Where Parallels Meet   Friday, September 26, 2008


III.9.4



Up this week -

From my library

Coleman Barks
Peter Reading
Arlitia Jones
Kabir
Victor Hernandez Cruz
Joan Salvat-Papasseit
James Hoggard
Nikki Giovanni
Arthur Sze
Frank Yerby
Duane Niatum

From friends of "Here and Now"

Teresa White
Michael Sottak
Jim Fowler
Walter Durk
Jerry Damm
Cliff Keller

and me.








My first poems this week are by Coleman Barks, from his book Gourd Seed published by Maypop Books of Athens, Georgia in 1993.

Barks was born in 1937 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Berkeley.

He taught literature at the University of Georgia for three decades and currently lives in Athens, Georgia, where he translates Rumi and composes poetry of his own.



Ornamental Decisions

Where to sit in the sun
is the only true question,
when not going in to teach,
along with how not to feel paranoid
they'll find out and fire me.

Under pear-trees full-white nearly hiding
the red and blue university
postal kiosk, I choose
this bench and this new-heat
on my face, instead of talking
the history of my fear
thus far. Petal-sky overall.

I know who planted these, my friend
in the Law School, Milner's
wife, June. June and Mr. Forsyth's
forsythia, they bolster my floral resolve
to write letters in the sun and become
a man resembling an Asian flower opening
with a curved knife in the center.


Or

We sit here trying to tell or sing
each other something truthful or tinged
with beauty or joy or some other empty,
full word that hasn't been ruined
by being overstamped, the die

blurred, before some fading thirst
we have or have had poisons us through
the water, or the very ground pulling through
good corn on the cob chomped on the back
stoop with sips of red wine, settles

enough bad micro-sediment somewhere,
the brain or the marrow, to make us
not any longer care, or recognize,
what in words or otherwise is
beautiful and/or true.








Here's a piece I did last week, part of my continuing poem-a-day regimen.



even in the fresh orange light of a rising sun

the north breeze
on this first-cold-front-
of-the-year-
morning
chills
me
as
i step out on the patio
to lay out rations
for the dogs

daylight
is about to edge
around
the corner of night
and across the creek
i see the traffic on
Callaghan,
the morning commuters
slowing for the dip
then speeding
up again
toward the traffic light
at the top of the hill

each of the dogs
gets her morning treat,
Peanut
grabbing hers from my hand
and rushing off to a corner
to eat before i take it back
while Reba
takes hers, drops it in the patio
until i play the game of taking it away
from her,
i'm gonna get it, i'm gonna get it,
i threaten as she pushes it
back and forth with her paws
taking it with her teeth
and throwing it
into the air,
finally lying down,
after i tell her i give up,
to take the biscuit between her front paws
and eat it,
top down

the game lasts
long enough for the sun
to turn the corner
and bring to light the town houses
on the opposite
hillside,
meaning it's time for me
to go back inside
and put on some clothes

this is not the kind of neighborhood
where views of naked neighbors
are welcome,
even in the fresh orange light
of a rising sun








My next poem is by Peter Reading from his book Marfan published by Bloodaxe Books in 2000.

The book is a series of untitled, seemly disconnected observations of the little town of Marfa in the desolate Big Bend area of Texas, a dead-end little town until about fifteen years ago when it began to develop (successfully) an identity as an arts community.

Reading, born in Liverpool in 1946, spent what he refers to as a year in exile in Marfa, creating, according to the book jacket, "a deeply unflattering but grimly affectionate portrait of the town" and what he sees as its artistic pretensions.

He is a prolific English poet known for poems described by The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry as "strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical."

Here are a few of Readings poems/notes about Marfa and the Big Bend.

A remedy for all that is not good:
Mezcal (also to celebrate good things).


The crumbling tomb of Senora Prieto
piously venerated with a posy
of plastic roses in a Bud Light empty.


On 90 East from Marfa through to Alpine
a section of dense brush, low oaks and thorns
harbor Wild Turkeys. A covey of 15
females flaps heavily against driving rain
over the Chevy, just clearing it by inches.
When I get home I'll fax this to you Johnston,
then drain a 6 of Michelob in their honor


Morning. Above this arid scrubland basin,
three dozen Sandhill Cranes, at about a thousand
feet, circle, bugle-croaking, south. Late fall.


Presidio County Courthouse: on the Green
a disgorged pellet of sylvilagus bones;
above, in a long-established Cottonwood,
the privilege of a Great Horned Owl at roost.


When Cabeza de Vaca crossed Big Bend
in 1535 these mortar-holes
in the Cretaceous limestone riverbank shelves,
cylindrical deep metates used for grinding
grain or mesquite beans, were already ancient.

It is not known what tribe, or if they lived
under these smoke-blacked sheer precipitous cliffs,
but that each time they pestled seed or legumes
their negative memorials deepened some.


Past Boulder Meadow the trail begins to switchback
up the South Wall. Beneath the peak it passes
between a stand of Bigtooth Maples. You drop
into Boot Canyon, residual Arcady,
after the heady crest of Pinnacles,
eroded stacks, and Pinyon, Juniper, Oak,
sheer steeps down near 8,000 feet below.
From Emory you see clear to Davis Mountains,
Marfa and Alpine and a hundred miles
into the smog of hapless Mexico


In Hicksville, real estate is snapped up - arties
architects, carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs,
"gallery owners," leather coat boutiquesters...


The indigenous can fuck off outa here








From Teresa White, the first of our friends of "Here and Now" this week, I have this new poem.

Teresa has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been published in numerous online and print journals. Her latest full-length collection of poems, Gardenias for a Beast received a favorable endorsement from Billy Collins.



Lemonade and Scotch

My girlfriend and I wore Dad's long white shirts
that skimmed the bottom of our short-shorts.
We were still CEO's in our own business selling
lemonade for three cents a cup. That we were
always in the red didn't matter much
as we sailed into junior high, giddy about boys
and what boys could do. Our mothers never met:
mine a fading chanteuse, hers a heavy-set woman
on her knees or in the kitchen.
All my mother ever made was "goulash."
We never knew what was in it and didn't care
as my friend and I fell into high school,
wearing padded bras to attract the Jims
and Bills. When no one asked me to the prom,
I stayed in my room for days,
stared into the mirror
thinking I'd never be fair enough to sit
in the back seat at a drive-in movie,
let some football star explore my body
like a cartographer drawing America
for the first time. By the time he might
have reached Florida, Mother discovered scotch,
invited policemen to our home.
I might have taken the back way out
but the door was gone
and she was howling from the front room.








Arlitia Jones, a butcher's daughter, is a poet and playwright from Anchorage, Alaska. Her award-winning book of poems, The Bandsaw Riots, was published by Bear Star Press in 2001, and her plays have been produced in Anchorage, New York City, and the United Kingdom.

This next poem is from Bandsaw Riots.



January

Morning is a black wing flaring
at a window feathered with ice
through which there's nothing
to be seen but Anchorage
hunkered under halogen lamps.
Industry stops. Too cold
even to work inside
at Wholesale Tendermeats where
the butchers move like slow bears
dazed in the chill of the cutting room,
white luggers stretched over
bulk of winter coats and longjohns.
At break the coffee in their cups
turns cold before they drink it.
They pass sections of newspaper -
a well-worn currency between them.
I see they're selling health insurance
for pets now, says the bookkeeper
behind the counter, who, at forty-eight
and uninsured, could finally pay
cash for her first mammogram.
And the butcher scrabbing
his fingers in the candy dish
set out for paying customers swears
These fucking people drive me nuts,
and tells about the border collie
he had when he was a kid. Smacked
by a car, not bad enough to kill it.
I had to hide him under our porch
or my dad would've shot him.
We never heard of a veterinarian.
Says his father worked swing
at the railroad, coupling, un-
coupling the cars. In his house
nothing went to the animals.
Hardly anything to the kids.
In the office black and white
floor tiles tell the lie: wrong and right
remain distinct, one for the other.
It's the cold platform they stand on
every day. Their break
stretches to half hour and still
they're reluctant to hit it.
With four hours and twenty-six
minutes of light, dark rules
the beginning of every year
and appetite sets the price
for red meat. Out of Nebraska
beef tenders run twelve bucks a pound
when you can get them. For months
Americans have been stockpiling
New Yorks and Tenderloins
to prepare for the barrenness
of a new century. They pay dearly
to avoid hunger, to avoid chicken.
One of the butchers worries
about pipes on the outside wall
of his house. In weather like this
something always bursts. Every-
thing shuts down. In her reflection
in the window glass the meat-
wrapper watches herself trying
to breath warmth into her hands.
You never think it'll come to this.
The kid who once believed
she would fly,vowed
to throw herself to the wind,
is hunched in a chair, conserving
body heat, cold and grouchy
at the thought of getting up.








Now, another one of my poem-a-days from last week.



come, Lord Jesus, be our guest

we said a prayer
every night
before dinner
when i was a kid,
just dinner,
breakfast and lunch
were apparently not qualified
for Jesus' blessing

when we stopped
and why
i don't remember

a strict German morality
ordered the family -
one did not lie
one did not curse
children
honored and obeyed
their parents
and wives
honored and obeyed
their husband,
one did not wear
loafer shoes
because loafer shoes
implied
someone
was loafing
and one must always
work hard
and never surrender
to laziness and loafing
around
and, as i became
a teen,
one must not
allow his hair to form
a ducktail
because ducktails
were the preferred style
of the queers and drug addicts
and petty thieves
and pachucos
one saw in the courthouse
while doing one's duty
as a juryman.

and religion
like all these rules of morality
was mostly rooted in the basics -
there is a God
and He keeps track of what you've done
and not done
and if He doesn't like what you've done,
He'll send you to hell -
all else was details, which,
if you stuck with the essentials,
wouldn't matter
much
just your basic
conservative Lutheran dogma
and rules of proper
worship,
no shouting
no dancing in the aisles
no holy rolling
no testifying from the floor
no fancy singing, just
your basic hymns
sung slow
and not too loud,
and no amens while the preacher
is doing his preaching,
amening at the end
is his job
and not something
for people to do willy-nilly -
God likes decorum,
you know,
so that's what we need
to give Him

and as for the prayers
before dinner
it could be everybody
just got tired
of fooling with it -
plus,that kind of stuff
was for the kids
anyway
and not for grown-ups
who had a hard day
and wanted
to get to eating








The next piece is from Kabir - Ecstatic Poems, versions by Robert Bly. It's a new book published by Beacon Press.

The word "versions" is an important qualification. Bly has been taking some heat for calling himself translator of other poets whose work is in languages he does not speak or read. What he does is take the work of other translators and rewrite the translated poems in his own poetic voice. So it is important that in this book he claims, not translations, but his version of the poems.

That doesn't seem to me to be a problem, as long as the practice is labeled correctly. I note though that I heard Bly read a couple of poems from this book on NPR and I'm almost certain he was identified by the NPR host as the poems' translator.

Oh well, being naught but a small timer, it is not for me to opine on matters relating to poets in the big time.

Whatever the heck is going on the product in the end are some very nice poems. I just don't know for sure who to credit.



There's a moon in my body, but I can't see it!
A moon and a sun.
A drum never touched by hands, beating, and I can't
    hear it!


As long as a human beings worries about when he will
    die, and what he has that is his,
all of his works are zero.
When affection for the I-creature and what it owns is
    dead,
then the work of the Teacher is over.

The purpose of labor is to learn;
when you know it, the labor is over.
the apple blossom exists to create fruit; when that
    comes, the petals fall.

The musk is inside the deer, but the deer does not
    look for it:
it wanders around looking for grass.

****

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine
    rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding
    around your neck, nor in eating nothing but
    vegetables.
When you really look for me, you will see me
    instantly -
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.








Michael Sottak, a good friend of "Here and Now," is a natural storyteller, in his poems and even in his introduction. Here's what he sent when I ask for a short bio I could use to introduce him to you.

"We'd been to Iraq, Kuwait...my brother shows up on my sister's doorstep after hurricane Ivan destroyed Pensacola....we are both broke from fixing up the homes of people we loved and he says "Dude, I'm fucken broke, let's go jump a ship in the Gulf of Mexico"...

"Alright, let me pack my bag." We were in Aransas, Texas by three a.m. the next morning, swatting mosquitos and drinking beer. He points down the dock, gravel and mud puddles...."This is the Oil Fields."

I start laughing, because all I can see is a fat engineer and a broken down pick up truck.

"Alright asshole! Did I ever tell you that I never loved you?"

How great is that.

Here are three more of his stories.



Freshwater Locks

the raccoons have straggled back
after Hurricane Rita, don't really know
how they survived that onslaught
nothing did for twelve miles inland
houses businesses shrimp boats mud bug farms
not a goddamn thing, even the oil fields
and the ditch itself were disrupted
but an apple at midnight
the crisp bite of a buck knife into red skin
the squelching at once thirst and surfeit
came running sideways under a crescent moon
and halogen wash industry on the edge
of a burning bayou wild fire from oil squeeze

unwhispered sheen on water

the whores twenty miles away
in Abbeyville fein chastity
the border is the double pay
of give and spill

the coons, the wise men of the boats,
grant passage



                        Gulf Currents

                         ....to the port of indecision
                         I return... (Jimmy Buffet)

                        I left my Irish friends
                        at the airport bar in Dubai
                        after a handful of stouts
                        and a goodbye to the war

                        Heathrow was a welcome door home
                        I had the barmaid giggling
                        and she slipped me a few...hell,
                        the Persian Gulf seemed a lifetime away
                        and I swore, once again, I'd never go back

                        In Philly they watched the weather
                        "Florida's about to get socked!"
                        I just laughed and bought another round

                        "You're flying right into the eye!"
                        the bartender said in Atlanta

                        ""I don't care, my man,
                        it's just good to be home!"

                        I was on the last flight in
                        before they closed the Melbourne Airport

                        Everyone I knew
                        had evacuated

                        Welcome home

                        I grab the last cab running
                        to the Hilton across the street
                        before Hurricane Frances hit

                        Call my daughters
                        two hours to the south
                        tell them I'll be late...

                        they call in hysterics
                        at three a.m., the front doors
                        had blown out of their house
                        and the wind roared

                        the line went dead...


In the rearview mirror...

the sun explodes
into magenta, pink and purple,
under a cerulean sky
as the pines whirl past
lining a swath of asphalt
to nowheres and tomorrows

where there will never be
a real Christmas again
and the marketing jingle-jangling
will begin on the first of January
...for NEXT Christmas...

they take five of those magic
lottery balls out of the popping pot
every holiday season, numbers between
one and thirty-one, the birthday numbers,
so nobody will ever win, just to jack-up sales.
And the religious are murdering pedestrians
in Mall parking lots, swearing they never saw
the muthafucka, in their race to get a Giggling
Elmo. Meanwhile, Disney has offered a discount
to all Florida residents for a Holiday pass
because they expect a drop in sales from Europe
and need more money for the Board of Directors
going to Bali on their New Years Conference
so they don't have to pay outta pocket for Thai
and Phillipina whores...HOWEVER...there is
some consternation over the rising price of fuel -
serious whispers are circulating in boardrooms
around the US as to how to cover THIS expense.
A few phone calls to Texas and it's all settled.

contrails wisp from New Orleans,
Pensacola, Mobile: an orange shock of sky...
then a champagne slipper of drunken moon,
in the rearview mirror








Victor Hernandez Cruz was born in 1949 in the small mountain town of Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico. He moved to the United States in 1954 with his family and attended high school in New York.

