Black Friday   Friday, November 28, 2008


III.11.28.




For readers from outside the United States, I should explain the "Black Friday" is not some kind of day of mourning as you might think by the name, but an unofficial commercial holiday. Thanksgiving Day is, by tradition, always on Thursday. The day after is called Black Friday, a day when retailers slash all there prices and open their stores at 3 or or 5 A.M. to waiting gangs of shoppers, some have waited for 14 hours of more for the opening. It's like European socceer, mostly in fun, but sometimes descending into mob rage. So far this year, the news has reported two shoppers shot and killed at a Toys R Us somewhere.

It is called Black Friday because it is the day many retailers "make their nut," as they say, or, in other words, it is the day they count on to bring their store into the black, into profitable status for the year.

I don't participate, so enough about that.

It's a short presentation this week. Time needed for a day of turkey and college football - not much time left over for blogging.

So, directly to it, here's our lineup for the week.

From my library

Robert Penn Warren
Joshua Clover
Blaise Cendrars
Antler
Ralph Angel
Charles Bukowski
Billie Collins

From friends of "Here and Now"

Dan Cuddy
Norman Anderson
Christopher George

And just a few from me.








Next, I have two poems by Robert Penn Warren from his book Rumor Verified, Poems 1979-1980, published by Random House.

Warren was born in 1905 and died in 1989. He was a poet, novelist, and literary critic, and the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. He won the Pulitzer in 1947 for his novel All the King's Men in 1946 and subsequent Pulitzers for poetry in 1957 and then in 1979.



Small Eternities

The time comes when you count the names - whether
Dim or flaming in the head's dark, or whether
In stone cut, time-crumbling or moss-glutted.
You count the names to reconstruct yourself.

But a face remembered may blur, even as you stare
At a headstone. Or sometimes a face, as though from air,
Will stare at you with a boyish smile - but, not
Stone-moored, blows away like dandelion fuzz.

It is very disturbing. It is as though you were
The idiot boy who ventures out on pond-ice
Too thin, and hears here - hears there - the creak
And crackling spread. That is the sound Reality

Makes as it gives beneath your metaphysical
Poundage. Memory dies. Or lies. Time
Is a wind that never shifts air. Pray only
That, in the midst of selfishness, some

Small act of careless kindness, half-unconscious, some
Unwitting smile or brush of lips,may glow
In some other mind's dark that's lost you name, but stumbles
Upon the momentary Eternity.


Sitting On Farm Lawn On Sunday Afternoon

The old,the young - they sit
And the baby on its blanket

Blows a crystalline
Bubble to float, then burst

Into air's nothingness.
Under the maples they sit,

As the limpid year uncoils
With a motion like motionlessness,

While only a few maple leaves
Are crisping toward yellow

and not too much rust yet
Streaks the far blades of corn.

The big white bulldog dozes
In a patch of private shade.

The afternoon muses onward,
Past work, past week, past season.

Past all the years gone by,
And delicate feminine fingers,

Deft and ivory-white,
And fingers steely, or knobbed

In the gnarl of arthritis, conspire
To untangle the snarl of years

Which are their past, and the past
Of kin who in the dark now hide,

Yet sometimes seem to stare forth
With critical, loving gaze,

Or deeper in darkness weep
At wisdom they learned too late.

Is all wisdom too late?
The baby lalls to itself,

For it does not yet know all
The tales and contortions of Time.

Nor do I, who sit here alone,
In another place, and hour.








I wrote this last week, two days after we returned from our drive in the mountains. I very happy camper was I.



all the wonderful things i can do today

it's
a beautiful morning

about 50 degrees
dry
and sunny

downtown traffic
on I-10
is dense but sane

the river
in its slow flow
is especially green
and reflective

the autumn lady
sleeps warm by the door
under a thick wool blanket

Shantel

d
 a
n
 c
e
 s


as she prepares
my latte

my mind
overflows
with all the wonderful things
i
can
do
today








The next poem is by Joshua Clover from his first book Madonna anno domini, published by Louisiana State University Press in 1997 and recipient of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Clover, born in 1962, is a California-based poet, critic, journalist and author. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and recipient of an individual grant from the NEA.

A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, he is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis, and was the distinguished Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999-2000. He is a frequent contributor to the Village Voice, writes for The New York Times, and is a former senior writer for Spin.

Under the pseudonym "Jane Dark", Clover has written a number of film and music reviews for The Village Voice, and maintains a blog entitled jane dark's sugarhigh!



The Nevada Glassworks

Ka-Boom! They're making glass in Nevada!
Figure August, 1953,
mom's 13, it's hot as a simile
Ker-Pow! Transmutation in Nevada!
Imagine mom:pre-postModern new teen,
innocent for Elvis, ditto "Korean
conflict," John Paul George Ringo Viet Nam.
Mom's one state west of the glassworks, she's
in a tree K*I*S*S*I*N*G,
lurid cartoon-colored kisses. Ka-Blam!
They're blowing peacock-tinted New World glass
in southern Nevada, the alchemists
& architects of mom's duck-&-cover
adolescence, they're making Las Vegas
turn to gold - real neon gold - in the blast
furnace heat that reaches clear to Clover
Ranch in dry Central Valley: O the dust -
It is the Golden State! O the landscape -
dreaming of James Dean! O mom in a tree
close-range kissing as in Nevada just
now they're making crazy ground-zero shapes
of radiant see-through geography.
What timing! What kisses! What a fever
this day's become, humming hundred-degree
California afternoon that she's
sure she could never duplicate, never,
she feels transparent, gone - isn't the heat
suffocating - no, she forgot to breathe
for a flash while in the Nevada flats
factory glassblowers exhale...exhale...
a philosopher's stone, a crystal ball,
a spectacular machine. Hooray! Hats
off - they're making a window in the sand!
Mom's in the tree - picture this - all alone!
Unforgettable kisses, comic-book
mnemonic kisses. O something's coming
out of the ranch road heat mirage, that drone -
an engine? Mom quits practice & looks
east, cups an ear to the beloved humming,
the hazy gold dust kicked wildly west
ahead of something almost...in...sight, Vroom!
It's the Future, hot like nothing else, dressed
as sonic-boom Cadillac. O mom!
This land your land This land Amnesia -
they're dropping some new science out here,
a picture-perfect hole blown clear to Asia:
everything in the desert - Shazam! - turns
to glass, gold glass, a picture window where
the bomb-dead kids are burned & burn & burn








Here's a piece from our good friend Dan Cuddy, something a little different from Dan.



A Little Love-Sex Poem With Little Love And Little Sex

Poets never write about lovers postponing time in the haystack
because of sneezing
or coughing
or one of the two just feels listless
no sleep for depressing days

cloudbanks overdrawn
all you wanna do
is sit by the window
watch rain drop
the patter of brittle feet
smashing themselves
dissolving into sleep

poets write
lovers are always young
athletic
often with tans
flat stomachs
and world record endurance
flexibility
abandon
her eyes rolled up in her head
his voice grunting pulsing emptying
oh
god
of the little sleep
how wonderful
life
rejoicing in the moistness
of a kiss

old timers grunt and roll their eyes
differently
bones caught in the pleasure
like tacks in a toe
oh
damn
the joints need a little oil

poets are liars
or idealists
that dream
like magazines
or flat-breasted women of implants
or over-a-four-hour stand at attention
without wrapping
delicately
the member in cloth
owner attached
and transporting the whole rig
of the thing-a-ma-jig
to the waiting surgeon

spare the limb
woodsman
let the branch hang

but
oh
how enhanced chemically is romance

and you gotta be at work
in the morning

well, poets never write such stuff
they lie about love
and in love
and out of love
tracing shadows in the sunlight
or making shadows spew forth curses
or languish in great clinical sadness

poets exaggerate

love is so often spilled baby food
and that's not bad
but it is not poetry
in the traditional sense

but the race keeps hammering away








Here's something from my favorite traveling companion, Blaise Cendrars.

Two things different.

I've included an extensive biography of Cendrars every time I've used his work. This time I'm going to skip that and leave more time for his poetry. If you don't know Cendrars, google him. He's a fascinating character from the turn of the 20th century.

Also, when I've done Cendrars in the past, I've concentrated on his short travel pieces. They are lovely you-are-there-with-him pieces that show him to be a really comfortable-to-be-around and observant traveling companion.

Instead of travel pieces this time, I'm using several longer pieces from a section of the book, Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems that includes often untitled fragments. If you are a fan of Cendrars, as I am, this is a book you need to own. It was published in 1992 by the University of California Press, Berkeley. Out of all the shelf-combing I've done at used book stores, this book is my most prized find.

All the poems in the book are translated by Ron Padgett.



******

This Paris sky is purer than a winter sky crisp with cold.
I've seen nights as starry and leafy as this spring's
Where the trees along the boulevards are like shadows from the sky,
Foliage in the rivers mixed with elephant ears,
Leaves of sycamores, heavy chestnuts.

A water lily on the Seine, it's the flowing moon.
The Milky Way is swooning in the sky over Paris and embracing it
Wild and naked and lying back, its mouth is sucking Notre-Dame.
The Great Bear and the Little Bear are growling around Saint-Merry.
My amputated hand is shining in the constellation Orion.

In this cold, hard light, trembling and more than unreal,
Paris is like the cooled image of a plant
That reappears in its ashes. Sad simulacrum.
As straight as an arrow, the ageless houses and streets are just
Stone and iron heaped up in an unlikely desert.

Babylon and Thebaid are not deader, tonight, than the dead city of
   Paris,
Blue and green, ink and tar, its edges whit with starlight.
Not a sound. No one. It's the heavy silence of war.
My eyes goes from the pisssoirs to the violet eye of the street lamp.
It's the only bright spot I can drag my worries to.

And so I walk all the way across Paris every night
From Batignolles to the Latin Quarter, the way I would cross the Andes
Beneath the light of new stars, bigger and more alarming,
The Southern Cross more prodigious with every step you take toward it
   as you emerge from the Old World
On its new continent.

I'm the man who doesn't have a past. - Only my stump hurts. -
I've rented a hotel room to be completely alone with myself.
I made a new name for myself
Billboard upon a scaffolding
Behind which new futures
Are being built

******

Suddenly the sirens wail and I run to my window.
Already the cannons are thundering over toward Aubervilliers.
The sky is starred with Jerry planes, shells, crisscrosses, rockets,
Cries, whistles, and melismas that melt and moan beneath the bridges.

The Seine is darker than an abyss, with its heavy barges that are
Long like the coffins of the tall Merovingian kings
Bedizened with stars that drown - in the depths - in the depths.
I turn and blow out the lamp and light a big cigar.

The people running for it in the street, thundering, still half-asleep,
Will take refuge in the basement of police headquarters that smells like
   powder and saltpeter.
The police commissioner's purple car meets the fire chief's red car,
Magical and supple, wild and caressing,tigresses like shooting stars.

The sirens miaow and fall silent. The shindig is going full blast. Up
   there. It's insane.
At bay. Cracking and heavy silence. Then a shrill falling and dull
   vehemence of the bombs.
The crashing down of millions of tons. Flashes. Fire. Smoke. Flame.
Accordion of the 75s. Fits. Cries. Fall. Stridencies. Coughing.
   Collapses and cave-ins.

The sky is jumping with imperceptible winking
Pupils, multicolored streaks, that cut, that divide, that revive the
   melodious propellers.
A searchlight suddenly hits the billboard of Baby Cadum
Then leaps into the sky and bores a milky hole in it like a baby bottle.

I get my hat and now I go down into the dark streets.
Here are the portly old houses that lean against each other like old men.
The chimneys and weathervanes all point to the sky with their fingers.
I walk up the rue Saint-Jacques, shoulders jammed into my pockets.

Here's the Sorbonne and its tower, the church,the Lycee Louis-le-
   Grand.
A little further up I go in and ask a butcher for a light.
I light up a new cigar and we exchange a smile.
He has a nice tattoo, a name, a rose, and a heart with a dagger through it.

It's a name I know well: it's my mother's.
I rush out into the street. I'm facing the building.
Stabbed heart - first point of impact -
And more beautiful than your naked torso, handsome butcher -
The building where I was born.

******

I stand in the sidewalk across the street and look at the building for a
   long time.
It's the building where the Romance of the Rose was written.
216 rue Saint-Jacques, Hotel des Estrangers.
At 218 is the sign of a first-class midwife.

Since she was full she sent my mother to the hotel next door to get
   some sleep and to have me.
Five days later I was taking the packet-boat to Brindisi. My mother
   going to rejoin my father in Egypt.
(The packet-boat - the packet, the courier, the mail-boat; they still say
   "the Indian mail" and they still use the term "long courier" for the
   three-masters that go around Cape Horn.)

Am I pelagic like my Egyptian nanny or Swiss like my father
Or Italian, French,Scottish, and Flemish like my grandfather or
   whichever of my great-grandfathers was an organ maker in the
   Rhineland and Burgundy.or that other one
The best biographer of Rubens?
And there was yet another one who used to sing at the Chat Noir, Erik
   Satie told me.
However, I'm the first with my name since I'm the one who made
   it up.

I have Lavater's blood in my veins and the blood of Euler,
That famous mathematician called to the Russian court by Catherine II
   and who, gone blind at 86, dictated to his grandson Hans, age 12
A treatise on algebra that reads like a novel
To prove to himself that if he had lost his sight, he had lost neither his
   lucidity
Nor his logic.

I stand on the sidewalk across the street and I look at the tall, narrow
   building facing me
Which is reflected deep down inside me,like blood. Smoke rises from
   the chimneys.
It's dark. Never have I seen such a starry night. The bombs are bursting.
   The bursts rain down.
The gutted pavement exposes the Etruscan graveyard laid over the
   mammoths' graveyard exposed
On the construction site where they're building the Prince of Monaco's
   Oceanographic Institute
Against whose fence I step back and stagger and glue myself
A new poster on the old defaced ones.

O rue Saint-Jacques! Old slit of Paris, shaped like a vagina and whose
   life I'd like to have made a movie of, shown on the silver screen in its
   formation, the grouping, the radiating out from around its hub,
Notre-Dame,
Deep old slit,long walk
From the Porte des Flanders to Montrouge,
O rue Saint-Jacques! Yes, I stagger, but I'm not mortally wounded,not
   even touched.

If I stagger it's because that building scares me and I enter
- Second point of impact - this Hotel des Etrangers, where many times
   I've rented a room for the day
Or the night, mama,
With a woman of color,with a painted girl, from the d'Harcourt or the
   Boul' Mich'

And where I stayed for a month with that American girl who was
   supposed to go back to her family in New York
And who let the boat sail away
Because she was naked in my room and dancing in front of the fire
   burning
In my fireplace and we had fun making love every time the corner
   florist brought us a basket of Parma violets
And we read together, going all the way, The Physiology of Love or The
   Mystic Latin by Remy de Gourmont.

But tonight, mama,I go in alone.








Besmacked across the face by reality, I wrote this.



it came in the mail

it
came in the mail
three weeks ago

i opened
the envelope
and snuck a peek inside

yep

just what i was afraid of -
a Medicare enrollment form

i stuck it in a box
and haven't looked at it since,
though i know i'll have to,
soon

i remember
the great joy and satisfaction
i felt
when it passed Congress
and the emotional moment
pictured
when LBJ signed it into law
with a frail and aged Harry Truman
at his side

i just never thought
it
would ever apply
to me








What a great new find for me, the poet Antler.

Since the WiFi here at La Taza appears to have crashed, I know nothing about Antler, except for the short bio on the last page of his book, Antler: The Selected Poems where he is pictured with Allen Ginsberg and a short note that says he won the 1985 Walt Whitman Prize and the 1987 Witter Bynner Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for his book Last Words.

The selected poems book was published in 2000 by Soft Skull Press. Although it may not be evident from the first lines, there's a lot of humor in this piece.



Last Words

As this girl lay asleep on the beach
An ant crawled up her nose and laid its egg
And when they hatched and ate into her brain
She clawed away her face and died screaming.
Or that deep-sea diver whose pressurized suit burst
Who was squeezed a liquid pulp of flesh
Up the air hose onto the deck
A long strand of human spaghetti.
Or the man on a Japanese train killed by the severed leg
of a suicide who jumped from a passing train,
A hundred miles an hour through his window.
Or Li Po launching himself like a paper boat toward the moon.
Or Aeschylus strolling along the shore
When an eagle, looking for a stone to crack a turtle's shell,
Spotted his pate gleaming in the sun.
Or that pompeii boy immortalized in lava
Or the unearthed coffin, the lid scratched and bloody inside.
Or abandoned by his family, the old Eskimo circled by wolves.
Or Superman no longer faster than a speeding bullet through his head.
Or Santa's helicopter crashing in a shopping center of expectant children.
Or six children trampled to death in Cairo by a mob
Rushing to a church where the Virgin had appeared.
These deaths speak for themselves. They don't need last words.
As for me, I'm not looking into the sky for falling flowerpots.
Yet any second sights of a rifle may fix upon my brain.
Fourteen humans walked alive that day a perfect stranger
By the name of Whitman up in a tower of higher learning
Shot them down one by one. Just like that. Dead.
I think of that old man stoned by three children
      who jeered him out of his house.
If someone told me that's how I'd die in fifty years
I wouldn't believe it. Did anyone tell the old man.

How will I die? Cleaning a gun with my eyes?
Walking into a mirror? Driving my car into a tree to avoid a porcupine,
      my learner's permit in my pocket?
I know the old philosophies. Yes, I've already died in a way.
My boyhood and all that. Showers of fingernails and hair.
The constant sloughing off the cells of my body.
The death of all the semen that has left me.
My turds, moving to their own bewildered death.
Maybe it'll be like that first night in San Francisco
Waking up to go to the bathroom in Milwaukee,
And getting out my old bed I walk into a new wall.
Maybe it'll be coming up or going down stairs in the dark
Thinking there's one more step when there isn't
Or not one more step when there is.
Will choke on a bone, or be swallowed by a whale?
Or a death brimming with allusions -
Tugging a book from the tightly packed shelf
      I pull my whole bookcase over on me.
Or slow death: torture, cancer leprosy, senility.
Or exotic: voodooed, cannibalized, human-sacrificed.
      devoured by man-eating plant.
Which is worse, being eaten alive or starving to death?
Dying crying for help or begging for mercy?
Yawning while a bomb drops in my mouth.
Sneezing in the avalanche zone.
Done in my hiccups that can't be stopped.
Or like in Stekel, that man who hid under the outhouse seat
and disemboweled his wife from beneath with a butcher knife.
      I look before sitting.
Or seeing my ultimate vision of absolute beauty
I scream as in horror comics - 'AAARRRGGGHHH!!!'
Will I die laughing? Be struck by lightning?
      Will I never know what hit me?

Maybe the sky will fall on me.
Maybe the ground'll just open up under me.
Maybe a gang of boys'll pour gasoline over me and light me.
      Or will it be a case of spontaneous combustion?
Will I be mistaken for a deer during deer season?
Or like Tita Piaz who climbed 9000 feet of sheer rock 300 times
      with his son strapped to his back, only to die in a fall
      down his steps?

