Here and Now: February 2010

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On the Road With My Pal, Reba Friday, February 19, 2010

On the Road With My Pal Reba

V.2.3.

I did most of this issue, including this part, ahead of time, so I don't really know where I am as I post this. Somewhere in Arizona, if I'm on schedule. As I write this, I don't have any pictures, except the one above, to post, and I'm hoping that when the magic post time comes, I will have pictures from my travels to that point. I will have pictures of something, for sure, it just remains to be seen what.

Setting all that present and future confusion aside, I am pleased to present Amna Tariq Shah as my featured poet for the week.

Amna says she was born in 1984, to a Muslim family in Peshawar, Pakistan. She is a writer and a poet. She writes short stories, prose and poems.

She received her early education from Beaconhouse School Systems, Peshawar. Later, she passed her B.A from F.G. Degree College, Peshawar with English Literature and Psychology as her majors. In 2007, she received her M.A degree in English Literature and applied linguistics from Dept. of English and Applied Linguistics, University of Peshawar, Peshawar.

After completing her masters degree, she worked as a lecturer in English, in Peshawar Model Degree College for girls in Peshawar, for a time period of two years.
She is currently working as a freelance writer for an Australian writing company "Write On."

Having Urdu and Pashto as her mother tongues, she has chosen English as her medium of writing so that her work can be read by a wider sphere of people.

I spent nearly a year in Peshawar 42 years ago. It was a time of trouble for that country and I didn't get to see very much of it, sometimes feeling that, although I was there, I wasn't ever really there at all. So now, here is this young poet, born in this city nearly 20 years after I left it.

Time and distance is nothing, it turns out, nothing, at least, that is beyond the boundaries of life's flows and cycles.

Here's the rest of this week’s agenda.

Me
on the road with my pal Reba

Lesley Clark
Brown
Bet
you, son of man
dance

Amna Tariq Shah
The Beauty and the Bee

Me
and a good morning to you, too, buckaroo

Czeslaw Milosz
Ars Poetica?
The Song On the End of the World

Me
original sin

Amna Tariq Shah
The Real Love of a Mother and a Child

Langston Hughes
The Dream Keeper
Negro Dancers
Reasons Why
Night and Morn

Amna Tariq Shah
Hope

Me
they come from beyond

Duane Niatum
Drawings of the Song Animals

Louis (Little Coon) Oliver
Empty kettle

Lance Henson
near twelve point

Me
walking with my dog on a new-bright day

Amna Tariq Shah
The Midnight Lamp

Coleman Barks
Easter Morning, 1992
An Up Till Now Uncelebrated Joy
Fixing the Door

Amna tariq Shah
An Outcast

Me
pure as the driven snow, again

Lorna Dee Cervantes
Uncle's First Rabbit

Me
stupid is

I start this week with one of my own, the title poem in fact. I'll have more poems next week about my little drive-around. This is the one that starts it off.

on the road with my pal Reba

the car is packed,
luggage
and Reba in the back

a box of CD's in the
front

the drive for today,
556 miles,
San Antonio to El Paso

(you know you're in Texas
when your GPS lady
tells you,
"drive straight, 375 miles,
then turn left")

a long drive
from rocky hills
to desert sands

mostly
boring after the first
several hundred miles
and you get into the desert
where cactus
passing at 80 miles an hour
begins to look
pretty much the same

i've done this many times -
it's what you have to do
from here
to get anywhere
where you can start
getting somewhere -

this trip,
getting somewhere means
Lake Tahoe
four days from now
and i'm anxious to get moving

the sun's up
the car's packed and loaded
breakfast's finished
this poem is about running down
to, for better or worse,
its conclusion

and Reba waits

I start this week with three poems by Lesley Clark, from her book An Absence of Color, published in 2000 by Orchard Press of St. Mary's University, San Antonio.

Clark was born in Big Spring, Texas, and raised in Aldeburgh, England. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Social Psychology and, at the time the book was published, was working towards a master's degree. Her poetry has been published in literary magazines and journals and has appeared in several anthologies. This was her first book.

Brown

I am brown, he tells me, brown
it is my brown skin that covers me
from rampant waters,
it is my skin that defines me
carries me to you,
and I tell him, I, too, am brown
but he does not agree
he tells me I am between colours
between black and white
between negative space
& shades of gray
I am the absence of colour
no term to define me
my spectrum is wide
from two distant ends
papa on one
mama on the other
I am blended
a colour to be measured and mixed
I am both black and white
becoming brown
I tell him that it is my skin
that protects me from the sun
that carries me across the sand
and to the sea
it is my colour that blends
the land to the sea,
the earth to the sky,
the sun to the moon
I surface in my perfect shade of blended brown
through rain weather and sunlight
through murk and flower gardens
he and I are one in the same
varying shades of thick, brown, blended skin.

Bet

graphic
artist
like the fiesta
flamenco dancers
dancing cumbias
by mariachis
tequila
gulped
warmth of the bottom side worm
swallowed whole
without regret

you, son of man

you, son of man
whose father claimed
your dying breathless body after birth

small infant in doctor's care
under the hands of God
and mother who weeps wildly in the night

her prayers mix with tears and stronghold
not to let go
to let live
to breathe in life

you have no pulse
your breathing is no longer rhythmic
your chest is collapsed

a last breath before mama carries you
with a knitted blanket
from the steel bed in which you lay

she carries you out of the cold room
through the slick streets

baptizing you with her trail of tears
breathing you life
inflating breaths
filling your body
your small balloon belly

she runs faster and further
not letting go
not giving up

her son, her small son
gift from the giver of life and a man
who claimed you as half his flesh

she runs, runs, runs

the wind whispering
big breaths into your belly

allowing you to live

dance

I saw the peacock dance
it was raining
he tried to run
feathers bundled behind
he slipped
then started to dance

I grabbed my harmonica
and he mooned me
bare butt

without feathers

Here's the first of our poems by our featured poet of the week, Amna Tariq Shah.

The Beauty and the Bee

Beauty, was as if caged in it,
its grace and fragrance like the towered
pride of the garden.
Sick Rose,
Fell in love with the bee!
How cruel can love be lets see.

The beauty awaited long for its return,
the bee, being late as too much absorbed in its fun.

Whole night the bee would wait in the hope,
just for an instant the bee would appear to go.

That moment of oneness was enough,
as the beauty lived only for that alone.

Then one day when Eros was being kind,
the bee realized how unkind it had been;
too lost in the fake world of others,
lost completely in the charming world of hemlock drinkers...
What it had done!

Ah! The beauty that waited long for its return,
no more waited now,
not because the beauty changed its love,
but the nature had been unkind again all and above.

And this time the beauty was dead,
The bee was late and the beauty was dead.

And here's what started out as my first poem of the week but was bumped for Reba, written on a morning I was feeling particularly feisty.

and a good morning to you, too, buckaroo

the Spurs
lost to the Lakers last night

i just noticed my vehicle inspection sticker
expired a month ago

and Sarah Palin
is still gettin' away with it -

on the other hand
the sun is shining

bright and fresh
and yellow as fresh cream

and a chilled north breeze
blows a hint of far mountains

across our modest
little hills

and i haven't had a hangover
in more than 30 years

so good morning
to you, too,

buckaroo -

i'm feeling pretty damn good
this morning...

considering

Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911 in Lithuania. He survived World War II in Warsaw, publishing in the underground press. After the war, he was stationed in New York, Washington D.C. and Paris as cultural attache from Poland. He defected to France in 1951, and, in 1960, accepted a position at the University of California at Berkeley. Even as his work was still banned in Poland, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

Milosz died in Krakow in 2004.

