Here and Now: January 2009

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New Day Friday, January 16, 2009

IV.1.3.

In recognition of the inauguration next week of America's new president, my photos this week will feature a collection of sunrises and sunsets, the dusk of the old day surrendering to the dawn of the new. Who cannot be hopeful and excited about this new beginning?

Here's what I have for you this week.

From friends of "Here and Now"

Christopher George
Tasha Klein
Walter Durk

From my library

Ralph Angel
Kabir
Gunna Ekelof
Issa
Melvin Van Peebles
Steve Richmond
Jack Micheline
Simon Armitage
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Frederick Seidel
Simon J. Ortiz
John Koethe

and me.

Here we are.

I have a poem now by Ralph Angel, from his book Twice Removed published in 2001 by Sarabande Books of Louisville, Kentucky.

Angel has two earlier books, Neither World, which I've used here frequently and which won the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, Anxious Latitudes. He is professor of English at the University of the Redlands as well as a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College. Originally from Seattle, he now lives in Los Angles.

Breathing Out

Now you are crossing a wide street at night
anxious in the traffic and rushing
to get to the bakery
before closing. What could be more breathtaking
than your beauty if not in my arms
at least on that side
of peril. That's
why I'm yelling at the driver of the pickup truck
I just slammed into so much did I
want to park and
wait for you.

May I never live with love
by surviving love and loving blocks and days away
the most ancient of the dead desire earthly
our getting born again
alone without
choice

children fill the air
the spices and the rugs of the bazaar.

I buy you tulips.
They are yellow and bright.
The port is dark and glittering blue airplanes
hover there. Like clarity
itself. Like
faintly wailing sirens attached to absolutely
nothing.
Like socks and sweaters and
the blanket that slipped somehow
from your legs while I
tidied up the balcony so lost in your book
are you tonight.

Nothing dramatic going on in my life, as my first poem for this week demonstrates.

Saturday morning

it's
one of those
winter/summer/spring/fall
days
we get around here
this time of year

bright sun
temps mid-50s
unless
you're standing
out in the blustery
north wind
that brings the wind chill
down 20 or 30 degrees

Reba
wanted a walk this morning
and i broke under
the pleading puddle
of her cinnamon eyes

tee shirt
long sleeve shirt
and a light jacket

too hot
or too cold
depending on where i was
relative to sun and wind

i could have skipped the walk
and gone straight for coffee

but
reba
had a great time

frisky
running
jumping
catching great mouthfuls
of sun and morning chill

that
was pretty good
for me
too

My next several poems are from The Winged Energy of Delight. The book is subtitled "Selected Translations" though it is unclear to me who the translator is. The book is credited to Robert Bly who has laid claim to translating poems from a wide range of the world's languages, past and present when what he seems to really do is add his own poetic sensibility to previous translations by others. Since his poetic sensibilities are among the best, the versions he produces of poems in other languages are excellent. The problem, for me at least, is to know who to credit for the poem, the original poet, the original unnamed translator or Bly himself.

I choose to go to the source and credit the original poet.

The first two poems are by Kabir,the Indian mystic, born in 1398, with, it seems to me, a very modern sensibility.

The Holy Pools Have Only Water

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the god's sculpted of wood and ivory can't say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something, it is not true.

Why Arrange the Pillows

Oh friend, I love you, think this over
carefully! If you are in love,
then why to you sleep?

If you have found him,
give yourself to him, take him.

Why do you lose track of him again and again?

If you are about to fall into heavy sleep anyway,
why waste time smoothing the bed
and arranging the pillows?

Kabir will tell you the truth; this is what love is like:
suppose you had to cut your head off
and give it to someone else,
what difference would that make?

The next poem is by Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof. Ekelof was born to a wealthy family in Stockholm in 1907. His father died in 1916 from syphilis after many years of insanity. He left home early and studied at the School of Oriental Studies in London, then moved to Paris where he intended to become a musician. He found himself in poetry instead, publishing his first book, thought to be the first book of surrealist poetry in Sweden, in 1932. He died in Stockholm in 1968.

from The Swan

1
I heard wild geese over the hospital grounds
where many pale people walk back and forth
- one morning in a daze
I heard them! I hear them!
I dreamt I heard -

And nevertheless I did hear them!

Here endless walks circle about
around bottomless dams
Here the days all reflect
one monotonous day
at the slightest touch
beautiful blossoms close
their strange petals -

the woman on a nurse's arm
she screams incessantly:
HellDevilHell
- is led home
hurriedly...
dusk has come
over the salmon-colored buildings
and outside the wall
an anemic blush over endless suburbs
of identical houses
with some vegetable beds steaming as if in spring between...

They are burning twigs and leaves:
It is fall
and the vegetables beds are attached by worm-eaten cabbages
and bare flowers -

I heard wild geese over the hospital grounds
one autumn like spring morning
I heard wild geese one morning
one springautumn morning
trumpeting -

To the north? To the south?
To the north? To the north?
Far from here -

A freshness lives deep in me
which no one can take from me
not even I myself -

If You Ask Me Where I Live

If you ask me where I live
I live right here behind the mountain
It's a long way off but I am near
I live in another world
but you live there also
That world is everywhere even if it is as rare as helium
Why do you ask for an airship to bear you off?
Ask instead for a filter for carbon dioxide
a filter for hydrogen, for nitrogen, and other gases
Ask for a filter for all these things that separate us from one another
a filter for life
You say you can hardly breathe?
Well, who do you think can breathe?
For the most part we take it however with equanimity
A wise man has said:
"It was so dark I could barely see the stars"
He just meant that it was night

Finally, here are several haiku by Issa. He was born in 1763 in a small mountain village in central Japan and died in 1827, the day after his house burned down.

***

Insects, why cry?
we all go
that way.

***

Now listen, you watermelons -
if any thieves come -
turn into frogs!

***

That line of ants -
Maybe it goes all the way back
to that white cloud!

***

The old dog bends his head listening...
I guess the singing
of the earthworms gets to him

****

Cricket, be
careful! I'm rolling
over!

Here are two short poems from our friend Christopher George. Chris, a lyricist as well as a widely-published poet, was born in Liverpool in 1948 and emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1955. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Deeply Discounted

For Frank Faust

I read your poem, frankly depressed:
pretty girls of yesterday you loved,

now plain and crabby grandmothers, you
look in mirror, see lines, receding hair.

But, I protest: inside I'm still
the slip of a lad I always was.

I buy a deeply discounted compact disc
of a Sixties group - a two-CD live
compilation, just a measly few bucks,

insert a disc into my CD player,
refuse to look in the mirror.

Locust Trees at Year's End

Locust trees barbwire the sky;
as the year fritters away,
the Bush administration fizzles
like a dud Scud missile.

It's been a while since I've pulled anything from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, such oversight remedied right now.

My first poem from the book is by filmmaker and author Melvin Van Peebles.

On 115

Born with the fastest hands Harlem had ever seen
Thought they had'em the next NBA star
On hundred and fifteenth

Same day his daddy split his momma had this dream
The Knicks and the Nets would be their ticket
Off hundred and fifteenth

Cross Lenox he'd dribble tearing ass in between
Jitneys muggers potholes and wind bottles
Up hundred and fifteenth

His jump was an arrow, his dunk was straight and clean
Sure as a flush junkies connection on
One hundred and fifteenth

The fool went one on one with big "h" and got creamed
Found him stiff o.d'back of the rib joint
On hundred and fifteenth

Horse will always foul you, flagrant as he wants to be
Aint no refs calling no penalties on him either
On hundred and fifteenth

Somewhere stars are shining, hope God's got a boss team
Homeboys dont like playing 'gainst no punks when
They from hundred and fifteenth

Born with the fastest hands Harlem had ever seen
Thought they had'em the next NBA star
On hundred and fifteenth

The next poem from the book is by Steve Richmond, one of a group of Southern California poets associated with the early career of Charles Bukowski.

A Bukowski Writing Lesson

It's about this time he pulls out my first book of poetry, the copy I mailed him three months earlier. He starts reading the very first poem:

i tore my nails into
my stomach ripping a hole
big enough to put my hand
into me with blind fingers
feeling between intestines
and liver for the flower of
me, until i found it pulling
it out, holding it in my bloody
right hand until my left hand
got hold of my soul, and i
took the two and smashed them
together until they became
a solid piece of total beauty
for me to throw with all
my strength into the
stars

I'm watching close as he reads it through. He seems not
to be hurting at all so i feel it's all working nicely and then he
gets to the last word and he suddenly goes, "OOOOOOOHHHH
SHIT. IT WAS GOING FINE RIGHT UP TO THAT LAST
WORD-STARS-OHH IT'S TOO DAMN BAD-WHAT A SHAME."

I was asking myself, "What? What the'hell does he
mean? Stars? What's wrong with "stars"? Nobody's ever said
anything bad about "stars" to me in my life - hmmmmmm."

Bukowski spoke on, "STARS is so goddamn ultra
poetic. You can't use STARS. STARS STARS STARS FUCK
TH' GODDAMN STAR! What a shame, kid. You had it strong
right up to the last word, then gone, ruined, all th'damn dead
false sewing circle poets are forever writing STARS STARS
STARS!! They can't write a line without STARS in it some-
where. I"m sorry kid."

What he was telling me made instant sense but I tried to
hedge in my mind because the 1,000 copies were already printed
and half the run was already distributed and there wasn't any
chance I could recall every copy and have Tasmania Press
change the last word of the first poem to some word, any word
other than STARS.

Now it's July 11, 1994 and it's been 29 years since
Hank tore his Lion's Claws into my use of STARS and I've
never used the word Stars or stars or stARS ever since
.....since ten minutes after i met Charles Bukowski face to face.

My last poet from the book this week is Jack Micheline, a street poet and author of dozens of books and chapbooks.

Blues Poem

I got no smile cause I'm down
I carry a horn to blow in all these streets
A solo riff out of my head
How could you ever know how I feel
So high on life and feet and ass and legs and thighs
That I can rise and dance with all the stars
And I can eat the moon and laugh and I can cry
The dark caves of cities hungry streets
The tired faces dark and dreary bent
and all the death it dies
I let it die
I lift my horn and blow some sounds
some soul for kids to com
Some unborn sun
in darker streets than mine
Magicians carry wings so they can fly
Let's blow a horn and love
Let's get on it and ride
and laugh and dance and jive
Let's shake the dead and let the downers die
The magic of the singers warms the earth
A song
A poem
some paradise of mind
I got to smile now
I'm feeling good
The city street
The palace of my mind

Next, here's another of my coffee shop observations.

a so, so serious man

man
in the corner
reading a book
under broad leaves
of a banana
plant

moves
his lips, nods
his head, smiles

amazingly
clever writer
it must be
to agree so completely
with this man as to bring a
smile
to his face,
this face
that carries no lines of
frequent
good humor

to make him laugh,
this
so, so serious man,
must require
a master
of the writer's art

or maybe i am
mistaken
and he is really
a clown,
this man
in the corner
reading
under broad leaves
of a banana plant
laughing
at the pretensions
of some so, so serious
man

Next, I have another poet i'm reading for the first time.

Simon Armitage, born in 1963, is a British poet, playwright, and novelist. Before finding success with his poetry Armitage worked as a probation officer, an undertaker's assistant and a supermarket shelf stacker. first studied at Colne Valley High School in the UK, then went on to study geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic, UK. He later lectured on creative writing at both the University of Leeds, UK and at the University of Iowa writers' workshop in the United States. He is currently a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom.

The next two poems are from his book Kid, published by Faber and Faber in 1992,

In Clover

This winter, six white geese have settled near the house.
This morning as she polishes the furniture
and peers across the river to their nesting place

she finds the gaggle floating off downstream, and there
instead is one white egg sat upright in the sand.
The geese, distracted with a crust, are unaware

as Rose, her eldest, in ankle socks and sandals
cradles the egg in the lap of her pinafore
and picks a safe way back across the stepping-stones.

She cracks the contents on a bed of cornflour
and paints policemen on the empty halves of shell
to sell as plant-pot-men in the next month's flower show.

Later, the six white geese will crane their necks to smell
the fine egg-pudding cooling on the window-sill.

I almost didn't use this next poem because of its length. But once started reading it, couldn't stop; just too much fun to pass up.

Eighteen Plays on Golfing as a Watchword

I

Among the twenty lovers
of the Lady Capitan, only one man

knew the wonder of an albatross.