And when am I going to die? I'd like to know.
I don't want to get there when the show's half over.
I don't want to fall asleep. I'll have to poke myself.
I don't want to miss my death the way I missed my birth.
I sit here and plan my last words. I'm going to be prepared.
As in murder mysteries where the victim lies dying
and the hero holds him and says - "Who did it?"
In the same way they'll gather round me and ask -
      "What does this poem mean?"
      "Or do you really think that is beautiful?"
And then like the murder victim, I'll mumble far away
Feverishly trying to think of something profound and rising in pitch gasp
"It was It was It was..."
Then slumping back I die.
What will I say? Shall I make fart sounds with my lips?
Should I tell where the treasure's hidden?
Should I utter Wanbi Galeska wana ni he o who e?
      My best friend's name?
Or make make-believe deathrattles better than birdlovers
      warble songs of their favorite birds?
Or should I join the chorus of thousands who shriek 'AAAIIIEEE!!!'
       Or the thousands who go "O"
      Or "ugh" or "Oof" or "Whoops"
Or should I press finger to lips in the sin of silence?
Not content with ruling the world, Nero, wanting to be its
      supreme actor and musician, ordered full houses and
      awarded himself all the prizes, and while he sang
      no one could leave, though many pretended to die
      in order to be carried out as corpses. Shall I say
      as he did when forced to commit suicide -
      "What a great artist the world is losing!"
Or like Rabelais - "Bring down the curtain the farce is finished,"
      and later as the priests surrounded him,
      he, with a straight face, sighed -
      "I go to seek the great perhaps."
Or like the Comtesse de Vercellesl, according to Rousseau -
      "In the agonies of death she broke wind loudly, 'Good!'
      she said, 'A woman who can fart is not yet dead.'"
Or like Saint Boniface as boiling lead was poured down his throat -
      "I thank thee Lord Jesus, Son of the Living God!"
Or Saint Lawrence, broiled on a gridiron - "This side is done now,
      turn me over."
Or Emily Dickenson - "I must go in, the fog is rising."
Or Beddoes - "I ought to have been among other things
      a good poet."
Or Lindsay, full of lyson - "They tried to get me...
      I got them first."
Or Socrates - "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius,
      will you remember to pay the debt?"
Or Chopin - "Swear to make them cut me open
      so I won't be buried alive."
Or Scriabin, his face engulfed in gangrene -
      "Suffering is necessary."
Or Marie Antoinette, having stepped on the executioner's foot -
      "I beg your pardon."
Or Huey Long - "I wonder why he shot me?"
Or Millard Fillmore - "The nourishment is palatable."
Or P.T. Barnum - "How were the receipts today
      in Madison Square Garden?"
Or Carl Panzarm, slayer of 23 persons - "I wish the whole human race
      had one neck and I had my hands around it."
Or Jean Barre, 19, guillotined for mutilating a crucifix -
      "I never thought they'd put a gentleman to death
      for committing such a trifle."
Or da Vinci - "I have offended God and man
      because my work wasn't good enough."
Or Vanzetti - "I am innocent."
Zeno, founder of the Stoic school, striking the ground with one fist -
      "I come. I come, why do you call for me."
W. Palmer, stepping off the gallows - "Are you sure it's safe?""
Metchnikoff the bacteriologist - "Look at my intestines carefully
      for I think there is something there now."
John Wilkes booth - "Tell my mother I died for my country."
Dylan Thomas - "I've had 18 straight whiskies. I think that's
      the record."
Dutch Schultz - "French Canadian bean soup!"
Byron - "I wish to go to sleep now."
Joyce - "Does nobody understand?"

Must I be the scribe of each word I speak,
      never knowing if it will be my last?
Or should someone else be my full-time scribe
      (in case deathfits keep me from writing them down)
Always ready to put my ear to my lips
      in case it should be a whisper?
"rosebud." "More weight." "More light."
"Now it has come." "Now I die." "So this is death."
"Thank you." "Farewell!" "Hurrah!" "Boo!"
      "Can this last long?" "It is finished.""
Or like H.G.Wells - "I'm alright. Go away."
Or like Sam Goldwyn - "I never thought I'd live to see the day."
Or like John Wolcott when asked if anything could be done for him -
      "Bring back my youth."

I tell myself what my last words will be.
Hoping I don't get stage fright.
Hoping I don't get laryngitis.
Hoping someone will hear them.
Hoping I'm not interrupted.
Hoping I don't forget what they are.
From now on everything I say and write
Are my last words.








The next poem is by Norman Anderson, a new friend making his first appearance in "Here and Now."

Norm says his poems are inspired by his work as a Direct Support Professional in a group home where he takes care of six mentally challenged men.



Sunday Night Mass Gang

Roger rides up the lift
in his wheelchair
I lock him in
he sits right behind me
I start the bus
Rog, let's blow
church off tonight
go down to the pool hall
"Stop, Morg, Norg, Norm
don't play around with me today
I gotta help out with the service"
I tried, I always try
Rog, has his dollar in his pocket
for the plate they pass around
I sit in the back of the church
with my notebook in hand
I don't stand and sing
or kneel to pray
but I sit and pray
for the war to end
I observe the Sunday night gang
I have to wear nice dress pants
company policy
I see two teenage lads
they look like they
just got off the basketball court
in T-shirts, shorts
one kid puts his feet up on the kneeler
he seems a little jittery
probably going through
cellphone cold turkey
One girl is 13, 14 years old
standing looking around
her ponytail bobbing
to and fro
she doesn't pray
she fixes her necklace
she isn't even listening
her little brother
is goofing around
under the pew
then I thought about
Nietzsche
He would love this
"If you want to find the truth
don't go into a church" - Nietzsche
something like that
Nietzsche Kids
I'll call 'em
Nietzsche Kids
one day will find the truth
I hope
Yeah, Nietzsche Kids
are the smart ones
our future
"Up with Nihilism"
"Up with people"
no God is not dead
he can't be dead
can he?
I know these kids don't know
Nietzsche from Nemo
but one day they will
I hope
At least they're not one
of them thar
"Born Agains"
scary people them
"Born Agains"
We had a born again
run this country for eight years
creepy
very
creepy
"Norm, I gotta go to the bathroom"
Son-of-a bitch
I forgot to ask him if he had to go
before we left

gotta go
I love all the Nietzsche Kids

God bless yah!








Next, from his book Neither World, I have a poem by Ralph Angel.

Angel, born in 1951, is a poet and translator. Raised in Seattle, he attended inner-city public schools there, then worked on freight trains for the Union Pacific Railroad as he earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Washington. Later he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Irvine.

He is an Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College.



Where All the Streets Lead to the Sea

Where all the streets lead to the sea, and full-throated
canaries are free in their cages, and geraniums
splash deeply the shadows of buildings,
in those tiny, dark cages, a woman is singing from
   her balcony.

With her eyes closed,her voice is a prayer an old
widow is mouthing on the steps of the shuttered
cathedral, syllable by syllable, to the know
   in her beads.

In that very pocket, every pocket, where the alleys,
where a man falls into himself and rises up and
   knows from the inside
the unbearable weight of a white suit,
the black boot polish in his hair threading slowly
   his cheek.

Whatever got scared
really is scared, the same child who
won't go to sleep because she can't comprehend how
   it might not
pull her under. Without her. Lost track of
The one who coughs and with his hands pushes the
   air away
and coughs again. Those who bring sticks, pieces
   broken down
furniture, a door for the huge, flowering bonfires.

The thousands, walking. More or less sad. More or less
unaccommodated. The woman who in her
   granddaughter
scrunching her nose like that, tilting her head that way,

discovers again her own mother. And those two,
who got close, with their clothes on fire, it's their
   laughter
crashing onto the damp sand,
roaring.








Even though we never interact, this woman, by way of the nest she has made for herself near the door of the place where I spend most of my mornings, has become one of the characters of my life story.



the autumn lady is not well

the autumn lady
is not well -
she bends over
by the black iron rail
that looks down
on the river
and coughs and coughs,
her blanket wound
tight around her

she does not seek help,
does not acknowledge me,
will not accept help,
and i am tempted to the arrogance
of the unwelcomed Samaritan

but,
so little
this woman has,
the dignity of choice
as to how to live or die
all she has left

her
tragedy,
if such it turns out to be,
is hers alone,
a final possession
i will not choose to take from her

(is this
my thought and inaction
an allowance
or is it avoidance -

a question
that pricks softly
at my conscience)








Charles Bukowski was one of American's best known and most imitated poets. Although he published over 45 books of poetry, hundreds of his poems were kept by him and his publisher for posthumous publication. This next two poems are from the first of those collections published after his death in 1994.



Strictly Bullshit

now
there's a new one
going around:
he is whining and
telling people
that
I
was responsible
for him
not getting
published
by
The Black Vulture Press.

there have been
at least
three other poets
who have whined about
this.

well, luckily, I
don't have time to
read unsolicited manuscripts
or
advise
The Black Vulture Press.

but
if I did
I would have rejected
all three
along with
at least a dozen
other
dandies
who would like to
be published
there.

that's why I would
never
edit or publish
any
literary
gang.

at least
at the track
I can bet
on something
that won't whine and complain
and will show me
some fight
and
some run.


written before I got one

the best writers now
i'm told
have

word processors.

I'm not even sure what a
word processor
is.

but
no matter
the tree roots tangled
in my mother's bones

no matter
the shadows in the forgotten
canyon

no matter
the dream of the last
elephant

I'm not getting
one

whatever it
is

but
I hope it helps the best
writers get better
because I never could read them
anyhow.

and any boost for them
major or minor
will help us
all.

right?








Next I have three poems in the same spirit by our good friend Christopher George.



Ghosts Lingering in the Shadows

Saturday: a memorial to remember Nagasaki,
the walls of the peace headquarters hung
with framed headlines about the A-bombs

dropped on Japan; a woman plays hammer
dulcimer: O'Carolan and a sad sea shanty.
I recite poems on the Gettysburg cyclorama,

on new graves at Arlington cemetery and
a shrine in the killing fields of Cambodia;
a vet of the Vietnam air war shows us photos

on his laptop of his pilgrimage to My Lai.
And now tanks roll into another nation,
the bizarre round of violence begins again;

a flag wafts in my plastic holder of jumbled
pencils and pens, father's name fading
in the white stripes, the fabric split.


What It Is

This is a collarbone, I'm certain
- but what is this? I am not sure:

I just know that the tanks rolled
through here, people lined up

and shot. Bodies tumbled,
head-to-toe: old foes made

love in death, found each
other entwined and kissing

in the final bleak moment.


The Generalissimo Speaks

In the old days, we broke
pregnant women and babies
with our steel boots;

we caused to flow perhaps
too much blood: Si, it was
a messy business alright,

but we had the satisfaction
to hear the final gurgle
of a traitor, the snap

of his hyoid bone. We
were masters of the will,
administrators of any man's

last seconds on earth.








No introduction is necessary for former US Poet Laureate and, without a doubt, the most widely popular American poet of our time, Billy Collins.

This next poem, is from his book Picnic, Lightning, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1998.



Jazz and Nature

It was another clear sunny morning,
a dry breeze agitating the trees around the house,
and I had nothing on tap -
my usual scene in late August.

I was reading the autobiography
of Art Pepper, so I put on an Art Pepper album
and switched on the outdoor speakers
so I could sit outside in the hot sun,

and read more about his life of junk and prison
while I listened to his speedy, mellow alto
pouring out of two big maples
as if West Coast jazz were the music of Nature itself.

In this way, I drew a kind of box
around the morning,
in three dimensions and in pencil
with me inside it holding a ruler in my hand.

I read and listened and read
and sometimes flipped to the photographs
to check the faces of the man
who told me he once drove a greennish gold Cadillac.

that you could see forever into, like looking into a lake;
the man who said he composed
a ballad called "Diane" for his second wife
only to realize later
that the music was way to beautiful for her.
The fellow who admitted to selling
his dog, a champagne poodle named bijou,
for a twenty-dollar score

and who mentioned that men in prison
who were trying to kick would tuck
their pant legs into their socks
so the slightest breeze would not touch their skin.

Behind where I was sitting in the sun
was an outbreak of wild pink phlox,
and some of the bees nuzzling there
started to hum around my head.

One bee in particular seemed so curious
about me I took a swipe at him,
stood up suddenly and said "Don't mess with me
and I won't mess with you, you little punk,"

a remark no doubt inspired
by my reading about California lowlife
in nineteen fifty-seven,
my all time favorite year for jazz, as it happens.

But he persisted, this bee, and finally
drove me inside to the cool, dark study
where a cat was sleeping on a chair,
a good placed to write this down
and wonder what the rest of the day would hold -
maybe hanging a print on the wall
or getting a surprise phone call
from someone I used to love.

How about some Dexter Gordon
around the cocktail hour,
and who knows?
perhaps an encounter with a vicious ant -

all likely parts of my own autobiography,
a more cautious tale, told in the present tense,
with a few crude illustrations
and a diagram of a small family tree,

the work whose pages are turned
every day like a wheel that is turned by water,
the thing I can never stop writing,
the only book I can never put down.









Here's my last for the week.



last words

three deaths
this past week,
the deceased
not close to me, but close
to some who are,
so, while i cannot mourn
with them
i can hold them in my thoughts

thoughts
which turn to deaths
closer to me

my mother
who died this time of year,
the day after Thanksgiving,
and my father
whose death came
when he was just a few months
older than i am now
and my brother,
though older,
died younger

thoughts
of death lead
to thoughts of other deaths
and deaths to come
including my own

and for some reason
i am led to thoughts
of Sunday church services
when i was a child,
Missouri Synod, Lutheran,
the strictest
and most conservative of the sect,
a little white church
on the corner of Tyler & 8th,
the congregation
sprinkled with a few prosperous
business men in silk suits,
but mostly workingmen,
farmers,
wearing, every Sunday,
the only suit they owned,
their large, knobby hands
hanging like rough red weights
from the loose sleeves
of their jackets,

fifty or more years ago
this was,
all of them dead now,
the silk-suits and the roughhewn,
all dead an in the ground,
like my father
who wore for more than twenty years
the same double-breasted
blue, pinstripe suit
he bought in 1943 for the day
he wed my mother,
and my mother
and the other women, too,
all the women dead, too,
their Sunday-church-hats
dusty
in dark attics,
or on the shelves of resale shops,
or on the pink hair
of a seventeen year old
with studs in her ears and nose
and tattoos on her legs

so many people died,
too many to count,
enough to know that
there are more dead in my life
now
than alive

and another death
today,
death at a lesser level,
but mourned just the same,
my morning refuge,
the place where i have written
for many months,
comfortable
with the same friendly
people, comfortable at the
same table in the back
looking out on the corner
of Martin and Soledad,
its doors
and big windows boarded up
this morning,
a note on the plywood-covered door

"we are closed - goodbye"

last words,
as good as any






And that's it for our short order take-out for this week. I hope everyone had a comfortable and well-fed Thanksgiving and encourage all of you on the road today to take care. The life you save could be mine.

Assuming we both make it home tonight, until next week remember that all of 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.
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On the Road Again, Again   Friday, November 21, 2008


III.11.4.




We made it back midweek from the excursion I was journaling in last week's issue. My poems this week continue that journey to its end.

I also have a few poems from our friends, but just a few. There's lots for us to catch up on, now that we're home, and "Here and Now" is only a part of it.

I also have, as usual, a selection of poets from my library.

Friends of "Here and Now"

Alex Stolis
Katie Sottak
Michael Sottak
Alice Folkart
Thane Zander

From my library

Paul Kane
Sapphire
Ann E. Thompson
Libba Moore Gray
Campbell McGrath
Julia Alvarez
Richard Howard
Mary Jo Bang
J.P. White
Aleda Shirley
James Hoggard
Demetria Martinez








I'm beginning this week with several poems by Paul Kane from his book Work Life.

Kane is the author of two previous collections of poems, The Farther Shore and Drowned Lands. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as Fulbright and Mellon grants, he teaches at Vassar College and lives in New York.



Widower

There on the stoop alone
when all along we thought
he'd be the first to go.

So much said in that wave:
the hand languid - as though
moving through water.

I nod and walk by - words
are clumsier than gesture.
The body knows its own.


For My Father Dying

I did my weeping a long time ago.
It was in Venice, on a family trip -
Planned for the fiftieth anniversary -
And I accompanied you back to the hotel
By Vaporetto while the others went
On to see the horses of San Marco.

Golden June, Venice at its best, and you
Proposed martinis - a drink I never drink -
But down we went to the waterside bar
And despite our doubts the Italian bartender
Made good ones - knowing his Americans -
And it was a joy to be with you in enjoyment.

The youthful glint and manner back again
After so many years, and when I led
You to your room, then found my own, I lay
Down and the tears came. I wept long and hard
and knew it was for the day that comes
Sooner than tears anticipate.


Dear Margie

I don't know what life looks like from the other
side of life, but I know what death looks like

from here: like sorrow and grief and loss
and people gathered in a long remembrance -

like a winter's shadow in the afternoon.
Dear Margie, do you smile at us because

we love you or because we don't understand?
When you died you left us your life -

you've finished with it, but we haven't,
and won't, until we've finished with our own.

Your life - that shinning thing in your eyes,
that laugh, ebullient like a spring

in a mountain pool, and as generous in its flow.
Your life remains with us -

you don't need it now, but we do.
It was always part of ours anyway.








I pick up my travel journal this week on the seventh day.



day 7

Roanoke,
Virginia

a long day
yesterday, so today
we decide to take it easy

breakfast first, we think,
but, over the 10 miles from our hotel
in Salem,
to Market Square in the center of Roanoke
we see not a single restaurant, not even more than
two or three fast food joints
which i exclude from the category of acceptable dining

finally,
finding a place to park at Market Square
we begin asking
about food

a fellow at the farmers' market
suggests Ernie's,
right around the corner,
a tiny little place, long and narrow,
just wide enough to set up a line booths from front to back
and a couple of stools
backing up against the grill

it is crowded, only one booth left when we slip in the door,
and noisy, downtown people, hardhats to neckties
and all fashions in between

Ernie the proprietor is also Ernie the cook

best breakfast
in months - 2 eggs over easy,
sausage patties, dry wheat toast
and thick, dark coffee


after a walk around the square
we settle in for a tour
of the art museum

a large futuristic building,
ten galleries
of art
with lots of blank space between pieces

$16.00 for the two of us -
makes me wonder when public art, funded by public money,
will become available
at prices the general public can afford to pay


some great photos in one gallery,
come classic American portraiture
in another; one gallery devoted
to the construction of the museum itself
and several other rooms
whose contents so impressed me
that i can't remember a thing about them now

except for the homeless man
sleeping
in the corner of one of the galleries,
not real, of course,
but a presentation of reality,
an essay on invisibility
as museum visitor after museum visitor,
myself included,
walked past with out seeming to see him,
stopped and looked at paintings hanging over
the space where "he" slept
and not seeing, as if the homeless
lived in an alternate universe, unseen and unknown
to us until they panhandle us
or scream and rant on a street corner


having seen
what we could find to see
at Market Square,
we headed out toward Lynchburg
and Poplar Forest,
Thomas Jefferson's second home and plantation

we find the home
following a series of smaller and smaller roads
and finally a narrow driveway
through a deep forest of tall poplar trees

acting as his own architect,
Jefferson created an octagonal structure,
a shape he preferred for better light
and ventilation,
with wide verandahs front and back
fronted by Greek columns,
sitting in its high place
looking like a temple
on some high Greek mountain

from his grand verandah
Jefferson
could look down on the nearest
of his 4,000 plus acres

large poplar
trees,
yellow leaves
still holding on
despite the lateness
of the season;
a gentle slope of close-cut
grass;
a creek running fast;
another pasture, tobacco fields
in Jefferson’s time, a crop he despised
but planted anyway
because he needed the cash;
a forest of poplar trees broken
by a winding crushed-shell drive

around the side
and in the back, slave quarters,
not for the cultivated eyes
of the gentlemen and ladies
of the Commonwealth of Virginia


such an enigma,
Jefferson,
a genius, the greatest mind
among the founders, and perhaps
the most conflicted,
hated tobacco as a noxious weed,
a destroyer of the soil,
but grew it anyway,
a slave holder who hated slavery,
saw it as a vile practice
despoiling the country he helped create,
but never freed a slave,
until his death,
and then only his own slave family

it is of such contradictions
that this American nation is made,
some still visible
even to a passing eye
in these short seven days of travel








Sapphire (born Ramona Lofton in 1950 in Fort Ord, California) is an author and performance poet. She attended City College of San Francisco and City College of New York. She obtained her Master's Degree at Brooklyn College.