I have two poems this week from the collection of his work, Selected Poems, 1931-2004, published by HarperCollins in 2004.

Ars Poetica?

I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a diamonion,
though it is an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing, his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read,
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

And yet the world is different from what if seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity,
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

Berkley, 1968

The Song On the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

Warsaw, 1944

There the feisty mornings and others, sometimes a little darker.

original sin

several
religiosos
at the table next to me

a different
set
than usually have their discussions

here
in the morning
and i'm overhearing -

life is a closed arc
one says,
or did he say

life is a closed heart,
either way,
there is a poem in both

but i can't write it today
because today
i'm more concerned

about the false spring
that's about to burst in on us,
little buds

poking their little green heads
out
from the trees

poor little babies
born too soon
& soon to die as winter

returns
later this week
poor little babies

born to die
in
in the seasonal mysteries

and lies of life
as are we all in our day
and time

and one of the preachers -
the tall
white haired one

who looks so much like a Lutheran preacher
that there is no way in his life
he could be anything else -

he says,
men and women
are not born evil, the fall

from the garden,
he suggests,
was not due to some original sin

but development
of a knowledge of self,
this naked, hairless

human creature
who had never known
either self or other

suddenly knowing both,
and from self-consciousness,
self-interest

and ego
and positioning of self
above all else,

the fall
not from some mythical garden
but from the universal soul,

becoming one alone
and distinct
and lonely in its divorce

from the greater all,
like the buds, aborning and dying,
all part of a greater truth,

while we,
the fallen, birth
and death on our own,

then,
having done our penance
of life as ourselves

return from exile
to the garden
of all undivided

Here, from Amna Tariq Shah, this week's featured poet, a second poem.

The Real Love of a Mother and a Child

That in arms of her slumbers,
is no one but a shade of her and all that she remembers.
Pangs and pains she saw;
for this moment to be in awe.
Life has been bestowed by HIM, no wonder;
but why is that HE chose her for this can be no blunder.
Wrapping her arms around;
exhibiting the warmth that heavens bound.
The little one smiles to adore
O angel figure! who sent you to me bore?

Once again arms in arms they lie,
difference being who carries and who sighs.
You gave me life, so how is it you say byes?
Questioning his tearful eyes.
Years and years of his cuddle, now in his lap lies!

Next, I have four short poems by Langston Hughes, from the book, The Dream Keeper and other Poems, published by Knopf in 1994.

I begin with the book's title poem.

The Dream Keeper

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

Negro Dancers

"Me an' ma baby's
Got two mo' ways,
Two mo' ways to do de Charleston!
Da, da,
Da, da, da!
Two mo' ways to do de Charleston!"

Soft light on the tables,
Music gay,
Brown-skin steppers
In a cabaret.

White folks, laugh!
White folks, pray!

"Me an' ma baby's
Got two mo' ways,
Two mo' ways to do de Charleston!"

Reasons Why

Just because I loves you -
That's de reason why
Ma soul is full of color
Like de wings of a butterfly.

Just because I loves you
That's de reason why
Ma heart's a fluttering aspen leaf
When you pass by.

Night and Morn

Sun's a settin',
This is what I'm gonna sing.
Sun's a settin',
This is what I'm gonna sing:
I feels de blues a comin',
Wonder what de blues'll bring?

Sun's a risin',
This is gonna be my song.
Sun's a risin',
This is gonna be ma song:
I could be blue but
I been blue all night long.

Now for another poem from Anma Tariq Shah, our featured poet of the week.

Hope

The sunshine that does birth in the blossoms,
the light that hath ever shone in the human breast.
A reason, it has been to breathe and live,
For old years and new, it gloweth the senses.
Without, thee, has all in despair
and darkness;
Thy shall liveth as HOPE.....ALWAYS!

I have some "Here and Now" changes from blogger.com, threatening because I don't know what the hell to do about them. I don't understand the problem and surely don't understand the solution.

I'm hoping to get it fixed before we go down some time in March.

In the meantime, I'm frustrated.

they come from beyond

one of the things
i liked
about growing up in the 50's

was the fact that things
didn't change
all that much

once you learned
to be a respectably competent
citizen of the universe

little retraining was required;
if you knew how to do something on Tuesday
chances were good that you'd still know how to do it

on Thursday -

it is conspiracy i think -
advance scouts from the planet
Geekopia

come to earth
to screw it all up
by making everything so complicated

that they became irreplaceable,
while slowly making the rest of us
irrelevant and obsolete -

and worst of all
it is hard to keep up
with these agents of confusion

and catastrophe
and today
as usual, it find myself

losing -

so if it happens
you know
one

please transmit via
email
how i might intrude

upon his fortress of solitude
with an urgent
request

to fix my computer
which has fallen and
i don't know how

to get it up

Next, I have several poets from Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poets, published in 1988 by HarperCollins.

The first of the poets is Duane Niatum, a member of the Klallam tribe, was born in 1938 in Seattle. His early life was spent in the Northwest and at seventeen he enlisted in the Navy. After spending two years in Japan, he returned to complete his undergraduate studies in english at the University of Washington and later received him M.A. from John Hopkins University. He is known for his short stories and essays in addition to his poetry.

Drawings of the Song Animals

I

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

II

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

III

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

IV

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

V

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

VI

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

VII

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

VIII

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

The next poem is by Louis (Little Coon) Oliver.

Oliver is a Creek Indian born in 1904 in Oklahoma and, a descendant of the Golden Raccoon Clan, can trace her lineage to Indian Clans who lived along the Chattahoche river in Alabama. She died in 1991.

Empty Kettle

I do not waste what is wild
I only take what my cup
    can hold.
When the black kettle gapes
    empty
and children eat roasted acorns
    only,
it is time to rise-up early
    take no drink - eat no food
    sing the song of the hunter.
I see the Buck - I chant:
    "He-hebah-Ahk-kay-kee-no!"
My arrow, no woman has ever touched,
    finds its mark.
I open the way for the blood to pour
    back to Mother Earth
      the debt I owe.
My soul rises - rapturous
    and I sing a different song,
      I sing,
      I sing.

And finally, from Harper's Native American anthology, I have this poem by Lance Henson.

Henson, a Cheyenne, was born in 1944 and raised in Oklahoma and is currently the poet-in-residence for more than 300 schools in several states. Author of six books of poetry, he was the first Native American to translate a major collection from Cheyenne to English.

near twelve mile point

for my grandparents

at times the heart looks toward open fields
and sees itself returning

orange pall of sun
the low hymn of trees

in the garden
a north wind blows over dry stalks of corn
birds gather there
scratching over the echoing footsteps

your names
have become the dark feather

to whom the stars sing

The Midnight Lamp

The midnight lamp kept burning silently
its quiet fire narrated some tales

Unattended, were some of them...still
thus ignored went this burning sacrifice to them

The lamp held in it thousands of stories
and it kept talking to only a few

Then came the gush of wind from nowhere
And there it stood all burnt

The midnight lamp was no more
but the brightness was more than it ever bore

Here's another report from another well-started day.

walking with my dog on a new-bright day

walking
with my dog
in a new-bright day

that's the way
to start a morning -
pushing back

against
the night storms
and all the pickle-sour clouds

of the day before -

and that be me
walking with Reba
in my coat and gloves

sucking up the cool
and the sunshine
and the fresh air never

been shined on before

and i'm rounding the corner
and see Old John
driving up

in his wife's Lexus
and I know it be his wife's
cause he's driving real slow

and cautious

like he never drives his own
old Jeep, like a 15-year-old
that's how he drives

his own old Jeep
and i can hear his wife saying
you don't be driving my Lexus

like you be driving your own old Jeep

or else -
that's probably what she said
but Old John won't admit it

says he always drives that way
but i know better
having observed from anear and afar

all his automotive
like he wasn't paying for the insurance
high-jinks

and speaking

of beautiful days
i think i might be calling
Dee

about using this beautiful day
for a country drive
to Fred-town -

maybe stop off and steal some rocks

at the quarry along the way -
she be working hard at her office
this Saturday morning

making the money to keep me
fed
and she could probably use a break

just like mine

Here again, featured poet Amna Tariq Shah.

