industrious hands, flourishing peonies,
        and elegant upturned eaves.
Banners, inscriptions, and the names of nobility were everywhere,
and so many temple halls where bright bells sang into my ears.
Then my shadow slipped over the fields and mountains, rivers
        and springtime
as all around my ancestors' cottages I sowed
towns and villages like stars of jade and gemstones.
Flames from the fire painted my face red; plowshares and pots
clattered out their bright music and poetry
that wove into the sky during festivals.
How should I savor these bright memories?
When I was young I gazed down at the world,
watching purple grapes, like the night, drift in from the west
and spill over in a busy street. Every drop of juice became a star
set into the bronze mirror where my glowing face looked back.
My heart blossomed like the earth or the ocean at daybreak
as camel bells and sail painted like frescoes embarked
from where I was to faraway lands to clink the gold coin
        of the sun.

When I was born
I would laugh even at
the gazed and opulent palaces, at the bloody red
  walls, and at the people rapt in luxurious dreams
for centuries in their incense-filled chambers.
I sang my pure song to them with passion,
but never stopped to think
why pearls and beads of sweat drain to the same place,
these rich tombs filled with emptiness,
or why in a trembling evening
a village girl should wander down to the river,
her eyes so clear and bright with grief.

In the end, smoking powder and fire erupted in the courtyard;
between endless mountains and the plain, horse hooves
came out of the north, and there was murder and wailing
and whirling flags and banners encircling me like magic clouds,
like the patched clothes of refugees.
I saw the torrential Yellow River
by moonlight unfolding into a silver white elegy
keening for history and silence.
Where are the seven-leaved tree and new grass,
the river's song beneath a bridge
      of my dreams?
There is only the blood of an old man selling flowers
      clotting my soul,
only the burned houses, the rubble and ruins
gradually sinking into shifting sands
and turning into dreams, into a wasteland.

(Translated by Tony Barnstone and Newton Liu)







My memories are not nearly so dramatic.


chicken and dumplings

thinking of food
takes me
to thinking of
my mother
who cooked for us
every night of the week

and thinking of her
and her cooking
takes me
to thinking of her

chicken
and dumplings

now chicken
is chicken
but her dumplings...
so plump
so...so....so...
good, like biting
into a sweet cloud

chicken and dumplings

I'd pay a hundred dollars
for a plate
of her chicken and dumplings
right now

with fresh peaches
in a light syrup

that's the way
I like
it






Wendy Cope is an English poet born in 1945 who, in addition to winning many awards and publishing three books of poetry, wrote this funny little piece.


Two Cures for Love

1. Don't see him. Don't phone or write a letter.
2. The easy way: get to know him better







Our friend Jane Roken joins us again this month with more tanka.


string of tanka

golden jewels, white satin
bindweed garland
post to post
offering whitest fragrance
as landing strip
for tiger flies

***

going uptown
up city streets
bright shops shouting
up loud lights
important style
nada nada nada

***

lost the map
jumping spider
tracing crack-marks
on the wall
are you off-beam
just like me?

***

folk tale
going up the arctic line
I saw two black horses
one was eating snow
and frozen brushwood
the other was scared

***


early spring
black brushwood
covered by snow
transforming into
light lushwood
ready to go

***

the lake
last year's cygnets
slowly attaining grace
but still diffident
their queen mum
make them toe the line

***

the beach
copper sand
prismatic microcosm
dewdrops hailstorms
the metallic voice
of the turnstone

***

the brook
carpet of leaves
floating on the stream
some part company
others stick together
one joins a rock






I enjoy a nice, cage-rattling rant. Here's a good one by Deborah Garrison from her book A Working Girl Can't Win.


Fight Song

Sometimes you have to say it:
Fuck them all.

Yes fuck them all -
the artsy posers,
the office blowhards
and brown-nosers;

Fuck the type who gets the job done
and the type who stands on principle;
the down-to-earth and understated;
the overhyped and underrated;

Project director?
Get a bullshit detector

Client's mum?
Up your bum.

You can't be nice to everyone.

When your back is to the wall
When they won't return your call
When you're sick of saving face
When you're screwed in any case

Fuck the culture scanners, contest winners,
subtle thinkers and the hacks who offend them;
people who give catered dinners
and (saddest of sinners) the sheep who attend them -

which is to say fuck yourself
and the person you were: polite and mature,
a trooper for good. The beauty is
they'll soon forget you

and if they don't
they probably should.