She held various jobs before starting her writing career, working as an exotic dancer, a performance artist, a social worker, and a teacher of reading and writing. Her first novel, Push, brought her much praise and some controversy for its graphic account of a young woman growing up in a cycle of incest and abuse. She lives and works in New York City.

This next poem is the title poem from her first book of poetry, American Dreams. It is a very long poem by "Here and Now" standards, but not so long at all by hers.



American Dreams

Suspended in a sea of blue-gray slate
I can't move from the waist down
which brings visions & obsessions of & with
quadriplegics & paraplegics,
wondering how they live, smell,
why they don't just die.
Some people wonder that about blacks,
why they don't just die.
A light-skinned black woman I know
once uttered in amazement about a black black woman
"I wanted to know how did she live
being as black as she was!"
I don't quite know how to get free
of the karma I've created
but I can see clearly now
that I have created my life.
My right ankle has mud in it,
I'm in debt.
I need dental work
& I am alone.
Alone if I keep seeing myself
through "Donna Reed" & "Father Knows Best" eyes,
if I don't see my friends,
people who care,
giving as much from their lives as they can.
If you live in the red paper valentine of first grade
   in 1956
then you are alone.
If you live in the world of now
of people struggling free
then you are not.

Isolation rises up
like the marble slabs
placed on the front
of cheat concrete high-rises
width apartments that start at 500,000 dollars.
It all seems so stupid
but I understand now,
why they have homeless people
sleeping in front of these
artificial-penis-looking building.
It's so we'll move in,
so such terror will be implanted
in our guts
we'll save our money
& buy a concrete box
to live in & be proud
to call it home.
All anybody really wants
is some security,
a chance to live comfortably
until the next
unavoidable tragedy
unavoidably hits them
& slices open their chests,
& takes the veins from their legs,
& carves up their heart
in the name of surgery
or vicious murder
murder
murderer.
No one,
nothing
can protect you
from the murderer.
Not the police, nuclear weapons, your mother, the
Republicans, mx missiles -
Even if you get all the niggers
out the neighborhood
the murderer might be
a white boy like David Berkowitz
baby-faced Jewish boy
who rarely misses a day
of work at the post office.
ha! ha! ha!
you're never safe!
Like a crab walking sideways
America hides its belly
under an arsenal of radioactive crust,
creeping along with its
long crustacean eyes,
stupid & blind
sucking debris from
the ocean floor
till there is no more,
while the giant Cancer breasts
get biopsied & amputated
& the crab caves in
under the third world's dreams
& million pounds of concrete.
& the murderer
stabs stabs stabs
at the underbelly &
submicroscopic
viruses
fly out
in
ejaculate
& claim
your life,
while the powers that don't be
join
for a loving circle jerk
& nostalgic reminiscence
of days gone by,
lighting candles for Roy Cohn
& J. Edgar Hoover
as they lay a bouquet of cigarettes
on John Wayne's grave
who is clandestinely slipping
into the wax museum
to suck Michael Jackson's dick
only to find he has had his penis
surgically reconstructed
to look like Diana Ross's face.
& the Trane flies on
like Judy Grahn's wild geese
over a land diseased like cancer
killing flowers by the hour
& a huge hospice
opens up in the sky
& the man quietly tells his wife
as he picks up his rifle,
"I'm going people hunting."
& he steps calmly
into McDonald's & picks off
20 people
& blood pours red
Big Macs fall flat
to the floor amid
shrieks & screams
while a plastic clown
smiles down on the house
additives & the destruction of
the rain forests built.
& you smile for a while
feeling ever so American
& in good company
as you eat compulsively.
After all,
the whole country does it.
It's just pasta heaven here
till you get your x-ray
of biopsy back.
Making the world safe
for democracy
& you can't even evade
heart disease
until you're 40
and it attacks quietly
walking on those big
expensive sneakers
niggers wear
as they shove the pawn shop gun
to your head & say
"GIMME EVERYTHING YOU GOT!"
& for once you are not afraid
cause the nigger has AIDS,
you laugh triumphantly,
finally you've given him
& the world
everything you got!

I was at Clark Center for the Performing Arts
getting ready for my monthly ballet class
when this old wrinkled-up faggot
ran up to me, threw his arms around me & grabbed me
in a vise-like grip & screamed:
BE MY BLACK MAMMY SAPPHIRE.
BE MY BLACK MAMMY.
He held on & wouldn't let go.
Finally I thought to turn
my hand into a claw
& raked it straight down his face
with my fingernails.
He let go.
I'll never forget how
hurt & bewildered he looked.
I guess he was just playing.
I was just devastated.

There are no words
for some forms
of devastation
though we constantly
try to describe
what America has done
& continues to do to us.
We try to describe it
without whining
or quitting
or eating french fries
or snorting coke.
It is so hard not
to be an addict in America
when you know numerology
& have x-rayed the inside
of Egyptian mummies 5,000 years old
& robbed the graves of Indians
deliberately blinded children
& infected monkeys & rats
with diseases you keep alive
waiting for the right time
so you can spring'em
on anyone who might be making progress.

Well, you're miserable now America.
The fact you put a flag
on the moon
doesn't mean you own it.
You can't steal everything
all the time
from everybody.
You can't have the moon, sucker.

A peanut farmer
warned
you could not stay number 1:
number 1 being an illusion
in a circle, which is
what the world is,
but you still think that
the world is flat
& you can drive out evil
with a pitchfork & pickup truck.

One time when I was a little girl living on an army base
I was in the gymnasium & the general walked in.
& the general is like god or the president, if you believe.
The young woman who was supervising
the group of children I was with said,
"Stand up everybody! The general's here."
Everybody stood up except me.
The woman looked at me & hissed,
"Stand up for the general!"
I said, "My father's in the army, not me."
& I remained seated
& throughout 38 years
of bucking & winging
grinning & crawling
brown nosing & begging
there has been a quiet
10 year old in my
who has remained seated.
She perhaps is the real American Dream.








The next three pieces are from our friend Alex Stolis who never seems to run out of ideas.

These are from his very recently completed project, on the run with dick & jane. I'll give you more information on this when it's available.



(2:52 A.M.)- Days & Deeds (Undone)

I will tell you all the secrets colors keep to themselves -
the deep blue of faith used to paint my name
on your arm

the pale yellow of fulfillment, the cool green
of silence on the highway at midnight.

With my hand on your ribs I ask you to save the pearl white
of innocence for last and you laugh,
not wanting to believe there are more ways for us to sin

I whisper your name and it gets lost in the buzz
of neon-you mumble plans to run south, hide in memories
that pull the sun away from us

in the end I will reassemble the past
piece by broken piece, crack open that last scene
and watch our future bleed to the floor.


(3:15 A.M.) Panoramas & More Panoramas

I ask if you can taste the sparks
in my mouth, smell the earth in my hair and wonder aloud
why each road we have ever taken leads us to the edge of guilt

we watch the rain come from the east, it spills on the highway
and each rumble
brings with it the feeling of desire

we're helpless as the moon dies
in shallow water. I tell you to stop.

Stop.
Wait for me

but every mile you drive we become further apart
the radio fades in, then out, then back and we get lost again
and again

let's forget where we're going, turn around and go back
to those one syllable days when we were ravenous and unafraid.



Attempting to learn Tai Chi (her version)


Jane said the desert was a reminder of deeds done, laws gone

past and stories that would never be. When they got to Mexico

the plan was to drink, maybe waste a week or two in search

of greener pastures but mostly sit stranded in the eye of a storm

and wait for winter to whisper through their belongings.

February was looking like a one way ticket back to Davenport

and by all accounts the guitar player in the Juarez dive was right -

buckets of rain would never add up to a river








I have a couple of poems now from All Around Us: Poems from the Valley, a poetry anthology published by the Knoxville Writer's Guild.

(I drove through Knoxville last week, one of the places I'd like to go back to for a longer visit.)

The first of the poems is by Ann E. Thompson, a native Memphian who received her BA from Arkansas State University.

I feel a personal connection to this poem having worked for a small newspaper many years ago that published with a press like the one described. It was a special treat to go back to the press room every weekday afternoon and watch the press roll, blank paper turning into the news of the for the little communities the paper served.



Gone to Press

A nuts and bolts creature,
the German beast lies still
as men force feed her
cyan soy ink and oil her joints.
X-ray-like plates are fit
in her metal-fashioned belly,
and paper rolls are webbed
through her skeleton.
With the flick of switches,
power vibrates through her frame.
She churns with the clink
of parts moving in mechanic rhythm
as broadsheets snake
through her iron innards.
Black-handed old timers
stand by as she stamps
on page after page,
bleeding he news
of Jack Owens, county sheriff,
who blew his head off
in the Gulf station
at Hollywood and James.
Old Ruff watches his child
spit the paper in his hand.
She will be tomorrow's dinosaur,
left to sit in he Smithsonian
and have her brittle bones
stared at by kids on field trips.



The next poem from All Around Us: Poems from the Valley is by Libba Moore Gray. Before her death, Gray published six children's books and left behind a number of pieces due for release.



Being Home

I have a friend who said the mountains were oppressive
smothered her
any day she said
green mold growing on her tongue
under her fingernails
moss for hair
green tendrils for arms and legs
she ran home to New Mexico
David left for San Antonio
Anne for Washington
Larry for Mississippi
Gretchen for South Carolina
Pat for Charlottesville
I'm still here
dipping green from mountain pools
blowing green smoke in the air
unwrapping kudzu vines from legs
listening to the whippoorwill sing a green hymn to the moon
while algae swims slowly over my lids.








Next from me, the journey continues through the eighth day.



day 8

Asheville,
North Carolina

2,601 miles

cold in Roanoke,
42 degrees,
and damp
with a stiff north wind

our plan
for today is to drive the
Blue Ridge Parkway,
that section of it from
Roanoke
to Asheville, 233 miles,
following the boney ribs
of the Appalachians
though Virginia
and into North Carolina

it will take all day

through the curves
and thick forest
of poplar and pine,
leaves falling like
golden snow,
we begin to climb


the road is good,
a federal park road,
two lanes, well maintained

a half dozen
wild turkey
along the roadside,
undisturbed
by our passing

a fat deer
i see ahead
leaps across the road
and through the trees


the weather,
bad when we started
gets worse

we had started
ahead
of a cold front
rushing down from
Lake Erie
and for a while
we stayed ahead,
but every time we stopped,
for a picture,
to give Reba a walk and sniff
and pee break,
or just for a walk -around
for ourselves,
the front passed over us
and for a while
we would be in its midst

we are enfolded
by the rain
and the fog
and the forest all around us


all of the facilities
along the way,
restrooms,
restaurants,
lodges are closed
for the winter,

but many small mountain
villages
line the route, some
a quarter mile or less
off the parkway

lunch in little Maybry Mill,
Becky's Home Cooking

from what we see,
Becky might be the middle-aged fellow
who takes our order, grills our burger,
and collects our money when we're done

an oil field looking guy
like i used to see around the oil patch
in South Texas,
two fingers missing
and permanent grease under
the nails that remain

he's the only person we see,
but for a family - mom, dad,
boy with a gimme cap,
and a little blond girl
who keeps looking at me -
and an older man who says
he's waiting for a business
associate to join him for a meeting


each time we get behind
the cold front
it takes longer to get ahead again

soon,
we are stuck in it
and cannot catch up

grand vistas
across green and gold hills around us,
cleared pastures,
little villages
with little white houses
and broken-down barns
and church steeples
and yellow school buses
parked behind schools closed
for the weekend

the temperature
at 3,700 feet
is 37 degrees,
a fierce cold wind
blows through the wooded valleys
and across the high crests,
so strong
it billows my levi jacket
out from my back like blue wings,
almost lifting me over the edge

the chill factor is in the teens


it begins to snow
as we approach Boone, North Carolina

enough
to take us off the parkway
and on to hwy. 26 to Asheville





"a day of fishing"
painting by Katie Sottak




I am very pleased to have this week more paintings by Katie Sottak, a fine young artist and daughter of poet and frequent "Here and Now" contributor Michael Sottak.




"a night in pari"
painting by Katie Sottak




"a taste of new england"
painting by Katie Sottak




"hazel drizzle"
painting by Katie Sottak




"monroe"
painting by Katie Sottak




"whiskey tide"
painting by Katie Sottak









Campbell McGrath was born in Chicago in 1962 and grew up in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1984 and his MFA from Columbia University's creative writing program in 1988. He currently lives in Miami, Florida, and teaches creative writing at Florida International University.

He is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including him most recent Pax Atomica.

The next poem is from Florida Poems, one of his earlier collections published in 2002 by HarperCollins. It is a beautiful piece about the sorrowful loss of language.



The Calusa

For the way the waves of the new-moon water
cross the wide flats of salt-mud and marl
to spill and pool and lap and purl
amongst the roots of the red and black mangroves
there is no word in you wide-traveled tongues.

In our language it was called:

Here is a word for a certain star which is also a flower:
Here is a river-fish, the alligator gar:
Here is a way of speaking of the character of a warrior
unskilled in the ways of village women:

The name of our brother, the great blue heron:
Our brother, who is also our enemy, the hammerhead shark:
A word for the way a greenback turtle lays her eggs:
For the mighty cypress from which we craft our war-canoes:
The name of the wind in the season of pelicans:
A way of saying many whelks or bountiful:
Infant seahorses cradled in brine:
Sand dollar worn through the ear of the chieftain's daughter
Masks in the forms of crocodiles, dolphins, panthers:

Because our carvers and craftsmen
had not learned to forge Spanish metals
the sacred figures of our artifacts are lost.

Because our priests and storytellers
had not mastered the scribal sorcery of letters
our words vanished with us
like the small round seals rich with fat
we hunted in such numbers to feast upon,

animals whose bones endure in our shell mounds and middens
as the ghost of our language moans through the names of our villages
disfigured by the accents of those
plucked from the torture fires to live amongst us:

Calos, Tanpa, Yobe, Guacata, Escampaba, Mayaimi

A man has three souls: his shadow,
the reflection he finds waiting to watch in still water,
the flame that dances in the pupil of his eye.
Two perish with him while one abides,
and the name of the eternal spirit is:

Here is a word for a rookery of flamingos and scarlet ibis:
A word for the color of the gulf at first light:

A word for us, the fierce people: Calusa.








Speaking of Michael Sottak, father of Katie, here's one of his pieces, typically hard-hitting and controversial.



the smell

comes from the alley
piss fermenting in a narrow shadow
i look at my socks for a second
a shadow occludes the moment
the musty rhetoric of forty years
and equal opportunity is begging
for another dollar

how long
equal in eyes of government
nothing has changed

how long do i have to work
my ass to the bone my feet broken
and my shoulders worn
my hands calloused
scars on my face
to come home to this

eight months a year at sea
so they can collect benefits
from uncle sam
you tell me

well nothing is perfect
nor will it ever be
but why do i owe
them entitlements?








Next, I'm back again to poems by Julia Alvarez from her book Homecoming.

Alvarez, a poet, novelist and essayist, was born in New York in 1950. A Dominican-American, she and her family moved back to their native Dominican Republic while she was still an infant. They stayed there until she was 10 years old, when the family fled back to the United States after her father participated in underground activities against the military dictator Trujillo.

Homecoming was her first book, published in 1984. Her breakthrough came in 1991 with the publishing of the international bestseller How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, which was subsequently chosen as a notable selection by the American Library Association.

Three months after she fled with her family back to the United States, the leaders of the underground railroad, the Mirabal sisters that aided their escape, were murdered. She based her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, on these events. The book was later made into a film produced by Salma Hayek.

Alvarez was a poet in the schools for the Kentucky Arts Commission from 1975 to 1977. In that capacity she visited elementary schools, high schools, colleges and communities throughout the state conducting writing workshops and giving readings.

In 1978, she served in the same capacity with senior citizens in Fayetteville, North Carolina, under the aegis of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Council of Fayetteville. This project produced an anthology, Old Age Ain't For Sissies. She also conducted workshops in English and Spanish at Mary Williams Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware sponsored by the Delaware Arts Council and the Wilmington School District. This project produced an anthology, Yo Soy/I Am.

Alvarez taught English and creative writing at California State University, Fresno, College of the Sequoias, Phillips Andover Academy (a 9-12 boarding school), University of Vermont, George Washington University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before coming to Middlebury College as an assistant professor in 1988. She was promoted to full professor in 1996 and resigned her tenured position to write full time in 1998. The college created the position of writer-in-residence for her, where she continues to teach creative writing on a part-time basis, advise Latino students, and serve as an outside reader for creative writing theses by English majors., University of Vermont, George Washington University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before coming to Middlebury College as an assistant professor in 1988. She was promoted to full professor in 1996 and resigned her tenured position to write full time in 1998. The college created the position of writer-in-residence for her, where she continues to teach creative writing on a part-time basis, advise Latino students, and serve as an outside reader for creative writing theses by English majors.

One of my favorite parts of Homecoming is a section of short prose pieces written as if pages in her diary. Together, they are the story of a person searching for a life, unsure, at her young age nearly 25 years ago, that such exists for her.

Here's a sample of those pieces.



My gay friends ask, Well are you gay or what?
And men agree we're friends, but don't I want
a man? Or husband, my mother wonders,
Don't you want children? My sister wishes
I'd end up with a man who also wants
to change the world and is willing to work
for it. The two of you could do peace work
and stuff, she says, certainly you'd worry
less if you were having sex. It's weird
not to be with someone, man or woman,
even a nun though celibate is wed
to Jesus Christ. What kind of woman
are you? I wish I knew, I say, I wish
I knew and could just put it into words.

********

33 is the year that Jesus christ
embraced His life, the minister teases.
I've come to take the edge of loneliness
by being convinced that maybe god exists,
is with me in the empty bed, with
me for bread and tunafish since recipes
depress me with leftovers, and just is.
Wasn't he crucified at 33,
I ask, depressed, deserted by his friends,
divorced from god, subject to human laws?
Wasn't he the most single finally
at 33, meeting his lonely end?
Yes, the minister takes my hand, he was.