The Midnight Lamp

The midnight lamp kept burning silently
its quiet fire narrated some tales

Unattended, were some of them...still
thus ignored went this burning sacrifice to them

The lamp held in it thousands of stories
and it kept talking to only a few

Then came the gush of wind from nowhere
And there it stood all burnt

The midnight lamp was no more
but the brightness was more than it ever bore

Next I have three poems from Coleman Barks, one of my favorite poets. The poems are from his book, Gourd Seed, published by Maypop Books in 1993.

Barks published his first book in 1972. Though he has continued to publish his own work, from the late seventies to the present he has been primarily known for his interpretations of the 13th century mystic, Jelauddin Rumi.

Easter Morning, 1992

A bright copper and brown striped lizard,
big for this area, seven inches long,
has taken over my mop
drying on the back fence.
Here four hours, bent over
like some clearly crazed old man
humping the back of the head of his goddess,
his goddess who has only the back of a head all round.
Not that there's pelvic motion,
but he looks tranced, the perfect five-fingered
hands spread for pleasure and grip.
He neverminds my face so near, nor I his.
It may not look like love but it is
that that keeps us in this head
over head over head, eons.

An Up Till Now Uncelebrated Joy

There's one book, a 1988 volume,
and it's here, never been checked out,
and flipping through, I sniff the carefulness,
the guarded assertions this Oxford guy
spent twelve years considering, so that now
I can have the rest of a Spring afternoon
finding out what's been known and what
will remain secret a while longer
about the Sixth Dalai Lama.

Good scholarship gives me such delight that I kiss
the book alone in the stacks, and I almost kiss
the checkout girl, and I savor the length
of the Bibliography walking through
the self-opening double doors, and I skip
going back to my truck, because Michael Aris
has sustained his interest in Tibetan mystics,
and I want to kiss the bald pate of research
like a n'er-do-well daughter going out on a date,
who before leaving, thoughtfully brings
some green tea for a little break.

Fixing the Door

Fixing the bathroom door would require
taking it off and planing two sides
the floodwater has swollen so that
it will close only with a definite
effort and sometimes springs open
to reveal a sweetheart shitting
or myself to whoever's standing
by the refrigerator looking in the way
we will when we're not hungry for anything,
just checking as we do when any door
opens of its own volition...First,
I'd have to buy a plane.

And now, our last poem from featured poet, Amna Tariq Shah.

Thank you Aman. With best wishes for your continue success as a writer. We hope we might hear from you again.

An Outcast

From tree to tree the eagle flies,
In quest of warmth, to stay by.
The fire flickers a distance away,
But it is nothing when the bird comes array.
Swooping high, it holds its breath;
Thinking twice, when it just once had to think.
Not in proximity to life;
It wonders to see a better day ahead.
The bird breaks its wings;
This was the only hope to keep it within the ring.
Sensing joys and sorrows are a part of existence,
It continues now by search through walk in the smooth ocean.

OK, so this next poem is not so nice. But it's true for most of us - kinda.

pure as the driven snow, again

a good thing
about getting old

if
you survive it

is that
as the years pass

more and more
of the people you wronged

die off,
allowing remorse

for past sins
with no requirement for restitution -

and how our virtue increases
as each new death and new year's passing

makes it easier and easier
to be the example

of rectitude
old folks

are supposed to be -
meanwhile, my birthday

next week
takes me to number 66

and i'm thinking
4 or 5 more

and i'll be pure
as the driven snow,

again

Now I have a poem by Lorna Dee Cervantes, another of my favorites. The poems are from her book Emplumada, which, as you might guess from the root "pluma," means "feathered." The book was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and was winner of the 1982 American Book Award.

Born in San Francisco in 1954, Cervantes is of Hispanic-Native American heritage. She grew up in San Jose, speaking English exclusively because of her parents who had a strictly enforced English-only rule at home. Currently a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she has been described as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."

Uncle's First Rabbit

He was a good boy
making his way through
the Santa Barbara pines,
sighting the blast of fluff
as he leveled the rifle,
and the terrible singing began.
He was ten years old,
hunting my grandpa's supper.
He had dreamed of running,
shouldering the rifle to town,
selling it, and taking the next
train out.
          Fifty years
have passed and he still hears
that rabbit "just like a baby."
He remembers how the rabbit
stopped keening under the butt
of his rifle, how he brought
it home with tears streaming
down his blood soaked jacket.
"That bastard. That bastard."
He cried all night and the week
after, remembering that voice
like his dead baby sister's,
remember his father's drunken
kicking that had pushed her
into birth. She had a voice
like that, growing faint
at its end; his mother rocking,
softly, keening. He dreamed
of running, running
the bastard out of his life.
He would forget them, run down
the hill, leave his mother's
silent waters, and the sounds
of beating night after night.
          When war came
he took the man's vow. He was
finally leaving and taking
the bastard's last bloodline
with him. At war's end he could
still hear her, her soft
body stiffening under water
like a shark's. The color
of rthe water, darkening, soaking,
as he clung to what was left
of a ship's gun. Ten long hours
off the coast of Okinawa, he sang
so he wouldn't hear them.
He pounded their voices out
of his head, and awakened
to find himself slugging the bloodied
face of his wife.
          Fifty years
have passed and he has not run
the way he dreamed. The Paradise
pines shadow the bleak hills
to his home. His hunting hounds,
dead now. His father, long dead.
His wife, dying, hacking in the bed
she has not let him enter for the last
thirty years. He stands looking,
he mouths the words, "Die you bitch.
I'll live to watch you die." He turns,
entering their moss-soft livingroom.
He watches the picture window
and remembers running: how he'll
take the new pickup to town, sell it,
and get the next train out.

Here's a little exploration of stupidity, my own and others' as well.

stupid is

i've done some stupid things
in my life and

even knowing they were stupid
i did them anyway

cause
i didn't know how to stop -

that leaves me
with, perhaps, more compassion

for adulterers and drunks
and chiselers

and all the standard
ne'r-do-wells

that populate our lives
and the morning newspapers -

it's just a bunch of stupid
things they did

cause they didn't know
how to stop,

is the way i think about it,
though i lose my patience pretty quick

when, after
getting away with stupid for a while

they begin to thinking
they don't need to stop,

thinking all their adultering
and stealing and whatnot was

just fine cause they were so special
and the rules

don't apply to them
and if they did it

it couldn't be stupid
anyway

and at that point
we're past stupid and into

delusion
requiring intervention

which they never see coming,
the stupidest part

of the stupid things they do
cause they should'a known

everyone always gets caught
in the end

So, from where ever I am, that's it for the week. I'll be back next week, though from where is even more confusing than the same question next week. I can narrow it down to California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas, one of those places, or, maybe some place else, like, maybe, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, or Utah. From what ever local that turns out to be I’ll have all sorts of stuff, including a new featured poet, Derek Richards, with some of his great poems for you.

In the meantime, all is as before. The material presented here remains the property of those who created it. Such stuff of mine as someone might want is available to whoever wants it, all for the very reasonable cost of telling people where you got it.