Cruz began writing at the age of fifteen and published his first chapbook Papo Got His Gun in 1966, followed by his first full-length collection of poetry, Snaps, in 1969 when he was twenty.

In the 1970s, Cruz lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he emerged as a distinctive voice in the Nuyorican school of poets.

He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: The Mountain in the Sea in 2006. My poem this week is from one of his earlier books, Red Beans published by Coffee House Press in 1991.

Cruz is a cofounder of both the East Harlem Gut Theatre in New York and the Before Columbus Foundation and a former editor of Umbra Magazine. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and San Diego, San Francisco State College, and the University of Michigan.



Messages from Across the Street
on Tobacco and Water Wires

The ocean turned red
And the land turned blue
Your face became a sensation
Your features were eaten by the
ground
Your tears reentered the breasts
of the mothers of singers
the fado
The bolero
El canto hondo
The sadness
the lament
The nostalgia
The separation

The rumbling of your heart
The dancing of your feet
Will circulate within the pockets
of the wind
Your hate will make a shadow
That covers the flowers in chill

You will not be forgotten
Plant your seed well
It is the harvest you will pick

It will be beautiful
You will have no mouth to keep shut
Starring will turn into cha-cha-cha
The craters of the moon will be
full of guayaba juice

We speak her the word which is spirit
Those on the other side tell me they speak
in matter

Out of pure air comes objects
Vegetable gases minerals can flow
In combination
and you can make a hammock
Between Uranus and Mars
Where a puff of love can swing

The watches and clocks go backwards
It is 13 o'clock out there
Your pain becomes currency
To buy the harmony of Celina

The ocean turns red
The boats are made of fire
Allan Kardec is the
Captain
Of one of them

His passengers come for water
on the shore
They marvel at the blue sand they
Will never step on
From your prayers they make
a picture of your face
So with confidence give it to
the worms
Leave your smile on endless loan
In the sensation land you are
going to you can kiss without lips
The history of your life
will be in the fingertips of the drummers
Nothing was wasted
Even the blank moments when we are
Morons
Drunks help us get home
the tears are the milk of the drummers
also
They sing and play
Your laughter
Your joy
Your dancing
The nostalgia
The separation








Dogs and cats and squirrels and uppity birds that crap on my car, there's always some kind of animal mayhem around here. Here's the latest on the squirrel front, written last week.



the squirrel ate my homework


she comes slowly
quietly
stealth
in a fur coat
jumps
to the flower pot
on the edge of the patio
flicks her tail
flick
flick
flick
wildly
up down
left right
and all points
of the compass
between

then stops

tail
so wildly thrashing
held high and still
in mid-flick

she as seen me
standing
inside
watching her
through the french doors

she waits

judges the threat level
decides to wait me out

frozen
together
we stare at each other
little black eyes
to my green eyes
magnified
by my glasses

eventually i give up
turn back
to my chores

returning
a few minutes later
i see
she has made it
to the bowl of dog food
by the door
watch her again
as she grabs one of the
dry nuggets
and scurries back to the
flowerpot

meanwhile
feigning sleep
Peanut, The Greedy,
has been watching
the dance
with one eye open

now
enough is enough
and she jumps off her chair
but the squirrel-sense of danger
is intact
and she is off the patio
and up a tree
before Peanut can get
even close

from the tree
she swishes her tail
and calls to the dog
hack hack hack hack
it sounds like

treetop
arboreal laughter
of the fast
mocking the not fast
enough

Peanut returns
to his chair
and sleeps again

one eye open
still








My next poem is from the book Modern Catalan Poetry: An Anthology published by New Rivers Press in 1979. The poems in the book were selected and translated from the Catalan by David H. Rosenthal.

In addition to the poems in the book, there are also numerous pen and ink drawings/illustrations by artist of Catalan, including several by Pablo Picasso.

The poet I chose to feature is the first poet in the book, Joan Salvat-Papasseit.

Papasseit, born in 1894, was one of the few Catala poets with a working class background. His father, a steamship stoker, died when Papasseit was seven years old, causing him to spend most of his childhood in a charity home.

In 1914 he began publishing revolutionary political essays in Castilian-language magazines. In 1917 he switched his writing language to Catalan and founded a political-cultural journal called An Enemy of the People: Cultural Subversion Sheet. The first of his six volumes of poetry appeared in 1919. A year later he developed tuberculosis and died in 1924.



La Femme Aux Oranges

               (Reflex No. 2)

The metro's song at the old Cite, which bathes its belly
in the Seine, oozes through all the roofs and says:

          - Today I'm perfumed
          with a printed grease.
          I wear a blue bracelet,
          another of scarlet
          and my hips quite naked

          My sandals bright with diamonds.

          And so my beloved
          comes unspeakable sought-after
          and descends to Rennes
          leaving her girdle at Saint-Michel
          and lies down in my bath of purple.

          Bath of the NORTH-SOUTH line!

The song ended when la femme aux oranges, going towards
Chateau d'Eau, opened her blouse and showed her nipples
               which were like smoking oil-lamps



                    Paris, March 12 1920








Here's a piece by our friend Jim Fowler.

Jim lives in Massachusetts, has eight grand kids and wants to retire, write poetry, garden, play tennis, cook and write some more poetry.




Beelzebub's Journey

In the Midwestern town of West Fargo,
the winter winds shook a dark cargo,
Beelzebub and his red wagon.
It was headed East with the Devil's beast,
a green komodo dragon.

It wasn't the only strange thing
the Devil did bring
on this trip to a far-away coven.
A medusa so big, it's arms wrapped the rig.
It was the dark king's terrible omen.

The coven cheered and clapped,
for the dragon had napped,
after eating the medusa from Hades.
And didn't bite, with all of his might,

the coven's tender Goth ladies.








James Hoggard is a poet, translator, essayist and novelist. The author of twelve books, he has published two collections of his translations of poems by Oscar Hahn: The Art of Dying and Love Breaks. His most recent books are Alone Against The Sea: Poems From Cuba By Raul Mesa and the novel Trotter Ross. He is the McMurtry Distinguished Professor of English Chair at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.

The next poem is from his book Breaking An Indelicate Statue published by Latitudes Press in 1986.



Song of Rebecca Calcutta

          R.C.
          b.1871-d.1908
          We did not know her.
          R.I.P.

My country is a myth and a swamp.
Men are paddling their canoes tonight
in the moonlight dance of lilypad bulbs
sleeping over quicksand.

I love these men rowing in my swamp,
these handsome shadows of he will-o-
the-wisp, eternal like my candles
and vague, vague like my heart.

My country's grown rich with water and plants
whose roots have never pierced rock.
It thrives, heavy with many years decay,
is wild with shivering fish.

but many feet down I know there are rocks
where the bones of snakes have lain,
where the caverns of wind are too dark
to see the rocks that have killed.

The murder of light makes dusk of day.
Songs of the swamp are too old
to be sung by the trees' agony,
and the myth that devours it is mine.

My land is a raft nailed by birdbeaks
and lashed with petrified ferns, and I
am large like the cypress trees, humble
like the sun that has gone.

And I am large like the cypress trees
and humble like the sun that has gone.
I am bitter like the taste of snakeskin
and long like the years

pulled toward the light by the power of doom.








We had a couple of beautiful days in a row. Maybe there's more coming with October around the corner. This poem came from one particular day, walking the dog in the morning.



we pay or dues

we pay our dues
here in South Texas
months
of misery,
heat and humidity
that brings each day down
the minute you step out
your front door

all those months
for a morning like this,
dry
cool
fresh
moon still high
in a soft blue sky

it is a
new life morning
promising
a rejuvenation day
a new-hope day
a make-plans-for-
tomorrow
day

we pay our dues here

making these rare
payoff
mornings
even sweeter








Nikki Giovanni was born in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee. She grew up in Lincoln Heights, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, and in 1960 began her studies at Fisk University in Nashville. She graduated in 1967 with honors, receiving a B.A. in history. Afterwards she went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. In 1969 Giovanni began teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University.

Giovanni has been teaching writing and literature at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA since 1987, and is a Distinguished Professor of English. Giovanni taught the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho in a poetry class. She described him as downright "mean" and, when she approached the department chair to have Cho taken out of her class, said she was willing to resign rather than continue teaching him.

Giovanni returned to her alma mater as a distinguished visiting professor at Fisk University, as well as teaching a writers workshop for about thirty students one day a week, while maintaining her position at Virginia Tech.

This next poem is from her book My House, published by William Morrow & Company in 1972.



Mothers

the last time i was home
to see my mother we kissed
exchanged pleasantries
and unpleasantries pulled a warm
comforting silence around
us and read separate books

i remember the first time
i consciously saw her
we were living in a three room
apartment on burns avenue

mommy always sat in the dark
i don't know how i knew that but she did

that night i stumbled into the kitchen
maybe because i've always been
a night person or perhaps because i had wet
the bed
she was sitting on a chair
the room was bathed in moonlight diffused through
those thousands of panes landlords who rented
to people with children were prone to put in windows

she may have been smoking but maybe not
her hair was three-quarters her height
which made me a strong believer in the samson myth
and very black

i'm sure i just hung there by the door
i remember thinking: what a beautiful lady

she was very deliberately waiting
perhaps for my father to come home
from his night job or maybe for a dream
that had promised to come by
"come here" she said "i'll teach you
a poem: i see the moon
        the moon sees me
        god bless the moon
        and god bless me."
i taught it to my son
who recited it for her
just to say we must learn
to bear the pleasures
as we have borne the pain

        [10 mar 72]








Here are two poems from our friend, Walter Durk. Walter was born in New York City and has lived in numerous other places in the United States as well as in Asia.



Broken people

I know them from an old photograph -
my father sits on a stump in knickers
a stern father by his side,
a mother in black and white
scattering chicken feed.

I remember my father drove us to the island
where he is buried, and parked
in front of an institution
that reminded me of a prison.
A woman in white brought Ann to us.

We saw her in a hallway,
a woman with a placid face.
She was somewhere, nowhere.
He spoke to his mother in calm tones,
she looked beyond
we never met.

Later she died. And later
he passed away but not
without consternation.


Love and absence


Years have passed,
now memories remain.
A smell of cherry tobacco
in the air,
swirls of smoke
rising from your pipe,
The smile on your face
as you opened my gift
one night.



Sheets snapped
as they catched the wind,
clothes dried on the line
like small sculptures
in the sun.



The dog at my feet
half-asleep,
finished his bowl of food.
the cat
nursed her litter in the shed,
to avoid prying eyes.



But experiences
have passed
and people.
Vanished into breezes
slapping sheets.








Arthur Sze has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts for more than a decade.

Born in New York City in 1950, Sze is a second-generation Chinese-American. He is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including The Red Shifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 published by Copper Canyon Press in 1998, and from which the poem below was taken.

His poems have also appeared in numerous magazines and he has won numerous awards from the Lannan Foundation and, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others.



Tsankawi

The men hiked on a loop trail
passed the humpbacked flute player and
a creation spiral petroglyph,
then up a ladder to the top of the mesa
and met the women there.

A flock of wild geese wheeled
in shifting formation over the mesa,
then flew south climbing higher and higher
and disappearing in clear sunlight.
The ceremony was simple: a blessing
of rings by "water which knows no
boundaries," and then a sprinkling of baskets
with blue cornmeal.

I write this a week later
and think of Marie, who, at San Ildefonso,
opened the door of her house to us.
And were deeply moved.
I hear these lines from the wedding:
"In our country, wind blows, willows live,
you live, I live, we live."








I don't usually eat breakfast and have to be careful when I do since, when I do, I almost always eat too much and feel bad all morning. I have be especially have be careful in the autumn because there's just something about a cool fall morning that turns on my breakfast cravings.



another beautiful morning

another beautiful
morning
and i'm thinking
about breakfast
on the porch at
Casa
Chiapas

chiliquiles
huevos mejicana
or
maybe just a
pancake
with some
super
crispy
bacon

i don't know -
there's just something
about a morning like this
that makes me
hungry
for fresh air
and anything derived
from
chicken embryos
and
assorted
pig parts








Wisdom should be shared, so here are a few gems passed on to me by web-miner, as well as friend and personal guru, Jerry Damm of Midland,Texas



Birds of a feather flock together and crap on your car.

A penny saved is a government oversight.

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right time, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat have gotten to be really good friends.

The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.

He who hesitates is probably right.

Did you ever notice: The Roman Numerals for forty (40) are "XL."

If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.

If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.

The sole purpose of a child's middle name is so he can tell when he's really in trouble.

There's always a lot to be thankful for if you take time to look for it. For example I am sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don't hurt .

Did you ever notice: When you put the 2 words "The" and "IRS" together it spells "Theirs."

Aging: Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.

The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know why I look this way. I've traveled a long way and some of the roads weren't paved.

When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of Algebra.

You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks.

One of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Then you forget to pull up your zipper. It's worse when you forget to pull it down.

Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today, it's called golf.








When I was thirteen years old or so, I read every book of historical fiction by Frank Yerby I could find. He was one of the popular writers of the 1950s. In all, he wrote 33 novels and, in 1946, became the first African-American to published a best seller. The novel was Foxes of Harrow which ultimately also became a 1947 Oscar-nominated film starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O'Hara.

Yerby was bon in 1916 in Augusta, Georgia but, beginning in the 1950s, made his home in Spain. He died in Madrid in 1991.

I took this poem by Yerby from American Negro Poetry first published in 1963, revised in 1973 to include new writers, then reissued by Hill and Wang in 1996.



Calm After Storm

Deep in my soul there roared the crashing thunder,
And unseen rain slashed furrows in my face;
The lightning's flame with tendrils fine as lace,
Etched intricate designs, too keen for wonder
Upon my dull-eyed soul. And that rich plunder
Of stolen joys, snatched in the little space,
Between the dawn and dark, had caught the pace,
This rip-tide of the heart, and was drawn under.

But this slow calm, this torpid lack of caring,
Creeping along, a drugged dream of content,
Kills no less surely than the storm's duress;
Better the winds, like thin whip-lashes sparing
No proud young heart until their force is spent,
Than this vague peace, akin to nothingness.








Here are two poems by "Here and Now" friend Cliff Keller. Cliff is a musician /songwriter and poet. He lives in California.