********

Are we all ill with acute loneliness,
chronic patients trying to recover
the will to love? Yet all we've suffered
from others and ourselves, all the losses
of faith in the human face - when we glimpsed
the animal in the mother's grimace
or in the lover's grin as he promised
the promise no one can keep - made us lapse
back into our separateness. We all feel
absence like a wound. Sometimes the love
of another wounded one acts like a salve
which soothes the dying self but cannot heal
our lives. And perhaps this is what if feels
like to be human, and we are all well?

********

My parents are in Germany as guests
of a Gerontology conference.
Mother mailed the cards so that they'd get
here on or about March 27th.
Today three strangely large envelopes came
with (in her hand) DO NOT OPEN UNITL
YOUR BIRTHDAY. The first card's a hallmark poem
about how daughters are incredible.
The second one is meant to make me laugh:
a middle finger tied with a ribbon
(a hint they missed) says, don't forget to have
a ball, love, Mom, Dad's name written by Mom.
In the last one's a check, the memo reads,
Get yourself something in our name you need.

********

Get yourself something in our name you need,
Sounds wistful, sounds like they already know
their daughter's life is turbulent, and so
to make up for it, here's pocket money!
Oh God, they think, watching the sad rain fall
from their Munich hotel the afternoon
of my birthday, Why did we bring children
into a world we can't make heads or tails
or sense out of? Perhaps they're visiting
monuments of man's inhumanity
to man, and turns to him asking simply
Why? And for comfort they hold hands wandering
where thousands died. And I want suddenly
to give them something, anything, they need.








The ninth day brings more bad weather, and a change in our plans.



day 9

Birmingham,
Alabama

2,962 miles

with bad weather
bearing down hard on us
we decided last night
to head south
today
to warmer weather,
but first one last stretch
of mountain vistas
across the Great Smoky Mountains

but the weather made a quicker turn
for the worse overnight than we had expected

heavy snow
during the night
has dusted white
across the lower elevations

higher,
thick dark clouds
wrap around the mountains,
covering them like a dirty white blanket


we asked our waitress
at the Waffle House
about what route she would recommend
and she was quick to say
we should stick to I-40 and bypass
the higher passes

the soft, slow slur
of a southern accent
can make a Southerner sound stupid
to many ears,
especially a Southern woman

pity
those who believe it true


the day passes
dark and rainy,
begins with the long descent,
miles of descent
between snow powdered
peaks
to the lower lands of North Carolina
and then Alabama

i expected
cotton fields
but found forests, instead,
still with all the colors of fall,
turning more and more to green
as pines begin to infiltrate, then dominate,
tall thin giants
straight as fence posts
with a bushy crown at the very top


Birmingham
as the sun falls,
the closest we've come to ending the day
before dark

our hotel
near the interstate,
is easy to find -
for the first time
we settle into our room
before 9 p.m.








Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He studied at Columbia University and the Sorbonne. After working for several years as a lexicographer, he became a translator for the French and has published more than 150 translations. In 1983, he received the American Book Award for his translation of Baudelaire's fleurs du mal.

He received the Pulitzer Prize for his third book of poems, Untitled Subjects and later received the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award for his poetry books.

He was formerly the poetry editor for The Paris Review and currently fills the same position with the Western Humanities Review. Formerly Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is currently Professor of Practice in the School of Arts Writing of Columbia University.

The next is a funny piece i may have used before (but I like it), taken from his book Trappings, published by Turtle Point Press in 1999.



Disclaimers

The text of Bach's St. John Passion, performed tonight unabridged,
is largely derived from the Gospels, portions of which are alleged
(by some) to be antisemitic. Such passages may well disclose
historical attitudes fastened (by Bach himself) to the Jews,
but must not be taken as having (for that very reason) expressed
convictions or even opinions of the Management or of the cast.

*****

The Rape of the Sabine Women, which the artist painted in Rome,
articulates Rubens's treatment of a favorite classical theme.
Proud as we are to display this example of Flemish finesse,
the policy of the Museum is not to be taken amiss:
we oppose all forms of harassment, and just because we have
   shown
this canvas in no way endorses the actions committed therein.

*****

Ensconced in the Upper Rotunda alongside a fossil musk-ox,
the giant Tyrannosaurus (which the public has nicknamed "Rex"),
through shown in the act of devouring its still-living prey implies
no favor by public officials to zoophagous public displays;
carnivorous Life-Styles are clearly inappropriate to a State
which has already outlawed tobacco and may soon prohibit meat.








Here's a piece, a little theological interpretation, by our friend Alice Folkart.



Let Me Tell You

God is mine saith the Man,
and I follow his ways,
HE speaks only to me,
do you hear Him?
That booming in the distance?
I will tell you what He wants.
HE wants me to tell you
what He wants and wants you to do it
for me as His agent and interpreter.
He speaks in tongues
that He has taught me, only me,
that only I can understand.
But, I'll tell you what He says,
what He says to me and says to you to do
as I say, now listen to my booming voice.
He is mine, and you are too,
And I will show you the Way.








Next, I have a couple of poems from the October 2007 issue of Poetry.

The first poem is by Mary Jo Bang.

Bang was born in 1946 in Missouri and grew up in a suburb of St. Louis. She received a B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Northwestern University, a B.A. in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University

She is the author of five books of poems, including Elegy, in 2007, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, in 2004, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of the Swans, in 2001), and Louise In Love, in 2001. Her first book, Apology for Want, published in 1997, was chosen for the Bakeless Prize.

Bang was the poetry co-editor of the Boston Review from 1995 to 2005. She continues to live in Missouri, where she is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Washington University.



And as in Alice

Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because
She's only a metaphor for childhood
And a poem is a metaphor already
So we'd only have a metaphor

Inside a metaphor. Do you see?
They all nod. They see. Except for the girl
With her head in the rabbit hole. From this vantage,
Her bum looks like the flattened backside

Of a black and white panda. She actually has one
In the crook of her arm.
Of course it's stuffed and not living.
Who would dare hold real bear so near the outer ear?

She's wondering what possible harm might come to her
If she fell all the way down the dark she's looking through.
Would strange creatures sing songs
Where odd syllables came to a sibilant end at the end

Perhaps the sounds would be a form of light hissing.
Like when a walrus blows air
Through two fractured front teeth. Perhaps it would
Take the form of a snake. But if a snake, it would need a tree.

Could she grow one from seed? Could on make a cat?
Make it sit on a branch and fade away again
The moment you told it that the rude noise it was hearing
      was rational thought
With an axe beating on the forest door.



The next poem from Poetry is by J. P. White.

White has published four books of poems, including In Pursuit of Wings in 1978, The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator's Garden in 1988, and The Salt Hour.



Minnesota Ice Train

Some men who are at least fifty-five
wake up in the night to touch their sex
like patting the family dog on the head.
Others rise to pace the square of their den
as if called to guard duty. Still others
peer back at me from their bedroom windows
as if on lookout for some lost shipment
to arrive from Bitterroot, Montana.

I uncurl in bed listening for the 3 AM train
to whip through Wayzata, hugging the lake
so close I imagine it could skip the hot rails
and skid across the ancestral ice toward me,
an ice train come to ferry me home or away
from my encircling command or back to some
earlier time when I too was more fiercely
racing the night, my body clamorous thumping,
the windows rattling, the length of me
moon-drenched, snow falling, sparks raking
my wheels, one more town flown through.








Now, the tenth day, and our last stop before heading home.



day 10

Lafayette,
Louisiana

3,443 miles

three states today

Alabama
Mississippi
Louisiana

cool
when we began
in Birmingham,
low 40's
with a clear sunny sky,
the first
since we left Columbus
whatever many days ago

it is a beautiful day

our passage through
these most southern of states
is uneventful

lunch at a little truckstop
in Pearl River County,
Mississippi,
3 county deputy sheriffs
at the table next to us,
all black,
making me think of my first
trip though the south,
on a bus
in the spring of 1966,
white and colored waiting rooms,
white and colored restrooms,
white and colored water fountains,
illegal
since the passage of the civil rights act
of a year earlier,
but lifelong habits break hard,
people still segregating themselves
because that's the way they knew

but hard or not,
habits change
and what could not be imagined
becomes routine


the forests
deepen and thicken

for awhile
the edges of
true wilderness can be seen

thinning
as we pass into Louisiana,
through Baton Rouge,
50 miles to Lafayette,
most of it on elevated highway
passing over lake and swamp

an easy end to the day
we expect,
the hotel is directly off the interstate
and it's still daylight

but the first hotel is a disaster,
three rooms,
all with one problem or another

after 30 minutes
of being moved from room to room,
we repack
and go to another hotel
next door

cajun cooking
at Prejeans for dinner,
spicy gumbo
and a dozen fried shrimp,
with a fiddle band
doing its best to play over
a large room full of loud-talking diners

early to bed tonight,
early to rise tomorrow

home
before dark,
if the gods of Houston traffic
allow








Aleda Shirley received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mississippi Arts Commission, and the Kentucky Arts Council. Her poems appeared in such places as The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Shirley's debut book of poems, Chinese Architecture, won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award in 1987. Her second poetry collection, Long Distance, received excellent reviews when published in 1996.

The poem I'm using is from her third book, Dark Familiar, was published in 2006 by Sarabande Books of Louisville, Kentucky.

Born in 1955, Shirley lived in Jackson, Mississippi at the time of her death earlier this year.



Blue Over Orange

October's first cold day & when I get in the car
my breath forms a brief chrysanthemum
on the inside of the windshield & I'm aware,

suddenly, of all the yellow leaking from the world,
the lost green veins of the leaves. On my list
of errands the last stop is the video store where

the movies I watched in college are now classified
as Cult Favorites or Classics & the beautiful boy
who works the counter rolls his eyes when I take out

the Truffaut for the dozenth time, Not again, he says.
He's nice to every one, but he sees me, if he sees me at all,
as an adult woman in a dark coat, with an expensive bag.

We touch only when we exchange money. The lobby
of a narrow French apartment, an alley of poplars:
those scenes from a movie, not my life. I'm unlikely

to rent the movies that excite him: Japanese animation,
a documentary on mountain climbing, seventies concert films
from before he was born. Hours later, at home

with my glass of bourbon, he's with me still, & I think,
out of nowhere I tell myself, about how when I was thirteen
& we lived overseas I saw middle-aged NCOS

with beer guts & sunburned scalps walking the streets
of San Angeles City, holding the hands of girls
not much older than I was, girls paid to be adoring,

who covered their mouth when they giggled
& wore strange yellow nylons the color of no human skin.
When we'd walk down those streets, my friends & I,

our raffia bags stuffed with devalued pesos,
Filipino boys would sit on their haunches & make
wet clucking noises at us. Back then I imagined the misery

of the teenaged prostitutes, though not in any detail,
& the men's daughters stateside, reading
Tiger Beat in their rooms, trying on Yardley lipstick.

Later I thought about the wives, left behind
at Lackland or Minot or Clovis, the scent
of coffee, Salems, Emeraude, & something that may

or may not have been history pushing them to the sides
of their own lives; now I think of the men -
how little of life turns out to be a choice, after all,

& the way those choices we do make
can transform beauty into pathos or desire
into commerce. We are, all of us, almost alike.








Finally, on the eleventh day, homeward is our direction.



home bound

San Antonio,
Texas

home!

3,986 miles

11 days,
9 states,
10 counting Texas
since the distance we drove
in Texas
was equivalent
of several of the states

Arkansas
Tennessee
Virginia
West Virgini
Ohio
North Carolina
Alabama
Mississippi
Louisiana
Texas

leaving
Lafayette
early this morning,
missed the turn to I-10 West,
headed down I-10 East instead,
back the way we'd come last night -
the first exit leads us onto a street of large houses
on acre lots backing up to a lake

a truism
proven several times on this trip -
the best way to learn about a city
is to get lost in it


much map waving later
and back on course,
i stop at a gas station,
convenience store,
deli, liquor store
and casino
for a bottle of Diet Pepsi
and a package of M&Ms -
easy shopping,
almost every vice
known to the human race
at one convenient location

friends from the state
speak of its beauty

i see that,
but i see the ugliness as well,

the seediness
behind the facade,
like a middle-aged beauty queen
showing the sag
of body and spirit that comes
from too many nights
closing too many bars
with too many men

i love the food
and the music of the accent,
but it is not a place i could ever live


pass Lake Charles
and over the Mississippi

twice this trip
i've crossed the Mississippi,
in Tennessee going north
and here in Louisiana going south

a beautiful broad river,
like the Grand Canyon,
a tale that lives up to its telling


across the state line
and back in Texas

the passage
of Ike
and Rita
and Katrina
still visible
in broken and fallen trees,
blue plastic tarps
over rooftops,
piles of refuse in fields
and on the sides of roads
and a travel trailer graveyard,
hundreds of travel trailers
in a field
relics
of FEMA
and the storms


a stop in Beaumont
for lunch
at Rick's Cajun Cooking

D goes for the fish,
broiled,
while i take a chance on the steak and sausage
special,
two pieces of sausage and a small steak
in a bowl of rice and gravy -
first time i ever had a bowl of steak

but D's fish was very tasty,
as was the dirty rice


an hour and a half to Houston,
with an easy crosstown drive,
never slowing below 55 mph
in a city that has taken me
as much as 2 hours to get through before

a good omen for the end of our journey

then,
home

Reba pees on her favorite tree,
Peanut pees on herself,
as she usually does when excited,
and cat fusses -
wants us all to go to bed
so she can sleep in my lap








The next piece is from Two Gulls, One Hawk by James Hoggard. The book, which consists of two long poems, was published in 1983 by Prickly Pear Press of Fort Worth, Texas. The second of the book's two poems is its title poem. The first is titled Tornado's Eye. The poem is broken into nine parts; I'm doing the first two parts.

Born in 1933, Hoggard was the first Poet Laureate of Texas. I can't find anything on him later than 2001, but at that time he was, and had been for many years, a professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls. He acquired his Bachelors of Art degree at Southern Methodist University in 1963 and his Masters of Art degree at the University of Kansas in 1965.



Tornado's Eye

1
Tall brush pulled back,
the cave's mouth gaped

  mutely now I think
  as if the secrets buried
  in the Indian mound nearby
  had astonished even
  the sandstone hill.

Stooping, we crawled inside
its gullet: huge room
lifting my 12-year old eyes
so high my feet felt
they'd leave the rock-rough ground

  I was entering that
  which I didn't understand
  and through my mind
  seethed with lust
  my groin was dumb

We went farther
The sharp coolness
turned dank
as if a giant's turd
had not yet died to stone

The vast place still,
no dust slapped
grit on sweating faces
as hot winds had
in the mesquite pasture's scorch
we'd maneuvered through
to get our blown selves here

Boulders pinched the pathway
Halls led left and ahead
flashlights went on
though sunlight poured
from a hole in the roof
forty feet up. We'd gone
deeper than i'd thought

  It wasn't a journey through womb
  but a wandering into daydarkness

Until I saw the million bats
hanging from the ceiling
like brown egg cups
I thought, Here's a place where
I could learn how to mate
if one of the college girls
would join me

  Two months before
  I'd taken my girlfriend
  into a crypt back in town
  in the Catholic graveyard

  Ignoring the fecal air,
  we sat on a slab,
  talked about school,
  ate Eskimo Pies

  I was too shy to kiss her
  and the next year
  she ran off for marriage,
  the little tart,
  not even pregnant,
  just whirling with hell

Feet slipping,
we scrimmaged for balance,
palms and fingers rubbed raw
on slick, sharp rock
A spring leaked
down the shiny walls

We slopped through a puddle,
found benches in rock
and listened to the teacher
tell us how
to recognize vampires:

those large bats
threading the dome
in circular flight

  The stories were right
  the don't sleep
  when the others do,
  but they won't get close
  as long as you move

That night we hunted
for ringtail cats,
saw muskrats in a lagoon

  If i'd only brought my frog-gigger
  I could've left this bunch
  and in the morning
  caught crawdads, too
  and lazed in a tank,
  dreaming about diamondbacks' coils,
    their heads in shade:
    silhouettes of my big-toes

but that night we slept
in a plowed field
whose clods made the slow night long

The sandwich I'd brought
for breakfast was stale
and I threw it away
with the one packed for lunch

Then again we went
back in the cave,
crawled deeper than before
but all I brought back
was a bat

I kept it in a Mason jar
three days till it died
then buried it with coffee grounds
to keep the earth from turning rank
but never lost the biting taste
of day-old miracle Whip
or the stiffness in my back,
the sickness in my gut
from trying to sleep
on hard, lumpy ground
or the softness on my eyes
of the pale swell of breasts
I saw through a blouse
before I became
too worn out to care
that I in my ignorance
was making a journey

into what I still am not
even sure was self

  at the end of the breast is a bud
  the size of a berry
  and between the legs
  shrimp-scented hair


2
Six years before
in a damper, green place
where few winds blew,
I was tramp of the park next door

and at dusk one evening
before lightning bugs rose
I saw the neighborhood
watching a man
beat up a woman
until Bobby Boggs' father
chased the sleeveless undershirt off,
Bobby and his mother both crying
hysterical Mr. Boggs'd get knifed

  World War II was just one year past
  but something more than fighting
  was going on between those two
  They'd been necking
  before the crowd arrived -
  I'd heard her refuse
  to go with him in the john
  so he hit her
  then pushed her down
  and rode her waist
    (yippi ti yay ti yo)
  while they cussed each other,
  tried choking each other
  there in the clearing
  persimmon trees ringed

  and the horse apples looked like cannonballs

  The public john was a two-doored bunker,
  play pen for us kids
  We'd trade with the girls there
  touches on our underwear
  and laugh while we squeezed
  ripe persimmons in our hands

The next day Bobby and I and Nan

  after checking the pipes
  we kept in the creek
f  or catfish and crawdads

went under the Beckley St. bridge

As Nan pulled her shift off
Bobby told her, "One day you'll have big ones"
"and we'll all," she said, "have hair"

Laughing, Bobbie asked me,
as he rubbed her mosquito-bite nipples,
"Don't you think she'll have great big ones?"

  I couldn't tell
  Her ninners looked just like ours

Cars were passing overhead
Bobby took a crap
then Nan squatted
to show us how she peed

A watersnake slid
through the weeds near
where our footprints were

  was thinking of Henry Noble,
  the gangster-gambler who lived down the street
  Seven attempts had been made on his life
  They'd get him on the ninth

That in Trinity Heights in Oak cliff in Dallas
whose wet air turned
the bones in your legs
to sponge

  and before I returned
  to the place of my birth
  where summersun's razorblades
  sliced beneath skin
  and a cave was required
  in the mind to protect
  yourself from the blast
  of drought in your bones








Here's a piece from our friend in New Zealand, Thane Zander.



Power Failures

Yes! Your standard car versus pole
this one today lasted four hours
a double pole taken out by speeding car,
the inhabitants apparently OK, BUT!!!

They left me without power for four hours
sacrilege - did they not consider me,
did they not think twice about my PC time
if they had they would have gone the speed limit.

How did that thought crop into my mind,
yeah this one - Bush is a shining example of power failure,
him and his cronies - or does power corrupt all?
Clinton had the power to tell the country, we did not do it?

Yes that's right, Monika Lewinsky, where is she now,
all power corrupts, makes minds wander,
I wonder where they think they are when having sex,
with the wife or other, where is their mind?