I remain, in any of those places mentioned earlier, allen itz, owner and producer of this blog.

(It turns out I am behind schedule - I had intended to be somewhere in Arizona by tonight, but ended up instead in Gallup, New Mexico. I'll tell you about it next week in my travel poem issue of "Here and Now.")

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May I Show You My Etchings, M'Dear Thursday, February 11, 2010

V.2.2.

I'm posting a little early this week because it's raining and sleeting and dark and cold and I'm bored and if I don't do this I have to do something else that I don't want to do, that being loading IWord on my MacMini which I need to do because my next book has been ready for months and I can't get it published until I have it in Word and I'll probably screw it up, which is a kind of tradition with me and computers, so I'm doing this, which I know how to do for another week or two until they change every thing again. Damn I hate/love computers.

So, getting right to it, I begin by introducing my featured poet for the week, Nancy Calhoun.

Like many others of us, Nancy is a second life poet. After several decades as a business owner, corporate manager, executive coach, part-time concert/opera singer, Nancy Calhoun recently retired to devote herself to writing full time. Poetry has come late in life, but with a passion, she says, that blossomed into her first book, a collection entitled Sip Wine, Drink Stars. She lives in southeast Arizona's wine country, and writes beside a panoramic view of mountains, grasslands and wildlife. Her work has appeared in CamrocPressReview and Persimmontree. New work will be published in the 2010 Spring issue of Poetry Magazine. Her blog can be seen at http://nancyinsonoita.blogspot.com.

In addition to Nancy and her five poems, here's our line-up of unusual suspects for this week.

Bogdan Czaykowski
Like a Child

Kathleen Spivack
Tipping Point

Barbara Buckman Strasko
Avenue of eh Poplars

Nancy Calhoun
Autopsy Song

Me
patchy

Walt Whitman
I Sing The Body Electric

Me
random acts of beauty

Nancy Calhoun
Cycle

Dael Orlandersmith
Poem II For Anne Sexton

Sekou Sundiata
Philosophy of the Kool

Nancy Calhoun
Cardiac Unrest

Me
she'd probably have me arrested

Charles Bukowski
the American Flag Shirt
what?
now she's free

Me
saggy baggy creaky crickity

Nancy Calhoun
Waiting

Juan Ramon Jimenez
Yellow Spring

Rafael Alberti
The Good Angel

Nancy Calhoun
Homecoming

Me
some people complain

Westley K. Mather
Tower Work
An Ocean Death

Me
flying

I'm going to pick up today where I left off last week, with several more poems from the Winter/Spring 2007 issue of The Spoon River Poetry Review.

The first poem is by Bogdan Czaykowski, translated by Adam Czerniawski.

Czaykowski was a Polish Canadian poet, essayist, literary translator and literary critic, professor emeritus and former Dean at the University of British Columbia. He was born in Poland in 1932 and died in Canada in 2007. He wrote numerous articles in academic journals and literary magazines.

Like a Child

Like a child,
Which in dread curiosity
Tightly grips his old nanny's sleeve
An pulls her to the wood,
So do I lead myself
Dipping my feet
In fathomless waters of silent stream,
Whose banks rustles in darkest depths
With leafy shadows that have shed their shade.

My second poem from the Spoon River Review is by Kathleen Spivack.

In an Amazon biography, Spivack describes herself as the author of five books of poetry and prose, with work published in over 300 magazines, and anthologies, and winner of numerous prizes/awards, including nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. She says she is a trainer of top writers from all over the world and all genres, both in the Boston area, and in France, holding a post from 1991 as a one semester Visiting Professor of Creative Writing/American Literature in the French University system.

Tipping Point

How this soft green garden strokes
and soothes as we walk among her:
the brush tips of grasses feathering paint me paint me;
translucent mauve fingers of children
shifting sun's shadow, the certainty of light.

You know the descending moment, day's end,
dark ending I'm speaking of
when the green glimmer inhales its fragrance, holds
an exact calibration, deliberate & slant-wise, the
breath-angle - you've seen it too -
making everything perfect and therefore unbearable.

That moment before the over-spilling pitcher is poured from,
when the sheen of droplets still shivers on its oval surface,
before liquid, brimming, melds with the Great River Thirst
and we, silver winged, lunar, are emptied and earthen -
I could love anyone right now: you, for instance.

And, finally, from the Spoon River review, this next poem by Barbara Buckman Strasko.

Strasko is the Poet Laureate of Lancaster County, appointed by The Lancaster Literary Guild. In 2009, she was named Teacher of the Year by River of Words, an International Environmental Poetry & Art Contest for Youth. For many years, she has been a teacher, counselor and literacy coach in the School District of Lancaster. Many of her students have been winners in the River of Words Contest and received their awards at the Library of Congress. She was chosen as one of "The Best New Poets of 2006." Her chapbook On the Edge of a Delicate Day was published by Pudding House Press in 2007.

Avenue of the Poplars

Whey did he paint her walking away
from the house? The door is ajar,
she could still turn around. What good
are trees that line the road
if she can't find her way back?
The small bridge she walks over
could be a sign, a sliver of hope the way the light
shines there, but he has spared her no
shadows. Even if she returns this time,
eventually she will be out here sharing
this autumn bench with me.

Here's our first poem from this week's featured poet, Nancy Calhoun. A kind of quirky idea you might think up front, wondering where it's going to take you, but in the end, you find a beautiful poem, a kind of love poem, even. it was previously published in her book Sip Wine, Drink Stars and at CamrocPressReview

Autopsy Song

When I die
and they cut the "Y"
to determine why
they will clearly see
in the deep cavity
that used to be me
nothing but music.

Where organs belong
there is only song.
The notes will spill out,
bounce and roll about
the sterile floor.

arias
melodies
harmonies
symphonies

The music pumped
my rhythmic blood
and filled my tuneful veins
melody washing like a flood
sang to me in the night.
the songs will survive me
and remain in flight
in lyrical convergence
with all I ever loved

my death will have loosed
my opus for all time
and I will be known

at last.

A lot of my poems recently have had to do with weather one way or another, for the very good reason that we're actually having weather around here. I'm enjoying it.

patchy

patchy fog
the radiofella said
which from here

looks like it might mean
fog as if
wearing a patch over both eyes

cause i can't see
diddly on the interstate
except for slipstreams

in the murk
signaling passage
of automobiles

which makes me kinda
nostalgic
for earlier days

living in Corpus Christi
going down Ocean Drive
in the morning

on my way to work
downtown
stopping on Shoreline Drive

sometimes
if i was really early
walking

out on one of the t-heads
to soak up some
morning mist atmosphere

listening
hearing the small sounds
that seem to echo

in the grey -
the lisp of small bay waves
quietly rubbing on concrete

and
one morning
a gull so close

like calling at my shoulder
so close
we are both surprised

when the fog shifts for a moment
and we see each other
near nose to beak

and other fog
i remember as well
the fog of monday mornings

during my drinking years
dead man walking
like the movie was about me -

funny
how i remember all the mornings
while the nights remain
as the radiofella says
patchy

I'm going to try to do a little piece of Walt Whitman this week and if I succeed it will be for the first time. Usually, when I try to do a short piece of Whitman, I get lost in it and end up going long. I was determined not to let that happen again.

But then old temptations overcame me.

My original intention was to use several sections from I Sing the Body Electric, but, reading through the poem, looking for a place to start and a place to finish, it became clear to me that the only place to start was at the beginning and the only place to finish was at the end.