II

At the second hole he saw the light,
paid off the caddie
selected a nine iron and his favourite ball,

steered a clean shot through a gap in the wall
and followed it out onto the unmarked fairway

of the world

III

Both our balls plugged
in that stodgy stuff
this side of the greenskeeper's hut.

You see them:
the mad eyes
of the ghost of the man in the mud

IV

The flag and the green
from this elevation;
a heron in its pool
of stagnant water.

V

I was about to say something marvelous,
then forgot.

Oh yes,
I stood and was bamboozled
by a line of badger prints
which stopped in their tracks
at the heart of the sand-trap

VI

You sliced a tee shot
off the toe of the cup. It pinballed

through the copse, came back
to within spitting distance of where we stood,
and stopped.

A blackbird burst out laughing.

VII

To hole in one,

or at last let go of your boy
on his new bike as he makes it
the length of the drive, down the hill,
along the carriageway,
between the weighbridge and the bottle bank -
just a dot now -
and through the gates of the big school without falling.

VIII

Which fink blackballed the Captain's brother?

among the twenty snow-white members
of the selection committee, the Captain's face

a picture

IX

A three-iron, two-hundred yards,
dead straight and a decent lie: one shot.

A sitter fluffed from two feet; one shot

Not the fear of flying
but of falling.
Not the first ten-thousand feet
but the last one. Fatal

X

An object-lesson in addressing the ball:

head down, hands
where you're happiest with them,
putter firm but at ease,
legs apart and slightly broken
at the knees.

You gents,
try it when you take a leak.

XI

Sometimes in bed I replay
every stroke
in that splendid round.

Some nights I dream
of badgers walking backwards.

XII

To do with film and shutter speed.
Just nicely teed off, this unremarkable old-timer
in a blurred imperfect circle,

caught in the act of hs own swing.

XIII

Uncanny, on the thirteenth
a blackbird rears up
like an umbrella.

Rain begins to happen.

XIV

Us roughnecks from the council estate,
out before breakfast
thieving magic mushrooms from the practice fairway,
lost balls to flog at competitive prices
and song-thrush eggs from the rhododendrons.

From his hut,
over eighteen misty holes,
the greenskeeper turning a blind eye

XV

Like a fish
it grows with every telling.

Yesterday you stroked it home from twelve yards.

Today you winkle it from the bunker,
it bites and borrows to the left, anchor us,
rattles the pin and somehow wangles its way in.

Plop.
Unforgettable.

XVI

I can't say which is preferable:

the fat man in his motorized buggy
getting no traction in that stodgy stuff
this side of the greenskeeper's hut,

or the lengthening shadow of the fat man
in his buggy, inching to the clubhouse
as he stays put.

XVII

The fairways deserted, the world's
our oyster.

In the wood the wind is the sound
of the sea.

A ball in the cup is a pearl
for the taking

On the back nine, one fathom now
from the surface.

XVIII

Sundown, almost, the 19th
lit up like a petrol station.

Let's live for the moment.
For the hell of it let's tee one up
and belt it
into the nothingness.

A shooting star
agrees with us

Tasha Klein makes her first appearance in "Here and Now" this week, the first, I hope, of many.

Asked what I could say about her by way of introduction, she said "Tasha Klein lives in a winter dream" which sounds pretty OK to me.

Here are her poems, a very sensual and affecting series on dreams.

Dream Poems

dream 1 - he hangs up

in this one
i have sex hair
and everything is sleepy

the phone rings
it's mr m
he wants to
make a plan
i tell him
i am naked
i say it slowly

dream 2 - to mr m

I sleep with your poem,
in its river, with its fist
and stone. I've stitched
the words to my brain,
tied them to my wrist,
swallowed them whole.

dream 2 1/2 - amsterdam

in a coffee shop
we laugh

new creatures we swim the streets,
if we keep left
the tulip shoe
will throw its magic glow

or so they claim
but our madness is not forgotten
we think about it everyday
it speeds through us like a red train

between the traffic
a dog's eye
sees nothing

between the buildings
I am still your green girl.

dream 3 - the nightmare

you aren't in europe but you might as well be
because you are mr unavailable
mr work on the house
mr it was a joke
i wrote your name in the sand
of some sad beach where sea turtles
are endangered & the area
is kept unlit all night and when i looked out into
the blackness from the hotel balcony
i felt the black pour into me
like dream/poem four
where you drink from my eyes and all my red cups
& my tears turn into music
and you become the wind

and so..
i turn in my dream and there you are
flowers dragging, hair roaring
bull eyes full of mud but your hands
are clean and they find me
open

not really a dream poem but sort of

at 3 am i heard the roar
of your blood racing through the night
felt the sweat of your words on my thigh
saw all the flowers following your scent
the deep dark colors of your hair breaking
up
i went
my body stayed behind
held down
by your hungry parts
all delicious like a favorite story
i'll never get tired of
tasting the
click click sounds spinning me round
and polished like your nails
like your mouth so glossy
and open down below
the meadow touching the roots
of the new grass
tender like your words outstretched and
hot

and I could suck you

You're touching yourself right now, aren't you?
Yes. Are you?
Of course, naturally.
Now if we were face to face, high
and there were black nylons involved,
well then, those are the perfect ingredients
to start a great moral and ethical debate..
Check out the string arrangements
on track four (Lonesome Tears).
I'm shutting down for the night. Later.

friday - burnt offering - room 229

only wild tribes burning their fire in the mirror

loose pages ready to fall out
Leviticus
the room is too hot
cut into pieces
paper on the floor

did you sit alone
wishing for bitter coffee
and a clear view
they tell me smog buckles
they tell me you got fat

Here's a poem by one of the last of the San Francisco beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from his book Wild Drams of a New Beginning, a combination of two previous collections, published by New Directions Paperbook in 1988.

Eight People On A Golf Course and One Bird of Freedom Flying Over

The phoenix flies higher & higher
above eight elegant people on a golf course
who have their heads stuck in the sands
of a big trap
One man raises his head and shouts
I am President of Earth. I rule.
You elected me, heh-heh. Fore!
A second man raised his head.
I am King of the Car.
The car is my weapon. I drive all before me.
Ye shall have no other gods.
Watch out. I'm coming through.
A third raises his head out of the sand.
I run a religion. I am your spiritual head.
Never mind which religion.
I drive a long ball. Bow down and putt.
A fourth raises his head in the bunker.
I am the General. I have tanks to conquer deserts.
And my tank shall not want. I'm thirsty.
We play Rollerball. I love Arabs.
A fifth raises his head and opens his mouth.
I am Your Master's Voice.
I rule newsprint. I rule airwaves, long & short.
We bend minds. We make reality to order.
Mind Fuck Incorporated.
Satire becomes reality, reality satire.
Man the Cosmic Joke. Et cetera.
A sixth man raises his gold bald head.
I'm your friendly multinational banker.
I chew cigars rolled with petro-dollars.
We're above the nations. We control the control.
I'll eat you all in the end.
I work on margins. Yours.
A woman raised her head higher than anyone.
I am the Little Woman. I'm the Tender Warrior
who votes like her husband. Who took my breasts.
A final figure rises, carrying all the clubs.
Stop or I'll shoot a hole-in-one.
I'm the Chief of All Police. I eat meat.
We know the enemy. You better believe it.
We're watching all you paranoids. Go ahead & laugh.
You're all in the computer. We've got all
your numbers. Except one
unidentified flying asshole.
On the radar screen.
Some dumb bird.
Every time I shoot it down
it rises.

As I write this, seven more days...

poor man

stalled
as long as i can

read the Times,
Wall Street Journal

and about five
magazines

including The Progressive
which i hate

(want to know why the hard left
never amounts to much in this country -

take a look at the drivel
they read)

also checked out
about eight web sites

and read and responded
to my email

and still i'm stuck with the idea
i started with

and i hate that cause i'm sick
of reading and writing about him -

fade away foul shadow like you're supposed to,
back to Texas, to Crawford, to Dallas,

anywhere

but no luck, he's still there,
the unwanted guest who won't go home -

George W. Bush

however he feels about his record
i'm am pleased with mine -

eight years of speeches and press conferences
and i neither saw nor heard any of them -

but i had the advantage of six years of experience
with him before the rest of the country

was so afflicted
and i knew what to expect

poor man

i'm sure he wanted to do good
(most of us do, after all)

instead he became worst of them all
from the first George W to the last

pretty much a fuck-up for most of his life,
failed, like this, at most everything he tried

but he probably hoped to do better
and probably thinks he did

poor man

Zabrieskie Point, not anywhere close to making my list of movies I'd like to see again, remembered fondly now as inspiration for this poem by Federick Seidel, from his book Poems 1965-1976.

Death Valley

Antonioni walks in the desert shooting
Zariskie Point. He does not perspire
Because it is dry. His twill trousers stay pressed,
He wears desert boots and a viewfinder,
He has a profile he could shave with, sharp
And meek, like the eyesight of the deaf,
With which he is trying to find America,
A pick for prospecting passive as a dowser.
He has followed his nose into the desert.

Crew and cast mush over the burning lake
Shivering and floaty like a mirage.
The light makes it hard to see. Four million dollars
And cameras ripple over the alkali
Waiting for the director to breathe on them.
How even and epic his wingbeats are for a small fellow,
He sips cigarette after cigarette
And turns in Italian to consult his English
Girlfriend and screenwriter, who is beautiful.

In Arizona only the saguaros
and everybody else were taller than he was,
Selah. He draws in the gypsum dust selah
He squats on his heels for the love scene, finally
The technicians are spray-dyeing the dust darker.
It looks unreal, but it will dry lighter,
Puffs of quadroon smoke back out of the spray guns.
The Open Theater are naked and made up.

Some people hold on to grudges well past time to let them go. I guess I'm one of them.

song of the order of the gold watch brigade

i
know stuff
nobody
else knows
but
no longer welcome
at the party
the stuff
i
know
will stay the stuff
only i know
and those
who dont know
the stuff
i
know
don't know yet
how much
trouble
they're in

but
i figure
what the hell
if i can't come
to the party
they
will just have to figure out
how to blow up
all those red balloons
on their own

and
don't expect
me
to feel bad
about it

Simon J. Ortiz, poet, short story writer, essayist and documentary and feature screenwriter, was born in 1941 in Acoma Pueblo. He lives at Deetseyamah, a rural community west of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Since 1968, Ortiz has taught creative writing and Native American literature at various institutions, including San Diego State, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Navajo Community College, the College of Marin, the University of New Mexico, Sinte Gleska University (one of the first U.S. tribal colleges) , and the University of Toronto. He currently teaches at Arizona State University.

The next two poems are from his book Woven Stone, published in 1992 by the University of Arizona Press. The poems are from a section titled "Going for the Rain" which was a previously published book incorporated into this collection.

Relocation

Don't talk me no words.
Don't frighten me
for I am in the blinding city.
The lights,
the cars,
the deadened glares
tear my heart
and close my mind.

Who questions my pain,
the tight knot of anger
in my breast?

I swallow hard and often
and taste my spit
and it does not taste good.
Who questions my mind?

I came here because I was tired;
the BIA taught me to cleanse myself,
daily to keep a careful account of my time.
Efficiency was learned in catechism;
the nuns spelled me God in white.
And I came here to feed myself -
corn, potatoes, chili, and mutton
do not nourish me they said.

So I agreed to move.
I see me walking in sleep
down streets, down streets gray with cement
and glaring glass and oily wind,
armed with a pint of wine,
I cheated my children to buy.
I am ashamed.
I am tired.
I am hungry.
I speak words.
I am lonely for hills.
I am lonely for myself.

Busride Conversation

She says,
"I came to Albuquerque
on Wednesday."

She's about eighteen.

"I have three shell necklaces
ready to sell.
A man offered me thirty dollars."

She smells slightly sour
with sweat, the several nights
in Albuquerque.

We mention names
to each other,
people we know,
places we've been.

She says, "In May,
I was in Gallup jail
with a girl from Acoma."

I've been there too.
"The cook was an Apache.
He sneaked two chiliburgers
in to us.
He was sure good to us."

She giggles, and I laugh.
She gets off at Domingo Junction.

"Be good," I say.

"You too," she says.

The next poem is by our friend, Walter Durk. Walter, born in New York City, has traveled around the world, living at times in various places in Asia and the United States.