Sadly they don't win, love at all costs conquers all,
love of country, love of the planet, love of the cosmos,
do they realize, yes even the car crash victims,
that supercharged power corrodes everything.

Now (as is plainly obvious) I have my internet back,
all power to me - have no fear, I'm incorruptible








My next three poems are by Demetria Martinez, from her book Breathing Between the Lines, published by The University of Arizona Press in 1997.

Martinez is an author, activist, lecturer and columnist. Her books include the widely translated novel, Mother Tongue, winner of a Western States Book Award for Fiction. Her autobiographical essays,Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana won the 2006 International Latino Book Award in the category of best biography. In addition to Breathing Between the Lines, she is also the author of The Devil's Workshop, a second book of poetry. The Mystery of Allie San Francisco, a children's book Martinez co-authored with Rosalee Montoya-Read, will be released in 2009 by the University of New Mexico Press.

Mother Tongue is based in part upon Martinez's 1988 trial for conspiracy against the United States government in connection with smuggling Salvadoran refugees into the country, a charge that with others carried a 25 -year prison sentence. A religion reporter at the time, covering the faith-based Sanctuary Movement, Martinez was found not guilty on First Amendment Grounds.

Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1960, Martinez earned her BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She teaches at the annual June writing workshop at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston. Martinez writes a column for the independent progressive weekly, the National Catholic Reporter. She is involved with Enlace Comunitario, an immigrants' rights group which works with Spanish-speaking survivors of domestic violence.



We Talk About Spanish

Not in Spanish
Dream with dictionaries
Blood-thinners
Marrying out to whites
Damn good black beans
But so what?
Damn good politics
But so what?
Oh there were times
Like in the orange groves
Outside Phoenix
My task was to mark charts
To ask the Guatamaltecas
When was your last period
And so on as they lined up
At the trailer to see a doctor

and that night in Harvard Yard
A North Vietnamese
Soldier-poet tested
Spanish he learned in Cuba
It worked
We found a third way
His voice a high wire
I crossed over to him
Fearless as a spider
If we didn't know a word
We filled in the blank
with a star
It is a light
That years later
I try not to curse


Las Mananitas

      "Love, unpredictable as death" - Daisy Zamora
      "It keeps you honest. It keeps you strange." - George Evans

The hour the world daubed

my forehead with sandalwood

mariachis accompanied me
to the graveyard
for the Day of the Dead

where cottonwood leaves
shimmered like jewels
in the navels of belly dancers

imagine the day
when we have a full day

pinto beans on jasmine rice

a rooster that does not know
what time it is
and tricks the sun
into staying over

the creak of a bed
like an orchestra warming up


Only So Long

      Old Town Plaza, Albuquerque

Castiron nights of August,
women refry beans, cicadas hum like
gourds on ankles of pueblo dancers.

Shop after shop,
mud walls fluted
as wasps' nests.

red chile pods
on doorposts
like Passover blood.

Pueblo women plant turquoise
on blankets under a portal,
harvest tourist dollars.

This night, my world,
your touch: I learned
the names for so many things.

come home, I will give them all
hundreds of days have poured
through my fingers like flour.

My patience is long
as a grocery list
but life is brief

as mesquite brush.
Someday soon, I might
wrap up my wound and go.








And then there's the day after, a return to regular life.



next...

there is pleasure
in travel
but comfort
in routine and the everyday

so
i'm back

second table from the rear,
by the window,
looking out on the corner
of Martin
and Soledad,
San Antonio, Texas

life
in the slow lane,
looking
for a poem
in all the old familiar places







And that's the end of this week's junket. Until we meet again, 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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On the Road Again   Friday, November 14, 2008


III.11.3.




"Here and Now" was written on the road this week, or, at least, my part was. I usually have the poems from my library prepared several weeks ahead of their use.

This week, I only have my own poems and poems from my library. Pulling poems from our friends into the mix would have been just too complicated.

I left San Antonio by car Saturday, November 7, heading east. I drove through Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia,West Virginia, ending in Columbus, Ohio, where D joined me on the 11th. It's Wednesday night as I write this. We'll leave Columbus tomorrow and hope to make it to Roanoke,Virginia by the end of the day tomorrow. Our plan is to just head back to San Antonio, taking 6 days to cover the distance I did in 3, no interstates, back roads all the way. We decided that we'll go wherever we want, as long as at the end of each day we're closer to home than when we began the day.

I'll be posting the blog from my laptop, which will be different from my normal posting from my desk top. Photos, for one thing, has me worried. I don't know if what I've done with photos this week is going to work, and won't know until I post. We'll see what happens.

In addition to my daily poetic travel journal, we have this month, from my library:

Ani Difranco
Jim Carroll
Judith Kafri
Paula Rankin
Diane Wakoski
Robert Bly
Hirsh Lazaar Silverman
Wistawa Symborska
Carol Connolly
Diane Glancy








My first two poems this week are by Ani DiFranco, from her book Verses, published by Seven Stories Press in 2007.

Born in 1970, DiFranco is a Grammy Award winning singer, guitarist, and songwriter. Beginning as a street performer with her music teacher when she was nine years old, she has released nineteen albums, mostly through her own company, Righteous Babe Records.



Tamburitza Lingua

a cold and porcelain lonely
in an old new york hotel
a stranger to a city
that she used to know so well
bathing in a bathroom
that is bathed in the first blue light
of the beginning of a century
at the end of an endless night

then she is wet behind the ears and wafting down the avenue
pre-rush hour
post-rain shower
stillness seeping upward like steam
from another molten sewer
they've been spraying with chemical in our sleep
us/they
something about the mosquitoes having some kind of disease
them/me
CIA foul play
if you ask the guy selling hair dyers out of a gym bag
"chemical warfare"
"i'm telling you, lab rat to lab rat!" he says, "that's where the truth is at!"
and everything seems to have gone terribly wrong that can
but one breath at a time is an acceptable plan, she tells herself
and the air is still here
and this morning it's even breathable
and for a second the relief is unbelievable
she's a heavy sack of flour sifted
her burden lifted
she's full of clean wind for one moment and then
she's trapped again
reverted
caged and contorted
with no way to get free
(and she's getting plenty of little kisses
but nobody's slippin' her the key)
her whole life a long list of what-ifs
so she doesn't even know where to begin
and the pageantry of suffering therein
rivals television
tv is, after all, the modern day roman coliseum
human devastation as mass entertainment
and now millions sit jeering
collective jeering
the bloodthirsty hierarchy of the patriarchal arrangement

she is hailing a cab
she is sailing down the avenue
she's 19 going on 30
or maybe she's really 30 now...
it's hard to say
it's hard to keep up with time once it's on its way

besides she never had much of a chance
born into a family built like an avalanche
and somewhere in the 80s between the oat bran and the ozone
she started to figure on things like
why?

one pointed upwards looking for the holes in the sky
one eye on the little flashing red light
a picasso face twisted and listing
down the canvas
of the end of an endless night

ten nine eight seven six five four
three two one
and kerplooey!
you're done.
you're done for.
you're done for good.
so tell me
did you?
did you do?
did you do all you could?


your next bold move

coming of age during the plague
of reagan and bush
watching capitalism gun down democracy
it had this funny effect on me
i guess
i am cancer
i am HIV
and i'm down at the blue jesus blue cross hospital
just lookin' up from my pillow
feeling blessed

and the mighty multinationals
have monopolized the oxygen
so it's as easy as breathing
for us all to participate
they're buying and selling off shares of air
and you know it's all around you
but it's hard to point and there
so you just sit on your hands and quietly contemplate

your next bold move
the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable
and sell them to seagulls flying in circles around one big right wing
the left wind was broken years ago
by the slingshot of cointelpro
and now it's hard to have faith
in anything

especially your next bold move
or the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself

you want to track each trickle back to its source
and then scream up the faucet 'til your face is hoarse
cuz you're surrounded by a world's worth of things
you just can't excuse
but you've got the hard cough of a chain smoker
and you're at the arctic circle playing playing strip poker
and it's getting colder and colder
every time you lose

so go ahead
make your next bold move
tell us
what's the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself?









Every journey begins with preparation, like spending a day getting stuff done that needs to be done while you're gone and trying to pack everything you'll need.

I did pretty well, but did forget my favorite pillow.



packing



it will be
at least 2,500 miles
start to finish
with first leg tomorrow -
500 miles plus, San Antonio
to Little Rock -

lots to do

wash clothes iron clothes
clean house
pack suitcases
one for D
and the big one for me
since i'll be gone longer

pull down three different
coats
to cover three different
meteorological possibilities
from autumn crisp
to knee-deep snow
on Appalachian heights

load the computer

get everything i'll need
transferred
from desktop to laptop
so that
the poet shall not
be deterred

charge all the batteries
laptop
camera
cell phone

don't forget the photo
download
thingie

gather the various
prescriptions -
the ever-lengthening list
of pills, chills and midnight thrills -

load a few books in the truck -
maybe peddle a few
if i see a bookstore like i did
last year in Durango -

and Reba

smelly, stinky Reba

off to the groomers,
bath and a brush,
clean and sweet-smelling
like her fresh-washed bed
fluffed out in the back
where she'll spend the miles
mostly asleep, but one eye open
at all times
for good stopping places
as we go, places
where foreign and interesting
smells might beckon
a good sniff
and an answering pee

7 in the morning
i think i'm ready now
but will know for sure by 8
when we remember what we forgot

write a poem
or at least a poem-like
confluence of
words








Jim Carroll, born in 1950 in New York City, is an author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician. He is best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which was made into the 1995 film of the same name with Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll.

Here are three poems from his book Void of Course, published by Penguin Books in 1998.

Carroll apparently doesn't spend a lot of thinking time on titles for his poems, labeling most of them simple, Poem. Well, he's the poet, so he gets to make the rules about what's his.



Poem

Crossing 14th St. The sunlight
Gentle today as if its fingers
Were broken. Yet still
The high pitch of Rastas
Selling incense and umbrellas

Which wake the neurotic orphans
Residing in my spine

What you told me this morning
As you were leaving, I'm afraid
To repeat it on paper
Speak it out loud
Wondering if the words

Could ignite the plane on which
You're flying home

I could concentrate a beast
And warm the coil of all hearts and loss
I've memorized your feast

As if it were a sheet on which I slept
Which holds your scent
Like a gun to my liver


Poem

Alright,
Buddha gets
A backstage pass

But his friends have to pay


For Virginia

You don't know what it's like at the strangest times your face
Pouncing into my mind like a wounded cheetah
Gripping your memory so tightly over years
It leaves blood on my hands as on your lips

It comes and goes might be days or months and with
Only the vaguest idea of places you are

Have been the way your name
Attacks attaches itself to me like lipstick
On airplanes, steep hills in San Francisco
First St. in the rain, the ache that comes
In parabolas of longing

I wanted to tell you
Because you should know
That my greatest nights in California
Were nights I spent inside Virginia









The first day of our little trip was a tough one - over 500 miles and, with stops at roadside parks to let Reba sniff and pee, 11 hours.



Day 1

545 miles

San Antonio
to Dallas on Interstate 35 -

one of the first of the interstates,
rough in places,
like we're still driving
on the first shovel of asphalt
Ike We Like pitched out in 1950 something -

Dallas to Little Rock
on I-30

a pick-up
pulling a horse trailer,
alone in the back
one horse,
a palomino,
golden mane and tail
and eyelashes
flaring
the wind,
brown eyes watching
as i pass


Temple, Belton, and Waco,
places
where dull people
go
to get duller

a hawk
slips slowly from the air
to land on a fence post,
watches,
sees all with yellow eyes
that view all that moves
as potential
prey


Red Oak,
little town before,
now just a raggedy
little spot on the road
on the poorer fringe
of the ever-spreading Dallas
metroplex

i stopped once for dinner
in Red Oak,
heading home from a business meeting
in Dallas 25 years ago,
a wonderful dinner,
prepared
and served
by a little old woman
no more than four feet tall


Dallas,
where snotty
white
right-wingers
go to get snottier
whiter
and even more right-wing

xurbs follow I-30 to the
northeast,
a paved-over world,
the only grass that
that survives
struggles
in the cracks
in the concrete


Waxachachie,
i like it
because
saying the name
makes my mouth feel good
and the only reason
to say it
is when you’re passing through it

orange sky
like mist
through a forest
of orange leaves


Texarkana,
where a line down the middle
of the street
in a business district
divides
one state from the other -
appealing to my dislike
of lines and boxes
and borders
that don't mean anything

lakes and ponds
and waterfowl,
a crane passes over the road,
low,
long neck outstretch
wings spread,
a dark shadow
against
a nearly dark sky


dark dark
night
in Arkansas

red sky
in my rearview,
the road like a tunnel
through the dark,
tall, thick forest
on either side


Hope behind me
Little Rock ahead

last time in Little Rock,
1980,
going home from somewhere,
hitting the city
the night of a UT-U of Arkansas
championship
playoff - no hotels anywhere
except, finally,
a sleazy rundown dump
in a slummy looking neighborhood
with bugs in the bathroom -
was i the kind to carry
a handgun
i'd have slept with it
under my pillow


this night,
better,
clean room,
king-sized bed,
and a bug-free bathroom

Reba
asleep on her little bed
in the corner,
11 hours on the road,
now i would join her
but for the woman singing,
badly,
in the next room over


Nashville tomorrow








My next poem is by Judith Kafri from the anthology The Defiant Muse, Hebrew Feminist Poems From Antiquity to the Present. The book was published by The Feminist Press of The City University of New York in 1999. It's a bilingual book, Hebrew, with English translation on the facing pages.

Kafri was born and grew up in kibbutz Ein Ha-Horesh, where her parents were among the founders. She has worked as a translator and editor of books related to education. She has also published eight volumes of poetry, beginning with Time will pity in 1962. The mother of three and grandmother of four, she is a member of the peace movement's Peace Now and Four Matriarchs. She lives in central Israel.

The translator for this piece was Tsipi Keller



The Woman
         "Really, you exaggerate," from a letter

This exaggerated woman
wasn't pruned right
she spouts all sorts of odd branches
water roots
cries of thirst.
I'll be good,
she vows,
tomorrow they'll prune me
like a disciplined tree.
Remove her from the scenery,
say the superintendents of nature,
she spoils the line,
the water budget of half a neighborhood
is wasted on her
even a river wouldn't be enough for her.
It doesn't matter, someone says,
in one of the driest summers
I saw several small birds
hiding in the shade of those odd branches of hers.
It was the only shade in the whole area.
Shade! spit the gardeners with disdain,
she doesn't know how to be a rounded palm-tree
or a square fiscus
or an upright cypress on the way to the cemetery.
And I'm thinking...
if you ask me shed hasn't a chance.
But I don't say it out loud
don't tell
maybe they'll forget.
Our gardeners, after all,
are so busy.








Following along, here is the second day of my little vacation. At the end of day two, I'm in Nashville, 940 miles into the trip.



day 2

940 miles

Nashville

i wanted to write about
the forest,
the colors, gold and yellow
and the the red-brown color the crayola people
used to call
indian red or indian brown
or something like that

and in the middle
of all that gold and yellow
and red-brown indian whatever,
some low bush that's flaming bright red
scattered among the trees
like little fires
burning in the woods

and i wanted to write about
the flock of ducks that flew over
in perfect V formation,
near enough to the ground
so that each duck could be seen
and counted
as an individual,
close enough to the ground
that i could hear the flapping
of their wings
and the mutter-quacks among the ranks

and i wanted to write
about
the hills, reminding me
of the hill country of home,
but soft hills, none of the hard face
of caliche and cactus and mesquite,
just soft
soft
forest-hills, trunks climbing close
together

i wanted to write about the sun
this morning
and how it lit the colors of the trees
and the covered the sky
from mid-afternoon, bringing
shadow
and mystery
and darker colors of the night

i wanted to write
about those
things
but

for two days
through two states
i have been unable to find
a national newspaper

again and again and
again
i talk to someone,
ask a question of my server
at a restaurant
or the cashier at a gas station
or the desk clerk at a hotel
and again and again and again
the response i get is
"uhhh, what?"
like it's some foreign language
i spoken,
a riddle i've presented to them
a conundrum
that strikes them dumb
in the middle of the day

and,
for the second night,
i arrive late,
trying to find an unknown location
on strange streets
in a strange city
in the dark

and finally,
arriving at my destination,
achieving my goal
for the day,
too tired,
too dark,
and too cold
to get back in my car
to search for a good meal,
too tired even to care
that KFC is greasy and harmful
to healthy bodies, i cross
the hotel parking lot
and buy my bucket of the colonel's
original,
take two bites
and strip the meat off the bone
for Reba
who doesn't mind it so much
that it slides down her gullet
like a slinky
on speed

all this
to make me very cranky,
crabby, even,
much too
to describe the glories
of Tennessee
foliage
and give it
its due

better
tomorrow
in Charleston,
West Virginia








The next poem is by Paula Rankin from her book Augers published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1981.

The book includes no biographical information about Rankin other than a large photo of a young woman dressed very much in a seventies style and a single line saying she lived in Old Hickory, Tennessee. I found references on the web to some of her work, but no where did I find a straight bio. I did find, in a story about someone else, a reference to the subject's creative writing teacher, the late Paula Rankin.

So, she may no longer be with us, but her work is. I like it and am pleased to be able to pass it on to you.



Foundry Poem: For All Children Burned Alive

It is Friday, the day for fish
and mold-pouring: I can still see the men
peeling waxed paper from trout, unrolling tin from sardines, waiting for ovens
to finish their work
so that something might come
of melted iron: wheels, anvils,
spikes for keeping trains
forever on their tracks.

My grandfather once turned his smoked face
to me and explained smelting, how all boiled down
to ore and slag, how sand learned
not to shift when pressed far from wind into casts.
He did not say how he used the same process
for raising his children, their skins on fire
not for his Lord but from their own core.
The furnace was no metaphor, but the blackslider's real
foundry, its latch loose enough for a child to open,
loose enough to open on its own
the way it opens to me
again and again without warning.

I stand in my grandfather's abandoned ironworks,
pretending I can question his hard, fixed visions
of evil and good, his dark saints coagulating
in molds me crush their bones on.
I stand here unable to swallow
slag eating the roof of my mouth,
fearing I might prove the body's flexibility,
its knack for being melted and reshaped
into ash, bone chips, cables of my brain

where despite all I do
I feel arteries hardening
like iron coming into its own.