But who could be better to go long with than him, the definitive American poet in my mind. It's his love of words, all words, that defines him in my mind. (Who else could take a page from an anatomy textbook, as in this poem, and make it poetry.)

I've had no other pleasure in poetry greater than the pleasure of reading Whitman aloud. I suggest you oil up your vocal cords as you read this.

from Leaves of Grass

I Sing the Body Electric

1

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the
     soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal them-
     selves
And if those who defile the living are as bad a they who defile the
     dead?
And if the body does not fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

2

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
     balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

The expression of the face balks account,
But he express of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips
     and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and
     knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broad-
     cloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-
     side.

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the
     folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the con-
     tour of their shape downwards,
The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through
     the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls
     silently to and fro in the heave of the water,
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the
     horseman in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner
     kettles and their wives waiting,
The female soothing a child, the farmer's daughter in the garden or
     cow-yard,
The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses
     through the crowd,
The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty,
     good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown
     after work.
the coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,
The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding
     the eyes;
The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine
     muscle through clean-setting trousers and waist-straps
the slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes sud-
     denly again, and the listening on the alert,
the natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv'd neck
     and the counting;
Such-like I love - I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother's
     breast with the child,
Swim with the swimmers,wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with
     the firemen, and pause, listen, count.

3

I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,
And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.
This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and
     beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the rich-
     ness and breath of his manners,
These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were mas-
     sive, clean, bearded, tan-faced and handsome,
They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,
They did not love my by allowance, they love him with personal
     love,
He drank water only, the blood show'd like scarlet through the clear-
     brown skin of his face,
He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail'd his boat himself, he had
     a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had flowling-
     pieces presented to him by men that loved him,
When he went with and five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish,
     you could pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of
     the gang,
You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit
     by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.

4

I have preceiv'd that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is
     enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly
     around his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask for any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and woman, and looking
     upon them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the
     soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the world well.

5

This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce and undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor,
     all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was
     expected of heaven or fear'd of hell, and now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response like-
     wise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused,
     mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling
     and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of
     love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate
     dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.

This the nucleus - after the child is born of woman, man is born of
     woman,
This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the
     outlet again.

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the
     exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

The female contains all qualities and empowers them,
She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,
She is all things duly veil'd , she is both passive and active,
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as
     daughters.

As I see my soul reflected in Nature,
As I see through the mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity,
     beauty,
See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

6

The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place,
He too is all qualities, he is action and power,
The flush of the known universe is in him,
Scorn becomes him well and appetite and defiance become him well,
The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost
     become him well, pride is for him,
The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul,
Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to
     the test of himself,
Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes sound-
     ings at last only here,
(Where else does he strike soundings except here?)

The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred - is it the meanest one in the laborers'
     gang?
Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as
     you,
Each has his or her place in the procession,

(All is a procession,
The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)

Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?
Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has
     no right to a sight?
do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and
     the soil is on the surface, and waterruns and vegetation
     sprouts,
For you only, and not for him or her?

7

A man's body at auction,
(for before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look at this wonder,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one ani-
     mal or plant,
for it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll'd.

In this head the all-baffling brain,
In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon
     and nerve,
They shall be script that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of breast - muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,
     good-sized arms and legs,
and wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heard, there all passions, desires, reachings,
     aspirations,
(Do you think they are not there because they are not exprss'd in
     parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of these who shall be fathers
     in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him the countless immortal lives with the countless embodiments and en-
     joyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring
     through the centuries?
(Who might you find you have come to yourself, if you could
     trace back through the centuries?)

8

A woman's body at auction,
She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,
She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man?
do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and
     times all over the earth?

If anything is sacred the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweat of a man is the token of manhood un-
     tainted,
and in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibered body, is more
     beautiful than the most beautiful face.

Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool
     that corrupted her own live body?
For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

9

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and
     and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the
     all, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you, shall stand or fall with my poems, and that
     they are my poems,
Man's, woman's, child's, youth's, wife's, husband's, father's,
     young man's, young woman'0s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,0
eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleep-
     ing of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth,jaws, and the jaw
     hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the
     ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger,
     finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls,
     man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg-fibers, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your
     body or of any one's body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palet-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from
     woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, ears, laughter, weeping,
     love-looks, love-perturbations and rising,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and
     tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the
     naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
the beauty of the waist, and thence the hips, and thence down-
     ward toward the knees,
the thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the
     marrow of the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of
     the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

There is much beauty in the world, though it may sometimes be hard to find. Other times it just falls, like a gift, right out in front of you.

random acts of beauty

the sun set last night
through a veil of fog

that had persisted
throughout the day

casting a red-gold
spell

over everything -
a beauty

not subject to the
photographer's art

like a plain girl's
smile

never to find it's way
to the cover of Vogue

still bringing
delight

to the hearts and days
of everyone who sees

her -
how we should treasure

such fleeting beauties,
these moments of grace

in the drabness
of humdrum life,

random acts of
loveliness

to reassure us all that there is still
grace

alive
even amid the spit and stench

humans leave behind
their excremental advance

like the slime trail of a snail
as it struggles

in its slow and patient way
to reach that place

where it too
will find beauty

And now, our second poem from featured poet, Nancy Calhoun, a winter poem.

Cycle

having let go
her brittle autumn glitter
the sycamore shivers
in a winter dress
white bones bleak
as a ribcage
waiting in the void
for the turned-in earth
to waken and dress itself
once more.

I have two poets this week from the book, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, published ii 1994 by Henry Holt and Company. Founded in or around 1973, the Nuyorican Poets Café began operating in the East Village apartment of writer, poet and Rutgers University professor, Miguel Algarin. It continues to operate now as a nonprofit organization in Alphabet City, Manhattan. It is known as a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement in New York City and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy and theater.

The first of my two poets from the book is Dael Orlandersmith, poet and actor. She was born in 1959 and raised in Harlem and the South Bronx. She was the winner of the 1994 Fresh Poetry Prize.

Poem II For Anne Sexton

The curve of my Pluto sister's back
is crooked
as are her smiles
which are interwoven w/cigarette smoke &
glitter dust powder
Her perfume is the bathwater
of faded party girls
w/broken heels & hearts to match
& their once seductive dances are now
Comic poses
& and toothless smiles lie underneath
cheap, loose lipsticked mouths
& their once glittering gowns are
shabby dresses

The curve of my Pluto
sister's back is due to
benzedrine and young boys
that holler obscenities & the
alcohol content in a glass
of gin & the
voices in her head that
Scream, "Kill yourself!"
& my sister
She heeds this call &
Sprawls
w/broken cocktail glass in hand
dismembered
rather like a shattered, painted
baby doll

My second poet this week from the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe is Sekou Sundiata, poet, performer, with the Black Rock Coalition and Nu Yo Records, leader of the band, "dadahdoodadah", poet in residence at the New School, and creator of The Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop at the Cafe.

Philosophy of the Kool

a blues for poets

I been swimming since water,
learning to sing like the songs.
The oldest one I know goes like this:
Some people came from the trees,
I remember coming out of the undertow: the ocean
of seas: the electricity the explosions
billions of us crashing with the waves,
then blown away into memory.
You can still hear us in the piece of a beat
or in the music made from scratch.
The first word still had roots,
like a James Brown syllable.
It was a single cell one minute, a slam dunk the next.
Speed was our need.