Inner Works

We peddle our lives.
Like a hawker we shout out the benefits -
the emollients in the soap to soften
the razor-sharp blade that slices a tomato
paper-thin.

We peddle our wares without telling how
quickly the soap dissolves or how fast the
knife edge dulls. Instead we speak of fragrances
or catch a ray of light to reflect on the blade.
And although they fear the razor-edge,
they are captivated. They crave the fragrance
and the feel of pain.

The next poem is from The Constructor, a collection of poetry by John Koethe published in 1999 b y HarperCollins.

Koethe was born in San Diego, California, in 1945. He was educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities. Since 1973, he has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. He has published several other books of poetry, including Domes, for which he received the Frank O'Hara Poetry Award.

Sunday Evening

Ideas as crystals and the logic of a violin:
the intricate evasions warming up again
For another raid on the inarticulate. And soon
The morning melody begins, the oranges and the tea,
The introspective walk about the neighborhood,
The ambient noise, the low lapping of water over stones.
The peace one finds encounters one alone,
In the memories of books, or half-remembered songs,
Or, in the mild enchantments of the passive mood:
To hesitate, to brood, to linger in the library and then,
As from some green and sunny chair, arise and go.
The noons seem darker, and the adolescent
Boys who used to hang around the parking lot are gone.
More water in the eyes, more dissonant musicians in the subways,
And from the font of sense a constant, incidental drone.
It is a kind of reconfiguration, and the solitary exercise
That seeks to affirm its name seems hollow. The sun is lower in
   the sky,
And as one turns towards what had felt like home,
The windows start to flicker with a loveless flame,
As though the chambers they concealed were empty. Is this
How heaven feels? The same perspective from a different room,
Inhabiting a prospect seen from someone else's balcony
In a suspended moment - as a silver airplane silently ascends
and life, at least as one has known it, slips away?

I thought that people understood these things.
The show the gradual encroachment of a vast,
Impersonal system of exchanges on that innermost domain
In which each object meant another one. Nature as a language
faithful to its terms, yet with an almost human face
That took the dark, romantic movements of desire, love, and loss
And gave them flesh and brought them into view;
Replaced by emblems of a rarefied sublime.
Like Canton's Paradise, or Edward Witten staring into space
As the leaves fall and a little dog raced through them in the park.
Was any of that mine? Was it anyone's?
Time makes things seem more solid than they were,
Yet these imaginary things - the dolphins and the bells, the sunny
   terrace
And the bright, green wings, the distant islet on the lake -
Were never barriers,but conditions of mere being, and enchanting haze
That takes one in and like a mild surprise gives way.
As though the things that one had strained against were shades of
   space.
The evening feels sweeter. The moon,
Emerging from a maze of clouds into the open sky,
Casts a thin light on the trees. Infinitely far away,
One almost seems to hear - as though the fingers of a solitary giant
Traced the pure and abstract schema of those strings
In a private moment of delight - the soundless syllables'
Ambiguous undulations, like the murmur of bees.

Here is an example of how very quickly a mood can change, I wrote the next two poems within fifteen minutes of each other, while drinking a latte at Borders.

As for the first, I woke up in a melancholy mood with the poem running through my mind well before I could be in a position to write it down. Minutes after finishing it, the scene in the second poem presented itself to me. Something about the sight of this very untraditional looking father of twins lifted my mood.

the time

the past,
so sweetly hurtful,
lays itself heavy
on me today

i pine
for the time
the best
seemed
still ahead
and not behind

Ozzie on duty

a pudgy-faced
young man
with mustache
and soul patch
pushes a double-
basket
stroller full of
twins

he sits
when they begin
to cry

feeds one,
his tattooed fingers
stroking
the baby's head

whispers
softly to the other

a hugely pregnant
woman
passes behind him

might
stay for lessons
from this 21st century
family man

Ozzie
on duty
while Harriet shops

On that sweetly domestic note, I end our efforts for this week.

As always, all 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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Go, As the River Flows Friday, January 09, 2009

IV.1.2.

Seems like time was always getting away from me this week, so, while last week's post ran long, this week's is a little shorter than usual.

Short though it may be, we still have our usual collection of good good poets and good poems.

From friends of "Here and Now"

Wiltshire
Teresa White
Mick Moss
Michael Sottak

From my library

Lorenzo Thomas
Larissa Szporluk
Catherine Bownam
Carl Phillips
Robert M. Petersen
The Monk Noin
The Monk Ryozen
Fugiwara No Sadate
Wendell Berry
D. K. Jones
Cyra S. Dumitru

And me

So here we go.

I start this week with several poems from ancient China. The poems are taken from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, From Ancient to Contemporary.

The book was published by Anchor Books in 2005. Editors and translators are Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping. For those interested in Chinese poetry, I recommend the book, both for the poems and for the book's introductory section titled "Introduction to Chinese Poetic Form (as a Function of Yin-Yang Symmetry."

The first poem is from The Book of Songs, from about 600 BCE, the earliest known anthology of Chinese poetry.

All the Grasslands Are Yellow

All the grasslands are yellow
and all the days we march
and all the men are conscripts
sent off in four directions.

All the grasslands are black
and all the men like widowers.
So much grief! Are soldiers
not men like other men?

We aren't bison! We aren't tigers
crossing the wilderness,
but our shadows
roam from dawn to dusk.

Hairy-tailed foxes slink
through the dark grass
as we ride tall chariots
along the wide-rutted road.

The next verses, from the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, are from the Dao De Jing, considered the seminal work of Daoism. Laozi, possibly a real, historical person and possibly not, is the legendary author of the Dao De Jing. The collection was originally known as Laozi. Since "Laozi" means "old man" in Chinese and since there is evidence of a body of literature whose titles translate to "old man" or "elder" it is possible the Dao De Jing is the lone survivor of a lost genre.

11

Thirty spokes join at one hub;
emptiness makes the cart useful.
Cast clay into a pot;
the emptiness inside makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows to make a room;
emptiness makes the room useful.
Thus being is beneficial,
but usefulness comes from the void.

22

Warp to be whole,
twist to be straight,
hollow out to be full,
fray to be new,
have less and gain more,
have much and be perplexed.
Therefore the sage embraces the One
and is a model for all under heaven.
Not exhibiting himself, he stands out.
Not full of himself, he is acclaimed.
Not boasting, he succeeds.
Not vain, his works maintain. He doesn't strive
and so nothing under heaven strives with him.
The ancients say, "warp to be whole."
These are not empty words.
Return to the source to be whole.

The Bureau of Music was established around 120 BCE by Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty and abolished in 6 BCE by Emperor Ai. Its function was to collect songs by the common people, not as a civic art endeavor, as you might assume, but as a way to gauge the people's reaction to the doings of the imperial government, a kind of musical/poetic Gallup poll.

He Waters His Horse Near a Breach in the Long Wall

Green so green is the river grass,
and I can't stop thinking of that far road,
can't bear thinking of that far road.
Last night I saw him in my dream,
dreamed him standing by my side.
Suddenly I was in another land,
another land and a different country.
I tossed and turned and woke apart.
The gaunt mulberry knows the sky's wind
and waters of the sea know cold heaven.
When travelers return in joy
not one has a word for me.
From a far land a traveler came
and left me two carp.
I asked my children to cook the fish
and inside they found a silk letter.
I knelt long and read the letter.
What did the letter say?
It started, Try to eat..
and ended, I miss you always.

Here is the first poem I wrote in the new year.

When I was a kid, I was always disappointed that nothing changed as the old, worn-out year was passed and tossed in the trash heap. It didn't seem fair, there it was the first day of a new year and I wasn't taller, smarter, more attractive to girls or richer. Why bother with all this new year stuff, I thought.

I guess I still feel that way, at least a little bit.

January 1, 2009

sun came up this
morning -
same one as
yesterday

went out to my car

backed into the street

passed the pile of leaves
beside the driveway

same car
as last year,
same street
same leaves blown
into our yard
by the neighbor's yardman
as well

drove to Jim's
for coffee
and morning paper

very familiar,
like i'd been there
before

oh,
i have
almost every morning

finished my coffee
drove home

almost hit a
squirrel
that raced across the street
and up a tree

same tree

different squirrel

ahhh, change -
the best part of a
new
year

Lorenzo Thomas was born in Panama and grew up in New York City. He is a poe, critic, and professor of English at the University of Houston - Downtown. His other books of poetry include Chances are Few, The Bathers, and Sound Science.

The next three poems are from his book Dancing on Main Street, published Coffee House Press in 2004.

Dangerous Doubts

The mind invents its own inadequacies
But not the power to erase illusion
That schemes and wholesome dreams
Can become actual despite the truth
That thoughts invest themselves in flesh
And direct motion

That you have 30,000 shots at immortality
But only one you dare not miss at being rich
Or at the least escape the nag of destitution

That maybe exercise shows on TV
Are really harmful
That sound bodies just
Amplify empty minds

That platitudes contain a grain of wisdom'
And fortune's a rush hour train that doesn't wait

To really live means needing other people
That whatever that means love
Could conquer hate

Country Song

Don't know a thing
Except what I know:
I like great big legs
& where they go

I love the colors in the Arkansas sky
When the sun goes down
And I'm lonely as an empty chair
When you're not around.

Multicultural

Watch who ends up in contestant's row
I like it when the colored people win
It always was all women years ago
Once in a while maybe a young Marine
LCpl in dress uniform
Every other word he said was "sir"
Probably a newlywed on top of that
You know he's going to win a car
Or a bedroom suit
Not that the game is fixed but to be fair
I'm sure someone at CBS
Made lots of money figuring this out
Before I did
The way they've got it now
All kinds of people get to come on down
OK by me. But yet and still
I like it when the colored people win

"
Next I have a poem from Wiltshire an old friend of "Here and Now." She returns with a new poem after a long absence, during which she says she spent far too much time on fiction (a novel and some short stories) and far too little time on her first love...poetry!

She still lives in Anaheim, California and is back to writing daily poems at Blueline's "House of 30".

Suddenly

the hard times,
the dark days
come suddenly
and you're wet and heavy
unbalanced
like unshorn sheep the sheer weight
topples you in your tracks
and it doesn't help to sa-
anything or nothing or everything –
what you knew
what sustained you
hides in the hollow
of your new view
through embered eyes

just as suddenly,
you find a jolt of joy bubbling
from somewhere deep -
you doubt but irrepressibly
laughter
floats in your dreams
something simple -
lights in the rain,
crispness in a blue and yellow morning -
and you consider the park, a poem,
find yourself humming,
answering the phone
grabbing hold again
wanting to be among friends

and so you start again...suddenly

The next poem is by Larissa Szporluk from her book Dark Sky Question, published by Beacon Press in 1998.

Szporluk was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and received her BA from the University of Michigan. She studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received an MA in Literature at the University of California Berkeley, and an MFA from the University of Virginia. She began her full-time teaching career at Bowling Green State University in 2000 and has since become an associate professor of Creative Writing and Literature. In 2005, she was a visiting professor at Cornell University.

Her poems, including the ones in this book, are mysterious to me.

Krell

He arrives and looks around,
and doesn't know the word for wind,
and wind is the subject.

He finds a girl on a fence
hurting herself with a nail.
He pulls her away without speaking,

to her surprise, and wipes
the stuff from her hair that smells
like burning-out lights,

and suddenly it's not a burden
to be walking with her
in enemy land. When she tells him

"the best thing here is the moon,"
he feels happier than if he'd seen it
and remembers a parable

about a string that never meets
its ends, and she tells him then
about a warm place at the end

of a grove of horned trees.
If the night steadies, if it controls
their speed, they'll reach it

together, fusing in the meantime,
discarding all the nuance
that betrays them with disease.

I hardly ever dedicate a poem to anyone or anything. On this one, I felt a dedication was appropriate.

deep thoughts to be thunk in 2009

this poem is dedicated to all the right-wing blog, newspaper, magazine, and tv and radio big-think blovators who continued in this past year to demonstrate their inability to think two or more consecutive thoughts coherently and come to a rational conclusion.

as with many people
i like to think deep
thoughts
about things i know
nothing
about

an explanation,
some might say,
as to why
all
the world's problems
i solved
last year are back on the table
today

balderdash,
as we
deep-thinkers like to say

obviously
the world wasn't paying
adequate attention

meaning
i'm just going to have to
deep-think
louder
in 2009

Catherine Bowman was born in El Paso, Texas. She received her B.A. from the University of Texas at San Antonio and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She was awarded a 1990 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.