Lorelei in Her Garden

Her songs are soft now
intended only for the coriander and sage
no sailors can hear, though they pass within stone's throw
on barges and pleasure boats

Two worlds that once collided
now slip past each other like cats on a pier
peaceful and circumspect, seemingly unaware
the river flows, the past is out at sea

She leans forward to inspect a leaf, turning it
over in her gentle hands to crush an aphid
thinks of her time in America painting portraits
of submerged rocks in the moments before impact

Calm blue reflects the green and brown
she lifts her wrist to brush back her damp shorn hair
looks downstream where a song had run its course
"You hold a heart there in your hands, you probably don't know..."



Cut and Dried

Flowers from last month's harvest
hang upside down from a rusted hook.
Scaly petals blow into corners,
settle and decay. No more
swaying lightly as the breeze gathers
or soaking feet in supple water.


Brittleness and faded hues now claim
their own stake on beauty.

I'm unconvinced








Now, here's a piece by Duane Niatum, from Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry published by Harper Collins in 1988. In addition to contributing his own work, Niatum edited the anthology.

A poet, author, editor, and playwright, Niatum was born in Seattle under the name McGinniss. After his parent's divorce, his Klallam grandfather became his surrogate father. After serving in the Navy, he attended the University of Washington where he received his B.A. in 1970, then his M.A. in 1972 at Johns Hopkins University. His career includes time as an instructor at Johns Hopkins University, editor of the Native American Authors Program, Harper & Row Publishers, and various other teaching jobs and librarian positions. He earned his Ph.D. in 1997 at the University of Michigan.



Drawings of the Song Animals

I

Treefrog winks without springing
from its elderberry hideway.
Before the day is buried in dusk
I will trust the crumbling earth.

II

Foghorns, the bleached absence
of the Cascade and Olympic mountains.
The bay sleeps in a shell of haze.
Anchorless is the night,
the blue-winged teal dredges for the moon.

III

Thistle plumed,
a raccoon pillages my garbage.
When did we plug its nose with concrete?
Whose eyes lie embedded in chemicals.

IV

Dams abridge the Colubia Basin.
On the rim of a rotting barrel,
a crow. The imperishable remains
of a cedar man's salmon trap.

V

Deer crossing the freeway -
don't graze near us, don't trust our signs.
We hold your ears in our teeth,
your hoofs on our dashboards.

VI

Shells, gravel musings from the deep,
dwellings from the labyrinth of worms.
Crabs crawl sideways into another layer of dark.

VII

Bumblebee,
a husk of winter and the wind.
I will dance in your field
if the void is in bloom.

VIII

A lizard appears, startled by my basket
of blackberries. In the white
of the afternoon we are lost to the stream.
Forty years to unmask the soul!








I finish off the week with another little piece of breakfast musing.



breakfast of champions

chorizo
from H & H Meats
in Mercedes
scrambled
with
two eggs from HEB
laid out
on a warm
freshly made
flour
tortilla

that's
a chorizo and egg
taco
a great way to start the day

except
nothing kills my appetite
for breakfast
faster
than having to cook it
myself

i think i'll just
pick up
a mollete
from Los Pasteles
panaderia
on Soledad
instead








That's it for now.

Until next week, remember, all material presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.
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Power to the Purple   Friday, September 19, 2008


III.9.3.




Here's who I have for you this week.

From my library:

Guillaume Apollinaire
Kenneth W. Brewer
Lyn Lifshin
Jane Taylor
Robin Britton
Jill Wiggins
Jennifer Cardenas
Chip Dameron
Walt Whitman
Robert Wrigley

From our friends:

Mick Moss
Robert McManes
Alice Folkart

And me.








Two of my favorite discoveries since I started "Here and Now" are Blaize Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. Both were French by choice, both suffered serious injury during World War I, both were avant garde poets of the very early twentieth century, both were world travelers and both wrote a very easy-going and naturalistic, observational poetry that I like to read and try to write.

Born in 1880 as Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky and raised speaking French, among other languages, he emigrated to France and adopted the name Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother was a Polish noblewoman and his father, though never official identified, is thought to have been a Swiss Italian aristocrat who disappeared early from Apollinaire's life. He was partly educated in Monaco.

Apollinaire was one of the most popular members of the artistic community in Paris. His friends and collaborators during that period included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon, Marie Laurencin, Andre Breton, Andre Derain, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp. In 1911, he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the cubist movement and coined the word surrealism.

In in 1916, while fighting in the war, he received a serious shrapnel wound to the head. He died two years later at the age of 38 of the Spanish flu during the pandemic.

Here are several of his shorter poems from the collection Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1995. The poems are translated from the original French by Donald Revell.



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 Mennonite
Her roses and her clothing have no buttons
My jacket is missing two buttons
The lady and I are almost one religion


Clotilde

Anemone and columbine
Where gloom has lain
Opened in gardens
Between love and disdain

Made somber by the sun
Our shadows meet
Until the sun
Is squandered by night

Gods of living water
Let down their hair
and now you must follow
A craving for shadows


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


Marie

      Little girl you danced there
      Will you dance there old
      The hop and the skip there
      All the bells will be ringing
      Marie but when do you come home

      The masks are silent
      And the music is far
      Almost far as the sky
I want to love you but only scarcely
      the pain is wonderful

      The sheep are gone into the snow
      Flakes of wool and tufts of money
      Soldiers go by and if only I
      Had a changing heart of my own
      Changing, but I know nothing

      Do I know where you hair absconds
      Frizzy as the foaming sea
      Or the fallen leaves of your hands
      In autumn strewn with vows

      I used to walk by the river
      An old book under my arm
      The river is the same as pain
      It elapses mindlessly
      And when will be week be over








Woke up last Sunday morning feeling really lousy, which led to this.



the future came at 6:30 this morning

woke up this
morning
feeling like
i had the kind
of zombie-maker
hangover that led me
to quit drinking
mostly
30 years ago

bloated
stomach blocked
from too much
chile con queso
and bean and cheese
nachos two nights
in a row
and i didn't take
the muscle relaxers
(hate relying on those things)
last night before bed
so my back hurts
and my hips
and my knees
and i'm shuffling
around, taking tiny
little steps
saying
ouwi, ouwi, ouwi
with every one
of them,
promising myself
that whatever i did
to feel this way
i'm never going
to do again

so i limped
over to Jim's
for morning coffee
and a few minutes
alone with the Express-News
and i read the front section,
about the hurricane
about the latest dirt
on that Palin woman
and the three hundred year-old
oaks
the developer bulldozed
before
the
city could get a cease
and desist order
and the two cops
who got shot
responding
to a domestic disturbance
call
then i went to the metro section
and got the local news and the paper's
regular cockamamie right-wing
columnists and finally, before
the comics, to two pages of
obituaries,
all the pictures looking back
at me of smiling people who didn't know
they're dead yet,
and i do my normal score
keeping
count,
all those born
before 1944 on one side
and all those born
in or after 1944
on the other side
and jeeezus
it's another of those days
when the 1944 and later stack
is larger than the pre-1944 stack,
and, not just a a little larger, but hugely
larger, the stack of gone-and-soon-forgottens
my age or younger twice as tall
as the old farts who'd done their time
and moved on
and i'm thinking, holy cow,
maybe today isn't an exception
at all
but the way old people
feel every day
and the way i'm going to feel
every morning
starting now and
until the end of time or
until i die, which,
if you get right down to it
is the same thing
as far as i'm concerned.








My next poem is by Kenneth W. Brewer from his book sum of accidents published by City Art of Salt Lake City in 2003.

Brewer, Poet Laureate of the State of Utah, received his doctorate of creative writing at the University of Utah in 1973. He retired from Utah State University after 32 years as a teacher of writing.

Brewer died in 2006, three years after publication of this book.



Hunter's Vision

Teal and mallard
spiraled through snow
to his call, some
splashing dead in the Bear.

They simply appeared,
green heads or green-
feathered wings suddenly
in his sights.

He watched his son
shoot a teal - their
first hunt together.

And the lost years

flew at him like
a feathered sorrow
suddenly vividly, suddenly
green with wings

beating his heart.
Then he shot a mallard
and watched his son
walk through the shallow Bear,

splashing water
like beads of time.
He noticed flakes of snow
dissolve in the river.

Half a century old, he
wished to go back,
to untie the knots
of all his decisions.

He wished to call
his son's life back
to live that childhood
together, buddies

as they are now.
But nothing can go back.
He calls his son
disappearing in the heavy snow.

He calls,
and calls,
and calls,
and calls.








My next piece is a present-meets-the past type from "Here and Now" friend Mick Moss. Mick is a 54 year old poet from Liverpool England whose poems have appeared here several times.



Bargain

Crossing the old border for the first time
without Charlie checking my points
or the Stasi giving the once over, at least twice
I walked through the Brandenburg gate
and felt the weight of history
that wore these flagstones smooth
the ebb and flow of shiny boots
marching along Unter den Linden
from Paris to Moscow
and back
the only army now
a rag tag band of displaced persons
scraping a living, from misplaced Russian gear
in reclaimed no man's land

Dollars? - he asked
Deutschmarks - I said handing them over
and waited for change that never came
the hat didn't fit
but I considered it a bargain

1994








My next several poems are from Spillway, the Spring/Summer 1999 edition published by Tebot Bach of Huntington Beach, California.

The first of the several poems is by Lyn Lifshin, a widely published teacher of poetry and prose. The series from which this poem was written was based on a National Geographic exhibit of the Peruvian Ice Mummy..

Lifshin was born in 1942 and is a Vermont native. She earned a Bachelor's Degree in English from Syracuse University and a Master's Degree in English from the University of Vermont. She also studied at Brandeis University.

Lifshin is a very prolific write with over a 120 books and chapbooks published. She has also edited four anthologies and was the subject of the award winning documentary film, Not Made of Glass. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and cultural publications, including The American Scholar, Christian Science Monitor, Ploughshares, and Rolling Stone Magazine.



The Ice Maiden Mummy's 24th S.O.S.

Some small girls write
me notes, shove them
under the base of this
glass case. I'm caught
in. The gifts of a
barrette, a ribbon
from their own hair,
still warm. They say
they love my long black
hair, could imagine me
as a ballerina. These
are the gifts I still
adore, their smiles
and sweet breath, as
innocent as I was. As
for jewelry, fine
clothes, please, leave
them for others. I
was given many gifts
I couldn't use, gold -
they pretended I'd need
them for my "journey,"
as much a lie as the
words exchanged by
lovers they might think
they mean, kneeling
under a canopy as if
planting a garden they
will still be together
to see bloom


The Ice Maiden Mummy's 77th S.O.S.

it's not the sun that
I missed, or wanted
to bathe me when I
left what I thought
would be my last room
in the earth. That
heat pleated what was
exposed, turned what
the dark held so well
leathery. No, it was
the moon I wanted to
wash over me, silver
and pale, camouflaging
my scars and wrinkles
cool and like an opal,
mysterious enough to
make of what shimmers
whatever I need.



The next poem from Stillway is by Jane Taylor.

There is a poet by the name of Jane Taylor from the 19th century, but I can't find anything on this Jane Taylor.

I suspect an error in the book. The poem is credited to Jane Taylor, but there is no one by that name included in the poets' biographies included in the book. Included in the biographies is one for June Vincent Taylor, who, so far as I can tell, doesn't have a poem in the book.

So maybe this poem is by June Vincent Taylor and the poet's name is wrong on the poem or maybe the poem is by Jane Taylor and they neglected to include a bio.

Whichever is the case, one thing is certain - someone, maybe June, maybe Jane, maybe both, wrote a fine poem.

(Makes me feel better about the typos in my own book. At least I got my name right.)



Chimney Rock

The way three women stand
beyond the canyon
in the dark morning
and decide to climb

boot on pediment
shale & siltstone,

the way the valley rises
under the sun's own
rising

and breathing
beats low
the drumskin lungs

three ways.
One path.

Walking sticks
click on clay.
At the mesa top

Chinle lightens
yellow & orange.

Below, adobe,
the famous painter's house
still holds

the cool night
in its windows.
Abiquiu's wanter makes a mirror.

the way three women
quiet under whistle
of finch and magpie
call. the way we carry
water, apple, bread
and the way descent
comes easier,

is the way I want to live.








Hurricanes are a strange kind of disaster. You can see them coming for days, but you can't know for sure where they're going until the last couple of hours.

I wrote this piece a week and a half ago, when it looked like hurricane Ike had drawn a bead on Corpus Christi on the coast, with a course that went inland and directly over San Antonio. In the end, of course, it didn't do that, picking Galveston, Houston and the surrounding area as its target.



trying not to think about politics

trying
not to think
about politics -
end up thinking
about hurricanes
instead

Ike
this time,
just off Cuba,
with a track now
that looks like landfall
between
Riviera Beach
just south of Corpus Christi
and Fulton Beach
just north,
the coastline minimally protected
from this point
all the way south
by Padre Island, a
barrier island
way more developed
than seems reasonable
for a long sandbar
barely above sea level
even at low tide

and from the coast itself,
the coastal plains,
not much higher, old timers
still telling stories
of people washed 30 miles
inland by the tidal surge
during the last "big one"
early in the last century

this one looks
likely to cross the coast
about 8 o'clock Saturday morning
so the race now will have begun
to get the plywood
for boarding up
before it all gets bought up

my house in Corpus Christi
had removable shutters
but i never
figured out how to put them up
so through two storms
i nailed plywood
along with everyone else

so while part of the family
is out chasing plywood
the other part is at the store
buying up batteries, gas for
the car, kerosene for storm lamps
and a fresh bottle of propane
for the grill, as well as sacks
of groceries, non-perishables
that won't spoil when here's no
refrigeration
and it's 100 degrees
inside and out
and 90 percent humidity

for those planning to leave,
many who can
are taking off early, before
all the roads out of the coast
turn into parking lots
creeping north and west
at 5 miles per hour,
city to city trips that normally
take two hours
turning into all-day marathons

meanwhile,
if the current course is kept,
the storm will pass over San Antonio
sometime Saturday night,
just as it is weakening from a
category 1 hurricane
to a stronger than usual
tropical storm,
wind
and heavy rain
sweeping across the hill country,
those on top of the hills
watching
for tornados
while those down slope
prepare for flash flooding
as little dry creeks
take on torrents of water
rushing down stream
with incredible speed and power,
pushing everything aside,
rising 8 to 10 feet over
low water crossings faster
than you can ever believe possible

that's how people die
in rainstorms here, driving
on streets just blocks from their
homes, trying to drive over
a dry creek crossing
they've crossed a thousand times,
a crossing that becomes
in the rain
a river of mud and debris
before they can get
from one side to the other,
passing through and leaving
as quickly as it came,
draining from the hills
into the river systems
that flow east, into flatter land
where water does not drain
so fast, where it flows over
river banks and onto farms
and into towns
and where it stays








My next several poems are from Feeding the Crow, and anthology edited by Susan Bright and published by Plain View Press of Austin, Texas in 1998.

The first of the poems is by Robin Britton.

Britton works for a child care center for teenage parents who attend an alternate, charter school. Her poetry has been published in a series of small hand-made books titled Wake Up Calls and in Poetography I&II, and Diverse City.



Full Moon Ceremony

We ditched our suits.
Slid into the icy water.
Melted Ice.