I remember salt and air, water slime and mud,
upright and thumb, fire and iron.
and most of all, the poetry we had then.
It was open verse, later called Africa.
I remember human life beginning female.
Gamete that I was when I knew it, zygote
that I was when I recalled it.
The earth was yet negative space, a canvas
stretched from the hymen to foreskin to drumskin.
And sleep told us in those days,
to stay awake: the blackness begins
the blackness ends.
Whoever said there was a light at the end
never lived at the end, never had to run
up ahead to see what it's going to be: womb
to tomb to womb.

Whoso knows, I mean I seen
Buddha and Krishna on the D train.
And you wouldn't know the river gods, the prophets
or the turn of the century
if you couldn't read the latest fashion
like proverbs on tee shirts:
the best things in life are toll free
I don't like the questions I don't like the answers, I just like to dance
I don't have to drive. I'm already driven
What you got is what you love
Good things come to those who wait, better things come to those who don't
Some people look down and find money, some people look down and lose their socks
Shit happens and it floats

I recall the first ships
that appeared like shadows on the horizon.
And we ran out to greet them with our sweet palm wine and guaguanco
thinking their books and harmolodies could tell us something
about love and beauty.
But it was more than a notion
in the middle of that frigid Atlantic: the vomit
the shards the babies with umbilical cords around their necks
the earthless rhythm of the water pitching to and fro.
I witnessed the birth of rock n roll.
My mama name Lucy, her real name Lucille.
Without the blues, we go under.

Here's Nancy's next poem, our featured poet Nancy Calhoun, a love poem from a moment of panic.

This poem was also previously published in Sip Wine, Drink Stars and at CamrocPressReview.

Cardiac Unrest

I wait alone

in a crowd of the worried and afraid
while they probe your hesitating heart
my own beating a fearful tattoo
willing the panicky taste to leave my mouth

closing my eyes I see you on the table
in my crazed mind an ethereal glow surrounds
a swarm of wizards in masks and tall hats
waving wands of mystery over your draped body
snaking a tiny battleship through your veins

I wait, feeling chilled, dreamlike
for the head wizard to emerge to pronounce
the exorcism successful, the war won,
and imagine you leaping from the table
in cape and tights,

your heart able to beat in my chest again.

And, speaking of beauty, as i was earlier...

she'd probably have me arrested

i know a couple
of pretty young girls

who have
little rings hanging

from the center
of their pretty pierced

noses
and i wish i knew someway

to tell them
how those nose rings

hanging down
look like boogers

drooping
from a runny nose

and that
pretty as they are

they'd be so much prettier
without the droopy booger effect

but i'm no good
at that sort of thing at all

like the last time i tried to tell
a woman

that she possessed
a timeless beauty it came out

sounding like i was telling her
her face could stop a

clock
so i don't try anymore

just observe
and remain silent instead

like not trying to convince
all the young tattooed girls that

skin
is in and of itself

a beautiful thing
and covering it with paint

does not make it better
no matter

how pretty the picture
painted on a young girl's

ass
a rosy pink ass unadorned

is still better
but then if i tried to tell a young girl that

as it concerned her own particular rosy pink ass
she'd probably have me

arrested

Next, poems from The Pleasures of the Damned, Poems 1951-1993, one of my many collections by Charles Bukowski. This one is a little different, being a collection of poems from his first to his last. I've picked a three poems from his middle years.

the American Flag Shirt

now more and more
all these people running around
wearing the American Flag Shirt
and it was more or less once assumed
(I think but I'm not sure)
that wearing an A.F.S. meant to
say you were pissing on
it
but now
they keep making them
and everybody keeps buying them
and wearing them
and the faces are just like
the American Flag Shirt -
this one has this face and that shirt
that one has that shirt and this face -
and somebody's spending money
and somebody's making money
and as the patriots become
more and more fashionable
it'll be nice
when everybody looks around
and finds that they are all patriots now
and therefore
who is left to
persecute
except their
children?

what?

sleepy now
at 4 a.m.
I hear the siren
of a white
ambulance,
then a dog
barks
once
in this tough-boy
Christmas
morning.

now she's free

Cleo's going to make it now
she's got her shit together
she split with Barney
Barney wasn't good for her
she got a bigger apartment
furnished it beautifully
and bought a new silver Camaro
she works afternoons in a dance joint
drives 30 miles to the job from
Redondo Beach
goes to night school
helps out at the AIDS clinic
reads the I Ching
does Yoga
is living with a 20-year-old boy
eats health food
Barney wasn't good for her
she's got her shit together now
she's into T.M.
but she's the same old fun-loving Cleo
she's painted her nails green
got a butterfly tattoo
I saw her yesterday
in her silver Camaro
her long blond hair blowing
in the wind.
poor Barney.
he just doesn't know what he's
missing.

I caught myself looking like someone else the other day.

saggy baggy creaky crickity

i look
in the mirror
in the morning
and the face i see

is not the face
i grew up with and
even after months
of this happening

it's still always
a big surprise
and i guess that's
the one thing

about growing
older
that we never
expect -

the surprise
of it all,
discovering it
right out of the blue

some regular morning
of some regular day
going our regular way
and the truth of it

just flops right on
the bathroom tile,
looking at us,
telling us -

remember you
it says to us,
that old reliable you,
remember the tight body -

the tanned face
and
fine brown
hair -

the running
and walking
with nary a muscle
twitch after -

the climbing stairs
two at time
with neither a huff
or a puff -

the sharp eyes
and quick mind
and muscular
frame -

well
that you ain't you
no more -
time has passed and

you is me and you might
as well get used to it -
pick me up off this floor,

slip into the new
saggy baggy
creaky crickity you
and live with it

or
not

When I finally graduated from college, later than most of my contemporaries because of military service and time wasted both before the military and after, I had an opportunity for a writing fellowship in a well known writers' program, but I did not follow up on it, feeling very old, very poor, and very tired and sick to death of academic life. I have never second-guessed myself on that decision, first because I like the way my life turned out otherwise and, as well, a feeling now that nothing I would have written then would be worth reading now.

This is a point, in a way, that featured poetNancy Calhoun makes in her next poem (previously published in Sip Wine, Drink Stars and at CamrocPressReview), which she begins with this quotation.

...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. - Rainer Maria Rilke

Waiting

never mind the aging of my face
or thickening of my waist
I have finally lived long enough
to be young

I dream I am willowy,
graceful, with wings to fly
singing an aria, laughing
at the color-riot I fling before me

no regrets remain, nothing taken back
every day a buoyant sunrise
the night a rich cabernet in a crystal stem
chaos silenced by proof of lingering love

waiting for nothing, as it all exists
now, peeling vaporous layers
of expectation and desire, loved enough
to release the craving, exalt in the warmth

the birds, the mountains, my songs and my poems
gifts bestowed perhaps because I waited
the wind lifts, clouds thread the sky
I write, becoming young.

I have two poets this week from the book Introduction to Spanish Poetry, published in 1965 by Dover Publications.

The first of the two poets is Juan Ramon Jimenez, born in 1881 and winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize for literature. An Andalusian, Jimenez moved to Madrid in 1900, where he lived for many years. When the Ciil War began, he moved to the United States, then lived for a couple of years in Puerto Rico and Cuba, returning then to live for a number of years in New York, Washington D.C. and Florida. He returned to Puerto Rico, where he died in 1958.

Yellow Spring

   April was coming, full
of yellow flowers;
the brook was yellow,
the fence, the hill were yellow,
the children's cemetery,
that orchard where love used to live.

   The sun anointed the world iin yellow
with its fallen light;
ah, among the golden lilies,
the warm, the golden water;
the yellow butterflies
over yellow roses!

   Yellow garlands were climbing
the trees; the day
was a gold-incensed blessing,
in a golden awakening of life.
Among the bones of the dead,
God opened His yellow hands.