I can rant, too. Grrrrr.....


up the banner, up the flag

where does it say
the proper position of a toilet seat
is down?

it's not in the bible
I've checked
chapter and verse

it's not
in the constitution,
the federalists papers

the magna carta,
or in the political philosophy
of any seer, sage, savant

or political science crackpot
I can find in any of the learned journals,
including wikipedia

how do things like this
become law then
when not precedentially established

men are taught from their earliest years
to check the target
before getting down to business

if men, so often deemed insufficient,
can do this, why not also those persons
of the femalien persuasion

who so readily complain
when this law of toilet seat alignment
is disregarded by those brutes

who dribble
when they piddle
from the evolutional advantageous upright position

up the banner, up the flag,
let the toilet seat rebellion
begin







Joining us on "Here and Now" for the first time is Jason Rubalcaba, a 30 year old poet from San Antonio. He is married and has one child. He has been writing poetry for 15 years and hopes to write for much, much longer.


But There is Something Beautiful

But there is something beautiful
in death, too.
Holding its fleshless head high,
cutting a swathe through the mob
that tries to understand
make sense
somehow discern
the movement of this shadow
through science and poetry -
subtle mimicry!

But we must always fail
our heart beat,
the ticking timepiece
in our quest for the absolute.
Our fears can only subside
in the face of this...
misunderstood riptide
that carries us against our will,
down below -
for our eyes must close
and our heat must cease
with the clutching hands sweet release
our threadbare spirits, absolved, for the moment, at least.







Here are several more of the travel jottings of Blaise Cendrars. Cendrars was the inspiration and the model for the travel notes I did during our recent vacation (see "We're Back"from two weeks ago). Cendrars' work is much better than mine (no surprise there) because he is both a better writer and, more important, a better and more acute observer. Perhaps a lesson there for those of us who sometimes seem to be writing with our ears and eyes closed.

Another of his secrets, I think, is he records observations straight, without obsessing on explanations.


The Captain Is a Terrific Guy

All the same the captain's a terrific guy
Yesterday he had the pool set up just for me
Today without a word and simply to please m
He swung the ship around
And skirted Fernando de Noronha so closely I could have almost picked
    a bouquet


Fernando de Noronha

From far off it looks like a sunken cathedral
Up close
It's an island with colors so intense that the green of the grass is
    completely gold


Grotto

There is a grotto that goes all the way through the island


Peak

There's a peak whose name no one cold tell me
It looks like the Matterhorn and it's the last pillar of Atlantis
What a feeling when I look through the spyglass and think I've
    discovered the traces of a ridge of Atlantis


Beach

In a bay
Behind a promontory
A beach with yellow sand and mother-of-pearl palm trees


Penal Colony

A white wall
High as a cemetery's
In gigantic letters it bears the inscription you can easily make out with
    the naked eye
"Caught Arms"


Civilization

There are some traces of farming
A few houses
A radio post two pylons and two Eiffel Towers under construction
An old Portuguese port
A calvary
With the spyglass I make out a naked man on the prison wall waving a
    white rag
The nights are absolutely beautiful with no moon with immense stars
    and the heat that will only get hotter
As the churning propellers turn the dark water more and more
    phosphorescent in our wake


Passengers

They're all there in their deck chairs
Or playing cards
Or having tea
Or being bored
There is however a little group of sporty types who play shuffleboard
Or deck tennis
And another little group that goes swimming in the pool
At night when everyone is asleep the empty chairs lined up on deck
    look like a collection of skeletons in a museum
Dried-up old women
Chameleons dandruff fingernails


Jangada

Three naked men on the open sea
In a jangada they hunt the sperm whale
Three white beams a triangular sail one outrigger


Dance

An American couple dances apache dances
The Argentinean girls gripe about the orchestra and heartily despise the
    young men on board
The Portuguese burst in applause when a Portuguese song is played
The French have their own group laugh loudly and make fun of
    everyone
Only the little maids want to dance in their pretty dresses
To the horror of some and the amusement of others I ask the black wet
    nurse to dance
The American couple dances apache dances again


Wake

The sea continues to be sea blue
The weather continues to be the most beautiful I have ever seen at sea
This crossing continues to be the calmest and most uneventful you
    could possibly imagine







I love the powerful storms that come this time of year.


spring storm

clouds
dark as the devil's black eyes
behind
as we race to clear skies
ahead








It's said that Sylvia Plath had "daddy issues" or, more likely, absent daddy issues since he died when she was eight years old.


Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Anymore, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breath or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time -
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters of beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you
Ach,du.

In the German tongue, in Polish Town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich.
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of Tyrol, the clean beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy-ancestress and my weird luck
and my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you.
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You -

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two -
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.







Here's a more introspective piece to go with Plath black vision. I did this last week.


same-o same-o

we are all
of the same stuff,
blood
and bile
and yearning
for selfness -
ambition,
accumulation of wealth
and acclaim,
scratching for a way
to love
and be loved,
all so that we can
be,
all so that we can
deny
that at the most basic
level
we are the same,
one could be
the other
but for the smallest
details,
details we cling to
like we once clung
to our mother's breast

those small details
that make us
the one
among the billions







Joyce Wakefield is a new friend of "Here and Now," appearing with us for the first time.

She lives in Southern California, an Oklahoma transplant. She is a poet, writer, and editor with Moondance - Celebrating Women's Creativity, with works in Loch Raven Review, Byline, Poems Niederngasse, and others. Her poem Sevenlings ... sometimes I feel was chosen by The Writer Magazineas best poem of 2006.



Squash

I planted too many seeds, just in case.
Now, the plants spread beyond
the carefully organized bed, almost wild
speckled leaves hiding the treasure
of creamy yellow zucchini, new variety
for bread and soup and neighbors.
I watch your growth, amazed,
how do you know to blossom
to bear the fruit, to shade them
from harsh sun and teach them water?
Soon now, I will ask of you this fruit.
This fruit that will become bread,
sweet, warm, walnuts wound
through shreds of zucchini, no icing
to hide the taste of sunlight, of water,
of your loving care, hiding the fruit
from predators, snails and beetles alike.
If you knew, would you be pleased
at your efforts and success
or would you let them die
being themselves and not bread.







Akhenaten was a Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, especially notable for attempting to compel worship of the Aten. It was the first known attempt at monotheism the world had seen. Suggested dates for Akhenaten's reign are from 1353 BC-1336 BC. His chief wife was Nefertiti, who was made famous by her exquisitely painted bust now on view in the Altes Museum of Berlin.

This worship poem is credited to him.


Hymn To The Sun

A glory,
  eternity in life,
          the Undeposed,

  beauty
  flashing
  powers,

Love,
  the powering,
          the Widening,
          light
          unraveling
          all faces followers of

      All the colors, beams of
          woven thread,
                  the Skin

          alight that
          warms itself
          with life.

      Place, man, cattle, creature-king,
          & tree of every image
                rise upon our

          Life-in-shining
          shining
          life,

      The Mother/Father
          sees the Seeing
                  rise upon our

          hearts beat
          dawn lights
          earth entire

      As you made. And as you
          pass we settle
                  equal to the Dead,

          linen wrapping
          head nostril
          plugged with

      Earth that waits
          return in Heaven
                  rises overturned

          the
          uplift
          palms upturned to

      Light your being is
          the living
                  Acts the

          Touch the voicing in
          all Land
          hears Man -

      Womansong en-
          throning
                  Truth

          gives
          heart the
          Food.

      This One, we give, to walk,
          purely to your
                  Will, all

          creatures
          dance you
          toward your coming every

      Day, you gave your
          Son, forever in your
                  Form he

          Acts
          in
          Beauty, saying:

      I am
          your son, my heart
                  knows you the

          strength
          the seat
          of powering

      Eternal is the Light
          you are the watchful
                  Maker

          solitary
          every
          life

      Sees light that breathes
          by light,
                  flowers

          Seeding
          Wilderness
          light stunned by

      Light before your
          Face,
                  the dancing

          creatures
          feathers
          up from nests a

      Wavering in wing
          goes round
                  around

      & praises
          living
                  Joy

          you
          Are.