Howling like wolves,
gliding like otters
down stream to catch the
      light of the moon
      imprinted upon the water
Swimming circles in this reflection.
Splashing upon black velvet
      adorned with gold.
I'm fifty-five.
She's sixty-five.
Harriet's seventy-five.
We are too old to be
      having this much fun.



The next poem in the book is by Jill Wiggins.

Wiggins has a degree in art from St. Edward's University in Austin and works as a writer and graphic designer. Her poetry has appeared in Poetography, Diverse City, and Patchwork. She also has a chapbook titled Lemon Curd and Other Poems.



The Light in Our House

I love the way
      the sun rises in our kitchen window
      catches in a crystal prism
      scatters rainbows on the floor,
      the stove and counters
      even sometimes in the freezer.

      I love the way
      leaves of the ash tree in front
      break up the light
      that falls dappled
      on our bed
      in the afternoon.

I love the way
      the hillside behind the back bedroom
      glows golden-green
      in evening light
      an occasional cardinal flashing in the warming sun.

I love the way
      sunset fills the living room window
      with peaches, purples, pinks
      before we close the blinds
      to shut out the night



Next, from the book, I have this poem by Jennifer Cardenas.

Cardenas is the third of six children and a graduate of Edgewood, ISD in San Antonio, subject of the Edgewood v. Kirby, 1989 Texas Supreme Court case which led to improvement in the equitable funding of rich and poor school districts across the state.

At the time of this publication, she was a member of Yoniverse, an all-woman performance poetry ensemble, living and working in Austin while attending the University of Texas.



"Popular Science," Nov. 1996

You sneeze without covering your mouth,
shooting some five thousand moisture droplets
on my arm.

I blink in astonishment,
upset that your mocos are still landing
some twelve feet away,
and that I have surpassed the scientific amount
of one blink per five seconds.

You smile, using only seventeen muscles.

I'm pissed off.
You sneezed,
caused me to blink,
and now I must use forty-three muscles to show my disgust.

The only thing preventing me
from smacking you on the head is pity,
pity that you only have ninety thousand hairs on your head
while I have one hundred-fifteen thousand on mine.








Now I have two poem from Robert McManes, a friend of "Here and Now" readers here have seen often.



obscene phone call

The heavy breather called again;
he wants a poem.
I recite Frost's "The Road Not Taken".
The breathing grows louder.
Next, a few lines from Poe's "The Raven".
The breathing becomes faster.
I read a poem from Collins' "Nine Horses" book.
He sounds like a freight train
barreling down the tracks,
chug-a-chug-a, toot-toot.
I thought,
the timing is right
start on a poem of mine
and "click" he's gone.
Everybody's a critic.


a street named desire

the headlines read
bearded man dies of clap
he didn't know
street sex could kill

red light, green light

meanwhile on the corner
the brightly painted lady
reels in her nightly fish
while others swim by
pretending not to notice

twenty bucks a throw

down the street
a bus screeches to a stop
Brando falls on his knees
and shouts to the stars

all in a row

the streets can't hear
no matter how loud
the fish schools swims by
desire is a short ride

cash only
no credit cards








The next poem is by Chip Dameron, from his book Hook & Bloodline published by Wings Press of San Antonio in 2000.

Dameron is the author of two other previously published poetry collections In the magnetic Arena and Night Spiders, Morning Milk, Definition of Hours and one subsequent collection, also from Wings Press, Tropical Green.

As editor of Thicket, an Austin-based literary magazine, he was an important figure in the early years of Texas small-press development. He lives in Brownsville, Texas, where he teaches writing and literature at the University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College.

This is the title poem of the book.



Hook and Bloodline

            Knee deep
in south Bay, spinning out
an artificial shrimp
to hook a speckled trout
or drum, you watch the gulls,
fixed on fish, dive
like newsreel Zeros at dusk,
smacking the air with their
wallops, each white bird
rising from the froth
of an airplane's fatal
plunge, another sea
and forty years away,
still potent.
            All night long
the ships rolled to port
and starboard, the men
banked into bunks, dreaming
of women and death,
no convoy safe in the zone
of paranoia, the deep
as cunning as the sky.
On watch, the loudspeaker's
squawk as close as humid air,
the men calmed their coffee
with whispers and waited out
the worst.
            Elsewhere
a city bloomed and withered
in a moment, the sky as bold
as love, the wind more violent
than any lust. Flesh fell off.
Things writhed in their wombs.
Days later, another dose
of the same.
            When the sailors
came back, fit and unfearful
their salty tongues as quick
to snatch at sweetness
as a snake's, the cries
in the darkness were most
of what hammered, some nights
never long enough. By day,
life became suburban,
televised, circumnavigated
by kids.
            Now, far from home
and childhood, flounder gig
at ready in the hissing
lantern light, you slog
along the shallows, looking
for the dark shapes that hover
by the bottom, stunning them
by spear, taking the firm
white flesh for yourself,
the heat of the fire
searing in a truth
that you taste each time
you chew with the teeth
of your faceless godparents,
whose vapors still hang
in the air.








This next thing is a long piece I did last week, telling a long story that finishes in the end with a point that bothers me more and more.



threads

many years ago
i served
for a year
in Pakistan,
on the northwestern
frontier,
that part of the
country
that nowadays
is mostly thought of
as Osamaland

part of a little
American
military enclave
on the desert edge
between
Peshawar and
tribal lands,
the Hindu Kush
shimmering like smoke
in the distance

the folks on either side
didn't like us then
either
but they were still
more interested
in killing each other
than killing us

for an American
with even a little money,
which described
most of us posted
there,
beautiful brass work
could be bought
cheap,
as well as wood work,
and tailored suits
of the finest silk
brought directly
from China
through the Kyber Pass
in the mountains
we could see in the
distance

you could buy
several thousand dollars
worth of silk suits
for a hundred, two hundred dollars,
tailored
to fit from pictures
you brought to the tailor
from magazines

take your
Seville Row ad from
Esquire
to the tailor and two
weeks later
you'd have a perfect fit
Seville Row
knockoff

there was a warning
though
coming back
from the States
and those who had
purchased their
several thousand dollars
worth of suits
before shipping home

as fine as the silk
was, the cotton thread
that sewed it all together
was poor grade, tending
to rot and break
and the only solution
was to dismantle the suit
and have it completely re-
sewn, making the suits
not quite as good a deal
as they had first appeared

i was thinking about this
this morning, thinking
about the threads that
hold together the shinning
modern
surface of our national life,
the threads of honor and
truth
and respect
that give us purpose
and confidence,
and how those threads
seem under strain today
from the rot of lies
and double-dealing
and casual, conscience-free
exploitation
in every aspect of our life,
from commerce
to religion
to politics and culture -

we must believe
in ourselves
and our neighbors
and countrymen
in times like this and
the threads
that stitch together
that belief
seem less and less
secure








From American Poetry's own Father, Godfather and Saint, Walt Whitman, here is a selection from Song of Myself.



Song of Myself

24

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and
   breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women
   or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me.
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through
   me the current and index.

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of
   democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have
   their counterpart of on the same terms.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and
   slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and thieves
   and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of
   wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove
   the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.

I do not press my fingers across my mouth.
I keep as delicate around the bowels as through the
   head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and
   tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever
   I touch and am touch'd from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles and all the
   creeds.

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be
   the spread of my own body, or any part of it,
Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!
Firm masculine colter it shall be you
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings
   of my life!
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
Root of wash'ed sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest
   of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
Mix'd tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be
   you!
Trickling sap of maple, fiber of manly wheat, it shall
   be you!

Sun so generous it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it
   shall be you!
Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving
   lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!
Hands I have taken, face I have kiss'd, mortal I have
   ever touch'd, it shall be you.

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so
   luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with
   joy,
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, not whence the
   cause of my faintest wish,
Not the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause
   of the friendships I take again.

That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it
   really be,
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than
   the metaphysics of books.

To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous
   shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently
   rising, freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.
The earth by sky staid with, the daily close of their
   junction,
The heav'd challenge from the east that moment over
   my head,
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be
   master!


25

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would
   kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of
   the daybreak

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and
   volumes of worlds.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to
   measure itself,
It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then

Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too
   much of articulation,
Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you
   are folded?
Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
I underlying causes to balance them at last,
My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the
   meaning of all things,
Happiness (which whoever hears me let him or her
   set out in search of this day.)

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me
   what I really am,
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,
I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking
   toward you.

Writing and talk do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my
   face,
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the
   skeptic.



(It's happened again - I start out to do a little piece of Whitman and end up doing twice as much as I planned. Once rolling with Walt, it's very hard to stop.)








Thursday a week ago was the seventh annual commemoration of the 9/11 attack on the United States of America.

Both our very good friend Alice Folkart and I wrote poems that day, commenting, not so much on the attack itself, but on the way we continue to mourn it seven years after the event.

We took different approaches and I thought it might be interesting to read the two poems together.

First, this is Alice's poem.



It Has All Happened Before

I should write about those people
falling through the flames,
talking on their cell phones,
trying to sprout wings or at least
get their feet ready to walk on water,
but I don't want to. I don't want to remember.

I should be able to write without crying,
keep the keyboard dry and wonder why
I am here and they are gone,
they, the living, then the dying,
and the world goes on and on and on,
all unimaginable, no flying to the sun on wings of wax.

It seems self-centered to start a poem like this
with "I," who should at least be part ghost by now,
"my" feelings, the wheelings and dealings
that have spun away from that terrible day,
flaming tower, falling souls not yet taken up by heaven,
the leaven of the bread of life.

There is power in the past.
It has all happened before.



And, now, here is mine, likely to raise some hackles.



9/11

with due respect
to those who actually
suffered,
it is time to end all this
national
wallowing in self-pity
and victimhood
every September 11th

no more
of that, i say, until
we can put Bin Laden's
head
on a stick
in the middle of ground
zero

until then,
let's turn our national
days of mourning
to those millions of
innocents,
including our own,
on the other side
of the ocean
killed, maimed, displaced,
tortured
and terrorized
in the name of 9/11
and mis-directed
rage

our sin
does not nearly equal
the sins
of those who attacked us,
but it is our sin
nevertheless,
and like all our sins,
should be recognized
and mourned
for the sake of the sinned-upon
and the sinners as well








Do dogs have nightmares, I wonder. If so, this might be one of their regulars.

The poem is from 180 More Extraordinary Poems For Every Day, selected by Billy Collins and published by Random House in 2005.

The poet is Robert Wrigley.

According to an excellent paper (from which I quote extensively) on the web by Kevin Schmall, a student in Advanced English III at Emmett High School in Idaho, Wrigley was born in Illinois in 1951. He served briefly in the US Army until honorably discharged as a conscientious objector.

He went to college at Southern Illinois University and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelors degree in English Language and Literature. In 1976, he earned a MFA in Poetry at the University of Montana

He began his career as a teacher in 1977 at Lewis and Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. As Professor of English. Wrigley taught at Boise State University's Summer Writers Workshop in 1988. In 1989 and 1990, he went east to Swannonoa, North Carolina, to teach in the poetry-enriched MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In 1990 and 1991, he was the Acting Director and Visiting Professor of the MFA Program at the University of Oregon. At Montana University, Wrigley has twice held the distinguished Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry as the Richard Hugo Distinguished Poet-in-Residence. He is the only writer to hold it twice and the first former student to hold the chair, which he held in the years of 1990 and 1995. For the years 1993 through 1999, Wrigley has appeared at the Idaho Readers' and Writers' Rendezvous. In 1993, he was the visiting professor of the Grace Nixon Summer Seminars at the University of Idaho. Wrigley joined the University of Idaho Graduate English Department staff in 1999, after spending twenty-two years as a professor at Lewis and Clark State College. At the University of Idaho, he currently teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.



Do You Love Me?

She's twelve and she's asking the dog,
who does, but who speaks
in tongues, whose feints and gyrations
are themselves parts of speech.

They're on the back porch
and I don't really mean to be taking this in
but once I've heard I can't stop listening. Again
and again she asks, and the good dog

sits and wiggles, leaps and licks.
Imagine never asking. Imagine why:
so sure you wouldn't dare, or couldn't care
less. I wonder if the dog's guileless brown eyes

can lie, if the perfect canine lack of abstractions
might not be a bit like the picture books
she "read" as a child, before her parents' lips
shaped the daily miracle of speech

and kisses, and the words were not lead
and weighted by air, and did not mean
so meanly. "Do you love me?" she says
and says, until the dog, sensing perhaps
its own awful speechlessness, tries to bolt,
but she holds it by the collar and will not
let go, until, having come closer,
I hear the rest of it. I hear it all.

She's got the dog's furry jowls in her hands,
she's speaking precisely
into its laid-back quivering ears:
"Say it," she hisses, "say it to me."








And, speaking of dogs, there's this I did this week.



moral lessons

two dogs
live
at my house
and a calico cat
who watches us all
with casual condescension

one of the dogs is large
and furry;
the other small, with
short hair

the small one was
an off-the-streets rescue
who must have spent many
hungry days
and cannot forget them -
the minute
you put food in front of her
she tries to gobble it all up
at once,
before anyone can take it away,
stuffing food into her mouth
until there is no more room for even
the tiniest portion of Purina chow,
then she runs off with
pouchy
chipmunk cheeks
to some secret corner where
she spits it all out and eats it bit by bit

the large dog
watches all this with grand motherly
tolerance
until she decides enough is enough
and picks up the plate
with her teeth
and carries it off

of course,
when she does that,
the plate tips to one side
and all the food falls off,
but she doesn't seem to care,
licking the empty plate
clean and
leaving the fallen food
for the small dog

i think she thinks it's
the principle
of the thing, trying
to teach a moral lesson
on the limits of greed
to the small dog
who really doesn't care crap
about moral lessons
as long as she gets to eat
everything

i also think,
moral lessons aside,
that the large dog,
knows i'm going
let her into the house,
where the small dog is not
allowed to go,
and give her a plate
of her own food
that she'll be able to eat
alone
in the privacy
of her own kitchen








Before I close out the day, I want to leave you with the latest in history, reported by high school and college students throughout the United States in class essays and brought to a wider appreciation by the book Ignorance Is Blitz. I had lost the book, then found it again this week after cleaning of the paper piles off my very messy desk.

The historical period we study today is the Renaissance.


"Machiavelli, who was often unemployed, wrote The Prince to get a job with Richard Nixon."


"This was the beginning of Empire when Europeans felt the need to reach out and smack someone."


"Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granola, a part of Spain now known as Mexico and the Gulf States."


"Dick Cavett was the first European to visit Newfoundland."


"The angry Martin Luther nailed ninety-five theocrats to a church door."


"John Huss refused to decant his ideas about the church and was therefore burned as a steak."


Ain't historical perspective grand? I guess we all just do the best we can.

And now, as you ponder thesee latest historical insights, remember that all material presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.
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Early Riser   Friday, September 12, 2008


III.9.2.




Places to go, things to do this week, so here it is, our menu for the week.