My next Spanish poet from the book is Rafael Alberti. Born in 1903, Alberti moved to Madrid in 1917 where he gained notice as a poet and a painter. He was involved in both the arts and politics, becoming a member of the Communist Party, leaving Spain in exile after the leftists lost the Civil War. He lived in Argentina and traveled extensively in Europe and South America. He died in 1999 at the age of 96, winning during his life both the Lenin Peace Prize in 1964 and the Premio Cervantes, Spain's highest literary honor, in 1983.

The Good Angel

   The one I wanted came,
the one I called.

   Not the sweeper of defenseless skies,
stars without huts,
moons without a country,
snows.
Those snows that fell from a hand,
a name,
a dream,
a brow.

   Not the one that tied death
to his hair.

   The one I wanted.

   Without scratching the air,
or wounding leaves or shaking windows.

   The one that tied silence
to his hair.

   So as, without hurting me,
to dig a bank of soft light in my breast
and make my soul navigable.

We say goodbye now to our feature poet Nancy Calhoun, with this, her last poem for the week.

Homecoming

Here, a gathering of familiar strangers pass
through the mirrors of their own disparate
expectations of family.

Their faces you could trace
with your fingers in the air, their laughter
like chords of a remembered song,

their tears never quite revealing the discordant
notes they hear, only that it is not the song
their hearts require.

We read into each other's hieroglyphs
stories of our own deficiencies,
bridges not quite meeting a faraway shore

where the bitter and the benevolent live together
in nominal peace, the truth and its absence
seeming equally credible.

Here is where the book falls open to the place
we always return as a reminder of what binds us
and what draws us apart.

As I said, lots of weather poems lately. I did this one last week.

some people complain

more rain today

more rain
in the fast five weeks
of this year
than in the first ten months
of the last

and some have begun
to complain
about the rain,
grumble
and fuss about the wet

jokes
about frogs
and webbed feet
nobody laughs at much

but no complaints
no grumbling
no fussing
no jokes from me

for i see green grass
coming
and wildflowers covering
pastures
and hills, the reds and blues
and purples and yellows
of spring
unfolding along roadside,
colors of spring

and
for the first time in three years
i see green coming,
the glorious colors of spring
coming

i do not complain
about the
rain

Next, two poems by Colorado poet Westley K. Mather from his first book, Into Pieces,
published by iUniverse Inc. in 2003.

Tower Work

Way up there
on a galvanized steel tower
that overlooks
not very much

A slum of an alcoholic neighborhood
a field ready again for the plow

And up there
so much bird shit everywhere
bright green and purple varieties
because these birds are pranksters
Your hands become coated with the stuff
Why so much shit?

Because the birds of prey
Have all gone away
And left the little ones to flourish

An Ocean Death

waves of salty sea
like mercury
lap at the abandoned sailor's
sun-chapped lips

Caught in a net of
circling hungry sharks
the sailor in a forgotten place
combs his hair with baited dreams

Long he waits
watching for the gritty beach
which never comes over the horizon
He remembers the smell
of a perfumed neck
that his fingers never got to touch

He lives in a time lottery
decorated with
golden mountain mirages

He wonders,
"Why did I choose the sea
when some little woman
might have me this very day
in the grip of her purple painted grin?"

Long minutes
disguised as days
pass by
intolerable and static

At long last the sailor
begins to sink
allowing the cotton strands
of his lungs to soak

"It is not a shame," he asserts,
"to die in the clammy embrace
of the bloated and lovely ocean."

I finish this week with a poem about a very special moment, possibly the most beautifully surreal moment I've experienced in many years. For a few moments, I was a pigeon.

flying

a cold mean
day

rain blown
like bullets
by a hard
north wind

on the road
i enter
an underpass
and pigeons

a flock of ten
or twelve

drop down
from the girders

and fly in front of me -
even with me -
fifteen feet ahead
of me

and
for a moment
i am in the cold
rainy sky

flying with them

That's all for this week. By this time next week I expect I'll be somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona, on my way to Lake Tahoe. I've given myself four days to get there (lots of time for side-raod stops. Then three days at Lake Tahoe and three days back to San Antonio. I have a post planned for next week and the week after, but will just have to see how the driving is going. I expect to be here, hope you are too.

Remember, as always, all the material presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. My stuff is available if you want to use any of it, just say where it came from if you do.

I'm allen itz - owner, producer of this blog and done for the week.

*************************************************************************

Well, not exactly done. Instead, I have this bonus, a picture that comes with a poem. It doesn't fit with anything else I've done in this post and it won't fit with anything I have planned for next week.

So here it is, in a little space all of its own.

I took the picture last week in front of a Borders bookstore. The dog reminded me of some old gent, waiting outside his club for his driver.

So I wrote poem to go with it.

3 vodk tonics

3
vodka tonics

3
lousy
vodka tonics
and they won't
let me drive

proof
if ever it was needed
that this world
has truely
gone to the
cats

Now, that's all.

1 Comments:

at 12:57 PM Judi Brannan Armbruster said...

Hello
I followed Derek here and enjoyed the travelogue because I am from Arizona. But, because I am from AZ I noticed that Kingman you spelled Kingsman needed a fix.

thanks for the pleasure of your magazine

Judi

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Dreams in a Land Under a Far Red Sun Friday, February 05, 2010

V.2.2.

Before I tell you about my featured poet for this week, I want to mention that I'll be taking a road trip to Lake Tahoe and back for a couple of weeks beginning near the end of the month. I may try to post from the road for at least one of those weeks, but it's likely I won't so its likely there won't be any new issues for that period of time.

Also, one of my web-lackies is getting out of the business in March. That will require me to do something, but I have no clue what or how. My frustration level is very low when it comes to this technical crap, so I'll have to find someone (nudge nudge Chris) to help me. Whatever happens, that change may also shut "Here and Now" down for another week or two. I hope not, but it that happens, be assured it will be back.

Now, on to my featured poet for the week, Laurie Corzett, with five poems marking her first appearance here.

Laurie is publisher of her visionary art 'zine, Emerging Visions, which can be found at http://emergingvisions.blogspot.com.

I visited the site and found very nice poetry and beautiful art. I recommend it.

Here's the rest of the gang for the week.

Elizabeth Seydel Morgan
How Space Travel Affects the Aging
December 2001

Me
priced to sell

Laurie Corzett
Rain-X

Herman Melville
from "Moby Dick" - Chapter 6 - The Street

Me
as every postman knows

Laurie Corzett
Beyond

Judith Viorst
Nice Baby
Where Is It Written

Me
morning slips in, almost unnoticed

Laurie Corzett
The Logic of Evolution

April Bernard
Psalm of the Spit-Dweller
Palm of the Surveyor in the Middle Latitudes

Me
the haircut

Pamela Kircher
What Some of Us Don't Know
We Love the Moon So It Shines

Laurie Corzett
Prologue

Me
the elements

Daisy Zamora
Campo Arrasado/Razed Earth
Voces Amadas/Beloved Voices
El Gato/Cat

Me
why do we eat cows but we do not eat dogs?

Laurie Corzett
of days past

Lawrence Joseph
When One Is Feeling One's Way

Charlie Smith
Santa Monica

Me
Till Death Do You Part, Amen

John Guzlowski
Fussy Eaters

Christian Knoeller
Having Sung with the Dead

Me
in the land of cat

And here we go.

I have often used by Elizabeth Seydel Morgan in "Here and Now" and have a couple of her books. The next poems are from one of those books, Without a Philosophy, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2007.

Morgan, a native of Atlanta, was the Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University in 2007.