The next two poems are from her first collection of poems, 1-800-Hot-Ribs, published by Gibbs-Smith Publishers in 1993 and reissued in 2000 by Carnegie-Mellon University Press as part of its contemporary classics series. At the time the book was published, she lived in New York City and taught writing in the public schools there. She is now the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University. She is also editor of Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR's "All Things Considered", an anthology of poems by poets she has reviewed and featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Her poems are pllayful and hugely fun to read.

Fernando and the Tomato Salad

And this is what happens every afternoon.
The tired sea lifts itself out
of the water and crawls over the beach,
while the water recedes into a flat
glass eye or a body emptied o dreams.
The huge sea ambles over the beach,
over the man sleeping on his Italian
sports coat. His hands clasp. His knees
pray. His tie dances in the wind as he
dreams about sex. The sea swells over two
children digging in the sand, conjuring ideas
they will never remember. Their teeth spark
like geniuses in the pale blue air
as they stroke a starfish. Slides
over the topless bodies of three fat women,
their nipples are so pleased, over four
college boys, over five nuns whose gowns
whip in the wind like pirate flags,
over a family of six, the mother garnished
in a seaweed wig sweeps the marl with a branch,
over seven bikinied Germans in lotus position.
And over eight - there aren't eight, or nine, or ten.
The beach is nearly deserted. The sea rolls
beyond the shore, over the ovine dunes, over
the grassy marsh where the fishermen net the eel,
over the hills, over the plum orchard, spreading
into the dim stone house, into the hallway
filled with the oiled portraits of craggy saints
and uncles. A thick, dusty mirror holds Fernando's
sister's stockinged legs and half-slip.
She sleeps with the door open. The sea spills
into the kitchen where he stands
holding each tomato against the light.
He says: This is a fine tomato, or
this is a bad tomato. Spain is ruined.
Then he mixes the tomatoes, onions, oil,
garlic, and salt. Pours the black red wine.
Then everything stops, and we eat.
And this is what happens every afternoon.

Texas, Then

Mita refused to dance with Pancho Villa and spoke of it.
She died,vanishing in to a rosary of jackrabbit holes
this side of El Paso.

Granny after returning from Cuba couldn't touch doorknobs
for fear a tarantula would be on every one of them. She melted
into the throats of mailmen who sang her the old songs
in the evening. All she left was her red hennaed hair
on a fireplace made into an altar.

and my mother makes sculptures of ice, red eyes that scream.
They do not make a sound.

We wait.
Granny says - Until I'm old, so I can grab waiters in the crotch?
We pray. And have forgotten how.

The maids refused to wake them when they sleepwalk through
the breezeway.

There were black cats named Pico.
Me and my cousin used to run through the desert
yelling Pico, Pico, Pico, Pico, Pico, Pico.

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

Teresa is a friend of "Here and Now" and i'm very pleased to have this piece from her.

Borscht

Beet soup fills the air with an odor
of blood. I've never tasted blood
except when sucking a nicked finger.

Roses of garlic are crushed
with the flat of a knife onto
a well-seasoned breadboard.

Peppercorns sting the nostrils
as the action of mortar
and pestle quickens.

Onions are chopped
pell-mell before
inevitable tears fall.

And out back, in the splintered
shed, is a wooden box where the
ice does its cold dance all day.

Here, we keep our precious
sour cream. Sour cream and borscht,
caviar and blini. And who thought

borscht was made of one thing:
this unforgiving vegetable
all that will grow in the stubborn ground

since Stalin took our goats and men.
But providence was on our side;
he left our beets and pluck.

Born in 1959, Carl Phillips is Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program. He is author of a number of collections of poetry, including The Rest of Love which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He also won the 1992 Morse Poetry Prize for his collection In the Blood.

The next poem is from his book Cortege, published in 1995 by Greywolf Press and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

A Mathematics of Breathing

   I
Think of any of several arched
colonnades to a cathedral,

how the arches
like fountains, say,

or certain limits in calculus,
when put to the graph paper's crosstrees,

never quite meet any promised heaven,
instead at their vaulted heights

falling down to the abruptly ending
base of the next column,

smaller, the one smaller
past that, at last

dying, what is called perspective.

This is the way buildings do it.

   II
you have seen them, surely, busy paring
the world down to what it is mostly,

proverb: so many birds in a bush.
Suddenly they take off, and at first

it seem your particular itself
has sighed deeply.,

that the birds are what come,
though of course it is just the birds

leaving one space for others.
After they've gone, put your ear to the brush,'
listen. There are three sides: the leaves'
releasing of something, your ear where it

finds it, and the air in between, to say
equals. There is maybe a fourth side,

not breathing.

   III
In One Thousand and One Nights,
there are only a thousand,

Scheherazade herself is the last one,
for the moment held back,

for a moment all the odds hang even.
The stories she tells she tells mostly

to win another night of watching the prince
drift into a deep sleeping beside her,

the chance to touch one more time
his limbs, going,

gone soft already with dreaming.
When she tells her own story.

Breathe in,
breathe out

is how it starts.

OK, I admit it. I stole about a third of this poem off an drink promotion posted on the at Borders. Satisfied?

Vanilla Red Tea Latte

Vanilla Red Tea Latte
is naturally caffeine-free
Rooibus tea and
velvety steamed milk

deliciously rich and smooth
with a hint (just a hint)
the sign says
of caramelized sugar

all that
and a source of
antioxidants as well

all well and good

except

it's eight in the morning
and i need my caffeine

and
caramelized sugar
even if only a hint
is probably bad for me

and
i'm southern
born and raised
and find tea without ice
in it
near unimaginable
especially
when the tea is from
some place like Rooibus
i never heard of

and
i don't know enough about
oxidants
to know if i'm fer or agin'um

and
what the hell ever happened
to plain old Folgers -

if it was good
enough for that
obviously hardworking
probably
oppressed
by the international
fru-fru
coffee cartel
guy
in the mountains
with his donkey, ought
to be good enough
for
me

i'm
a Democrat
after
all

Here's something different from The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. The book was published by Free Press in 2005. Annotations are by David Dodd.

This music for the song was written by band member Phil Lesh and the lyrics by his friend and poet Robert M. Petersen.

If you're into the Dead, I recommend the book. In addition to the compilation of lyrics, the annotations are excellent.

Pride of Cucamonga

Out on the edge of the empty highway
Howling at the blood on the moon
A diesel Mack come rolling down my way
Can't hit the border too soon

Running hard out of Muskrat Flats
It was sixty days or double life
Hail at my back like a shotgun blast
High wind chimes in the night

Oh, oh, pride of Cucamonga
Oh, oh, bitter olives in the sun
Oh, oh, I had me some loving
And I done some time

Since I came down from Oregon
There's a lesson or two I've learned
By standing on the road alone
Standing watching the fires burn

The northern sky it stinks with greed
You can smell it heavy for miles around
Good old boys in the Graystone Hotel
Sitting doing that git-on-down

Oh, oh, pride of Cucamonga
Oh, oh, silver apples in the sun
Oh, oh, I had me some loving
And I done some time

I see you silver shinning town
But I know I can't go there
Your streets run deep with poisoned wine
Your doorways crawl with fear

So I think I'll drift for old where it's at
Where the weed grows green and fine
And wrap myself around a bush
Of that bright whoa, oh, Oaxaca vine

Yes it's me, I'm the pride of Cucamonga
I can see golden forests in the sun
Oh, oh, I had me some loving
and I done some time
And I done some time
and I done some time

Mick Moss is another friend of "Here and Now." He is a 54 year old poet living in Liverpool, England. I present here his very reassuring poem, it being some comfort to think that whoever we are, great or small, our days start pretty much the same.

Ritual

Yeurghh! Who's that?

Splash of cold
To wash away the muzzy headed cobwebs
And clear the mucous membranes

Run the hot
Wipe the steam from the mirror
Lather up
Scrape off the stubble
Rinse the razor

Squeeze
(always in the middle)
Up down side to side
Rinse, gargle, spit

Final splash of cold
(it's good for the skin apparently)
Grab the towel
Dab, dab
Fingers through the hair
(what's left of it)

Another apprehensive look
Hmmm
Right, come on then
Coffee, ciggie, newspaper.....

Next, I have five poems from the collection One Hundred Poems From the Japanese.

The first two poems were composed by The Monk Noin from the 11th century. His secular name was Tachibgana no Nagayasu.

The third poem was written by The Monk Ryozen. Also from the eleventh century, he was a monk of the Gion Temple near Kyoto.

The fourth and last are by Fujiwara No Sadate who lived from 1162 to 1242. He was an Imperial Vice-Councillor and compiler of Single Poems by a Hundred Poets from which half of the poems in this book were taken. He also assisted in other compilations for two Emperors and left a diary.

****

After the storm
On Mount Mimuro,
The colored leaves
Float like brocade
On the River Tatsuta

****

As I approach
The mountain village
Through the spring twilight
I hear the sunset bell
Ring through drifting petals.

****

When I am lonely
and go for a walk, I see
Everywhere he same
Autumnal dusk.

****

You do not come, and I wait
On Matsuo beach,
In the calm of evening.
And like the blazing
Water, I too am burning.

****

As the mists rise in the dawn
From Uji River, one by one,
The stakes of the nets appear,
Stretching far into the shallows.

Here's a tableau from the Olmos Perk last Saturday morning.

no days off

a cool
and sunny
Saturday morning,
time to take the family
our for a walk before the chores
of the day begin

a stop-off
for coffee and fresh apple juice

i see them out front
at an outside table, mom
and dad and three little girls
and their terrier pup
who watches each
coming and going, ever alert -

no days off
in the family-protection biz

Now I have a poem by Wendell Berry, from his book Entries published in 1997 by Counterpoint of Washington, D.C.

Berry lives and works on his farm in Kentucky. An essayist, novelist, and poet, he is the author of more than 30 books and has received numerous prizes for his work, most recently the T.S. Ellion Award.

I have two poems from the book. If you're so fortunate as to still have a living mother, save this poem for Mother's Day.

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, as I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

A Third Possibility

I fired the brush pile by the creek
and leaping gargoyles of flame
fled over it, fed on it, roaring,
and made one flame that stood
tall in its own wind, snapping off
points of itself that raved and vanished.

The creek kept coming down, filling
above the rocks, folding
over them, its blank face dividing
in gargles and going on, mum
under the ice, for the day was cold,
the wind stinging as the flame stung.

Unable to live either life, I stood
between the two, and liked them both.

Now I have a piece from sailor, world-traveler, and friend of "Here and Now," Michael Sottak

Narragansett Bay

windows open to summer
the fog crawls from the bay
across the cow fields

into my room

the horns chant
oooouuuhhhhrrra!
oooouuuhhhhrrra!

i leap to the smell of brine
press my nose to the screen
see only glistening stone walls
in ghost dancing white

oooouuuhhhrrrah!

i know Dad's ship is hunkered-in
off Brenton's reef, try to imagine
which horn or bell is his

it's been six months

ooouuurhhhaa!
clang, clang
ting, ting

i know every sound of the bay

the tramp steamers and the troubled

watch the white roll in
like waves

what will it be
ivory tusks from Africa?
brass tables from Istanbul?
it doesn't matter

i feel you
coming home

Next, two poems by D. K.. Jones from his book Next of Kin, published by The Geryon Press in 2008.

Jones' books include a memoir, a novella, a series of fables mixed with recollection essays and five poetry collections. His book outrider was a finalist for the Carl Sandburg Award. He lives in Minnesota and Arizona.

The Blue Angel

It's time - my eldest daughter said.
Well past time is what she meant.
The nearly painful blinding glare in my eyes.
Trying to lift the scruffy old dog thin but
Still a load off the cold,
Leaf-mold snow, neither of yet god or ghost,

Bend and kiss her warm before I kiss her cold.
Take her to the vet so he can make of her
Keepsake ashes. Ashes, ashes all fall down...
Thinking back to when she was raring to go,
Had the heart,
But no longer the legs.

A man lost without his dog
Never quite finds his way.

Now the collie visits in monastic dreams
Where she lays only staring -
A rebuke
I did not bury her like the others

A Small Rebellion

When I was young, adults spoke in riddles
and the stars, so far away, shed no light.
I was a puppy waiting for a owner. Me.