By the third day, after 1,440 miles on the road, I was in Charleston, West Virginia.



day 3

Charleston,
West Virginia

1,440 miles

a cool
brisk morning
starts my day

and a waffle
at the Waffle House,
everywhere here
but long gone from where i live

better
in the remembering
than in the here and now


less than an hour out of Nashville,
i find the best roadside park
in the USA,
surrounded by trees
with a slow muddy river flowing nearby

the forest colors
have changed,
the yellows gone
as we have journeyed
further north
and the gold is starting
to fall as well, a shower of golden
leaves
around me
as I stand by the river


and just a little farther
down the road,
something new
with something old

Huddle Inn
with friendly servers,
dark thick coffee,
and pie,
not homemade, i'm sure,
but good,
without the usual taste
of something
made by robots
and child slave labor
in East Berserkistan


all before 10 a.m.

i'm surprised
by Knoxville, a small city, i thought,
but with expressway traffic
that reminds me of Houston or Dallas,
complicated
by highway closure that routes me
on a loop around the city,
leaving me
at detour's end
concerned that i had missed the turn-off
that would route me to Virginia
rather than North Carolina

the colors now
are mostly shades of red and brown

on a hill
surrounded on four sides
by forest
a horse enjoys a pasture
all his own


i notice
how all the pastures and grass lands
are cut short,
manicured as if for golf -
only the woods
seem to harbor the wild

in a dell
green as spring,
a small church,
white clapboard with a white wooden
steeple
rising twice the church's height

on a hill behind the church
rows of tombstone
in rank and line,
climbing
the hillside like steps
to an afterlife that,
if we are all lucky, would look
exactly this green little dell
and this white little church


finally,
Virginia

i've lost an hour somewhere
when i changed time zones
and am another hour
behind besides

i stop at a park
just across the state line
so Reba can walk and pee

just across the highway
cows
line a ridge, dark cut-outs
against the sky


we are climbing

unlike mountains
in the Southwest that stand starkly
against a dusty desert floor,
mountains here are discreet

only the popping of my ears
tells me they are there

the road rises in front of me
bordered, as always, by red and brown forests,
at the top,
a silver-dollar moon
on a pale blue sky


reaching,
finally, the road to Charleston,
i turn
and traverse the mountains
in the dark

two long, long
tunnels

you know you're
in the company of miners
when the solution
to getting to the other side of the mountain
is to go through it,
not over
or around


finally,
Charleston,
an industrial city
of smoke and steam and light
following
the path of a long mountain hollow








Diane Wakoski was born in 1937 in Whittier, California. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published over forty books of poetry and is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems."

Wakoski teaches creative writing at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan and won the prestigious William Carlos Williams award for her book Emerald Ice.

The poem I'm using this week is from her book The Rings of Saturn published by Black Sparrow Press in 1986.



Cannon Beach

One week of early morning sunshine, like a perfect rose
    frozen in an ice cube,
made us so grateful, we then loved the mist
which rolled in and blanketed us for days.
When the sun shone, we walked
the beach at dawn
while most people slept, but on the foggy mornings,
we slept too, not even hearing the horns
sounding from the rocks. Two thousand miles away,
I can only pretend to see the Pacific Ocean
no matter how early I rise.
The mist that steams up from this autumn ground
over pumpkins, the dried dinner-plate sun flowers
with bowed heads, the final red tomatoes on the browning
vines, a different beauty. It is as if everyone
in Cannon Beach is sleeping
while I'm awake, everyone, everywhere,
different from this landscape sleeping,
only I awake, not knowing the images in each head;
as we all sleep through others' lives.

Only a few even try to imagine
what others simultaneously perceive,
and then know its futility. An act of faith
lets me believe the Pacific Ocean's still there, since I now
can't see it. That the sun exists,
through the fog entirely covers it today, or in death
pass beyond what I know I am.








My next poem is by Robert Bly whose poetry and biography has been featured here many times. The poem is from Bly's book Selected Poems, published by HarperCollins in 1986.

Sometimes I find Bly sublime; other times he seems just plain silly, a stereotypical left wing blowhard. And sometimes I can't make up my mind, like in this poem.



Hatred of Men with Black Hair

I hear spokesmen praising Tshombe, and the Portuguese
In Angola. These are the men who skinned Little Crow!
We are all their sons, skulking
In back rooms, selling nails with trembling hands!

We fear every person on earth with black hair.
We send teams to overthrow Chief Joseph's government.
We train natives to kill the President with blowdarts.
We have men loosening the nails on Noah's ark.

State Department men float in the heavy jellies near the
    bottom
Like exhausted crustaceans, like squids who are confused,
Sending out beams of black light to the open sea.
Each fights his fraternal feeling for the great landlords.

We have violet rays that light up the jungle at night,
    showing us
The friendly populations; and we teach the children of
    ritual,
The forest children, to overcome their longing for life,
    and we send
Sparks of black light that fit the holes in the generals'
    eyes.

Underneath all the cement of the Pentagon
There is a drop of Indian blood preserved in snow:
Preserved from a trail of blood that once led away
From the stockade, over the snow, the trail now lost.








And here's the fourth day of our adventure.



day 4


Columbus,
Ohio

1,603 miles

a grey day,
damp and overcast,
fog drifts
over the hills

lost
an hour out of Charleston,
hwy. 35
became 810
last week

not
on any of the maps

finally
find someone at a quik-stop
who tells me
"ahh, well..."
and he points to the road
right outside
his store,
hwy. 810, the road
i've been traveling the wrong direction on
for 25 miles

finally
straightened out
i follow the road,
a narrow two lane that twists
with a river north,
on the river side
shacks,
square little homes
with junk cars
and several hundred dollars
worth of scrap metal
in front
and on the other side of the road,
great brick houses
with wide green lawns
and barns
and horse stables

then
i pass a little village
where all the houses seem new
McMansions
side by side and a little village green,
everything green and fresh
and i wonder where the old houses went,
the little square houses
with junk yard
landscaping,
and the people who lived in them

finally
a sign across the road
welcomes
to Ohio and the tiny little road
widens to four lane divided,
a beautiful road
but the speed limit is 15 to 20 mph
too slow
and i am stuck, watching
the hills go by, mostly bare now,
leaves fallen in the night freezes,
trees tall and stark against the gloom

an hour lost early
now another lost to the snail-paced
speed limit
and my two hour drive
turns to four hours

again,
it is dark
when i arrive

and i still need to find the airport,
in a strange dark city,
on strange dark streets

i pick up D tonight
as she joins me for the six day
meander
home








The next two poems are by Hirsch Lazaar Silverman from Explorers, A Collection of Contemporary Literature, an anthology that also includes one of my poems. It was published by Cyberwit.net of Allahabad, India.

Silverman, a clinical and forensic psychologist and teacher has authored 23 books, including ten volumes of poetry, and over contributor to over 270 national and international journals.

He lives in New Jersey.



Grim Reality

Man paints over
The grim realities
  Surrounding him
  With idyllic portraits
Of personal life
cut from the timber
  Of self-deception
  Often unknowingly.


Winter Scene

The winter snow throws
  Skeletal shadows
Of barren trees
  on gray ice
Reinforcing the sounds
  Of shuffling feet
In heavy shoes
  Of people subdued
  With wintry depression.








Wistawa Szymborska, born in 1923 in Kórnik, Poland, is a poet, essayist and translator. She was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Although she has published no more than 250 poems so far, her books when they appear, rival most prominent prose authors in sales.



The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
an existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving,.
Revenge of a mortal hand.








Finally, a day off. Here we are,in Columbus, Ohio, on the fifth day of our travels.



day 5

Columbus

after four days
on the road,
a
rest day

another
dark day,
gray and overcast
again,
rain hanging back
like the word that gets caught
on the tip of your tongue,
there
but not there,
waiting in the wings,
waiting for its cue
to bring on the storm

up early
for a short drive
down to Bob Evans
for breakfast

stopped
along the way
by a very polite
Columbus police officer
who explains
the State of Ohio's view
of u-turns -
don't do it, he says
with a smile
and passes us on our way

then a drive down Dublin-Granville
to Old Dublin,
enjoying
along the way
the houses that line the street
as we creep through the Village of Worthington
(established 1803, the sign says)
and its school zones

D prowls the little shops
of Old Dublin
while i enjoy
the luxury of a latte
and a Times at Starbucks,
this, assumed as an entitlement
a week ago, this fancy-shmancy
upgrade of regular old joe
and daily national news,
now joins my list of things
to be thankful for

more
intense map scrutiny
and airing of differing opinions
of the relative merits of South Hwy 71
as opposed to South Hwy 315
until we find ourselves
on Broad Street,
outside
the Columbus Museum of Art
where we had intended to go all along,

their show this month, "Objects of Wonder,"
which could as well describe
our success in arriving at our
destination
without bopping each other over the head
with our competing maps

all in all
a good show,
but i went to school with Art
(Fastinbinder Jr.)
and once you've seen one Art
you've seen them all

we drive around downtown
for about an half an hour,
mainly because we're lost
and can't find Short North,
the arts district
and i notice there seems to be
a church on every other corner,
and not just churches,
but huge cathedral looking things,
D thinks they’re beautiful,
I think they demonstrate why gothic
went out of style,
ugly
as the sin they're trying to get
the faithful to renounce

finally,
and by accident, as you might expect,
we find ourselves on High Street,
right in the middle of Short North,
the arts district, but the galleries
all seem to be closed,
so we settle
for a late lunch at Betty's Food & Spirits,
named, it might be, after Betty Page,
whose photos, along with other mid-century
pin-up girls, paper the walls

the most vivid dreams
of my 14-year-old days and nights
revisit me
as i enjoy a bowl of beef vegetable soup,
a bit thin of broth for my taste,
but full of vegetables, and thick chewy bread

the day ends darkly again before 4 p.m.

and now it's 8
and the rain that threatened
all day
has finally come

D is asleep
and Reba is asleep
and i am finishing up the last chore of the day,
trying to peddle a book
at the bookstore on Dublin-Granville
that used to be a church

owner's out,
won't be back for a week,
so i left a book and my email address

tell him to email me, i tell the clerk,
if he wants some more

she indicates,
without actually saying it,
that i probably shouldn't be sitting by my email
waiting to hear from him

oh well,
it could be worse,
i could be trying to sell
aluminum siding

tomorrow,
back to Virginia,
to Roanoke if the weather holds








Carol Connolly, a lifelong resident of St. Paul, Minnesota, has been variously known as a political candidate, activist, journalist, poet, and playwright.

After an unsuccessful bid for elected office, women's rights emerged as the focus of her civic and political activities, which included serving as co-chair of the Minnesota Women's Political Caucus and coordinating the Wonder Woman Foundation, a New York City-based organization which recognized and rewarded women over forty for heroic accomplishments, as well as work with numerous other feminist and women-centered organizations in the Twin Cities area. In 1977 Connolly was appointed to the St. Paul Human Rights Commission, where she served for nine years, five of them as chair. As the first woman ever appointed to the commission, she worked to bring women's causes to the forefront. Motivated by a desire to make sure that women would have a presence in the new industry, Connolly sought and received an appointment from the governor to the Minnesota Racing Commission when it was formed in 1983 and served as chair of the commission's affirmative action committee.

Connolly began writing poetry in 1976 by accident, when the fiction class she wanted to take was full. She signed up for a poetry class instead and published her first collection, Payments Due, in 1985. The poems were later adapted for a stage performance that played successfully to audiences in the Twin Cities and Los Angeles. In 1989 and 1991 she appeared as a stand-up comic in the Dudley Riggs Experimental Theatre Company production entitled, What's So Funny About Being Female? From 1988 to 1991 she wrote a gossip column called "Connections" for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch newspaper.

I have three poems from her first book Payments Due, published by Midwest Villages and Voices.



Last Resort

I am trapped here in a second-rate body.
I. Me with the proper address
and acceptable blood lines
and the appearance of a decent bank balance.
Trapped here at the pool
during he thigh show.
Sins of the flesh
are punished here. Exposed.
Sagging tits and a stretched belly
negate a person at this spa.
Here the only interest is in bones
and sinew and teeth and tan.
No flesh need apply.

Attention. Over here. I would
like to say that I am terribly sorry
if I have visually assaulted you.
I want to explain. I followed the rules.
It was seven pregnancies for me
and twins and nine-pound babies,
and do you know?

If you want to have your cake,
you must eat it.


An Ordinary Event

The fact that it happens
to all of us
doesn't make it any easier.

I turned a corner,
and suddenly
without warning
I stand full
before a mirror,
and there it is.
My mother's face
staring back at me
in disbelief.
The face
I swore
I'd never have.


In a Word

A woman I met
briefly,
and only
by chance,
said,
"I like your
boyfriend,
but you are
smarter
than he is."
It had never
occurred to me.
I thought
it over.
He is taller,
stronger,
prettier,
younger,
and she's right.
I am
smarter.
This news
changes
everything.







Here are two poem by Diane Glancy from her book Long Dog's Winter Count.

Glancy was born in 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri, to a Cherokee father and an English/German mother. Her B.A. was received from the University of Missouri in 1964. From 1980 to 1986 Diane was Artist-in-Residence for the State Arts Council of Oklahoma. In 1987, she attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and subsequently obtained her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1988. The following year she began teaching at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is now a Professor in the English Department In Creative Writing, teaching poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and scriptwriting. She also teaches a Native American Literature course and a seminar in Native American Literature. She also taught in the Bread Loaf School of English M.A. program on the campus of the Native American Preparatory School in Rowe, New Mexico, in 1999.



Kemo Sabe

In my dream I take
the white man
slap him
till he loves me.
I tie him to the house
take his land
& buffalo.
I put other words
in his mouth
words he doesn't understand
like spoonfuls
of smashed lima beans
until his cheeks
bulge.
Chew, now, dear
I say.
I flick his throat
until he swallows.
He works all day
never leaves the house.
The floors shine
the sheets are starched.
He whips grime
from the windows
until cloud dance
across the glass.
He feeds me
when I'm hungry.
I can leave whenever
I want.
Let him struggle
for his dignity
this time
let him remember
my name.


Portrait of the Artist As Indian

She severs the buffalo hide down the backbone
pulls the skin to the belly.
She separates the muscles, knifes along the grain.

She lifts the white flower-patches of fat to her nose
licks the blood from the wound in the hide.
She slices the hot belly
loosens the pouches, vessels, the stomach,
bladder, the bands that hold them.

Now she scrapes the skull, pulls the teeth,
stretches the meat on sticks to hang on the drying line.

The ribs like rungs of a rocker the wagons carry
across the land.
She dismantles the carcass
the way old stories are carried into the heart.

The entrails washed at the creek,
the hide tanned.

Finally a medicine pouch sewn from 2 little tufts
of the ears.








It is the end of the sixth day on the road. We rest for the night in Roanoke, Virginia.



day 6

Roanoke,
Virginia

1932 miles

early start
planned, but as usual,
early became late
and we didn't get out of the hotel
until 9:30

warmer,
but rain closes up
the day,
wet street, wipers
on intermittent


we both thought
Columbus was good for another day or two
and we might have stayed,
but the Blue Ridge Trail
and the Great Smokey Mountains called,
and if we were going to spend any time there,
but we had to move on,

71 through the city
then connecting to 77
through Ohio
into West Virginia,
through Charleston,
and on toward Virginia
on a great,wide,
four-lane divided highway
paid for by tolls, three toll stations,
$1.25 at each one, a bargain
for travelers like us

when i passed this way
two days ago, it was dead-black dark
and i couldn’t see anything but the lighted island
my headlights threw ahead of me

today, i appreciate the tree covered hills
and vistas
as we curve around the mountain side

though the rain has stopped,
most of the color on the hills is gone
and what remains
is draped in drab by the overcast sky


instead of staying on 77 all the way to hwy 81
in Virginia, then east to Roanoke,
we take a short cut on 460
that will take us on a more direct route

a smaller, slower road
with dips and turns and twists
that takes us across a river
then alongside it for twenty miles

people here are different from people
in Texas who post the name of every
river and creek,
whether flowing water or dry,
that every road, paved,
caliche, or blowing dust,
crosses - we value water
for its scarcity and want a name
everywhere it might be found, even
if only a couple of days a year

here even rivers have no posted name

this river,
wide, with white-water rapids,
deserves a name
we thought,
even if only the name we gave it

a "man with no name" river
we have named
El Rio Sin Nombre


the rain stopped
two states ago, but as we approach Virginia,
the temperature dips
and fog rises from the hollows
and slides over the mountain tops

a white house
on a hill
surrounded by leaf-bare trees
and behind them,
mountains
showing bits and pieces
through the fog

on the road
short, thick-foliaged pines
stand, crowded side by side,
like spectators
standing shoulder to shoulder
watching a passing parade

or, i think of the hundreds of clay soldiers
lined in rank after rank
buried with the Chinese emperor

fog drifts around them
and that shifting fog, the soldiers
seem to move,
coming alive while their emperor
still lies as dust


finally,
we end our journey for the day

tomorrow
a full day in Roanoke






It is the seventh day or our tour of the mountains of the South. But it's also "blog day."

So, instead of my seventh day poetic travelogue, I give you this new issue of "Here and Now."

We will continue to travel until the middle of next week, so my next week's issue will carry forward with our Marco Polo imitation, beginning with a report on today, the seventh day.

In the meantime, you no doubt know to 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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Picnic on the Pedernales   Thursday, November 06, 2008


III.11.1.




Welcome to our first issue of November, Halloween past and Thanksgiving on the horizon.

I'm posting a day early. Tomorrow, my normal post day, will be spent mostly preparing for departure early Saturday morning for points in and around the Appalachians. Neither D or I have been there before so we're looking forward to seeing places and things we haven't seen before.

If I can get everything I need loaded on my laptop, I hope to post next weeks issue from on the road. It'll probably be shorter than usual, but I expect to have it up on line about when we usually are. Come back and heck us out - I hope to have some traveling tales to tell.

As for this week, I worked last week and and this week, leaving me a little short of time. So contributions this week from our friends are fewer than usual. At the same time, there's a bit more from me as I try to clear out some old files. My hope for next week is to have all new poems from me, written on the road, as my contribution to the blog.

All that explained, here's the lineup.

From my library

Neal Michael Dwyer
Maxine Combs
E. Ethelbert Miller
David Rivard
Hale Charfield
Kelly Cherry
Tony Hoagland
William Meredith
Tina Koykama
William Carlos Williams
Siegfried Sassoon
Natasha Trethewey
Lynn Crosbie
Carl Sandburg

From friends of "Here and Now"

Dan Flore
Maria Gail Stratford
Margaret Mayberry

and a bit more of me than usual.








My first poems this week are from Hungry As we Are, an Anthology of Washington Area Poets. The book was published by The Washington Writer's Publishing House in 1995.



My first poet from the collection is Neal Michael Dwyer.

Dwyer studied poetry at the University of Nice, France, and George Mason University. He teaches English at the College of Southern Maryland. His poems have also appeared in Iowa Review and Tar River Poetry. He is also Editor of the literary magazine Connections.



24, Avenue De La Bornala

Young in America I fished the Saugatuck
for nothing - an altarboy crowded
with tiny sins. Verdi crowds the room now
with shudders. I look to the clock,
the volet again

I left the country on a north Jersey swamp
and turned by cabin pressure
above the black Atlantic,
till grey light said turning was done
over Ireland.

London slopped in mist before my eyes,
I emerged with one mind, two bags, and uneasy.
When I woke to Cambridge, a cold
lunged at me from mold under thatch.
And Dover sunk, a dream in fever,
under the sunless Channel.

More hot drizzle, then Dieppe, whose rooves
were borrowed from Boston. My country tugged
at me, sweet land, insisting fragments.

Without the word I lost the "gare," but found
the shifting Seine. Next night's fog train
was shared with an Italian, whose penknife
knew salami by heart. Around dawn, he told me
Toulon was St. Raphael, and I said "grazie,"
and barely made it back on board
before the train pulled out.

No tiny swirls of dust and scraps of paper,
but Sunday morning pigeons milled about,
finally, the vacant taxi stand, finally
about this country I'd traveled into.