From my library

Gwendolyn Brooks
Charles Bukowski
Zbigniew Herbert
Manuel Blas De Otero
Steve Healey
William Blake
Ishle Yi Park
Julia B. Levine
Susan Holahan

From friends of "Here and Now"

Jim Corner
Christopher George
Kathy Paupore
RatAva
Pam Hauck

And me.

So here we all are.








First, here's a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The poem is from the collection of her work, Selected Poems, a Perennial Classic published in 1999 (first published in hardback in 1963).

Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas and grew up in Chicago. She first attended Hyde Park High School, a leading white high school, before transferring to all-black Wendell Phillips and eventually attended an integrated school, Englewood High School. Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents. When she was in High School, her mother took her to meet Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.

Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. When Brooks was sixteen years old, she had compiled a portfolio of around seventy-five published poems. At 17, she began submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows," the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. During this same period, she also attended Wilson Junior College, graduating in 1936. After publishing many poems and failing to obtain a position with the Chicago Defender, Brooks began to work a series of typing jobs.

She published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945 by Harper and Row, brought her instant critical acclaim. She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was one of the "Ten Young Women of the Year" in Mademoiselle magazine. In 1950, she published her second book of poetry,Annie Allen, which won her Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first given to an African-American.

After John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962, she began her career teaching creative writing. She taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin.

Brooks died in 2000.

This poem honors her father, the son of a runaway slave who fought in the Civil War, who gave up his ambition to attend medical school to work as a janitor because he could not afford to attend medical school.



In Honor of David Anderson Brooks, My Father
     July 30, 1883 - November 21, 1959

A dryness is upon the house
My father loved and tended.
Beyond his firm and sculptured door
His light and lease have ended.

He walks the valleys, now - replies
To sun and wind forever.
No more the cramping chamber's chill,
No more the lingering fever.

Now out upon the wide clean air
My father's soul revives,
All innocent of self-interest
And the fear that strikes and strives.

He who was Goodness, Gentleness,
And Dignity is free,
Translates to public Love
Old private charity.








Next, I have a nice short poem from frequent "Here and Now" contributor Jim Corner.

Jim is owner and publisher of Desert Moon Review, on the web now for the past seven years going on eight. He holds a Master's in English, Theology and Philosophy. He is widely published on the web and sometimes in hardcopy and is completing his first book: My Life In Several Seconds, A Collection of Poetry.

He lives in Mesa, Arizona with his wife Kathy and dog Trudy.

You can take a look at Desert Moon Review by clicking on the link in the link section on the right.



Working Weathers

A cool breeze has taken over
monsoon's territory. Sea of Cortez
has lost it's humid stasis, Gulf
of Mexico is battling Fay,
Valley of the Sun struts its dry heat
on this yellow-orange Sunday
for time and a half.








So, back to Charles Bukowski with a poem from his book what matters most is how well you walk through the fire, published by HarperCollins posthumously in 1999 from a selection of poems written between 1970 and 1990.



4 Christs

when I went up to Santa to read
they had the four of us
in the restaurant first
at an elevated table
with placards;
Ginsbin', Beerlinghetti, G. Cider and Chinaski.
it wasn't even the reading yet.
it was dinner first.
it looked like the Last Supper to me.
I arrived late
sat down
a thin man
with a scarf around his throat
got up and stood over me:
"guess you can't guess who I am?"
I looked.
"no."
"I'm G. Crider."
"ah, hello, Garry, I'm Chinaski."
he went back and sat
down.

Ginsbing and Beerlinghetti looked like they
were used to all the attention
we were getting.
they sat
impervious.

Jack Bitchelene hollered from the scumbag
crowd of minor poets also eating there
that night:
"hey, Chinaski, start some shit!"
"you are shit, Jack!" I hollered back,
"eat yourself and die!"
Jack loved it. he opened his dirty Brooklyn
mouth and laughed all over Santa
Cruz
his filthy grey uncombed hair
hanging in his face.
"look" I asked Beerlinghetti, "don't they
serve drinks up here?"
"we're waiting for dinner," he informed
me politely.
I got up from the table and went
over to the bar.
"give me a vodka-7," I told the
barkeep.
I got it down fast, ordered
a beer
and went back to the Last
Supper.
on the way a guy grabbed my arm:
"Ginsbing says he doesn't know how to
relate to you," he said.
I sat down at the table.
dinner came.
we ate it.
then before our transportation to the reading
arrived
we were given orders:
each was to read
20 minutes.

I read 15 minutes.
Beerlinghetti read 25 minutes
Ginsbing read 30 minutes.
G. Cider red one hour and
12 minutes
then it was over.

and now the others say
I am the
Judas
among us.








I got to thinking, you know, I have Google which, though not perfect, is right probably more often than me, so why the heck do I need to know anything.

Which leads into this piece from last week.



knowing things

i'm not one
to act as if i know everything
but i'm starting to think
i might know everything
i want to know

in fact,
as i age
and begin forgetting
things
i'm learning
the pleasures of
guilt-free ignorance

i used to know
all the state capitols,
for instance,
but i don't know them anymore
and haven't seen that lack of knowing
having any negative
effect
on my quality of life

i used to be able to name
all the kings and queens of England
from Arthur forward,
don't know that anymore,
just like i used to know all the books
of the Bible, King James version,
old testament and new, but
can't get past Ruth now

i used to know a lot of really useful things

like i used to know how to tune
my car's engine,
set the points,
adjust my carburetor,
and reline my brakes

can't do any of that now

everything's got too complicated
and learning how to do the stuff
you do now instead of the stuff
i did then
would take much more time
and mental exertion
than i'm willing
to expend

there's lots of things
like that,
things i used to know and
forgot
and things i never knew
and don't want to learn

there's just not enough time
to learn and relearn,
i'd rather spend that time
thinking a bit more,
thinking
maybe even deeper,
about stuff i already
know

besides,
it's truly amazing
how much ignorance
you can get away with
these days








Zbigniew Herbert, born 1924, was known as a spiritual leader of the Polish anti-communist movement. A member of the Polish resistance movement during World War II, he is one of the best known and the most translated postwar Polish writers.

Herbert was a bachelor of the Order of the White Eagle (Poland's highest decoration awarded to both civilians and the military officially instituted in 1705) and was educated as an economist and lawyer. In the 1980s Herbert was the main poet of the Polish opposition. Starting in 1986, he lived in Paris, returning to Poland in 1992 and died in Warsaw in 1998.

In July 2007 the Polish Government decided that 2008 would be the Year of Zbigniew Herbert.



The Nepenthe Family

Did Jean-Jaques the Tender know about the pitcher plant
- it was described by Linnaeus he should have known it -
so why was he silent about this scandal of nature

one of many scandals but perhaps
beyond the capacity of the heart and tear glands
of the one who sought only comfort in nature

      this criminal grows in the dark jungles of Borneo
      and lures with a flower that is not a flower
      but the main vein of a leaf fanned out in the form
         of a pitcher

      with a hinged lid and very sweet mouth
      that draws insects to the treacherous banquet
      like the secret police of a certain empire

      for who can resist - fly or man -
      the sticky nectars orgy of colors glowing with hues
      of white of violet of meat like the windows of a red tavern

      where a kind innkeeper with a beautiful daughter wife
      sends the company of drunken guests drained of blood
      to heaven or hell depending on their merits

      it was a favorite of the Victorian decedents
      combining the salon of debauchery with the
         torture chamber
      everything was there - rope nails venom sex the knot
         the coffin

and we lie peacefully with the pitcher plant
among gulags concentration camps with no concern for the
   knowledge
that innocence in the world of plants - does not exist





Photo by Gordon B. George



We have a treat now, a poem by Christopher George, a good friend of "Here and Now," accompanied by the photo above of Chris on the beach. The photo was taken by his father, Gordon B. George.

Chris was born in Liverpool, England in 1948. He first emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1955. He went back to Liverpool for a refresher on his Scouse accent, living with his grandparents while attending Rose Lane and Quarry Bank Schools. Chris returned to the U.S.A. in 1968 and has lived there ever since. He now lives in Baltimore, Maryland, near Johns Hopkins University with his wife Donna and two cats.

I have to note that, though a couple or so years older than Chris, I was born and grew up just a few miles from Boca Chica beach, on the very southern tip of Texas and the United States where the Rio Grande River dumps it's muddy waters into the Gulf of Mexico, and have some beach pictures of my own. I was not nearly as photogenic as Chris at that age, nor as well dressed - bare-assed in the sand is what I was.

Anyway, my own misadventures aside, this great picture, taken by his father so many years ago, and the poem below make a wonderful combination.



Boy on the Beach

August 1951, era of the Festival of Britain,
which I do not remember...do you?
As the British pulled themselves up
by their shoelaces after World War II -

I was on a brisk beach at Laxey, Isle of Man,
dressed for warmth: shorts and tee-shirt.
Although some brave souls ventured
into the rolling Irish Sea...not me,

content to dig the wet sand
with my bucket and spade.








Manuel Blas de Otero was born on March 15, 1916 in Bilbao. At the age of 7, he entered a preparatory school for later education under the Jesuits. Compared to the peace of his home, it was a harsh, repressive environment.

Because of family financial problems, he moved with his family to Madrid where de Otero found new freedom and a new sense of self-identity and in this environment, he began to write.

I took these two poems from The Steel Cricket, Versions 1958-1997, a collection of "translations" by Stephen Berg. Actually, unlike Robert Bly who claim to translate in a dozen languages he does not know or read, Berg makes no claim of translation. Instead, he applies his own poetic sensibilities to poems translated by others. It's a kind of rewriting, rather than translation, leaving me somewhat unsure who I should credit for these poems. Though it takes considerable nerve (or maybe just good sense of humor) for a translator to slip his own name into the text of someone else's poem, I don't think there's anything inappropriate about what he does. (Can't say the same for Bly's translations, even though I like the heck out of most of them I've read and have noticed in a recent book that he has become more circumspect when describing what he does.)

The original language of these poems is Spanish.

Unfortunately, Berg provides no biographical information about the poets he interprets and the most I could find on the web about de Otero was several pages of Spanish very poorly translated into English. Out of all that, I got the little bit of information above. (Actually, even with my poor grasp of Spanish, I learned about as much from the Spanish as I did from the English translation.)



Inquest

I walk around everywhere, I have to find out what causes suffering,
the one reason for suffering that's
bloody, tearful, but mostly dry,
cause of all the horrible things
done to men.

Not to Blas de Otero or Charlie, not Jeff, not to
Kulik or Berg, not Vallejo, no, that's not
what I mean. I go around looking
only for the cause, for the one cause
and the one suffering that's
always ready to begin

What I'm asking is who gets pleasure from men's suffering?
Who shaves for the sake of the pointless wind?
We know so little about what suffering is,
we're so proud of our pride,
but nobody can tell me anything about this when I ask.

Read the telephone book
or the Bible, it's easy to find something there.
I grab the telephone bible,
I hold on to
the Fisherman's Guide with both hands - and the dishes hit
    the floor.

Since age six
I've been hearing the same every hour - holy sky,
holy, holy - as if issued from God at the end of His great work.

But when it comes to suffering, it's like the first day -
silences and welts of the double column. I can't stand it!


Enough

Imagine for a minute how miserable I felt
when I thought God, the only living thing, doesn't exist,
or if He does is made of nothing except
earth, water, shadow, and wind,

and that death - Oh I'm shaking like crazy -
is an emptiness without even the light from a staircase,
a colossal hole that sinks endlessly
into a nothing of moist silence.

They why live, sons
of mothers, at what windows be, crucified ones
and all you others? Enough death.

Enough. God, stop killing us wrong like this
of if you can't, just let us dangle way up
above you - howling river that overflows -.








It's a political season, towards the end of a race much tighter than I hoped it would be by this time. Us political junkies, and I think that describes me pretty well, tend to get a bit obsessive at such a time as this, which means a lot of political poems.

People that know me and my views might be surprised by this poem.



George Bush

i was listening
to Prairie Home
Companion
tonight
and Keillor
was telling one
of his trademark
stories and mentioned
the name "George Bush"
and his audience of
Vermonters
roared
with rage,
a sound of hatred
so intense
it shocked even me

it seemed somehow
unfair, unseemly even,
this hatred,
this abhorrence,
for George Bush is
what he is, your
basic West Texas
doofus,
seeming
a genial man
with a common touch
on the two occasions
i was able to observe him
up close, in a small room
with a small group of people,
a man who thinks -
a man who will always think -
he has done good, a man
who does not understand,
who will never understand,
the magnitude of ruination
he has brought to his country,
a hard man for me to hate,
even if i was
the type to nurse
hatreds,
which i'm not

he is what he is,
and does
what a person
like he is
is likely to do
and so, cannot
be entirely blamed
for the mess he made,
he did not,
after all,
take his position by coup,
not the second time
anyway,
he was elected in the end
with the careless votes
of those easily moved
by superficialities
or through the arrogant
nearsideness
of those who couldn't see
past their own narrow interests
or through sheer lassitude,
all of these
among the many
who scream his name
in rage today

perhaps it is time
to remember the words
of that great poet -

"blame not the gods,
cassius,
for we have made them"








Steve Healey earned a Bachelors Degree from the University of Virginia and a Master of Fine Arts Degree at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst.

He is Associate Editor of Conduit Magazine. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including LAmerican Poetry Review, Fence, Jubilat, Open City, and Verse.

The next poem, from his book, Earthling, was published by Coffee House Press in 2004.



things we say

in unison, to resemble a cathedral,
to be pretty and healed,

not worthy to receive you,
flesh wafer and blood grape.

You the star of what we say
after swallowing, sucking teeth,

considering how the priest shaves
his face, still hungry, multiplied
by zero, divided by scars,

thin enough to exit and say things
in motion. Like a wheel turning north
from a parking space under scarlet skies.

driving through air across a bridge
not found on a lipstick map.

Like branching toward an electric vacancy
to hear the silent things we say
bathing, soaking our breasts.

Because we don't die at the same time,

we don't stay here to see this time zone
weep the way a sleeping pill
sees water surrounded by clear glass.

The way water is fireproof,
fire marries what keeps it alive.

the way we say things burning papers,

to a parent dying ungracefully
with cosmetics and old movies,
to avoid being abandoned or infected

Things we don't mean to neglect
today, the birthday of no one

who recalls the things we said about
what still hurts for the wrong reason,

ex-lovers and ventriloquists
of tomorrow, jazz molecules above lips,

the whole planet curving away
like embryonic light.








Kathy Paupore is a new friend of "Here and Now" making her first appearance with us this week.

Kathy lives in Upper Michigan with her family. Her poetry has been published in several ezines including Sol Magazine, Amaze Cinquain Journal, Fireweed, and Loch Raven Review. She has won an IBPC Honorable Mention and her poetry has been anthologized in Poets Gone Wild (Wild Poetry Press, 2005).

She is currently a moderator at Wild Poetry Forum.



Menominee River Songs
          after Li Po

1.

A long hot summer, deserted water
Menominee River will return your sorrow.