(Translated by John Perlman)







Akhenaten wanted to start a new religion. My ambitions are somewhat less grand.


my to-do list

there
was a time
when grand ambition
woke me
in the morning

the force
that drove
all the labors of my day
and my darker dreams
at night

now
I wake
and wiggle my toes
and my charge
for the day is
complete








Diane Glancy, born in Missouri, of German, English and Cherokee parents, received her BA from the University of Missouri, an MA from Central State University in Oklahoma and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She teaches Native American literature and creative writing at Macalester college in St. Paul, Minnesota.

She has published four collections of poetry, One Age in a Dream, Offering, Iron Woman, and Long Dog's Winter Count, from which the following poem is taken. She also published a collection of short stories in 1990 titled Trigger Dance.

Invocation

You bend the road where light begins,
watcher of cock fights
& pearls on the ears of loud women.
You plow chaos
with your tractor
& pull from me the teeth of gladness.
You are the image of stars,
the whisper of wind on a country road.
Under our flooring
there's mud like lard in cake pans.
You, God, squatting in your tomato-
rows, would you look up?
There's a massacre going on,
we're fast turning the last corner we can turn.
We're calling out your name.
"E hok a yee." You Spirit,
in our harness
we believe.







This has been the best spring in my memory, almost over, but great while it lasted.


wet spring

wet spring
and we live
in a hundred
shades of
green
tree limbs
so leaf-heavy
they break
in the softest
breeze
wet spring and
pools of
red
yellow
blue
purple
fresh laundry
white
wildflowers
grow in fields
and pastures
and beside roads
large
and small
going to market
going to town
going nowhere
at all
wet spring now
brown
days of summer
for a moment
forgotten







Here's a little Rimbaud seduction.


The First Evening

- She had very few clothes on
And big indiscreet trees
Threw their leaves against the panes
Slyly, very close, very close.

Sitting in my big chair,
Half naked, she clasped her hands
Her small feet so delicate, so delicate,
Trembled with pleasure on the floor.

- The color of wax, I watched
A small nervous ray of light
Flutter in her smile
And on her breast - a fly on the rose bush.

- I kissed her delicate ankles.
Abruptly she laughed. It was soft
And it spread out in clear trills,
A lovely crystal laughter.

Her small feet under the petticoat
Escaped, "Please stop!"
- When the first boldness was permitted,
The laugh pretended to punish!

- Poor things trembling under my lips,
I softly kissed her eyes;
- She threw her sentimental head
Backward: "OH! that’s too much!...

"Sir, I have something to say to you..."
- What was left I put on her breast
In a kiss which made her laugh
With a kind laugh that was willing...

- She had very few clothes on
And big indiscreet trees
Threw their leaves against the panes
Slyly, very close, very close.







Was thinking kind of old the other day - wrote this.


surprise

the diminished
sight and hearing

the knees
crackling when I stand

the back
that keeps me awake most nights

the drooping skin
the wasting muscle

all of that I knew
was coming

but no one warned
of the moments

I would miss past days
to the point of aching







August Stramm, born in 1874, was a German poet and playwright who is considered one of the first of the expressionists.

After traveling to the United States several times in his youth, he settled in Berlin. In 1912 - 1913, he wrote two plays, Sancta Susanna (which was subsequently used as a libretto for an early opera by Hindemith) and Die Haidebraut. These were the first of many to appear before the war.

Stramm had served his mandatory year of duty in the German army and was a reservist with the rank of Captain when the war broke out in 1914. Called to duty, he served first in France, then at the Eastern Front where he rose to the rank of Battalion Commander.

He was killed in hand-to-hand combat in 1915.

This poem is from a collection of early German expressionist poems called Music while drowning


Rendez-Vous

The doorway catches with stripe ribbons
my stick raps
tap
the straddled kerbstone
giggling
frights
through darkness
trickteasing
hastily
my thoughts
stumble
into
warm trembling.
A dark kiss
steals shyly out of the door
flicker
the street lamp
lights
after
it
up the street.

(Translated by Patrick Bridgwater)







We have fought many wars in our history, including the one that killed the poet Stramm.

The most deadly of our wars, with a half million dead, was the Civil War, one we fought against ourselves. A couple of our wars were morally mandatory, at least one, while not necessary for our survival, produced results for us and for the world that made it worth the dying. The rest were mistakes, errors by leaders either led to war by lack of wisdom or pushed to war by public opinion they lacked the will and courage to disobey.

Our current war is unique among our other wars, first in the blatant lies, ignorant foolishness, and hubris that led up to its instigation and, second, the deadly incompetence of its execution.