I ran the days to its knees.
There were trees to swing on, schools
outside the school, like tar trucks and fire stations.

My tongue had already begun to sharpen
to the dismay of others, but I tried to compromise,
all sunbrowned and scabbed like a colt.

The world already showing wear
was long in the tooth.
And I was older than I am today.

Maybe I'm a little obsessive about some things, but I think, when considering options, one should always consider the odds.

smiley faces

i stop in
at my local newspaper's
obituary page daily

as i start what might be
my last day
i like to see
if my acquaintances
among the legions of the dead
have increased overnight,
thinking it will be good to know
who new might be greeting me
should it be my time
to make that dark passage

also
i like to begin the day
by calculating the odds
though analysis
of the ages of the most recent
dearly departed

i figure (optimistically) that at my age
at least half of those most recently
taking the big step to the great black nowhere
should be older than me

i keep those odds in mind
as i peruse the page,
feeling a great surge of rejuvenated life
if those older are greater than 50 percent
of the total
and the dread of all deep shadows
if those younger
are the greater percentage

on those days when the younger
out number
the old
i am especially cautious
in matters of diet and driving habits,
so in some sense
a surge of death among the young
is probably good for me, thankyouverymuch
but...
.
.
.
by they way,
have you noticed
(being a regular visitor to the page i noticed)
most of all these former people are smiling

why in the world are they smiling -
don't they know they're dead?

i have chosen my picture for when
the time comes
and
you can be sure
i'm
not smiling

I've read many accounts of man's fall from the Garden, but none of them has moved me as this one does. The poem is by Cyra S. Dumitru from her book Listening to Light, published by River Lily Press of San Antonio in 2001.

First Flesh

What struck me when were first
beyond Eden was the carrion.
The way a body looked when dead,
innards trailing like thick vines
tory flesh like fading hyacinths.

And the great birds that rose up
flooded the air black with wings
lumbered until they gained a current.
Once we had passed,
they descended, picked again.

It was Eve who noticed how the eyes
of fallen animals were often open
staring at something so remote
that vision was useless.
Such stillness.

All we had lived was movement -
the doe twitching her tail before leaping,
the panther rippling like black water,
lizards quick as raindrops through leaves.
When we found the python swallowing a rabbit

hind legs twitching,
Eve clutched my hands and finally wept.
"We will eat only berries, fruit.
We will learn the uses of plants,"
I said and held her until she slept.

The light began to change as we foraged.
It skimmed our skin, rather than warmed us.
At night we shivered when pressed together
beneath blankets of grass woven by Eve,
her ribs rubbing too close to mine

despite her growing belly.
One cool morning I rose before dawn.
Found the stag's leg bone picked clean,
rinsed the dirt and dried blood in the stream.
Felt its weight in another way.

I knew where the burrow was hidden
when the rabbits ventured out.
I crouched in tall grass, practiced stillness.
The three hopped above ground, sniffed the air.
The smallest, always behind, hobbled a bit.

I inched forward as it settled
in a bed of clover, nose quivering,
ears up and listening.
I bounded forward, pounced,
clutched the rabbit by its tail

pressed my strength upon his
clubbed again and again while
its legs thumped against my chest.
the small skull cracked.
Blood oozed sticky in white fur.

As the rabbit went limp
a sharp breeze rose.
Something shifted inside me,
that terrible stillness.
I sat listening as my heart

nearly burst from pounding.
My right hand, the one which in Eden
had stroked the offspring of fox,
squirrel, cougar blistered
from the grip of battering bone.

Using a jagged rock,
Eve skinned the creature slowly
rubbed the soft fur against her cheek
traced the curve of muscle
the delicate thrust of young bone.

"How shinny is the flesh.
How rounded the muscles."
Finally she tore an opening
in the belly, and the entrails
spilled out, gleaming.

Eve saved the tendons
cooked the meat which
we found almost tender.
Later she caressed the bruises,
dark stains against my chest.

Here we are in dry, dry, dry San Antonio, on the cusp of rain.

a man of faith

rain
around here
is like the
"Free Beer Tomorrow"
advertised
at the corner pub -
always
in the offing
two or three days out
but never poured

well
today is the day
that might be tomorrow

it is cold
and overcast
with a little bit of drizzle
that promises
to become rain any instant

i brought
my umbrella
for i am well-known
as a man of faith

in beer
always
and
sometimes
in rain

That's it.

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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New & New Again Thursday, January 01, 2009

IV.1.1

Well, I'm bored, so here I am, a day early, beginning the fourth year of "Here and Now" with my first post of 2009. Lots of good in 2008 and lots of bad. Let's hope the good wins out in this new year, which we will celebrate here at "Here and Now," by doing nothing different, just poetry and a little art.

Well, almost. I would like to add a review feature to at least some of our weekly posts. Books, movies, music, even products, i suppose - you saw it, read it, heard it or used it and loved it or hated it, so write us a review. Our weekly posts usually run 7,000 to 9,000 words (a little longer this week), so try to keep your reviews at or under 600 words. Send those words to me at allen.itz@gmail .com and I'll (usually) share them with our readers. Include a short bio (3-4 lines), because everyone is going to be interested in knowing more about you after reading your brilliant reviews.

For this first post of the year, I decided to celebrate my friends and house mates on the Blueline Forum's poem-a-day "House of 30." By these poets' example, I am encouraged to continue on my write-a-poem-every-day discipline. I hope I do the same for them.

As well, i invite any "Here and Now" reader-writer who wants try the 30-day discipline to join us at the forum. It is a non-critique forum meant to support the practice of writing on the theory nobody ever turned into a worse writer by writing more and some, with the encouragement of house mates, might become better. That's my hope for myself, anyway.

Whatever kind of writer you are, poet, prose, fiction/nonfiction, or just one hell of a writer of elegant grocery lists, come visit us at

http://blueline.goobertree.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=31

and see what you can do in 30 days.

This week we enjoy some of the work of my poem-a-day friends

Thane Zander
Susan B. McDonough
Marie Gail Stratford
Gary Blankenship
Connie Walker
Alice Folkart

The work of long-lost friend

John Moulder

As well as bits from my library by

Leroy V. Quintana
Eugenio De Andrade
Emma Lazarus
Yahuda Amchai
Pablo Neruda
Robert A. Fink
Francisco X. Alarcon
Renny Golden
W.S. Merwin
Samuel Hazo
Steve Gehrke

And a few from me.

Leroy V. Quintana was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1944. He never knew his father and spent his early years moving between small northern New Mexico towns such as Raton and Questa, where the old cuentos (tales) had not yet been displaced by Anglo influence. He lived first with his grandparents until third grade, then with his mother and stepfather. His family moved back to Albuquerque when he was in the fifth grade and from that time to the time he graduated from high school in 1962, he did little writing, but did not finish anything he wrote. After graduation he worked for a time as a roofer with his stepfather. In 1964 he began to study anthropology at the University of New Mexico. His college career was interrupted by a tour of duty in the army (1967 to 1969), with one year in Vietnam. Upon his return he wrote a few rough drafts about his experiences and those of his buddies. These would later become the core of a cycle of Vietnam poems in Five Poets of Aztlan, published in 1985.

Quintana returned to college at the University of New Mexico in 1969, majoring in English. He became the poetry editor for the university's literary journal, Thunderbird, and sent poems off for publication. Some of them were accepted for a new periodical, Puerto del Sol, at New Mexico State University. In 1971 Quintana finished his B.A. in English, then worked as an alcoholism counselor at St. Joseph's Hospital in Albuquerque. In 1972 he began an M.A. at the University of Denver, but left after one quarter to take an assistantship at New Mexico State University, He finished his M.A. in English in 1974, and taught for one year as an instructor at New Mexico State. Since then, he has published six books of poetry and twice won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. He is currently professor of English at San Diego Mesa College.

I have two poems from Quintana's book the Great Whirl of Exile published in 1999 by Curbstone Press.

Poem for Myron Floren

What could be more boring than shuffling
into the gym to listen to some square
from Lawrence Welk's band play the accordion
just because his niece, who's got to be a big square
herself, convinced the principal, no cost to the school?

But he never gave us a chance to doubt him.
Yeah, he was a square squeezing some aold-
fashioned tunes out of an instrument s popular
as acne. be we quickly learned to say hip
in his language: it didn't matter what you did,
it was how much you loved it that counted,
as well as doing it in front of the disbelievers
shamelessly, but not like the Marine Corps
recruiting sergeant, who also charmed us when
his turn came around the end of our senior year.

Poem for Harry Houdini

What a delight that summer, page after page,
slipping out of hicktown jails, out of trunks
strapped tight and dropped into the ocean,
sliding out of miles of chains twined around
you like serpents squeezing your last sigh from you.

I have slipped through the fingers of my grandparents' home
forever, taken away to live with my mother and stepfather.

Your nimble fingers allow you to unbuckle
straitjackets, squirm to freedom.

You go from town to town, leaving
the dictionaries humbled, wailing,
the definition of escape
continuously evading them.

Olmos Perk is a coffee shop i've been trying to become accustomed to since my old hangout closed. The coffee shop is located on the edge of Olmos Park, a heavily wooded park, also called Olmos Basin, which is behind an old dam which is part of a flood protection system for downtown San Antonio, the Riverwalk and points beyond. On the edge of Olmos Park, the park, is Olmos Park, the incorporated village of mostly rich people completely within the geographic boundaries of San Antonio. It is one of a number of such smaller communities that San Antonio has overtaken and surrounded through years of growth.

Anyway, that's where the name of the coffee shop "Olmos Perk" very cleverly came from. Here's a poem from Olmos Perk, with the hope that, at least until I find another resting place, many more will follow.

just in case i can't get the fire started

it's
been
a cold, cold day

dark
overcast
and a little wet

i've
been up
since 6:30

and now
it's eleven hours
later

and i'm
at Olmos Perk
looking for something

in any part
of those hours
that suggest the possibility

of poetic
exploitation

so
what did i do
today

?

well
i finished layout
of the first finished draft

of the first
of the four chapbooks
i want to do next year

but
that was all drudge work

no poetry there

i spent
a couple of hours at home
waiting for the chimney sweep

so
i'll be able to have a nice fire
tonight

but
though that might spark a poem tonight
it does diddly for me

right now

i went to the used book store
and bought four books
a Neruda and three other worthies

i never heard of

but since i haven't read
any of the books yet
can see

no way to
weasel
a poem out of it

looking
around the Perk
i see about 10 people

but none of them
blip
on my poetry radar

except
for the skinny blond
with the straight bleach-white

hair, serious, don't-fuck-with-me glasses
and an attitude
that suggest if i wrote a poem about her

and she found out about it
she'd have to kill me

she's not a happy camper,
pissed about something
something
to do with a man

i think
and being one such
i don't think i want to know anymore

and thinking as well
it might
be safer
to just sit in front of the fireplace tonight
and write some doofus
poem
about the glow
of dancing flames
etc.
etc.
etc.
and you know

doofus

The good news is though I got the fire started, I fell asleep in front of it before I could get to the doofus poem, I think.

Eugenio de Andrade, pseudonym of Jose Fontinhas, was born in 1923 and died in 2005. He was considered one of the leading names in contemporary Portuguese poetry.

I have two poems from Andrade's book Forbidden Words, published by New Directions Paperbook in 2003. It is a bilingual book, Portuguese and English on facing pages, with English translation by Alexis Levitin.

From the Ground

The porous skin of silence,
now that the night bleeds at its wrists,
brings to me the murmur of your white rain.

Summer is somewhere out there, the violent
smell of belladonna blinds the earth.
Blind as well, the mouth searches
for the works of love. but finds instead
the shadowy knot of words.

Words...Where a single cry
would be enough, the blubber
of words. Words -
when one yearns for instant clarity,
purest sap, the furthest reaches
of your body, bow, arrow,
crown of water open
to the slant fire of my body.

From the ground to the hilltops,
behold the sands. Be still.
Lie down. Beneath my thighs.
All the earth above. Now burn. Now. Now.

Dark Domain

To love you, vigilant, like this,
between fresh clay and ardor.
To sip from slightly parted lips
the light of dewy, whitewashed walls.

Smoothly to glide down the slope
of the throat, to be music
where silence flows
and gathers together.