Unable to gauge the grief of the families,
I climb the train bridge to Wisconsin's side

gaze into Michigan, the distance of loss.
I look down at the river flowing past,

it never ceases unless the dam breaks.
I ask the water: will you remember

nothing of them as you carry their names
and each fistful of tears so very far?

2.

Menominee River's white-tail deer are countless,
a flurry of leaps, colored leaves falling

coax spotted fawn out of the autumn woods
they frolic, drink the sun from the water.

3.

Meandering river, in sadness I gaze
into blossoms of red, sorrow follows you

under the bridge, no matter which side,
the water flows, but I can no longer look.

4.

Along the Menominee River banks
Michigan's woodlands are unforgettable,

the blue sky open, granite spilling ridges,
white water washes the rumble of stones.

5.

Hundreds of white pines spread away here,
a hundred stands of maple trees ignite,

broad-winged hawks fly the endless ridges,
unseen, gray wolves night after night howl

stay away from the Menominee River,
the great-horned owl cries, warns of sorrow.

6.

The burning sun heats up the river
scorches the sands, three crows gather.

He heard them laughing together
near the water, made them take flight.

7.

On a slab of concrete at the train bridge,
three white crosses and bouquets of flowers.

On the sand abandoned clothing strewn,
on the waves wilted petals ebb and tide.

8.

The river's a bolt of blue silk,
the shoreline stretches toward heaven

on the banks where children scattered
Only hoof prints of the white deer.


9.

Train bridge mid-river at the swimming hole,
the Menominee's depths pass underneath,

in rough waters, a boat rocks, deserted,
a round hole near the bottom, trying to sink.

10.

Campfire lights up the night sky,
from a leafless tree an owl whoos

on silent wings it whooshes by,
ghost stories are passed around.








Here's a poem by William Blake from the Penguin Classics collection William Blake - Selected Poems.



Night

The sun descending in the west,
The evening star does shine.
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine,
The moon like a flower
in heaven's high bower;
With silent delight
Sits and smiles on the night.

Farewell green fields and happy groves,
Where flocks have took delight;
Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves
The feet of angels bright;
Unseen they pour blessing,
And joy without ceasing,
On each bud and blossom,
And each sleeping bosom.

The look in every thoughtless nest,
Where birds are covered warm;
They visit caves of every beast
To keep them all from harm:
If they see any weeping
That should have been sleeping
The pour sleep on their head
And sit down by their bed.

When wolves and tygers howl for prey
They pitying stand and weep;
Seeking to drive their thirst away,
And keep them from the sheep.
But if they rush dreadful,
The angels most heedful
Receive each mild spirit
New worlds to inherit.

And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold:
And pitying the tender cries,
And walking round the fold:
Saying, "Wrath by his meekness
And by his health sickness,
Is driven away
From our immortal day.

"And now beside thee, bleating lamb,
I can lie down and sleep;
Or think on him who bore thy name,
Gaze after thee and weep.
For wash'd in life's river,
My bright mane for ever
Shall shine like the gold,
As I guard o'er the fold."








It's funny, I have the poem and a distinct memory of hearing something that set me to thinking along these lines, but can't for the life of me remember what.

Probably something on NPR - getting a lot of my material from public radio these days.



have a really good day

think
of this...

you're driving
down
a country road
one day,
a little two-lane
blacktop,
and you come
to this field,
this calm
pastoral
scene
of clean
green
grass waving
gently
in the breeze
and a herd of cattle
just standing around
munching away
and you stop
and walk
to the fence
and all the cows
come running
cause they know
that when the rancher
comes and stands
by the fence
he's probably going
to have something for
them, maybe some
nice dry crispy hay,
something good
they're thinking
so they come running,
great sad brown eyes,
innocent eyes,
like the eyes
of a fallen angel
watching,
cud chewing, tail swishing,
waiting
for you, and you say,
hello, cows,
i just thought i'd mention
that one of these days
i'm going to eat you,
a few minutes
over a hot grill with
a little salt and pepper
and maybe some A-1
if i leave you on the fire
too long and all your
juices
dry up and you're
going to taste
really great

until then,
you all have a really
good
day








Ishle Yi Park is a young Korean American poet, singer, and the first woman to be named the Poet Laureate of Queens. Dubbed "the Queen of Queens" by her fans, the Borough President declared Park's birthday as "Ishle Yi Park" day in her hometown.

Park's poetry has been published in literary magazines such as Ploughshares, Wasafiri, The Best American Poetry of 2003, and Century of the Tiger: One Hundred Years of Korean Culture in America.

Her poetry CD, Work is Love, includes tracks with Korean traditional drums, Spanish guitar, beatboxing, and music produced by Japan's critically acclaimed DJ Honda. She has been featured at literary and music festivals, performing her unique blend of poetry and song at over three hundred venues around the world, including Cuba, Jamaica, Singapore, Korea, and New Zealand.

Park is also a regular on HBO's Russell Simmons Presents: Def Poetry Jam and was a touring cast member of the Tony-Award winning production of Def Poetry Jam.

The next poem is from her first book, The Temperature of This Water, published by Kaya Press in 1994. It is the winner of three literary awards, including a Pen America Award for Outstanding Writers of Color and the Member's Choice Award of the Asian American Literary Awards.

She has been one of my favorites since I first ran across her book, one of the few in my library I bought new and paid full price for.



Uma

My mother was the biggest love of my life. Before I could
speak english, I'd curl into the pleats of her khakis. I'd hang up
phones so people wouldn't wake her. I wedged my body
between her and the pillow when my father once tried to
smother her. All my early intelligence, I think, was born of the
intense desire to please her. I held in my piss. Stopped wearing
diapers. Twitched a shoulder-raising dance to make her laugh
instead of scratching off my chicken pox.

After my father beat her and retreated to the hot silence of his
room, filled with the fuzz and glare of tv, I would sit near her
in the soft corners. But not too close, I learned Such times
she'd flinch from my touch.

I knew her responsibilities intimately: to cook, to clean, to
stay home, scrub tub, set table, make dinner, stay home, stay
home, stay home. Once I sat through a children's play about
leprechauns with an audience full of other kids, my stomach
tight with fear because it was 5:30 and cutting close to dinner.
The green felt costumes with sharp, pointed edges, the painted
faces and frenetic children running on stage dizzied and
terrified me. What time is it? Let's go. Let's go home

Another afternoon: fallen leaves and a series of wooden
balancing beams stacked higher and higher around a rusted
playground in Bayside. I balanced on them, fingers latched
lightly in my mother's hand until, high above her head, I let
go and ran. She'd let me run reckless.

She possessed that serrated, metal tinge that bared its edges
when he wore her down. His endless hisses and epithets -
shangnyunah, shibhalnyun! - left us lying on our sides like dull
knives. Then she'd bark something harsh and exacting, about his
mother being a dog. His face would startle awake, a streak of
hurt and shock flashing across his cheeks before he pummeled
into her. A rush of bile and water filled my belly. For her.

Funny, he'd never hit us, just lift and carry us by our pajamas,
gently, to the next room. Hit me, I'd cry. Hit me. My father
would look at me with disgust and surprise before shaking his
head and locking the door.








My next poet, a friend of "Here and Now," writes under the pin name RatAva.

I first met her at a weekly poetry gathering at La Taza coffee shop on San Antonio's north side. She is a native San Antonian who wandered around awhile before returning home in 1984. She says that, although she wrote while attending high school, she only began writing seriously a few years ago when she discovered that writing about her feelings helped her to deal with them.

You find out more about RatAva, read more of her work, and get the scoop on her chapbook, Fragments, by visiting her website, "Wrong Planet...Right Universe." You can get there by clicking on the link in the link section on the right.

This is her first appearance in "Here and Now."



Exacerbate

I love the word exacerbate
The way it rolls off the tongue
The sexy little x
Snuggling between e & a
The way it just stops
At the end
With the mere hint of emphasis
On its final syllable

I love its c, masquerading as an s
Tripping up misspellers
The way a flirt
Makes a married man think twice
About whether or not
To try this one
Only to find that things aren't always
As they seem

But most of all I love
That so many other words rhyme
And some of them
Express an opposite meaning
And it's like a gift
To the poet
Who mixes the words
That transform exacerbate into ameliorate








I discovered a poet new to me last week at one of my friendly local used bookstores. The poet is Julia B. Levine and her book is Ditch-tender. Actually, it's not such a used book, published last year by the University of Tampa press.


I couldn't find a biography on her anywhere on the web and the bio-blurb on the back cover is less than intensive. She is, it says, author of Ark, winner of the 2002 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and Practicing for Heaven, which won the 1998 Anhinga Prize for Poetry as well as a bronze medal from Fore Word magazine. Her other awards include the Discovery/The Nation Award for Emerging New Writers and the Pablo Neruda Prize.

I did learn from the web that she received her Ph.D in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and lives and works in Davis, California.



Dark Carpenters

I'm not sure what the ants were waiting for -
the right heat or darkness,
a certain kind of silence turned up high.

But the night their wings broke through,

you cut your engine, the heat of your voice
leading me further down the dock.

Imagine stepping through a door into sea.

Imagine loving anything the way we do,
words poured onto the world's cold table,
and no language to name the shyness inside my desire.

A trawler shone its one light across the water's gun metal.
Above us, I remember corridors of stars,

and closer in, bats lacing up the passageways of sky
as we turned and drove the coast highway south.

Did you take me there, only to see that door?

Did you want me to know we fall
and fall again,

into the black, black water of a life
we did not choose?

Or was it later, in that damp room,
a broken river of ants coursing through the walls,
your boots on the cement landing,
your hands on every door my body hid,

that you felt it too: all those wings unfurling,
love's dark carpenters
husking the absolute carapace of being,

breaking apart the old body
just to make it new?


My daughter tells me she is
no longer a virgin,

just before Benicia on 680,
the Pacific glassy and wild in sun,

slow descent of the coastal mountains
gaining speed through the stunning green,

a flock of wrens
rushing to wake the dark between the trees.

Sure, there's plenty to be afraid of:
her future, spilling as it is carried forward.

How, already she knows
anyone can dream anyone into being,

his hand on the gorgeous swell of her thighs,
his hand anywhere he wants.

And there, above the freeway, a line of Holsteins
plodding home, udders swollen,

as if the entire horizon had ripened
into a sweetness asking to be let down.

There are tears in her eyes, in mine.
There are places no one ever expects to leave,

tiny nothing of her laid against my chest;
the everything that I was with her,

in those unmoored hours before dawn.


Silence Prepares Us for the Fields

That's what you said the day it was clear
we were no longer young,
the hillsides stunned with drifts of lupine.

Wild iris split apart the meadow
with purple blades, and though damage
was a word I didn't want to use,

a hundred grebes dove at once;
a floating graveyard slipping underneath
the distant sea, and you beside me,

mumbling, This how the sky will look
when we are gone. As if all that mattered
was that it did:

and endless rush of swallows
dragging shadows across the perfect quiet,
until there was nothing,

finally, but my hand
brushing slowly across your hair.
It was April. It was the argument

we had lost.
Not even touch to prepare us
finally, for the silence
of a body standing deep inside the fields,
listening to the little ivories of fescue
rising up, lying down, in wind.








For everyone grown tired of my long rambly stuff, here's a short, very unrambly thing I wrote last week. Those who like long and rambly are just going to have to wait their turn.



morning

birds call
in the still-
dark

announce
the day

claim the
sun

*****

morning breeze
rustles trees

the tender
passing
of leaf
on
leaf

*****

alarm sounds

Debussy
whispers

awake awake

Mussorgsky
up
next

*****

cat
asleep on my arm
purrs

a soft feline
snore








Susan Holahan was born in New Jersey and grew up on Long Island, New York. She received her Ph.D. in English and her J.D. from Yale University. She taught creative writing at Yale College to pay law school tuition and daycare. Briefly, she worked at New Haven Legal Assistance and from the late 70s through the early 90s worked as a journalist in New York and Connecticut. In the mid-90s she taught writing at the University of Rochester. Currently, Holahan writes poetry, essays, reviews and lives in rural Vermont.

My next poem is from her first collection,Sister Betty Reads the Whole You published by Gibbs Smith of Salt Lake City in 1998, which was winner of the 1997 Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition. Her poetry has appeared in Agni, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Women's Review of Books, and Seneca Review. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.



What Fire Has to do with Sorrow

Widowed, waiting in a chair to die, she traced on the table
before her, on the chair arm, on her thigh, shapes like letters
with her thick-nailed

index finger, her crabbed hand looping around, back, over
calligraphically. I lick the word. I make the flourishes myself.
I can't read my messages.

Desire - aslant, each word placed far from the last. And one
project after another she begins then stores: squares cut for
a quilt she'll never piece.

When he left her again last night, cold as he leaves her
only in dreams, she stumbled in his slippers, struggling
to parse a sentence

he would never utter for signs of his return. In joy words
flash upward, not like flames but like the graphic images
of flames.


Dead Letter

         to Lore

Cousin, removed - a stranger
in the family, you let them

let you see their clothes, their
houses, eat their food. they called

you poor. When all I knew was
poor was ugly, Germans killed

Jews like us, and Jews like us
couldn't say Jesus or have

cats, they told me your husband's
mother called you that German

Woman. No one told me
German Jewish. Later they'd

say you lost your family; you
dropped them by some German road?

I studied you. I'm taking
your place in my family.








Now, here's Pam Hauck, another new friend of "Here and Now" appearing here for the first time.

Pam lives in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Her creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry have appeared in The Phoenix, flashquake, storySouth, The Southern Scribe, Blue Magnolia, The Tactile Mind Quarterly, The Hiss Quarterly, From the Heart 2: Stories of Love and Friendship, Women of the Web Anthology of Poems, The Dead Mule, The War Journal, Pen Pricks, and various other venues.



Bath of Bane

I soak in a balsam bath,
drown my memories of you.
The way you said, Dammit woman,
don't you know I love you
the night you saved me from myself
when my blood sugar dropped.
Candlelight shadows my silhouette
against wallpaper of wild roses.
I feel fragile, stripped
of your protective armor.
Juice from a peach
you picked in the south orchard
trickles down my chin like tears
too torpid to turn loose.
A pit of pain remains
between my breasts
as though it’s all that's left of you.
I scrub my sins, wash away
reasons you left me,
the bitter bile of my betrayal.
I sit in a tub of cold dirty water
bathed in guilt.








Now here's a last poem for the week from me, a return to political mode.



i have this awful feeling

lies
slander
and right-wing bullshit,
lacking any talent
for governance,
it's all they can do,
ever do,
and
i have
this awful feeling
that they're going to get away with it
again
just like they did
four
years ago
and eight years
ago

it's like the abused wife
i once knew,
the abused wife
who worked for me -
after marrying three times
in twelve years
to three different
abusive men
it was hard to see her
as an entirely
unwilling
victim

it-s the same
with this election -
if the same old drivel
prevails again
for the third time
in a row,
i'll hold no sympathy
for those persistent
enabler-victims
who elect them,
then get what they deserve

it just seems
unfair
that i'll get
what they deserve
as well








Who the hell has time for subtlety - the bad guys are fighting back hard and the good guys have to do the same.