Over 3,600 Americans have died in this war, as well as tens of thousands of Iraqis and in all those deaths I see no national interest of the United States of American, no pressing enemy laid low, no increased safety or security for our citizenry. Only pointless death by the thousands.

That's a hard thing to say near Memorial Day when we honor the sacrifices of those who have paid the ultimate price, but it must be said since the needless deaths of the sons and daughters of our country in Iraq are being used as justification for the future deaths of others.

It is an obscenity, that cannot be stopped now that it has begun. Another hard truth.

This is my poem for Memorial Day.


thinking of this memorial day as an island in a river of blood

what
can be done
about this man,
so stubborn
and delusional
the river of blood
he started
has become honey
to his tongue

and his bitter-end
followers,
so blinded
by fear
by resentment
that in the midst
of screams that
scorch
eyes and ears
they cannot see
they cannot hear

and what can be done
about us,
those of us
who see no succor
in the future,
death instead

unremitting

what can be done
about this flood of pain
past
and future

the short
answer:

nothing

the consequence
of some error
must play
to its own hellish end







Xue Tao was a well-respected Tang dynasty poet. She was born in 768 in Sichuan province where her father was a minor government official. She ended up a very successful courtesan, one of the few paths for women in Tang dynasty China that encouraged conversation and artistic talent. Later she put on the habit of a Daoist churchwoman and went to live in seclusion. More than one hundred of her poems survive, including this one.


Spring Grazing

1.

Flowers boom but we can't share them.
Flowers fall and we can't share our sadness.
If you need to find when I miss you most:
when the flowers bloom and when they fall.

2.

I pull a blade of grass and tie a heart-shaped knot
to send to the one who understands my music.
Spring sorrow is at the breaking point.
Again spring birds murmur sad songs.

3.

Wind, flowers, and the day is aging.
No one knows when we'll be together.
If I can't tie my heart to my man's,
it's useless to keep tying heart-shaped knots.

4.

Unbearable when flowers fill the branches,
when two people miss each other.
Tears streak my morning mirror like jade chopsticks.
Does the spring wind know that?






So how about a little limerick fun that doesn't mean anything at all.

Too bad none of them are dirty.


Dylan Thomas

The last time I slept with the Queen
She said, as I whistled "ich Dien"
   "It's royalty's night out,
   But please put the light out,
The Queen may be had, but not seen'


Wendy Cope

The fine English poet, John Donne,
Was wont to admonish the Sunne;
   "You busie old foole
   Lie still and keep coole,
For I am in bed having funne."


J. Walker

(On T.S..Eliot's "Prufrock")
An angst-ridden amorist, Fred,
Saw sartorial changes ahead.
   His mind kept on ringing
   With fishy girls singing.
Soft fruit also filled him with dread.


Richard Leighton Green

(Apropos Coleridge's "Kubla Khan")
When approached by a person from Porlock
It's best to take time by the forelock.
   Shout. "I'm not a home
   'Till I've finished this pome!"
And refuse to unfasten the door-lock.


A. Cinna

Did Ophelia ask Hamlet to bet?
Was Gertrude incestuously wed?
   Is there anything certain?
   By the fall of the curtain
Almost everyone's certainly dead.







After thinking about it for years and years, it finally came to me how the rules of our life are made.


division of labor

have
you noticed

when children
set out to play

little boys
pick their noses

while girls
make up the rules







We will close this week with a poem from Gary Blankenship.

I have contacted Gary often, requesting permission to use one of his poems, and he has always obliged. Lucky for me and for all "Here and Now" readers who m ight not have had opportunity to read him before.

This poem is from his book A River Transformed: Wang Wei's River Wang Poems as Inspirationand demonstrates once again his feel for the Chinese masters.


After Wang Wei's South Hill - Leaving the City

A fisherman waves,
his skiff lifted by the ferry's wake
and curls from a tramp steamer headed north
to deliver toys to the river's children

A black fish pod breaks the surface,
passengers crowd against the wet windows;
the city's last red radiance ahead.

I leave with too many questions.
Do the answers lie in firs near a gravel stream?
You seem certain, your smile without doubt,
except when you glance south, behind us.

Beneath the water, ghost nets, spotted shrimp,
shadows lost to a painter's palette.


Until next week.

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