Unbridled burning,
dizziness unfolding
kiss by kiss,
dilacerated whiteness.

To penetrate the sweetness of the sand
or of the flame,
the faded, burnt-out light
of the deepest, bluest eye,

the twilit, dusky gold
between closed petals,
the high and navigable
gulf of our desire,

where frenzy dwells
crinkling with needles,
where I would make
your naked waters bleed.

Thane Zander is the first of my "House of 30" poem-a-day house mates. A sailor retired after nearly 30 years for medical reasons, he is a mostly an online poet, having been participating at Blueline Poetry Forum since 2002. As well as being a director of two forums there, he also posts in the "House of 30" forum. He runs his own New Zealand Poets only forum, as well as posting at Salty Dreams and Babilu Forums. He has been published in several ezines (Blackmail Press, Windjammer Press, and Loch Raven Review, and The Times of London online) and in local newspapers and an international anthology called A Bouquet of Poetry. He features often in "Here and Now." He has just recently gained a B average for a university paper - Creative Writing.

Here are two of his recent poems.

Giving God Guidance

I pointed across the field,
told God to bypass the hanging tree
and the building
with the electric chair,
and, of course, a poisonous injection.

He/She (still not sure these days, though we talk)
danced a merry dance,
highlighting the joy they received from death,
the Devil (yup, he/she)
just stood like a scarecrow
in fields of wheat and maize,
a Cheshire Cat grin.

I orchestrated a medial welcome
God in charge of proper things
the Devil to wear the trousers of the damned,
I decided to stand on a road going nowhere
under the strain of reflective glories,
the lady in the Scalpel Hall
for delinquent teenagers,
massaged her strap.

I still try and understand why we are, as a people
frightened of all entities, God, Satan, and a strapping Matron,
and why some love them all implicitly?

I washed my hands in the roadside puddle,
started down the road laughing maniacally,
the last of the Mind Jumpers
sorting his own shit out
as always.

No more pain, from strap,
misguided God
unhinged Devil
no more lasting effects
as insanity buries the truth
hides the reality
chars cognitive thought.

Buy time in a corner dairy,
unwrap, unhinge, unprovoked
the verbal outburst
borne from a God
that follows directions
and has no love for the maimed.

Poor Man, Rich Man, Men

Smoke from the Head Hall
fueled by cackling cauldrons
of immense fires
in halls
and kitchens
where servants toil.

The last Diary entry
of Sir Southall Sutherthwaite
in his immense study,
"I loved a man"
as he placed the hunting pistol
in his hesitant mouth.

In the dining room
a log exploded,
drowning the pistol shot
and assuring his Lordship
peace and quiet till the butler
brought him his nightly tipple.

The "man" concerned shivered
in a flat his lordship provided,
no servants, nor fire, and no love tonight,
he cried not knowing why,
a weak moment,
shuddered in hindsight.

In Victorian England
times were good
and times were tough,
and chatter ruined lives
with a breath of fury.

Emma Lazarus was born in 1849 and died in 1887. She was a poet born in New York City and best known for writing The New Colossus in 1883. The poem's final lines were engraved on a bronze plaque in the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1912.

She is known as an important forerunner of the Zionist movement, arguing for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before the term Zionism came into use.

I have a poem this week from the book Emma Lazarus - Poet of the Jewish People, first published in Great Britain in 1977 by Arthur James LTD.

Gifts

'O World-God give we Wealth!' the Egyptian cried.
His prayer was granted. High as heaven, behold
Place and pyramid; the brimming tide
Of lavish Nile washed all his land with gold.
Armies of slaves toiled ant-wise at his feet,
World-circling traffic roared through mart and street,
His priests were gods, his spice-balmed kings enshrined,
Set death at naught in rock-ribbed charnels deep.
Seek Pharaoh's race to-day and ye shall find
Rust and the moth, silence and dusty sleep.

'O World-God, give me Beauty!' cried the Greek.
His payer was granted. All the earth became
Plastic and vocal to his sense; each peak,
Each grove, each stream, quick with Promethean flame,
Peopled the world with imaged grace and light.
The lyre was his, and his breathing might
Of the immortal marble, his the play
Of diamond-pointed thought and golden tongue.
Go seek the sun-shine race, ye find to-day
A broken column and a lute unstrung.

'O World-God, give me Power!' the Roman cried.
His prayer was granted. The vast world was chained
A captive to the chariot of his pride.
The blood of myriad provinces was drained
To feed that fierce, insatiable red heart.
Invulnerably bulwarked every part
With serried legions and with close-meshed code,
Within, the burrowing worm had gnawed its home,
A roofless ruin stands where once abode
The imperial race of everlasting Rome.

'O Godhead, give me Truth!' the Hebrew cried.
His prayer was granted; he became the slave
Of the Idea, a pilgrim far and wide,
Cursed, hated, spurned, and scourged with none to save.
The Pharaohs knew him, and when Greece beheld,
His wisdom wore the hoary of Eld.
Beauty he hath forsworn and wealth and power.
Seek him to-day, and find in every land.
No fire consumes him, neither floods devour;
Immortal through the lamp within his hand.

Here's another poem from the Perk.

to hell with politics

i'm
sitting in one of the little
cage-
feeling place they
have set aside
for laptop users
and while it's better than
trying to work at one of the waxed tables
that leave you chasing
your laptop as it
slips
this way and that
with ever single letter
typed,
i'd still be
pissed
though not entirely surprised
if someone tossed me a banana,
did those gynyeck-gynyeck-gynyeck
monkey noises in front of me

speaking of higher
life forms...

across the room
i can see the parking lot
through the big north-facing windows
and out of six cars
i see three
including my own
with Obama stickers

not entirely surprising
since Obama took San Antonio
and Bexar County with about 53 percent
of the vote
but, still, Olmos Park
is one of the richest parts of the city,
fat cats on every corner,
and not often tempted to vote Democrat
and even more
not willing to advertise it
when they do

has to do with
winning
i suppose

even
rich folk like
being
on the winning side

they
just happen to be more accustomed to it than
i am

ooops!

a
pretty
young girl
in a purple fedora
just sat down in front of me

blocks my view
of the parking lot
the cars
and the Obama stickers

to
hell
with politics

Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1924 and emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1936. He later became a naturalized Israeli citizen. Although German was his native language, Amichai read Hebrew fluently by the time he moved to Palestine. He served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in World War II and fought with the Israeli defense forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Following the war, he attended Hebrew University to study Biblical texts and Hebrew literature, and then taught in secondary schools.

Amichai published eleven volumes of poetry in Hebrew, two novels, and a book of short stories. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. His collections of poetry available in English include Open Closed Open The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai: Newly Revised and Expanded Edition, A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994, Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers, Poems of Jerusalem, The Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers, Love Poems, Time, Amen, Songs of Jerusalem and Myself and Poems.

In 1982, Amichai received the Israel Prize for Poetry and he became a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. He lived in Jerusalem until his death in late 2000.

The next two poems are from A Life in Poetry, 1948-1994, published by HarperCollins in 1996. The poems in the book were translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav.

Poems From Buenos Aires

Subtle tools,
Very subtle tools.

And a woman, surprised by light pain,
Something fled from her face inside,
Smile of a shadow.

Her forefathers annihilated Indian tribes:
The guilt of birds
That hurt the air in their flight
Stayed with her.

Subtle tools,
Very subtle tools.

__________

Words hanging in a mouth
Like a cigarette unlit,
The migration of birds begins in me,
From my cold heart to my warm heart.
Those do not know
That I am the same man (the birds
Outside know it's the same world.)

"In this room
Two may be strangers
To one another, as in immense time."

__________

Close to Cordoba: I saw
A Jewish girl
From Poland, from Cordoba in Argentina.
In her eyes
I return
To Cordoba in Spain
By a long route.

Echoes of eyelids marked in white
And the chill of musty caves in her eyes
And shadows of long lashes
Like endless fences.

__________

Early in the morning, the sun
Is extracted from pillows of dark velvet,
A family treasure, handed down for generations. (Ah!)
An old lamp, a golden samovar,
Refugee of robbery rape
By Cossacks, Indians, missionaries
Crusaders, Mamelukes,
(Ah!)

Hurry, hurry get up!
Cologne hastily blurred
In the armpit, the neck
Between the legs still dreaming.
Hurry, hurry, outside! (Ah!)

__________

And you live not to remember
But to finish the job
You (in spite of all: you) have to finish.
and not to remain do you love
And not to love are you in pain.

You're fast, weary, impatient
As a day of flying from country to country,
Exchanging good hours of living for ample
Rains, for unknown trade,
Passed on to a lover to a passerby
On Corientes Street, flowing, flowing.

Vamos. In other languages
It is less painful, "let's go" -
There's an illusion of together,
At first, then: away from each other.

Ballad In the Streets of Buenos Aires

And a man is waiting in the streets and meets a woman
Precise and beautiful like the clock hanging on her wall,
Sand and white like the wall where the clock is hanging.

And she doesn't show him her teeth
and she doesn't show him her belly
But she shows him her precise and beautiful time

And she lives on the ground floor near the pipes
And the rising water starts in her wall
And he choses softness

And she knows the reasons for crying
And she knows the reasons for restraint
And he begins to look like her, look like her

And his hair will grow long and soft like her hair
and the hard words of his tongue melt in her mouth
And his eyes will shed tears like her tears

And the lights at the crossroads are reflected in her face
And she stands there in the allowed and in the forbidden
And he choses softness

And they walk in the streets that will be in his dreams
And the rain weeps quietly into them as into a meadow
And the crowded time make them into prophets

And he will lose her in a red light
And he will lose her in a green and yellow
And the light is always prepared to serve every loss

And he won't be there when the soap and the cream is finished
And he won't be there when the clock is wound up again
And he won't be when the the dress is unraveled into flying threads

And she will lock his wild letters in a quiet drawer
And lie down to sleep near the water in the wall
And she will know the reasons for crying and for restraint
And he chose softness.

Susan B. McDonough is another "House of 30" house mate. As a master gardner, she creates gardens for a living and enjoys the journey of transplanting words into poetry. She lives part of the year in Arizona and another in Maine. Her poems can be found both on-line and in print.

Here are three of Susan's latest.

Quittin' Time

Pine trees
rumble
with thunder
thick in clouds.

I hear
their growls
as I place
plants to sight them

before I plant.
The sky looks
closer and I
smell her get thick.

My day is deemed
done. I grab
my shovel
by its wood stem

letting the metal
handle lead me
in quick strides
to my ride.

Make me a Butterfly

Understand me. Eat my pain.
Undo me. Siphon off the poison.
Underneath there must be
undying, a green stem pushing
up somewhere. Daydreams still
unborn, tiny bits of future left
unturned. Wish me peace.
Undermine my despair and my
uneasiness. Tell me fairy tales.
Ugly dragons lay beneath my
universe, they drool, salivate,
unmoved by the echo of my screams.
Use me up, spend me,
until you've kept all the change, then
unbend me, lay me where sun
underscores my shadow and
unfurls my soul unharmed.

Wisps of Sanity

tranquility is
a chant
that proofreads
the laundry list
pinned to your
cerebrum

it peels extemporaneous
sense away
to float where
light and dust
collide

we soften
see thoughts
as fleeting
gentle doves
on the lip of
a breeze

The next two poems are by Pablo Neruda from his book, The Yellow Heart, written in 1973 as he prepared for his death from cancer and the imminent U.S.-backed military coup in Chile, his homeland. The book was published by Copper Canyon Press. This is a bilingual book, Spanish, with facing page translation to English by William O'Daly. Though he came to rue his many years as an apologist for Stalin and Stalinism, he died a committed Communist, secure in the rightness and morality of his principles.

One

Because I am unfinished and spindle-shaped
I had an understanding with needles
and then they were threading me
and never have finished.

That's why the love I give you,
my woman, my needle woman,
coils in your ear moistened
by the sea winds of Chillan
and uncoils in your eyes,
letting sadnesses drift.

I don't find pleasant the reasons
my fortune comes and goes,
my vanity escorted me
toward unheard heroics:
to fish beneath the sand,
to make pinholes in air,
to devour every bell.
As it was, I did little
or I did nothing, as it were,
but enter for a guitar
and leave singing with her.

The Hero

On a Santiago street
a naked man lived
for many long years, yes,
without lacing up, no, he never dressed,
but he always wore a hat.