Now schoolkids chase recess on the roof
across the street. And the rouget I fry
for lunch stinks burnt.



My next poem from Hungry As We Are is by Maxine Combs.

Combs teaches English at the University of the District of Columbia. She has published a poetry chapbook, Swimming Out of the Collective, a fiction chapbook, The Foam of Perilous Seas, and a novel, Handbook of the Strange.



Form and Content

The woman I met
in a downtown park
sitting beside a bed
of white chrysanthemums
told me her birthday
falls early in June,
on the same day as mine.

She also said
schizophrenics improve
if kept in trapezoidal wards,
I admitted that statistics
and abstractions both me.
But mirrors angled in windows
to show who's walking up the street
or quartets with only three players
interest me.

She mentioned universals:
spirals in turrets of mollusks,
concentric rings in trees,
the recognition scene implied in every dream.

None of the nights of love are the same,
I told her.
And memories may turn to wolves,
legends to quarantines,
drops of ink to mirrors of the past.

Yet she insisted on first principles:
lines alternating on a zebra's back,
grids in a honeycomb,
the pattern of an updraft of air.

Each is inevitable as our meeting tomorrow
beside our bed of white chrysanthemums -
You'll come, won't you, she said.
And I saw I was in over my head.



And my last poem from Hungry As We Are is by E. Ethelbert Miller, who I just heard on NPR last Sunday give a very good reading from Whitman.

Born in New York City, New York, in 1950, Miller received his B.A. from Howard University. His poetry collections include How We Sleep On the Nights We Don't Make Love, Whispers, Secrets, and Promises, First Light: New and Selected Poems, Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators?, Season of Hunger/Cry of Rain: Poems 1975-1980, The Migrant Worker, and Andromeda. He also is editor of many anthologies and author of the memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer.

Miller is the Founder and Director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington area, and the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, a position he has held since 1974.



Candy

before we undressed
you said your nipples
were like chocolate
and I prayed they
would melt in my mouth
and not in my hands
because I would hate to
stop and lick my fingers








I wrote this last week after a walk along the creek, proud of these trees and how they've grown. But not too proud, for I know ten fall for every one we planted.



planting trees on Apache Creek

several years
ago
a group of us
from the neighborhood
got together
and planted trees
along the two streets
bordering Apache Creek
on either side -
about 30 trees,
7 seven different kinds of oak -
trying
a little piece at a time
to rebuild the forests
we pushed aside,
plowed under,
and paved over
many years ago,
for good reasons, no doubt,
for our reasons,
just as, today, our hills are stripped
down to their caliche base,
for good reasons, no doubt,
for our own reasons,
just as asphalt ribbons
snake through the hills today
where squirrel and deer and raccoon
still live and birds still sing
from trees still standing
and wild flowers still cover pastures
with color in spring,
but we know what those asphalt ribbons mean,
asphalt parking lots follow asphalt roads
and gray roofs and commuter stench
follow asphalt roads and plastic grocery bags
and 32 ounce Big Gulp cups and shit-filled
diapers and all the other foul trash of our lives
follow asphalt roads and soon these trees too
are covered and the squirrels and deer and raccoons
and birds are covered and dry caliche blows in the wind
all for good reasons, no doubt,
for our own reasons and our own reasons
are all the reasons that count
no matter
what

but our trees -
our partial repayment,
our miniscule repayment -
our trees do well
and on some sunny day,
perhaps a day in July or August
not too far from today as the time of forests is measured
there will be shade from trees I planted
providing a resting place for me
or someone after me,
nest space for birds,
and high branches for squirrels to play
their squirrelish games

i'm too old to think i can save the world
but old enough,
desperate enough,
to believe we can each save our own little part of it








David Rivard was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1953. He is the author of Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, which won the 1996 James Laughlin Award, and Torque, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the Pitt Poetry Series. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and TriQuarterly. Rivard's other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has also received the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Pushcart Prize.

Rivard is Poetry Editor at the Harvard Review and teaches at Tufts University and the Vermont College M.F.A. in Writing Program. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The next poem is from his second book Wise Poison.



Against Gravity

blue sky, ungated clouds, & on a sand-pitted
highway sign the number 10 stands out -
a minor footnote in a monograph on drugs,

a reference instructing the reader to study
my nap on the floor of a Ford Econoline
summer after high school. As if rest, & only rest,

were what we found ourselves made of, sometimes.
Though rest is only one trait, actually, when
you've been hitching between Tucson and El Paso

and gotten picked up by a van. The equally ingenious
others look like tie-dye & restlessness, like
rest stops & silvered heather, maybe jimson,

and a little lantana raising its nippled red speckles
into the scent of sagebrush rained on & drying.
They got me high, three men & a woman costumed

estimably in the style of out-of-work jesters,
jovial people of 1971, wearing the standard issue -
fusty cloches, velveteen pants, embroidered emblems,

with shiny balls like cat bells dangling
off one or two ears. For one a self-etched tattoo,
its motto the equation ACID=BLISS framed

by a multiplying fungus or exploding chloroplast.
For another, a Fu Manchu & fedora. A synaptic Apache
snake clinching the woman's frayed macrame belt.

Mirror sunglasses for all. And small mirrors
like tiny ponds, frozen pools, had been sewn
onto the woman's India print blouse by some

Kashmiri laborer, who, if he could have looked into
them, might have seen me dozing off, stoned
on pan hash, bits of myself reflecting back,

scattered, a tired grin from the woman's
right sleeve, the puffed wrist, pale ear at the tip
of a breast, nose on her stomach, and haven't I

always loved being broken up & abrogated by sleep?
But when I woke we had pulled of the road
into a ranch. From the tape deck "Brain Salad Surgery"

blared, a form of premature senility disguised
as endless synthesizer riffs. For a second into the nazz
and compression of noise, still stoned, I thought

they intended to kill me. an intuition
so melodramatic & dumb the sight of two of the men
kissing in the front seat had to wipe it away.

I had never seen two men kiss & the surprise,
which in another setting might have shocked,
even disgusted, my sheltered murmurous little self,

somehow reassured me. The kiss implying
not so much gentility as distraction.
Then, out of the eddies of shade, the woman

ran, having tossed off her incongruous imitation
alligator heels, naked now except for
purple tights, she ran & turned cartwheels

three times across the yard. Gravity.
Gravity. They had wanted to visit a friend
who, they claimed, was connected to anti-

gravity research being conducted there.
Merely a windbreak occupied by
an adobe shed and barn, it seemed abandoned,

as if during the night the hard rains,
the lightning, had chased away the enemy
of gravity, & now we were to take his place.








Here's a poem by a friend of "Here and Now," Dan Flore.

Dan is 30 years old and lives in Pennsylvania. He has led many poetry therapy groups for people with serious mental illness and hosts a writer's circle. He plans to put out a chapbook.

Here's his poem.



where we lay in the spring leaves


let us sing in the hay
let us roll in the dust
let us remember the popsicles as not so cold
we are popeyes's sailor
with everything in the sail
nothing for sale
'cept the truth
the upstairs staircase
has no wars
no famine
no natural disaster
the water rolls in the dust
we see the person as perfect
the drafts are bright purple
with God's tree of light prairies
the gold sinners follow you and me
like a faded bracelet
travel into the prison of Jesus
where He is a prism
and we jump into the sky of of our ceilings
the cast is pristine
pop goes to the laundromat
to unwind his gown sheets
I listen to the crack addicts
pumping themselves with wavering self esteem
I saw a pickpocketer try and steal some sleep
when he couldn't rob loneliness
up to the trees we go
where we lay in the spring leaves








I have a couple of poems from Three Rivers Ten Years, an anthology of poems from Three Rivers Poetry Journal, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1983.



My first poem from the anthology is by Hale Chatfield.

Born in 1936 in Passaic, New Jersey, Chatfield received a B.A. degree from Wesleyan University in 1957 and an M.A. from Rutgers University in 1963. He was a longtime professor of English at Hiram College in Ohio, retiring in 1998. He wrote eighteen books, including ten volumes of poetry, and taped a two-week educational series on poetry for NBC-TV. Actively involved for more than twenty years in Ohio's "Poets in the Schools" program, Chatfield died from a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day, 2000.



Chapter I & Chapter II

Chapter I


      Doris and I were coming out of a movie, and Doris said, "What a funny thing to have in a movie, a man with an obsession for apple juice. But I think I can almost understand it. I like apple juice, too. It makes you shit; keeps you honest."

      I laughed. I said, "Doris, if I said this by way of complaint it would be unforgivable, but I'm just making an observation. I don't hear women saying 'shit' very much. I'm not used to it, and I'm surprised every time."

      "What are you used to hearing women say?" Doris asked.

      "No," I said.

Chapter II


      Doris said, "If you had your choice, which would you prefer being used to hearing women say, 'shit' or 'no'?"

      "What's the difference?" I said. "If they say it to me it comes out to the same thing."

      "Even what I said about apple juice?" Doris asked, astonished.

      "Apple juice!" I exclaimed. "What is all this about apple juice? It was only a movie - just one, single, rather particular movie. Do you think I have an obsession with apple juice?"

      "No," Doris said.



My second poem from Three Rivers Ten Years is by Kelly Cherry.

A graduate of the MFA Writing Program at Greensboro, Cherry is the author of seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (criticism, memoir, and essay), including the poetry collections God's Loud Hand,Death and Transfiguration, and Rising Venus. She is Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cherry lives on a small farm in Virginia.



Going Down On America

Turned on to the transcendent, he holds her
in his arms, strokes her sunny hair.
Such sweet skin is coming into view
as the clothes of Straight are shed
over New Jersey & kicked aside
into the wide Missouri River -

He pledges allegiance to light filled breasts,
to the drops of shine spilled
on Shenandoah's apple rich harvest.

In this union of smoke & suck he enters a state just west
of grace where Wyoming is what cowboys do
on Saturday night when the boss has paid them up
& the wind smells of Montana carried downstream,
clean but unmistakable.

O Mount Rushmore,
move him to your eye of stone!
In wheat fields he may dream
of stalks of sun,

discover blue shadows
in the shingles of the fallen pinecone!

The seventh day dawns somewhere above the fabulous Sierras,
so high he can scarcely see it,
& in a whirlwind of contradiction funnels itself south
into the dusk of his throat,
enlightens his heart,
& sets the flesh to dancing upon bare bones
across known borders
into a land lost
to reality.








Here are two poems I wrote, one on Sunday, last week, and the other on Thursday.



rejoining the brotherhood of labor

have
to go back to work
tomorrow

just
a little five-day project
followed
by an even smaller
three-day project
the week
after

but right now
those eight days
stretch
before
me
like a five hundred mile
trek
across the Sahara
on a one hump
camel
with a two lump
disposition

used to be
i looked forward
to these little work
interludes -
breaks
from the routine,
but that was
when
my routine
was a lot less
engrossing
than now

i
ought to just quit
this job
the next time they call me,
but the way i grew up
my mouth
just can't quite form the word
"no"
when someone asks me
if i want a job

i blame
my
parents
for this condition


burn baby, burn

one work project
finished
today
another one starts
next week

had been scheduled
to work
tomorrow
but we finished early

tomorrow
now like fulfillment
of the child's dream
of the school's burning
to the ground
on the night
before
the big test

burn baby
burn!








Here are two poems by Tony Hoagland, a poet I like more and more with each new poem of his I read. These two are from his book donkey gospel, winner of the 1997 James Laughlin Award on the Academy of American Poets.

Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His other collections include Hard Rain, What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Sweet Ruin, chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College.

Included in his many awards (maybe illustrating one of the reasons I like him so much) is the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry.

Hoagland currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.



The Replacement

And across the country I know
they are replacing my brother's brain
with the brain of a man:

one gesture, one word, one neuron at a time
with surgical precision
they are teaching him to hook his thumbs
into his belt, to iron his mouth as flat
as the horizon, and make his eyes
reflective as a piece of tin.

It is a kind of cooking
the male child undergoes:
to toughen him, he is dipped repeatedly
in insult - peckerwood, shitbag, faggot,
pussy, dicksucker - until spear points
will break against his epidermis,
until he is impossible to disappoint.

Then he walks out into the street
ready for a game of corporate poker
with a hard-on for Dow-Jones
like this hormonal language I am
flexing like a bicep
to show who's boss.

But I'm not the boss.
And there is nothing I can do to stop it,
and would I if I could?
What else is there for him to be
except a man?
If they fail,
he stumbles through his life
like an untied shoe.
If they succeed, he may become
something even I can't love.

Already the photograph I have of him
is out of date
but in it he is standing by the pool
without a shirt: too young, too white, too weak,
with feelings he is too inept to hide
splashed all over his face -

goofy, proud, shy,
he's smiling at the camera
as if he is under the illusion
that someone loved him so well
they would not ever ever ever
turn him over to the world.


Research

That summer, Vietnam was heating up,
and at the press conferences, our Texas president
drawled each syllable
with such a Southern slowness

it felt like he was raising a ladle
from a pot of soup
and tasting it to see if it was done.

Life magazine published a special issue
called The Mind-Body Split
about a recently discovered fracture
in the human condition,

but what I remember better is
the research all the rest of us were doing
in the densely populated dark
behind the old Safari Bar,

where the drumbeat of the band thudded
through the plywood walls
out into the jungle of the parking lot,
and the mosquitos came in droves to feast

on car after car of teenage bodies
making out in an intoxicated haze
of sweat and skin.

And how the tough guys, the really tough ones,
after they got drunk enough,
would leave their girls
and gather in a circle to perform
the trick of placing a lit cigarette
in the crook of their own arms,

then crushing it out
while staring in their best friend's eyes
and screaming he words of the latest song
over the perfume of burning flesh.








Now, here's a piece by Marie Gail Stratford, a friend of "Here and Now" I hope we see a lot more of.

Marie Gail is a freelance writer and dance instructor from Kansas City, Missouri. Her work has appeared in several online periodicals, including The Loch Raven Review, Blue House, and Poems Niederngasse.

This is a "haibun," a form that combines element of prose and poetry. I like the form, though I haven't been particularly successful in doing a good one myself. This one is excellent.



Anniversary

"Since we got married, we've celebrated the eighteenth of every month," she laughed into the phone. "Thirty-eight years now."

twilight
shadows
light shifts

A month later in her hospital room I realize the eighteenth has nearly passed them by. No dinner is possible. No candles are allowed in ICU. I sift through my hastily packed belongings and find a square of muslin decorated with a single rose.

fading
injured dove
attentive mate

Her husband's eyes mist. He lays the fabric over her swollen fingers. "Lilly, it's the eighteenth."








A strangely "modern" feeling poet, despite his age of 88 years at the time of his death in 2007, William Meredith graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in English, Magna Cum Laude.

After obtaining his degree, he worked briefly as a reporter for The New York Times before joining the U.S. Army Air Force in 1941. In 1942 he served as a carrier pilot for the U.S. Navy, achieving the rank of lieutenant. During his service, Meredith's first book of poems, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, published in 1944, was chosen by Archibald MacLeish for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. For the next few years he taught English at Princeton University as Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Writing and Resident Fellow in Creative Writing while still in the U.S. Navy Reserves.

In 1948, his second collection, Ships and Other Figures was published. Meredith then taught briefly as Associate professor of English at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu before returning to the Navy as a pilot in the Korean War. During his service, he achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander and received two Air Medals.

For most of the rest of his life, Meredith, as a poet, opera critic, dramatist, translator, editor, and public servant, divided his time between teaching and writing.

I take this next poem from Meredith's book Effort At Speech. This was his last book, published in 1997, after years of struggle to recover from a stroke in 1983 which left him with great difficulty in expressing himself at will.

I think I may have intended to use this poem before, but I don't think I ever actually did it.

As much as I hate to admit it, the poem, which seems so suitable for our time, was not written during the reign of George W. Bush. I suppose it's good advice for any president, including the new one we'll have come January 20th.



A Mild-Spoken Citizen Finally Writes to the White House

Please read this letter when you are alone.
Don't be afraid to listen to what may change you,
I am urging on you only what I myself have done.

In the first place, I respect the office, although one night
last spring, when you had committed (in my eyes)
criminal folly, and there was a toast to you, I wouldn't rise.

A man's mistakes (if I may lecture you), his worst acts,
aren't out of character, as he'd like to think,
are not put on him by power or stress or too much to drink,

but are simply a worse self he consents to be. Thus
there is no mistaking you. I marvel that there's
so much disrespect for a man just being himself, being his errors.

"I never met a man worse than myself."
Thoreau said. When we're our best selves, we can all
afford to say that. Self-respect is best when marginal.

And when the office of the presidency will again
accommodate that remark, it may be held by better men
than you or me. Meantime, I hear there is music in you house,

your women wear queen's wear though winds howl outside,
and I say, that's all right, the man should have some ease,
but does anyone say to your face who you really are?

No, they say Mr. President, while any young person
feels free to call me voter, believer, even causer.
And if I were also a pray-er, a man given to praying,

(I'm often careless about great things, like you)
and I wanted to pray for your office, as in fact I do,
the words that would come to me would more likely be

god change you than god bless the presidency.
I would pray, God cause the President to change.
As I myself have been changed, first my head, then my heart,

so that I no longer pretend that I don't swindle or kill
when there is swindling and killing on my nation's part.
Well. Go out into your upstairs hall tonight with this letter.

Generous ghosts must walk that house at night,
carrying draughts of the Republic like cold water
to a man parched after too much talk and wine and smoke.

Hear them. They are elected ghosts, though some will me radicals
and all may want to tell you things you may not like.
It will seem dark in the carpeted hall, despite the night lights

in the dull sconces. Make the guard let you pass.
"If you are President," a shade with a water glass
will ask you (and this is all I ask), calling you by name,

himself perhaps a famous name, "If you are the President,
and things in the land have come to all this shame,
why don't you try doing something new? The building rose,

Laborious as a dream, to house one character;
man trusting man anew. That's who each tenant is
- or an impostor, as some of us have been."

1969








I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and '’m writing this little note now on Saturday, three days before the election, hoping the asshole who wrote this letter didn't win.

By the time you read this we will all know.



nuts in the neighborhood not all hoarded by the squirrels

received
mail yesterday
addressed to
"MY NEIGHBOR"

the letter inside
two pages
of elaborate obscenities
carefully

written
in large block print
almost impossibly neat
and precise

response
to the two
Obama-Biden
campaign signs

in my front yard

but here's the curious thing

despite
the obscene letter
the campaign signs
are untouched

does this mean
we have a fruitcake
in the neighborhood
who respects

the first amendment
and my right to exercise
my political
opinion

truly a positive attestation
to his patriotism and respect
for American political traditions
or does it if just mean

that the fruitcake
hasn't taken the signs
because he's afraid
i'll catch him in the act

and kick his ass








Next, I have three short poems by Tina Koyama from Breaklng Silence, An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, published by The Greenfield Review Press in 1983.

The book doesn't include any bio material for Koyama and from what I can find on the web, it seems her emphasis is on bead art.



Definitions of the Word Gout

In Japanese,
two characters combine:
Wind.
Pain.

A man sits in his easy chair,
stares at his bit toe, watches it swell
to the size of a lemon,
glow red as tuna sashimi.
At each meal, his wife
reminds him that he can't have:
acids, maguro, tea spiked with V.O.
Increase alkalinity, says his friend
at Lloyd's Bathhouse.
Avoid beans.