Between bouts, if you happen to be in downtown San Antonio, along the Riverwalk, and feel a desperate need to buy a book of poetry, my book, Seven Beats a Second, is now available at Ruta Maya, above the river at Martin and Soledad. Also available, great coffee, wide smiles, and lunch specials as good as it gets.

In case I don't see you there, remember all of the material presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.
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The Place Where I Live   Friday, September 05, 2008


III.9.1




First, on a personal note -

I don't get much time to send stuff off as a submission for publication, so it's always nice when something I did get time to submt is published.

I submitted some material to a new web-zine, Octopus Beak Inc., several months ago. After some problems in getting up they did finally get on line last week, using one of my poems. The zine is at

www.octopusbeakinc.com


and is really nice looking with some good stuff. You can copy and paste the url or go to the link I'll set up before this goes to post.

Moving right to the good stuff, here's what's on tap this week:

From my library

Carol Ann Duffy
Carl Sandburg
Stephen Dobyns
Alice Walker
Jack Kerouac
Herman Melville
Ramon Lopez Velarde
Ai
Richard Wilbur
From friends of "Here and Now"

Alex Stolis
Jane Roken
Lois P. Jones
Alice Folkart

And a few things from me.

Oh, other good stuff I almost forgot. I sold a couple of my photos at the Starbucks where I had them hanging, That's a first - a cool thing for me, especially since the store didn't allow any hint that the photos were for sale.








We will start this week with a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, from her book The World's Wife, published by Faber and Faber Inc. in 1999. The book looks at the "great men" of history and literature though the eyes of their spouse.

Duffy, a British poet, playwright and freelance writer, was born in Glasgow in 1955. At age sixteen, she embarked on a relationship with the thirty-nine year old poet Adrian Henri. The poem Little Red Cap from her book The World's Wife is commonly thought to be about their relationship.

She was a poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 to 1989, and is the former editor of the poetry magazine Ambit. She is currently Professor of Contemporary Poetry and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is on the judging panel for the Manchester Poetry Prize.

Duffy was almost appointed the British Poet Laureate in 1999, but lost out on the positio. It was reported that Tony Blair was worried about having a homosexual poet laureate because of how it might play in middle England.

She later claimed that she would not have accepted the laureateship anyway, saying that she had no interest in writing poetry for the type of people that would have been bothered by her appointment.



Pygmalion's Bride

Cold, I was, like snow,like ivory.
I thought He will not touch me,
but he did.

He kissed my stone-cool lips.
I lay still
as though I'd died.
He stayed.
He thumbed my marbled eyes.

He spoke -
blunt endearments, what he'd do and how.
His words were terrible.
My ears were sculpture,
stone-deaf shells.
I heard the sea.
I drowned him out.
I heard him shout.

He brought me presents, polished pebbles,
little bells.
I didn't blink,
was dumb.
He brought me pearls and necklaces and rings.
He called them girly things.
He ran his clammy hands along my limbs.
I didn't shrink,
played statue, shtum.

He let his fingers sink into my flesh,
he squeezed, he pressed.
I would not bruise.
He looked for marks,
for purple hearts,
for inky stars, for smudgy clues.
His nails were claws.
I showed no scratch, no scrape, no scar.
He propped me up on pillows,
jawed all night.
My heart was ice, was glass.
His voice was gravel, hoarse.
He talked white black.

So I changed tack,
grew warm, like candle wax,
kissed back,
was soft, was pliable,
began to moan,
got hot, got wild,
arched, coiled, writhed,
begged for his child,
and at the climax
screamed my head off -
all an act.

And haven't seen him since.
Simple as that.


Little Red-Cap

At childhood's end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit's caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,

my first. You might ask why. Here's why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew,would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes

but got there, wolf's lair, better beware. Lesson one that
    night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn't dearly love a wolf?
Then slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird - white dove
which flew straight, from my hands to his open mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with
    books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

But then I was young - and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a graying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe

to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.








I wrote this little piece after watching the four days of the Democratic convention. I didn't watch the Republican event, my appetite for lies, slander and low humor being limited.



four nights

the first night

the ramparts
laid

the cannon
primed

the togathering
begins

greetings

exchanges
of talismen,
totems,
and charms


the second night

the queen
descends her throne

lays blessing
on the tribe's
new champion

all are
swept into
the cause


the third night

hearts lifted

battle cry
sounded

shouts in
accents diverse
and insistent

setting aside
fears of the night,

of shadows
and dark forces
lurking


on the fourth night

the prince
appears
and raises his
lance
to the foe








Next, I have two poems from that old radical Carl Sandburg. They're from the Selected Poems collection published in 1992 by Gramercy Books. These are war poems, written during the first world war.

I don't know if Sandburg is still taught; I suspect not. He is seen as outdated in his blunt, straight-talk radicalism, red hot in an age when cool counts above all.

But he is still one of my heroes.



Murmurings In A Field Hospital

[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain
two days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in
                his lungs.]

Come to me only with playthings now...
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sun
    flowers...
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling
    stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world...

No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet...
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses...
And the world was all playthings.


Buttons

I have been watching the war map slammed up for ad-
    vertising in front of the newspaper office.
Buttons - red and yellow buttons - blue and black but-
    tons - are shoved back and forth across the map.

A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
and then fixes a yellow button one inch west
and follows the yellow button with a black button one
    inch west.

(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a
    red soak along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death
    in their throats.)
Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
    inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper
    office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing
    to us?








The next piece is by Alex Stolis, a friend of "Here and Now" of long standing. It is from a series Alex did on the Tarot deck.



Card VI

The Lovers have second thoughts

I've never seen a wounded bird
in flight but have heard the sound
of longing as it walks out the door.

there are no words to describe the moon
as it ripens on the horizon.

after you go I will dye my hair
again and again until its original color
is forgotten

every moment feels caged and quiet,
the sting of penance becomes dull.

magnolias remind me of our first time,
a dry summer and intentions that crumbled
to dust at sunset.

I could leave without a trace,
not even a whisper to mark my path.








Stephen Dobyns was born in 1941 in New Jersey . He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967.

He worked as a reporter for the Detroit News and has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.

My poem for this week is from his book Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides published by Penguin Poets in 1999.



No Tangos Tonight

Heart meets Death in a fashionable singles bar
and they dance. Why so standoffish? asks Death.
Why must you squeeze me so tight? asks Heart.
They take a few turns about the floor. You keep
trying to lead, says Death. You step on my feet,
says Heart. The room is smoky and the music lout.
Heart and his new partner spin round and round.
Why not come home with me tonight? asks Death.
Sorry, says Heart, being polite, I'm here with friends.
Heart tries to keep a space between them. Too bony,
he thinks, to cold. Death pats Heart on the bottom.
Won't you ditch your pals for me? Heart is stubborn.
I swore I'd only leave with them. Across the room,
the faces of his friends blur in the smoke. It's funny
how I get the last dance, says Death. But the night's
still young, says Heart. He takes a peek at his watch
but it's hidden within the folds of Death's dark cape.
The song goes on and on. The band fades from sight.
With every turn Death weighs more as Heart labors
to lug him across waxy floor. Won't someone cut in?
In my house, whispers Death, the lights are kept dim,
the rugs are thick. We could have a ball. The rhythm
swells to a calypso beat. Heart no longer feels his feet.
He hardly hears what Death is murmuring in his ear,
something about not having to drive a delivery truck.
And why does Death keep calling him Morgan? I beg
your pardon, says Heart, but Morgan's not my name.
The band falls silent; the vapors begin to disappear.
Death raises Heart's chin with a boy finger. I wish
you had told me that before. I see by my dance card
that our turn comes later. Maybe a tango or milonga.
Thanks at least for a taste of pleasures yet to come.
Heart is left by himself on the floor. Soon the faces
of his friends emerge through the smoke. Some laugh,
some are deep in thought. Heart returns to his seat.
One friend buys a round of drinks, another tells a joke
about a car. Still in shock, Heart grasps that he nearly
threw them over for a stranger. He starts to remark:
How capricious are the bonds that link us to our fate.
But then a dance begins, a tango. Heart will sit it out.








This is a poem I wrote last week. It was the end of a very long and hard day and I was dead tired and trying to get to sleep early. The piece started to unreel in my head and I had to get up and finish it before sleep would come.



and this is why


when i woke up
at 5:55 this morning,
i...

wait,
this story requires
a little bit of
set up

important
it is
first
to know
that i am a head-west
feet-east
sleeper, that is, i sleep
better if my head
is oriented to the west
and my feet are oriented
to the east

that explains
why i was sleeping at
the foot of my bed

important
also
it is to know
that, at a hair
over six feet tall
i used to be tall, though
no longer, because
people younger than me
got fed better than me
so they got taller
than me,
(my brother, for example
is six three and his son is
six five - all fed better
than me
and i try not to resent it)

anyway,
i sleep on an old bed, the bed
my father was born on
it's probably 110-120 years old,
an important fact
since it was built back when
i was still tall or would have been
had i been around
in 1880 or 1890

that explains why
i sleep on a pillow half
hung over the end
of the bed

finally
also important
it is to know that my cat
often sleeps with me,
actually more on top of me
than with me

and that explains why,
when i woke up at 5:55 this morning
with a cat hat, the cat, that is,
sleeping on the top half
of the pillow
on top of my head which she had pushed
to the bottom half of the pillow,
i was not surprised

but i was a bit surprised,
though not as much as the cat,
when i lifted my head
from the bottom half of the pillow
causing the cat on the top half of the pillow
and the pillow itself
to fall off the bed
and drop to the floor

and that's what happened
at 5:55 this morning
and it's also the reason
my cat
has ignored me all day

not a big story, perhaps,
but a funny start to what has been
a very tough day otherwise








I have a poem now by Alice Walker from her book Once: Poems by Alice Walker, published in 1968 by Harvest/HBJ. This was her first published poetry collection.

Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child of sharecroppers.

After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred up north to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi.

Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was still a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She took a brief sabbatical from writing when she was in Mississippi working in the civil rights movement, then resumed her writing career when she joined Ms. magazine as an editor before moving to northern California in the late 1970s.

In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences.

In 1982, Walker published The Color Purple, her best known work. She has written several other novels since and has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other work.



Hymn

I well remember
A time when
"Amazing Grace" was
All the rage
In the South.
"Happy" black mothers arguing
Agreement with
Illiterate sweating preachers
Hemming and hawing blessedness
Meekness
Inheritance of earth, e.g.
Mississippi cotton fields?

And in the North
Roy Hamilton singing
"What is America to me?"
Such a good question
From a nice slum
in North Philly.

My God! the songs and
the people and the lives
Started here -
Weaned on "happy" tears
black fingers clutching black teats
On black Baptist benches -
Some mother's troubles that everybody's
Seen
And nobody wants to see.

I can remember the rocking of
The church
And embarrassment
At my mother's shouts
Like it was all - "her happiness" -
Going to kill her.
My father's snores
Punctuating eulogies
His loud singing
Into fluffy grey caskets
A sleepy tear
In his eye.

Amazing Grace
How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch
Like me
I once was lost
But now I'm found
Was blind
But now
I see.

Mahalia Jackson,Clara Ward,Fats Waller,
Ray Charles
Sitting here embarrassed with me
Watching the birth
Hearing the cries
Bearing witness
To the Child,
Music.








Here's a nice summery poem by our friend Jane Roken that I want to use before summer slips away.

Jane is Norwegian, living in Denmark, on the interface between the hedgerows and the barley fields. She has been writing poetry, on and off, since she was five, starting under the combined inspiration of the Salvation Army and Calypso music. Now sixty, she has been working in many different trades, but says she has not yet decided what she wants to be when she grows up.



Wild Strawberries

Wild strawberries...
pick them on a sunny hillside
among harebells, clover
and sweet-scented grasses -
the forest on your right,
its canopy jingling with bird calls
and dragonflies jewel the air -
the pasture on your left
where dark-eyed cows graze,
fueled by content, courted
by glittering flies.

Wild strawberries...
pick them in the fragrant field,
thread them like beads
on a stalk of grass,
remember, timothy is best.

Wild strawberries...
pick them while the sun
nuzzles the nape of your neck.

Wild strawberries...
they're yours, too.
Come.








My next poems are by Jack Kerouac, from his book Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses), a Grove Press reprint from the book originally published in 1959.

I can't think of anything to say about Kerouac that anyone reading these poem isn't likely to already know.



57th Chorus

Green goof balls,
Blue Heavens.
Sodium amythol,
Sleeping compound.

Thirty of em
To commit suicide -
Lethal dose is 30 to 50
Times the therapeutic dose,
The therapeutic dose is une -
Take to thirty to be safe -
or else praps forty be better -
If you take too many
You throw em up -
    You gotta let alone
    Your stomach, if you
    threw it right down
    you would throw it up
    then, in lethal powder
    form
Better to eat the capsules
Swallow about six at a time,
Take em with cold water,
Till you get about 35 in ya
And then lay down on your back


58th Chorus

All about goofballs,
    all about morphine,
    so I read all about it,
    that's what it said,
    "Lethal dose is 30 times
    the Therapeutic dose"

Very painful death, morphine
    or heroin; never
Try to kill yourself with
    heroin or morphine:
It's a very painful death.

Doctor gave me a mainline shot
O H grain - Jesus I
thought the whole building
was falling on me -
went on my knees, awake,
lines come under my eye
I looked like a madman
In 15 minutes I begin
    to straighten up a little bit
Says, "Jesus Bill I thought
    you was dead
A goner, the way you
    looked
When you're standin there"


59th Chorus

Then I always managed to get
    my weekly check on Monday,
Pay my rent, get my laundry
    out, always have enough
Junk to last a coupla days

Have to buy a couple needles
    tomorrow, feels like
Shovin a nail in me

    Just like shovin a nail in me
Goddamn - (cough) -

For the first time in my life
I pinched the skin
and pushed the needle in
And the skin pinched together
And the needle stuck right out
And I shot in and out,
Goofed half my whole shot
On the floor -
    Took another one -
    Nothing a junkey likes better
    Than sittin quietly with a new shot
    And knows tomorrow's plenty more








It's fair to say that for the past couple of years, my writing has been mostly about recapturing memory, something I'm not all that happy about, because it's hard for me to see how anyone else could be interested.

But then, I'm not into second-guessing myself. This is what I'm doing now, and, for better or worse, its keeping me entertained, so I guess I'll keep doing it until I do something else.