His body clad only in hairs,
this philosophical fellow
appeared at times on the balcony
and the citizens viewed him
as a lonely nudist,
enemy of shirts,
of trousers and overcoats.

So it was, the fashions came and went,
vests withered
and certain lapels returned
certain walking sticks fell:
everything was resurrection
and burials in street clothes,
everything, except that mortal
naked, as he came into the world,
scornful as the patron gods
of athletics.

(The men and women who witnessed
the peculiar neighbor
gave details that shake me
with proof of transformation
of the man and his physiology.)

After all that nudity,
after forty years of being naked
from head to toe,
he was covered with black scales
and longhair covered his eyes
such that he could never read again,
not even the dailies.

In this way, his thoughts remain
fixed on a point in the past,
as on some old editorial
in a defunct newspaper.

(A curious case, that the fellow
who died as he was chasing
his canary on the terrace.)

Once again, this story proves
pure faith cannot withstand
the assaults of winter.

There's something about a foggy night makes me want to just jump into it. In fact, some of my earliest poems were written 35 years ago, walking around downtown San Antonio on foggy nights. That was always an adventure, since, in those days, you could never be entirely what might jump out of the fog at you in late night downtown San Antonio.

a circle of stowaways, waiting

a foggy
foggy night

streetlights
fuzzed
like the moon
behind a cloud

the kind of night
that pulls me
out
to walk
in the gloom and mist

to sit in the light
of a street-side cafe
with other night wanderers

like
joining
a circle of stowaways
marooned
on a yellow island

waiting
to see the
mysteries that fall
to earth on foggy
foggy
nights

The next poem is by Robert A. Fink from his book The Ghostly Hitchhiker...and other stories,published by Corona Publishing Company of San Antonio in 1989.

Fink was born in North Texas and, at the time the book was published, was Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing Workshops at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene. He was a Marine Corps lieutenant in Vietnam.

This poem strikes a chord with me. I was running a very large employment/unemployment office deep in the South Texas oil patch during oil bust years of the late '80s - saw tens of thousands of people just like the characters in this poem every month.

Hard times.

We may be seeing them again.

The Dangers of Picking Up Hitchhikers in Texas

The price of oil has dropped
a lot of roughnecks at the exit ramps,
common a junior executives from the suburbs
who lock the Olds at the Park and Ride,
wait confidently with The Wall Street Journal
for the bus. Except these hitchhikers
are three years out of high school
with football sweetheart wives
who drop them off in the pickup,
the two-year-old begging to go with daddy,
the baby nursing inside the unsnapped cowgirl shirt.

You tell yourself
they're fresh from Huntsville Penitentiary,
a fifty-dollar polyester suit
and pointed shoes black as their plans for your car
should you pull off the Interstate,
overlook the price tag hanging from the suitcase,
the thumb indiscriminate as a filed-sharp spoon.

Mom slide across to take the wheel,
kisses Dad leaning through the window.
No, he didn't forget the sack lunch
and thanks again for lettering DALLAS
on the poster board
neat as any first-grade teacher.
Of course he'll write each day,
call when he finds work.

The two-year-old begins to cry,
reaches across his baby sister for the window.
His father almost picks him up
but Mom accidentally guns the engine,
whips a u-turn on the access road
and heads for home, like you,
watching him as long as possible
in the rearview mirror.

Poem-a-day house mate number three is Marie Gail Stratford. She is a freelance writer from Kansas City. Her work has appeared in several online publications including The Loch Raven Review, Poems Niederngasse, and Blue House.

Here are new poems from Marie Gail.

Keys Across Town

I miss pianos...the little
uprights that used to grace
the front room of every home on the block.

I miss "Chopsticks" and "The Entertainer"
stuttering from open windows
on late Spring evenings when children
put in the dreaded
half hour of practice before being set loose
to bike up and down the alley
or catch toads and insects in backyards.

I miss paying piano tuners
thirty-five dollars a month for the joy
of playing old timey tunes
on an instrument with newly tightened wires.

I miss endless evenings of singalongs
with family, neighbors, friends...accompanied
by a Steinway.

I miss "We Three Kings" played in staccato
by the newest piano student in church
every Christmas Eve.

But this year, the thirty-five dollars
pays half the cable bill or a month's
worth of unlimited texting
on the latest "must have" phone, and the music
has degraded to the click and beep
of keypads marked with letters,
in sync to keep us in touch

with the world
but unacquainted
with neighbors across the street.

Nieces: Back to School in August

The tiny girl with ponytail and miniature curls
whispers secrets about fairies and kitty cats.

The smallish, brownish child in pigtail braids
flexes petite muscles, swings the bat (left-handed)
and plays first base with first-grade finesse.

The curvy young lady, new to bras and junior high,
stretches and leaps - smiling, clapping, and toe-touching
her way toward a place on the cheering squad.

Francisco X. Alarcon was born in Wilmington, California, in 1954. As a child, he lived in Guadalajara, Mexico and, ever since he was 18 years old, he has lived in California. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including No Golden Gate for Us, Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation, Poemas Zurdos, De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love, Body in Flames/Cuerpo en llamas, Tattoos, and Ya Vas, Carnal.

Alarcon did his undergraduate studies at California State University, Long Beach, and his graduate studies at Stanford University. He currently teaches at the University of California, Davis, where he directs the Spanish for Native Speakers Program.

I have used poems from his book De amor oscuro previously. This week I have a couple of poems from Snake Poems, published by Chronicle Books in 1992. The book's inspiration was a treatise written 100 years after Cortes's conquest of Mexico by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon, a Mexican priest who lived from 1587 to 1646. The treatise was commissioned by the Inquisition which wanted to create, a handbook of Aztec magical chants and spells so that priests in Mexico would know when the natives were slipping back into their pagan practices. Among the things about this that drew Alarcon's attention was the possibility that he might be related to Hernando.

Here are three poems from the book

Mestizo

my name
is not
Francisco

there is
an Arab
within me

who prays
three times
each day

behind
my Roman
nose

there is
a Phoenician
smiling

my eyes
still see
Sevilla

but
my mouth
is Olmec

my dark
hands
are Toltec

my cheekbones
fierce
Chichimec

my feet
recognize
no border

no rule
no code
no lord

for this
wanderer's
heart

Matriarch

my dark
grandmother

would brush
her long hair

seated out
on her patio

even ferns
would bow

to her splendor
and her power

Rescue

at the end
I found

myself
holding

the other end
of the rope

We restarted a grand tradition this Christmas. Here's a report from the front.

making tamales on Christmas Eve

with a Mexican mama
and a bunch of Mexican tias
in the house
it turns out
the only one who knows
how to make tamales,
the only one who
has ever made tamales
before,
is my half-Mexican son

so we all gather around,
the aunts and uncles
nephew and nieces,
and girlfriends
mom and dad,
to watch
him do the magic mixing
of the masa,
the spicing of the meat,
then all file into the
dining room
to take our place
around the table -
corn shucks
in the middle,
a bowl of masa
and a bowl of meat
in front of each of us -
and begin our part of the
night's entertainment,
spreading the masa
just so
on the damp corn shucks,
too much masa,
we scold each other,
no,
now that's too little,
minding everybody else's tamale business -
careful
careful how you spread,
we remind each other,
from the bottom of the shuck
about two thirds to the top,
leaving a little shuck tail
to fold over
when the tamale
goes into the steaming pot -

and then the meat strung
in a little line down the middle,
just right amount of meat
or the tamale
will not
hold together if too much meat
or it will be just a masa ball
with hardly any meat at all
if too little

then the rolling
of the corn shuck into the little
cigar shaped
masa and meat pie,
careful,
still,
not need for perfection
it's just a tamale, after all,
but best if all about the same size
so that as they steam
they will all come done at the same
time, no dried out little ones,
no mushy big ones

then
into the pot
and the wait begins
checking
every twenty minutes
to make sure there is water in the pot
to boil to make steam,
and two hours later,
three hours later,
11 dozen tamales,
a dozen for everyone to take home
and several dozen
for breakfast tomorrow morning,
Christmas Day

The next two poems are by Renny Golden from his book The Hour of the Furnaces, published in 2000 by Mid-List Press of Minneapolis.

Golden grew up on Chicago's south side. In the 1980s, she co-founded the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America. She is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Sociology at Northeastern Illinois University.

Popular Education

The teacher, Marie Isabel, walks toward the milpa
carrying a basket of pupusas and salt fish.
Outside Scuhitoto they are walking
in from Guazapa, singing
Dale! Salvadorans! Dale!
Who are these frail peasants who
come from earthen buzones
where they hid from the battalions trampling
through the ash of squash and sorghum fields?

Marie Isabel is not interested in the past
only this bread and tetracycline she
distributes like sacraments

The sandaled teachers walk in
loping strides, shy and grinning.
These intellectuals of the campo
forge knowledge on the anvil
of paper and pen.
They are the text that says:
I am hungry.
I am not dead.
I am coming.

The poet notes that in conflict zones during the internal wars in El Salvador, peasants educated their children in cane-stalk or tree shaded classrooms they built themselves. Since the wars ended, the peasant teachers have sought official certification so they can continue to teach. Unable to complete the education requirements, unable, even, to afford the 75 cent weekend bus ride to complete certification requirements, they continue to teach without salaries.

Waiting for Passes

Our safe conduct passes lay
behind the sergeant's desk. Hopeless.
Corinna, he calls me, rolling
the r's like a radio announcer.
Corinna, he repeats familiarly,
reading the passport name I never use.

The Cuartel is a fortress of buildings
hunched behind plump sandbags
piled up like dead animals.
Inside, men with black mustaches
and black mirror glasses
parade past lines of jeep Cherokees
with smoked dark windows.
The sergeant produces a single white gardenia,
which he offers, arrogant and gallant.
"Para la poesia," his eyes slits.
He'd read Profession? Writer,
and guessed I was a poet.

We wait two hours
to deliver seed, medicines to campesinos.
"Fijate, for your own protection,
I cannot permit you
on the road to Guarjila.
Terrorists ahead," he shrugs.
Because of the absurd gardenia,
I think he believes this lie.
We insist. Amused, his mustache lifts slightly.

But it is the sergeant
who's not considered the odds.
distant rattles of firepower
burst intermittently under a
silver-hammered moon.

They surround you, sergeant,
dark cinnamon men with your
black eyes, women of mud
and oily bandannas.
They slip through green walls
in the mountain, move like iguanas
through the starry groves,
a fragrance of mangoes
lingers on their hands.
They have nothing to lose, sergeant,
nothing.

"Corinna, why do your
people bring food to these farmers?"
The sergeant does not say
the word subversive.
He thinks gringos know nothing.
"I am a Christian," he says,
as if it explained something.

But the sergeant does not remember
the morning, does not remember 7 a.m.
when eleven-year-old Jose,
who stepped on a mine,
lay in the truck, bleeding in his
mother's lap, bloody fingerprints
on the permit she hands the sergeant,
the child's blanket stiff with blood.
The sergeant does not remember
calculating how long it would take
to bleed away this childhood.
"They won't make it past
Suchitoto," he'd said.

He only remembers the first time of blood,
the river seven years before,
when he was a boy with a gun,
how he ate mangoes while they marched
through the corpses.
He ate mangoes for days after Rio Sumpul.

The poet notes that 600 refugees, mostly women, children, and old men, were massacred at Rio Sumpul. The sergeant (real-life version) admitted that, when he was a young recruit in 1980, he had participated in the attack.

Gary Blankenship is one of the founders and current moderators of the poem-a-day House of 30 forum. He is a retiree from Bremerton, Washington whose avocation is poetry. He edits, moderates forums and writes, but still, according to him, grows lazier by them day and does not publish enough.

Gary is currently in his 35th month of writing a poem-a-day on the House of 30 forum.By my count, that's about 1,050 days and 1,050 poems - some lazy!

He is also, as I've noted before a great writer of series poetry. Here are some from the latest series.

These poems are part of Gary's ongoing series inspired in part by the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse poems primarily preserved in the Icelandic mediaeval manuscript Codex Regius. It is the most important extant source on Norse mythology and Germanic heroic legends. It was also a source of inspiration for Tolkien's writings.

Gary has included some Wikipedia references you will have to copy and paste to your browser if you wish to check them out.