From the patio door, a Rainier wind
whitens lake water on the other side
of the bridge, pulls my mother's
haiku calendar from the wall.
She come in to close the door,
replace the calendar,
reach a corncob pipe for my father.
Shifting his weight to light
the pipe, he is careful not to jar
the big toe. Through his pipe,
he breathes out the last of the wind
as if it were a word.


Ojisan After the Stroke: Three Notes to Himself
   (for my uncle)

Early morning.
Small birds drop from the plum tree
to the yard. Every day,their patterns
in my window the same: my window
always the same.

Afternoon.
Voices from the kitchen buzz in
and out of the room. I catch my name
in the corners like too much light.
Wasted as my left side.

Night.
the moon is half empty,
but I can't remember
if it's growing or shrinking. It creeps out
of my window
and into the rest of darkness.


Next

Probing my mouth as if searching for gold,
eyeing the lower left molar, his raw, unpolished jewel,
the man with snaps on his shoulder leans into me, so
eager I'm surprised he doesn't jump
right in, take a dip in cool pools of saliva.

"Keep it open, please," he smiles, then asks about my dog,
undergraduate education, the muffler on my car,
smiling, always smiling, his kind moon eyes expecting
answers. He knows my life can be answered with a nod,
knows the stony surface of my tooth
and the narrow parabola of my jaw
better than his own hand. He fears
extraction will be necessary, taps with his mirror

deep cracks that even promises won't fill. Here,
decisions come in the shape of pliers. I nod,
swallowing old questions with a numbing tongue.








I wrote this piece last Sunday, inspired, in fact, by a strip in the Sunday comics.



el dia de los muertos

on a day like today

and every day
is like today with living
and dead
in their separate
territories
only the border between
the two brighter
today
than other days
when our thoughts
of the dead
are rarely so celebrated

i imagine myself
standing
at the grave of my parents
and my vision
is not of my parents
but of myself
standing at their grave
trying
to conjure up
a vision of them

and it never works

for i have no memory
of them
bound in a box
beneath the earth

my memories
are of them walking together
beneath an open sky

moments
particular to them

my father
not as bad as he would be
at the very end
but knowing that very end
was coming

calling the three of us
my two brothers
and i
into a room to talk about
the final days he saw ahead
worried
about what would happen
to my mother
his wife of forty years
losing
control for a minute
only the second time
i ever saw him in tears
the first
at the funeral of his father

30 years passed since
and now
him gone
mother gone
older brother gone
and
just the two of us left
and most of my family life
lies now
in the memory of it

and memories of my mother
so proud
at the sale of her first painting
holding a $50 check in her hand
waving it at me
from across the room

and little memories

mixing cornbread and buttermilk
in a glass
a treat from her childhood
she enjoyed
into her last days or
playing dominos with my son
so happy she was to see him when
he finally came
crying on the phone
when i told her

my father
not a man to show affection
or emotion
putting his arm across my shoulder
the night of my high school graduation
or sitting
in the back row of a Catholic church
site of papist heresy
to his strict Lutheran soul
giving me a thumbs up as i pass
down the aisle
with my new bride

so many moments

too many to fit in boxes
under this well-tended grass








From the book, Selected Poems, published by New Directions in 1985m here are three pieces by William Carlos Williams.



Franklin Square

Instead of
the flower of the hawthorn
the spine:

The tree is in bloom
the flowers
and the leaves together

sheltering
the noisy sparrows
that give

by their intimate
indifference
the squirrels and pigeons

on the sharp-
edged lawns - the figure
of a park:

A city, a decadence
of bounty -
a tall negress approaching

the bench
pursing her old mouth
for what coin?


Labrador

How clean these shallows
how firm these rocks stand
about which wash
the waters of the world

It is ice to this body
that unclothes its pallors
to thoughts
of an immeasurable sea,

unmarred, that as it lifts
encloses this
straining mind, these
limbs in a single gesture.


A Woman in Front of a Bank

The bank is a matter of columns,
like convention,
unlike invention; but the pediments
sit there in the sun

to convince the doubting of
investments "solid
as a rock" - upon which the world
stands, the world of finance,

the only world: Just there,
talking with another woman while
rocking a baby carriage
back and forth stands a woman in

a pink cotton dress, bare legged
and headed whose legs
are two columns to hold up
her face, like Lenin's (her loosely

arranged hair profusely blond) or
Darwin's and there you
have it:
a woman in front of a bank.








times and places

usually
here by 9:30
in the morning,
but i worked today so it's
6:30 in the evening
and i'm lining up the differences
between
normal and now

some of them
are in the nature
of how the world turns
as in how the sun
has shifted it position
relative to me -
the glare through the window
on my screen in the morning
is no problem now
and the traffic on the street
outside window, a one-way-going-home
street
for most people working downtown,
is bumper to bumper now,
instead of the quiet little lane it is
in the morning

about
as many beer drinkers
as coffee drinkers in the afternoon,
office folk
and bankers
and hotel clerks
and accountants
and a city worker or two
having a beer
on their way home, like
my Dad did, one beer a day
in a beer joint along the way,
a whole series of different ones
over the years,
The Brown Bottle, The Glass Hat,
The Silver Slipper, Three Palms,
Bob & Mabel's, later, just Mabel's,
workmen stopping in,
mechanics, like my dad, a plumber,
a bus driver, a farmer,
the same group of men,
quiet men,
talking sports,
politics,
the sonsabitches
at work,
getting old together one beer at a time,
migrating over 40 years
from one place to another, leaving
one place and picking up another for no reason
i could ever figure out,
it was like the hospitality leaked out of a place
after a while and they had to move

it's that kind of place here at 6:30 p.m.

way different at the end of day
than in the morning when a new day's struggle
begins
and the coffee drinkers and the aura
and the smell of coffee brewing
are as young as the morning in fresh








The next two poems are by Siegfried Sassoon from the book The War Poems, first published in 1983 by Faber and Faber of London and Boston.

Sassoon was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical antiwar verse during World War I, then, later, won acclaim for his prose work.

Motivated by patriotism, he joined the military just as the threat of World War I was realized and was in service with the Sussex Yeomanry on the day the United Kingdom declared war. Though, like many, he entered into the war with romantic visions intact, he soon became horrified by the realities of war and the tone of his writing changed completely, as he increasingly attempted to convey the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience lulled by patriotic propaganda.

Despite his increasing disgust with the war, his periods of service on the Western Front were marked by exceptional bravery, including the single-handed capture of a German trench in the Hindenburg Line. He often went out on night-raids and bombing patrols and demonstrated ruthless efficiency as a company commander. Deepening depression at the horror and misery the soldiers were forced to endure produced in Sassoon a paradoxically manic courage, and he was nicknamed "Mad Jack" by his men for his near-suicidal exploits. Despite having been decorated for bravery, he decided in 1917 to make a stand against the conduct of the war.

At the end of a spell of convalescent leave, Sassoon refused to return to duty. Encouraged by pacifist friends such as Bertrand Russell, he sent a letter to his commanding officer titled A Soldier's Declaration, which was forwarded to the press and read out in Parliament by a sympathetic MP. Rather than court-martial him, the military authorities decided that he was unfit for service and sent him to a hospital, where he was officially treated for "shell shock."

Born in 1886, Sassoon died in 1967.



Two Hundred Years After

Trudging by Corbie Ridge one winter's night,
(Unless old hearsay memories tricked his sight)
Along the pallid edge of the quiet sky
He watched a nosing lorry grinding on,
And straggling files of men; when these were gone,
A double-limber and six mules went by,
Hauling the rations up through ruts and mud
To trench-lines digged two hundred years ago.
Then darkness hid them with a rainy scud,
And soon he saw the village lights below.

but when he'd told his tale, and old man said
that he'd seen the soldiers pass along that hill;
"Poor silent things, they were the English dead
Who came to fight in France and got their fill."

October 1916


In the Church of St Ouen

Time makes me be a soldier. But I know
that had I lived six hundred years ago
I might have tried to build within my heart
a church like this, where I could dwell apart
With chanting peace. My spirit longs for prayer;
And, lost to God, I seek him everywhere.
Here, where the windows burn and bloom like flowers,
And sunlight falls and fades with tranquil hours,
I could be half a saint, for like a rose
In heart-shaped stone the glory of Heaven glows.
But where I stand, desiring yet to stay,
Hearing rich music at the close of day,
the Spring Offensive (Easter is its date)
Calls me. And that's the music I await.

Rouen, 4 march 1917








There are mixed feelings about Daylight Savings Time. Some like it, some don't, but most, like me, have a mixed view. We love the falling back and hate the leaping forward.

I wrote this, special for the ocassion.



the natural order of things

it is
the first morning
of DST

while
others scurry
to change clocks
jump forward
fall back
whichever the correct course
for the season

i take a more
benign
approach
don't
change anything
just remember
to add
or take away an hour
when i look at the clock

whichever might be required
for the season

this means
that
without any action
by the human hand of
intrusion
all my clocks
are correct half the year
and
through the other half
of the year
are equally correct except
only
set slightly akilter
by the human need to fuck
with the natural order of things
correctable -
since
correction is always required
when humans
surrender
their need
to fuck with the natural
order -
by the simple addition or subtraction
of 1

thus
my clock
unaffected by the human need
to fuck with the natural order of things
reads 10:06 a.m.
though
being sufficiently proficient in math
i know that
1 whole hour unit subtracted from (now) 10:07
means that it is actually
(now)
9:08 a.m.

meanwhile
i got up this morning
at the normal time i always get up
the only change being that
because of the human need to fuck
with the natural order of things
i
had to kill an hour
waiting for the rest of the world
to catch up








Natasha Trethewey, born in 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, from which I've taken the poems below.

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University.

She is also author of Bellocq's Ophelia and Domestic Work, for which she won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize.



Theories of Time and Space

You can get there from here, though
there's no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you've never been before. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion - dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp - buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry - tome of memory,
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph - who you were -
will be waiting when you return.


The Southern Crescent

1
In 1959 my mother is boarding a train.
She is barely sixteen, her one large grip
bulging with homemade dresses, whisper
of crinoline and lace, her name stitched
inside each one. She is leaving behind
the dirt roads of Mississippi,the film
of red dust around her ankles, the thin
whistle of wind through the floorboards
of the shotgun house, the very idea of home.

Ahead of her,days of travel, one town
after the next, and California - a word
she can't stop repeating. Over and over
she will practice meeting her father, imagine
how he must look, how different now
from the one photo she has of him. she will
look at it once more, pulling into the station
at Los Angeles, and then again and again
on the platform, no one like him insight.

2.
The year the old Crescent makes its last run,
my mother insists we ride it together.
We leave Gulfport late morning, heading east.
Years before, we rode together to meet
another man, my father, waiting for us
as our train derailed. I don't recall how
she must have held me, how her face sank
as she realized, again, the uncertainty
of it all - that trip, too, gone wrong. Today

she is sure we can leave home, bound only
for whatever awaits us, the sun now
setting behind us. the rails humming
like anticipation, the train pulling us
toward the end of another day. I watch
each small town pass before my window
until the light goes, and the reflection
of my mother's face appears, clearer now
as evening comes on, dark and certain.


After Your Death

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you brought for preserves. The next morning
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or - like another I plucked
and split open - being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I'm too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.








Getting near to time to close up shop here for this week. Here's a slow-burner to ease us toward the door.



slow sunday

on
my own

D in a crafts class
and i'm in a
funk
of
don't know what
to do

not that i don't
have anything to do
just can't decide

could write a poem

could work
on the next issue
of the blog

could take a nap

could go to a movie

spent
ten minutes this morning
watching
the neighbor cat
stalk
the black bird
with the dog food nugget
it stole
from the bowl i put out
on the back patio
this morning
for the dogs - sitting
in my car
in the driveway
motor running
watching
the black bird
trying to break the dry dog food
and the cat
belly to the ground
tail twitching
poised to leap
then looking at me
grimacing
at the futility of it all
and turning away
back to its nap by the
front door

not
worth the trouble

i'm
at La Taza
watching
with one eye
some food program
on the making
of candies i can't eat any more
the other eye
watching my laptop screen
as my fingers push word after word
into this little construct
of cat
stalking bird
stealing dog food

thinking
i should go
lay down with the neighbor
cat
by the front door
and go to sleep before
i cause more
trouble

the soft wrath
of world
indifference
watches
my every move








The next poem is by Lynn Crosbie from her book, Miss Pamela's Mercy, published in 1992 by Coach House Press of Toronto. She is a Canadian poet and novelist, born in Montreal in 1963 and, and at the time of the book's publication, living in Toronto.



Love Letters

I would give my husband drawings for grocery lists,
with smiling faces on the eggs, and spider feet
dangling everywhere. I could draw letters too.
fat senseless alphabets, lexical landscapes of
pointed trees and bloated clouds. that is how I
wished words were, with changing colors and
feathers in their spines. on road signs in my
dreams, they shimmied, their Rockette heels a
variegated sunburst. unlike the stiff black
knots and stakes that glared at me from envelopes
and books. an unchanging and cruel exotica,
like smelling Cuban cigars wherever you go or
the same screaming opera. he said that I did
not need to learn with him there, reading slowly
aloud, but sometimes in silence. that drove me
insane, he would laugh or frown at something
on the page, and look as if he were creeping
vine on a tombstone, a coffee stain on a piece
of clean manilla. I practiced learning on a stack
of mail he kept in his sock drawer, and I
finally learned dear. Dear Hank, it felt like
having a perfume sample fall from a magazine
in a sweet sudden breath. it made me think of
velvet antlers, of his rumpled cardigan sweater
and my love for him, a word which slayed me,
with its clean lines and quick exhalation,
the swelling heart in its middle. I began to
screams things all day long, and I felt the first
affection for poetry through the ringing sounds
of advertisements, soapbox labels and advice to
the lovelorn columns. words were heroic, huge
killing things, and they beat in my head and
bled from my eyes and fingers. I would be ironing,
and a giant phrase or comma would barrel into
the room, its veins bulging, its arms around
my waist. Dear Hank, I miss you especially
your sexy hands, mine clenched when I got that
far and then some. then I knew for sure that
reading was magic, it conjured up these long
eyelashes and white Harlow hair, and the guilty
bald spot and shaking dewlap of my faithless
husband, adrift on the libretto of his private
life. he would still read to me in his annoying
way while I squirmed on my novels and texts
that lay under the couch cushions like misplaced
scissors. I drew him an elaborate list one day,
of pink champagne bottles and support girdles,
and wrote my first words. I left them with his
letters, on the back of our marriage certificate,
I think they were my finest, I said, Dear
Hank, the end. and right away began working on
a longer book.








I wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago, after a day trip to the little city of Fredericksburg, up in the hill country where my father was born and raised.



summer school

we would
come up here
every summer when
i was a kid -
bbq brisket every night,
then the men would sit around
drinking beer and talking
well past dark

all this on
big tables outside
with my grandmother,
aunts and uncles
and my cousins, especially
the one, my boy cousin
just a couple months older
than me, we'd spend the day
riding bikes around town, going
to the city pool with the regular
diving and the high board
that was like flying for a couple
of seconds before you'd hit the water

camping out at night in the big lot
between my grandmother's house
and my cousin's house, sleeping
under a big tree with a little camp fire,
hobo stew for dinner, eggs and bacon
for breakfast, all cooked on our little fire,
played baseball - i was shy about sports
at home, but with him i was pretty good, strong
arm, good pitcher - caught one of his grounders
with my right eye once, then he did the same thing
the next night at his Little League game, same
eye and everything, so we were the black eye
twins for the rest of the time i was there that year

back home, there was a irrigation canal
about a quarter mile from my house
where i learned to swim, muddy, full
of catfish and alligator gar and who knows
what else in the muddy water - not like
the creeks we swam in during our summer
visits, clear, cool, fast moving through the hills
a different world from the one i knew

running along the creek one afternoon,
i was following my cousin as he ran, jumping
into the creek, then back onto the bank -
snake! he yelled
one time as he jumped over a little patch
of water and i was running right behind,
too close to stop so i jumped too -
looked down, saw two water moccasins
curled up, heads raised below my feet

that was the summer i learned to levitate








Next, I have a piece by our friend Margaret Mayberry.

Margaret says the poem is, at least in part from her own experience on a difficult sea voyage. In her words:

"In 1948 I went from Marseilles, France to Australia on an ancient ship of 1,600 tons which once carried coal off the coast of Scotland. The roughest part was the first week out though we broke down and drifted for 4 days in the Indian Ocean on a sea as smooth as glass. The journey took 8 weeks. The absurdly few lifeboats and rafts had been painted to the deck. It was at the time of the Berlin Air Crisis and it was impossible to get a passage out of England on an ordinary ship."



The Storm

The ship, creaking and groaning,
Rises from the water,
Hovers in mid-air, shudders and crashes
Into the churning foam.

The horizon disappears in the raging storm,
Lost below as the ship reaches for the sky,
Then falls again to the writhing ocean,
Sky and sea one in a soaking sheet.

A forlorn man huddles, blanketed and damp,
Sea-sickness adding to his earlier woes,
A bird, off course, blown sideways, lags behind,
A tiny speck beating hopelessly against the gray.

Water ebbs and flows over the sloping decks,
Of a once coal carrying boat,
Sailors lurch from post to rail catching their breath,
Securing banging doors as they go.

Broken glass beneath the Bridge,
Lies hidden in the shifting water,
The ship heaves itself across the waves,
Its engines rhythmic and determined.

There is no safe harbor, no retreat,
While the Gods in their fury,
Ride the skies, watching the battle,
Spurring the storm to greater violence.

Day gives way to darkness as the ship,
Rises and falls, shakes and shudders,
Silhouetted against the black water,
As the lightening flashes.

The groans of the old timbers are lost,
Drowned in the roar of the thunder,
The vessel labors on, undaunted,
Knowing that tomorrow will be calm.








And, finally this.

The great Studs Terkel died last week, in his 96th year. A tribute to him on National Public Radio's morning news program concluded with him reading this poem about the city he loved, Chicago, by Carl Sandburg.

In my own little tribute to this man who thought everyone had a story and was worth talking to, I'll finish this week with that poem. I take the poem from Carl Sandburg - Selected Poems, published in 1992 by Gramercy Books.



Chicago

        Hog Butcher for the World,
        Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
        Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight
            Handler;
        Stormy, husky, brawling
        City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
    have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
    luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yet it is
    true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill
    again.
And they tell me your are brutal and my reply is: On the
    faces of women and children I have seen the marks
    of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
    sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
    and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
    so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cun-
    ing.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
    job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
    little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
    as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
        Bareheaded,
        Shoveling,
        Wrecking,
        Planning,
        Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
    white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
    man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
    never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse,
    and under his ribs the heart of the people,
            Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth
    half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher,
    Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Rail-
    roads and Freight Handler to the Nation.








And so much for this week.

As I said in the beginning of this issue, I'll be traveling next week, and, if I can get everything I need transferred to my laptop, will be posting next week's issue from somewhere on the road in the Appalachian Mountains.

Until then, I'll be remembering, and you should too, that all the material present in this blog remains the property of its creators, while the blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.
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