I just hope I'm bringing a couple of you along with me.



rejoining our story in progress

27 years old
in 1971,
i finally graduated
from college
9 years from when
i started

after
using my last
GI Bill check
to pay off
the friendly grocer
who had been holding
my hot checks,
i enjoyed
total assets of
one Bachelor of Arts degree
(Sociology & English),
a tank
of cheap gas,
and 35 cents,
36 if you count
the lucky penny
i found in the parking lot
while walking back
to my car

i went
where one goes
with 36 cents,
a tank of cheap gas,
and a Bachelors Degree
of limited
immediate
applicability
to any employment likely
to greatly increase
my fortune -

i went home
to the only place
i knew
where i was likely
to eat free
for at least a couple
of weeks

it turned out
i had misunderstood
the benevolence
of my father
and within three days
of arriving to the
welcoming arms
of family
i had a temporary job
delivering frozen chickens
for a company
owned by the parents
of an old girlfriend
i wanted
very much never
to see again

and within
two days of
that job's ending
i was back
to driving a taxi,
2 am to 2 pm
7 days a week
for a 33% commission
which, more than once,
amounted to
$3 in earnings
for a 12-hour day

i had a few more
jobs like that,
offering little pay
but a lot of material
for a couple of good poems,
until, eventually,
rescued from literary
exploration
i found
a temporary job
lasting 30 years
and 10,000 neckties

......

this personal history
came to mind
two weeks ago
when i attended a
college graduation
featuring graduates
who will probably, by
the time i finish this poem,
be employed and earning
3 times what i made
in the best of those 30 years

so it was
and so it is
for this late-blooming
pre-boomer
born to early or born to late
it doesn't seem to make a big
difference
when comes closer the judgment
at the end








Now, for something more than a little different, a poem by Herman Melville from Good Poems for Hard Times collected by Garrison Keillor.

A couple of weeks ago I used a couple of poems from Poets Against the War, both website and book. This Melville piece would have made the book, no doubt.



The College Colonel

He rides at their head;
   A crutch by his saddle just slants in view.
One slung arm is in splints you see,
   Yet he guides his strong steed - how coldly, too.

He brings his regiment home -
   Not as they filed two years before,
But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn
Like castaway sailors, who - stunned
      By the surf's loud roar,
   Their mates dragged back and seen no more
Again and again breast the surge
   And at last crawl, spent, to shore.

A still rigidity and pale -
   An Indian aloofness lines his brow;
He has lived a thousand years
compressed in battle's pains and prayers,
   Marches and watches slow.

There are welcoming shouts, and flags;
   Old men off hat to the Boy
Wreaths from gay balconies fall at his feet,
   But to him - there comes alloy.
It is not that a leg is lost,
   It is not that an arm is maimed,
It is not that the fever has racked -
   Self he has long disclaimed.

But all through the Seven Days' Fight,
   And deep in the Wilderness grim,
And in the field-hospital tent,
   And Petersburg crater, and dim
Lean brooding in Libby, there came -
   Ah heaven - what truth to him.








Now, here's a poem by Lois P. Jones, a friend of "Here and Now."

Lois has been published in The California Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Prism Review and others as well as anthologies, ezines and internationally in Argentina and Japan. She co-edited A Chaos of Angels (Word Walker Press, 2007) with Alice Pero as well as completed work on a documentary of Argentina's wine industry. She is the recipient of IBPC's first prize honor for February 2008. You can find her as co-host at Monday's monthly poetry reading in Pacific Palisades, California and hear her as a frequent guest host on 90.7 KPFK's Poet's Cafe. She is the Associate Poetry Editor of Kyoto Journal.

This week she presents us with a found poem based on the PBS documentary, The Lobotomist. In presenting this to us, she explains that Lobotomy, in a modified form, is still done in rare cases at hospitals around the world, and that Thorazine, one of the first drugs administered after the use of lobotomy tapered off was touted as the first "chemical lobotomy" and the precursor to today's psychotropics.



An Absence of Suffering

I. Patient is Evaluated - October 26, 1960

Twelve-year-old Howard Dully is evasive and objects to going to bed.
He does a good deal of daydreaming.
He turns the room lights on when there's sunlight outside.
He hates to wash and puts on a sweater on the hottest days.
He goes without an undershirt on chilly ones.
I would not wish Howard on anybody.
Mrs. Dully said it was up to her husband.
I would have to talk to him and make it stick.

II. The Patient

After mother died, step-mother said I was unruly, defiant.

The doctor said that I was getting tests.

And I was not to now what they were doing.

I didn't know until three weeks afterward.

I don't remember that time after I woke up.

What had I had done to deserve this?
Something was taken from me.

I wasted my whole life on this, my whole life

III. The Doctor

You won't feel this.
One tap of my unsterilized ice picks.
One tap under the violet petals of your lids.
Here the skull is thin enough to transmit light.
It can be perforated easily with a sharp instrument.
The instrument upon removal appears clear and shiny.
Mental illness is a defect somewhere in the brain.
I will be the one to find it.








Ramon Lopez Velarde left few poems behind at his death in 1921, but during his life his work had been recognized to the point where he was considered Mexico's "national poet." Born in Jerez, Zacatecas in 1888, Velarde retained his love of rural Mexico, wrote frequently of that life and became known as the "poet of the provinces."

My poem for today is from Song of the Heart, Selected Verse, a collection of his work published by The University of Texas Press in 1995. It is a bilingual book, in Spanish with English translations by Margaret Sayers Peden.



Wet Earth

Wet earth,liquid afternoons
when rain whispers
and girls grow limp beneath
the drumming of raindrops on the roof...

Wet earth, redolent afternoons
when misanthropic desires rise through lewd
solitudes of air and, there, are wed
with Noah's farthest dove
as persistent lightning
crashes through murky clouds...

Wet afternoons in peasants' clothes
when I recognize that I am made of clay,
because in its summer weeping,
beneath the auspices of the half-light,
the soul turns to liquid upon the nails
of its cross...

Afternoons when the telephone rings
for those artful, languid naiads
who step from their bath to love,
to spread the conceit of their hair across the bed
and babble - with perfidy, and gain -
moist and yearning monosyllables
that echo rain upon the windowpanes...

Afternoons like a submersed chamber
with its bed and basin;
afternoons when a young girl ages
before the flameless brazier of her hearth,
awaiting a suitor who will bring a glowing coal...
afternoons when the angels
descend to plow straight furrows
in edifying fallow fields...
afternoons of prayer and Easter candles...
afternoons when cloudbursts
induce me to kindle each and any
shivering girl with the opportune ember...
afternoons when, all volition
oxidized, I feel I am
a camphor-scented acolyte:
one part swordfish
and one part Sr. Isidore laborer...








I wrote this the other night after a near-encounter at one of my coffee shops.



a tough decision

the woman
at the table next to me
looks just like
Sandra Bullock

i
looooove
Sandra Bullock

Maybe
i should just ask her,
"are you Sandra Bullock?"

maybe she is;
maybe she isn't

what's the harm
in asking?

if she isn't
well,
i'd be embarrassed
but that's not
such a big deal

the kind of life
i've led,
a double left-footed
hick from the sticks

i've been
embarrassed
many times

like the time
i was about 6 years old
and i followed

my cousin,
both of us just out of the bath naked,
down the hall in his house

into a room full
of people
i didn't know

or the time
when i was about 15

and 2 girls i liked
were yelling at me

from about half
a block away

but i couldn't
understand them
and yelled back,
"What?"

and they yelled
again
and i yelled "What?"
again

and that happened
about five times
before i realized
they were talking to someone
in an alcove closer to them

that i couldn't see

not me

and despite the fact that i remember
these incidents
and a thousand other little
embarrassments

even though they happened
112 years ago
doesn't mean I've been scarred
by them

not permanently
anyway

so
what's the big deal

i ask her if she's Sandra Bullock
and she says no
and i'm embarrassed
and that's the end of it

another in a long list of embarrassments
that haven't scarred me,

not permanently
anyway

but what if i ask her
and it turns out
she is Sandra Bullock

i ask her
"are you Sandra Bullock"
and she says, yes,

and calls that tough-looking guy
she married
over
and tells him to kick my ass
for stalking her

- you know who i'm talking about,
the one with long hair and a beard
and tattoos
all over his body
and a mean look in his eye -

so i look ahead
and see only two possible outcomes
to my simple query
as to the woman's identity

embarrassment
or an ass-kicking

a tough decision
averted
when i notice that
the woman who looks exactly
like Sandra Bullock
has already finished her
White Chocolate Raspberry Mocha Kiss
and left the
building








Florence Anthony, born in 1947 in Albany, Texas, legally changed her name to Ai, which means "love" in Japanese.

Describing herself as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, Ai grew up in Tucson, Las Vegas and San Francisco. She majored in Japanese at the University of Arizona and immersed herself in Buddhism.

Ai holds an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine and currently teaches at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater.

She is the author of Dread (2003), Vice (1999), which won the National Book Award for Poetry, Greed (1993), Fate (1991), Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation Killing Floor (1979), which was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Cruelty (1973).

She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and various universities, and has been a frequent reader-performer of her work.

This poem is from her 1999 book, Vice.



The Priest's Confession

1
I didn't say mass this morning.
I stood in the bell tower
and watched Rosamund, the orphan,
chase butterflies, her laughter
rising, slamming into me,
while the almond scent of her body
wrapped around my neck like a noose.
Let me go, I told her once,
you'll have to let me go,
but she held on.
She was twelve.
She annoyed me,
lying in her little bed -
Tell me a story, Father,
Father, I can't sleep. I miss my mother.
Can I sleep with you?
I carried her into my room -
the crucifix, the bare white walls.
While she slept,
she threw the covers back.
Her cotton grown was wedged above her thighs.
I nearly touched her.
I prayed for deliverance, but none came.
Later, I broke my rosary.
The huge, black wooden beads
clattered to the floor
like ovoid marbles,
and I in my black robe,
a bead on God's own broken rosary,
also rolled there on the floor
in a kind of ecstasy.
I remembered how when I was six
Lizabeta, the witch, blessed me,
rocking in her ladder back chair,
while I drank pig's blood
and ate it smeared across a slice of bread.
She said, Eat, Emilio, eat.
Hell is only as far as your next breath
and heaven unimaginably distant.
Gate after gate stands between you and God,
so why not meet the devil instead?
He at least has time for people.
When she died, the villagers
burned her house.

I lay my hand on the bell.
Sometimes when I ring this,
I feel I'll fragment,
then reassemble
and I'll be some other thing -
a club to beat,
a stick to heave at something:
between the act and the actor
there can be no separateness.
That is Gnostic. Heresy.

Lord, I crave things,
Rosamund's bird's nest of hair
barely covered by her drawers.
I want to know that you love me,
that the screams of men,
as loud as any trumpet,
have brought down the gates of stone
between us.

2
The next four years,
Rosamund's breasts grew
and grew in secret
like two evil thoughts.
I made her confess to me
and one night, she swooned,
she fell against me
and I laid her down.
I bent her legs this way and that.
I pressed my face between them
to smell "Our Lady's Rose"
and finally, I wanted to eat them.
I bit down, her hair was like thorns,
my mouth bled, but I didn't stop.
She was so quiet,
then suddenly she cried out
and sat up;
her face, a hazy flame,
moved closer and closer to mine,
until our lips touched.
I called her woman then
because I knew what it meant.
But I call you god, the Father,
and you're a stranger to me.

3
I pull the thick rope
from the rafter
and roll it up.
I thought I'd use this today,
that I'd kick off the needlepoint footstool
and swing our over the churchyard
as if it were the blue and weary Earth,
that as I flew out into space,
I'd lose my skin, my bones
to the sound of one bell
ringing in the empty sky.
Your voice, Lord.
Instead I hear Rosamund's laughter,
sometimes her screams,
and behind them, my name,
calling from the roots of trees,
flowers, plants,
from the navel of Lucifer
from which all that is living
grows and ascends toward you,
a journey not home,
not back to the source of things,
but away from it,
toward a harsh, purifying light
that keeps nothing whole -
while my sweet, dark Kyries
became the wine of water
and I drank you.
I married you,
not with my imperfect body,
but with my perfect soul.
Yet, I know I'd have climbed
and climbed through the seven heavens
and found each empty.

I lean from the bell tower.
It's twilight;
smoke is beginning to gray the sky.
Rosamund has gone inside
to wait for me.
She's loosened her hair
and unbuttoned her blouse
the way I like,
set table
and prayed,
as I do -
one more night.
Lamb stew, salty butter.
I'm the hard, black bread on the water.
Lord, come walk with me.








Here's a poem from our very good friend from Hawaii Alice Folkart.

Known in Hawaii for her blossoming hula talent, she is equally well known by readers of "Here and Now" as a terrific poet. There's something special about this poem, in addition to being especially good, but I'll let you figure it out. I'll admit that I was so into the poem as I read it that I didn't notice it until someone pointed it out to me. That's good!



Xanadu is all yours

Anagrams
bother me,
confuse the issue,
distract everyone.

Find the answer, and
give your opinion.
Haven't you learned anything?

In case you hadn't noticed,
joggers run the world.
Kite flyers can see all, fields and felons.

Leaping lizards keep in shape.

Must you just stare at me like that?
No one can do anything for you.
Open your eyes instead of your mouth.
Put on your costume and mask, and
quit quarreling with every other guy.

Remember that day when we ran away?

Stand by your guns.
Take your medicine and lump it.
Undulate in some kind of dance.

Victory can be yours, if you have enough quarters.

When you're ready...
Xanadu is waiting.
Yes, it's all yours.
Zoom in and take a closer look.








Born in New York City in 1921, Richard Wilbur was the second named Poet Laureate of the United States (after Robert Penn Warren) and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the United States Army from 1943 until 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade.

The next poem is from Wilbur's book Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004, published Harcourt in 2004.



A Grasshopper

But for a brief
Moment, a poised minute,
He paused on the chicory-leaf;
Yet within it

The sprung perch
Had time to absorb the shock,
Narrow its pitch and lurch,
Cease to rock.

A quiet spread
Over the neighbor ground;
No flower swayed its head
For yards around;

The wind shrank
Away with a swallowed hiss;
Caught in a widening blank
Parenthesis,

Cry upon cry
Faltered and faded out;
Everything seemed to die.
Oh, without doubt

Peace like plague
Had gone to the world's verge,
But that an aimless, vague
Grasshopper-urge

Leapt him aloft,
giving the leaf a kick,
Starting the grasses' soft
Chase and tick,

So that the sleeping
Crickets resumed their chimes,
And all things wakened, keeping
Their several times.

In gay release
The whole field did what it did,
Peaceful now that its peace
Lay busily hid.








To finish off the week, here's a little character thing I did several weeks ago. I don't think I've used it here since I wrote it.



rainbow shoes

red shoes
one day
blue
shoes
the next
green shoes
yellow
orange
and purple
shoes
too

the bonny-eyed
girl
with rainbow shoes
always
wears a
golden
smile

invites
you
with a sparkle
of a laugh
to join in
the bright
happy
day
no matter what
the hue
of your shoe








That's it for this week. Time to saddle up and move on. Until next week, remember, all the material presented on this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.
3 Comments:
at 3:40 PM Anonymous Chris said...

How did you do the pictures this week?

at 3:41 PM Anonymous chris said...

or who drew them?

at 9:40 PM Anonymous Lois said...

Allen an excellent issue. Love Jane's Strawberry's, your Sandra Bullock and Wet Earth. Thanks for having me over for dinner.

Lois

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