Solstice, Giving

The fields lie fallow, frozen, snow covered,
Sul has left us at the mercy of Night.
Beneath the granite surface, potatoes
wait for the ground to warm, her recovery.
Dance, sing, merry make so that she returns
with gifts of green, sudden rain, fresh turned earth.

Sunna 2008

They ignore the old ways, this generation -
they cut their hair and cover their loins
with threads of foreign cloth and faux jewels.
They imagine themselves to be divine,
lessons discounted, they let the horses run wild.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B3l_(Sun)

The Edda: Suns from Odin's Voice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%ADmnism%C3%A1l

Svalinn, Shield (Edda I)

An ice sheet fills the city from beltline
to piers on the abandoned river front -
on the mountain the last glacier recedes.

Children careen down barricaded streets,
shoppers empty shelves of beer and matches.
Wolves prowl frozen swamps, bears the forest edge.

Forgotten, fires that ravaged summer,
remembered, wild strawberries ruined by rain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalinn

The next two poems are from The Shadow of Sirius, the new collection of poems by W.S. Merwin. The book, published by 2008 by Copper Canyon Press, was a very special Christmas gift.

Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. He was raised in Union City, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he began writing hymns as a child.

He attended Princeton University on a scholarship. After graduating in 1948, he spent an additional year at Princeton studying Romance language, a pursuit that would later lead to his prolific work as a translator of Latin, Spanish, and French poetry.

His first collection, A Mask for Janus (1952), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. myth.

Merwin live in Europe for several years, returning to the United States In 1956 when he received a fellowship from the Poets' Theater in Cambridge, MA.

In 1967, Merwin published the critically acclaimed volume, The Lice, followed by The Carrier of Ladders in 1970. He received the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders and used the situation to continue his objection to the war in Viet Nam.

In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. He settled in Maui, in a home that he helped design and build, surrounded by acres of tropical forest which he painstakingly restored after the land had been devastated and depleted by years of erosion, logging, and agriculture.

Over the course of his long career, Merwin has published over twenty books of poetry, as well as nearly twenty books of translation.

Merwin's honors include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, the Governor's Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. He currently lives and works in Hawaii.

Here are two poems, selected at random as I paged through the book for the first time.

The Making of Amber

The September flocks form crying
gathering southward
even small birds knowing
for the first time
how to fly all the way as one

at daybreak the split fig
is filled with dew
the finch finds it
like something it remembers

then across the afternoon
the grape vine hangs low in the doorway
and grapes one by one
taste warm to the tongue
transparent and soundless
rich with the late daylight

No Shadow

Dog grief and the love of coffee
lengthen like a shadow of mine

and now that my eyes no longer
swear to anything I look out

through the cloud light of this autumn
and see the valley where I came

first more than half my life ago
oh more than half with its river

a sky in the palm of a hand
never unknown and never known

never mine and never not mine
beyond it into the distance

the ridges reflect the clouds now
through a morning without shadows

the river still seems not to move
as though it were the same river

One of the things I don't like about holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving is that, for people who like to eat breakfast out, there aren't many choices. It basically boils down to Denny's or I-Hop. Since I don't like I-Hop less than I don't like Denny's, I-Hop is where we usually end up, as we did this year early in the morning on Christmas day.

breakfast at I-Hop on Christmas Day

the last of the tamales
cooked
counted into dozens,
and wrapped in foil at 2 a.m.
we're up again
five hours later, ready
for whatever comes next
on Christmas 2008

after the 10 hour intimate
relationship
we had yesterday and last night
with our tamales,
neither of us is up to
eating one for breakfast
so it's off to I-Hop
where we're greeted
by a scrowly-faced waitress
with lips painted red
as Santa's red raincoat

an incomplete literalist
this woman
who gets our order exactly
right
except for small details
that change everything
entirely

so instead
of the "harvest healthy nut combo"
i ordered, i get harvest
healthy nut pancakes which is
two pancakes more than i can eat
and no scrambled fake eggs
which were supposed to have been
compensation
for the blueberry syrup
pool
in which my four (not two)
harvest healthy nut pancakes
floated
like an island in the blue Pacific,
and D gets her pigs in a blanket,
but a full order instead of a half order,
so she has two extra pigs
and two extra blankets
whispering
to her from her plate

but then
i start listening to the people
across from us
a dark-eyed beauty home
for the holidays
having breakfast with her parents,
a premed student, i think,
telling mom and dad about
the lab work she's doing
and the experiments she's working on,
her eyes flashing
with the excitement of discovery,
the enchantment of learning,
and her parents
not saying a word,
not understanding a word
but soaking it up,
their daughter's joy
and their own,
the joy a parent feels
when they can see their child
has found her place and
begun a life
on her
own

Samuel Hazo is author of books of poetry, fiction, essays, and plays. He is the founder and director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, where he is also Professor Emeritus of English at Dubuesne University. He was chosen the first State Poet for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1993, and, in addition to many other honors, was the 2003 Maurice English Poetry Prize.

The next poem is from his book A Flight to Elsewhere, published in 2005 by Autumn House Press.

The General

He considers smiling a weakness.
Better to say he's read Sun Tzu,
likes Verdi, has grandchildren
and a twelve-year-old Shih-Tzu.

He strides with the unabridged stance
of a man accustomed to deference.
He plays the courtier with women,
bowing as he kisses their hands.

A rainbow paragraph of battle
ribbons flashes like a flag
above his left breast-pocket
The stars on his tunic twinkle.

With other generals he sees
himself as equal but detached.
With colonels he parades his rank
like a gander courted by geese.

He says that war makes men,
that men were created for war
no matter where, why or when.
Wait, and he'll say it again.

My next "House of 30" house mate is Connie Walker. Connie is a retired RN., mother of three, grandmother of two. She now lives in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio after returning from an almost ten year stint working in Saudi Arabia. living in Cornwall, England and traveling extensively.

Connie says her life long love of poetry led her to start writing poetry over twenty years ago. She now considers it her obsession. She is a master of the etheree form.

Snow Day

Cold
winds howl
snowflakes fall
frost window panes.
Sleds fly down the hill
skaters glide on the pond
kids happy laughter rings out.
Snow men appear in every yard
wearing carrot noses, pebble smiles.
These are the joys of snowy winter days.

The next poem is by Steve Gehrke from the Fall/Winter 2004 issue number 23 of Borderlands Texas Poetry Review.

Gehrke is poetry editor at the Missouri Review. His second book, The Pyramids of Malprighi, published by Anhinga Press in 2004, won The Philip Levine Prize for Poetry.

If I had found it then, this would have been a timely poem for a couple of months ago.

The Candidate

- after Norman Rockwell

Lately, his life is divided into trains,
which is where he sits now,
decompressing from the speech,
remembering the spring moment
when the audience
applauded, the one he likes to call
money in the bloodstream, that brief
expansion - footstep in
the puddled nucleus - when all his pores
released their confetti: in that moment,
how many selves
were distributed, haphazard, like campaign
buttons on the street? Years ago, his first wife
complained, you don't
embrace people, you stack them like sandbags
against your loneliness. And it was true.
When he met another woman,
some of him remained alone,
and he began to believe that once
the self is broken,
it continues to divide, like a dab
of mercury, which may explain
the way he copies himself
in leaves, that absurd, homesick feeling
he's developed towards his own body,
the feeling,
when he's looking in the mirror
that he's looking at the stars, or how later,
in the sleeper, disguised
in the tidal brilliance of the television,
as he watches with the sound turned down,
himself give the speech,
all pixel and glow, like a man
reduced to his chemistry, he feels
even then
the audiences' gaze upon him, like ropes
tied to a blowup float in a parade,
as if he were a Trojan
horse, or a Chinese Dragon
with a dozen men inside. Once,
watching cartoons
with his son, he saw a cat
frozen, step from a walk-in freezer,
the shatter
into a hundred shards of ice which,
when they melted, refigured the cat's
image into a puddle
on the floor. I'll represent the people
with a single mind, he said tonight,
thought he couldn't help
but think of his son upon his lap
that morning, like a cup poured
from the pitcher
of himself, and how he yelped
when the terrorizing mouse
stepped forth, hoisting
was it a paintbrush? No, a mop.

Alice Folkart, a frequent contributor here, is the last of my "House of 30" poem-a-day house mates. Alice lives and writes poetry and short fiction in Hawaii, traveling frequently to Japan with her husband. She says that her desire for immediate gratification is satisfied when she writes poetry. "You write it and there it is," she says, "the whole thing all on one page, beginning to end." Seeing that makes her happy, she says.

Here are some haiku from one of her recent Japan visits.

Haiku Land

Haiku land is cold
blue-nosed toddlers off to school
cherry blossoms bright white

***

Japanese keyboard
speaks two languages sort of
neither fluently

***

Tokyo cyber club
three hundred yen hour fee
Poems, a dime a word

***

Long, long, long, long flight
over invisible sea
to hot noodle soup

Painting by John Moulder

John Moulder is an artist and poet I've know for a long time but haven't seen in four or five years. Our paths crossed recently and I invited him to joins us on "Here and Now."

Though John posted on the Blueline Poetry Forum some years ago, he's never posted on the poem-a-day forum. I hope, now that he knows about it, he will.

You can see one of his paintings above, below, his poem.

Cormorant sighting

Crape Myrtle along South Alamo
puts out baby-finger buds
reaching for the sky's flagrant bauble.
A lone grackle exalts dark assertions,
taunting March with squawk and click.

A cormorant trio suns itself perched
on the Blue Star dam; they are off in turns,
as if talked up by a control tower,
pocking liquid runway with wake-lines
stitched by webbed kangarooing feet
and lifting to bank over the narrows,
wide wings clawing toward the opening
in the pecan, cypress and cottonwood.

Don't leave,
swimmer, keep spreading your wings in the sun,
digesting lunch and looking crucified,
overlook this interloper of noon.

Stay,
supple-neck, in San Antonio's middle
keep diving for fry, who entice with glint
as they flit within the river's black belly.

Remain,
harvester, winnow perch in good number;
help those that escape pass their swifter dash
to the next wave; cull dawdling from their ranks.

I thrust not hand, stone, stick, net or bullet;
I do not clutch, throw, shoot, nor do I stalk,
but ease within sight only to marvel.

Shy golden-eyed god of low dams,
hook-beaked minnow haunter, tadpole killer,
silent loiterer on half-submerged logs,
plumage stained by Golgotha's billow,
you would not linger, though I only peer,
and with my presence bring the least of hurts.
But it's known why your kind scorns my kind;
all of you born knowing not to expect our good will.

Trust the grebe and whistling duck,
trust the heron and coot,
trust the sheen of fleeing trout,
trust the river and always
trust your wings.

I've retired twice so far in my life and am about to do it again. For about six years i've been working on a project by project basis with a company involved with assessment testing. I've met and worked with lots of very fine people there, but for at least the past couple of years, my first thought as I arrive for the first day of a new project is, with all the other stuff I have going on in my life, what the hell am I doing here.

As I approach the beginning of my 66th year, I have decided it's time to stop doing things I don't want to do and so I resolve the question of what the heck am I'm doing there by just not being there anymore.

a job for me

that's it

i'm not going back
to that dinky little job
i've been doing
for the past several years

not much of a job

just enough
to interfere with my life
and things i'd rather
be doing

so
i
quit

i have lots of friends
in the canine community

and the pound
where
many of them might reside
needs
volunteer dog walkers

now there's
a job for
me

Well, that's it for our first outing of the new year, the beginning of our fourth year of doing this stuff. Come back new week, as we try to keep the ball moving, remembering in the meantime, all work presented here continues to be the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.

2 Comments:

at 10:00 PM Anonymous said...

Allen--This is a fine beginning to this year's adventures. Thanks for featuring the House this week. I hope we find even more friends to join us. --Marie Gail

at 1:49 PM Alice Folkart said...

Allen - what a great issue! I adore the photos - especially the one of you and (I presume) D. And the poetry! Thank you for including mine. I'd forgotten these. it's nice to see them again. I particularly liked the work of W.S. Mervin, Alarcon, Golden and Moulder - as well, of course, as the wonderful poems of my fellow house mates at Blueline.

My favorite line of poetry here - and it's a hard choice, is from No Shadow - Dog grief and coffee lengthen like a shadow of mine . . . and the rest of the poem is just as good.

Thank you for the introduction to so many people I'd never even heard of--all provocative and inspiring in many ways.

Happy New Year.

Alice

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