How Space Travel Affects the Aging

1. What Their Bodies Know

They're not used to it.
There's a lot their bodies have learned
to endure.
through
facing a mirror or fingers -
yours or someone else's -
where a part of you is missing
or added.
Gravity
too little, too much
floating, free-falling, pinned to the Earth
in magnetic boots going nowhere.
Thus patience in one place -
a sightseer unable to hike mysterious
mountains seem from a window,
take the old bike up those blue curves
or swim for miles in a foreign sea.
Sight: eyes will not be portholes long.
Perspective:
how space travel affects the aging
is a question that makes them laugh.
They know where they're going next.

2. Italics Mine

   Researchers hope the sleep experiment will help explain
   why so many astronauts sleep one to three hours less each
   night in orbit than they do on Earth, and why the elderly
   tend to have trouble sleeping on Earth.
   - The Associated Press

trouble sleeping on Earth
trouble sleeping on Earth
troubled sleeping on Earth
Earth on sleeping trouble

one hundred, ninetyfive
ninety, eightyfive, eight-
y, seventyfive, seventy.
sixtyfive, sixty, fiftyfive
trouble sleeping on Earth
Earth. Earth. Earth.Earth

earth hearth heart further
heart hurt hear ear earth
birth breathe eat beat be
trouble sleeping on
earth trouble sleeping
on earth trouble
sleeping on earth

3. John Glenn HIres Literary Agent

   The Associated Press, November 3, 1998

But when he came down
he found he was wordless
having stored so few in his life

when it came down to
writing about he found
he kept thinking of birds

how when they come down
from the air they're at home in
they perch on a branch and sing

4. How the Aging Affect Space Travel

No crew
No tests
Below
Just blue
And you,
Weightless

December 2001

In the hundred hues of sorrow
Tonight is the color of fog
No memory of your face
How could that be?
All day I've been sick to my stomach
I suspect the mail, so empty
Of you, so full of spores
I make another drink anyway

Were you once right here?
Why can't I picture you doing
That little tap-step by the stove.

Here's my first contribution for the week.

priced to sell

i am in a anti-zen state
this morning, a disaggregated
mind -

no focus or concentration,
but my mind
whirling

with bits and pieces
of sixty-five years
of this and that

picking up
odd bits
as they pass

like the first time
i got in a fight,
a kid, fifteen or so,

don't know why,
just know
i lost,

the other guy
bigger with long arms
with fist upon

their ends
that repeatedly found
tender parts of my face

while i got in a couple
of shots to his stomach
so that the next day

my face looked like i'd drug it
on the sidewalk
and he complained of a mild

stomach ache
as he chewed on his
Babe Ruth candy bar -

never did get any better
at fighting
though as i got older

and large for my time
i did develop a mean look
that ended fights

before they got started,
except in bars
where there sometimes

are very drunk men
who try to accommodate
other personal inadequacies

by seeking out the largest
person in the room
to fight

but these could hardly be called
fights
since, by the time they reached

this state of self-delusion,
all i had to do was duck
their first swing

and their own momentum
would put them
face down

on the floor
which would end the fight
since the floor

is a hard place to get up
from
if you're drunk enough

to want to fight
the biggest person in the room
and that's the kind of thing

running through my mind
this morning
as i get ready to drive to Austin

to the State Surplus Property Warehouse
where i'm going to buy a desk - battered,
beat up and put out to pasture

like me
it may be,
but still sturdy and reliable

with many more good years left in it
and, like me, priced
to sell

As promised, here is the first of the five poems I have this week from our featured poet Laurie Corzett.

Rain-X

Dark, stormy roads.
I bravely observe through my windshield
which I have learned to protect with
a magical coating
brought from that place of wisdom,
a coating to aid clear vision,
too slippery for rain to cling.
The rains have always come
soaking to my bones,
blinding tears to dampen
the dust,
some say making life possible.
But that only works out if
I can see my road clearly,
the streams and ponds delineated.
Too blinded by the storm, I could drown.
Clear, serene, alive with joy and pleasure,
I have learned the route to wisdom,
though not yet found the payment
to make it my home.
On that poorly paved and lonely road
I seem to always be traveling,
beset by sudden storms
or long-raging desperation,
I am glad to have my slippery potion,
it's gift of clarity of vision,
for these storms are so magnificently
beautiful.

And now, for something completely different.

I am reintroducing myself to Moby Dick fifty years after I first read it, discovering along the way all sorts of stuff I was in too much of a hurry to appreciate when I was a kid.

This, for example, Ishmael's take on New Bedford as he takes his first walk around town in the daylight. He is stopped for the day on his way to Nantucket where he intends to sign on with a whaling ship, for no reason but that he's bored and when he gets bored he gets antsy and often into trouble. Having never been a whaler before, he thinks it might be a worthwhile thing to add to his store of experiences.

This is a bit long, but, oh well, I'll just go short somewhere else.

from Moby Dick

Chapter 6 - The Street

   If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
   In the thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
   But, beside the Feegeeans, Tongatabooans, Erromanggoans, Pannagians, and Brightggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In some things you would'd think them but a few hours old. Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazing cloak.
   No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one - I mean a downright bumpkin dandy - a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a counrry dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trousers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou are driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.
   But think not this famous town has only harpooners, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been or us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more partrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
   Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansions, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
   In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in permaceti candles.
   In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples - long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabar-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final day.
   And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial ass sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match the bloom of theirs, yet cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.

So how does one follow Herman Melville? Something short, I think, with a touch of snarky humor.

Like this.

as every postman knows

read
in the papers
that the Tea Party people
are having trouble
with their national convention,
speakers dropping out,
complaints about high registration fees,
concerns that someone
is making a whole bunch of money
off this thing

not a surprise
to me,
cranks and crybabies
have started many a political movement,
but they always fall in
on themselves,
because

as every postman knows,
ankle-biters
will bite ankles, even if there are none
available
but their own

it is their nature

Now, the second poem from our featured poet, Laurie Corzett.

Beyond

Slipping through the hour-glass
to breathe ethereal sand,
to land unseen, but tasted
deeply in the interstices
of consciousness.

Will I meet you there?
A long-lost hope,
inspiring melody
synergizing anthem of camaraderie?
Welcome me to this place
beyond secrets and stars.

As I mentioned above, I am rereading Moby Dick fifty years after I read it the first time. As you might expect of a fifteen-year-old reader of a book like this, I missed a lot. One of the things I'm finding, at least in the early chapters, is some fairly subtle and humorous social commentary.

Carrying on that tradition of humor and social commentary, Judith Viorst has been writing, since the 1960s about growing up and growing old in America. In her poems, she is the young single New Jersey girl, moved to Greenwich in search of orgies, working fireplaces, and intellectuals, and her transition from aspiring bohemian to a married woman and mother, trying to find some way to incorporate at least some of her old life into the new.

The poem I've used is from her book, When Did I Stop Being and Other Injustices, published by Simon and Schuster in 1987.

Nice Baby

Last year I talked about black humor and the impact of the common
   market on the European economy and
Threw clever little cocktail parties in our discerningly eclectic
    living room
With the Spanish rug and the hand-carved Chinese chest and the
    lucite chairs and
Was occasionally hungered after by highly placed men in
    communications, but
This year we have a nice baby
and Pablum drying on our Spanish rug
and I talk about nursing versus sterilization
While men in communications
Hunger elsewhere.

Last year I studied flamenco and had my ears pierced and
Served an authentic fondu on the Belgian marble table of our
    discerningly eclectic dining area, but
This year we have a nice baby
And Spock on the second shelf of our Chinese chest.
And instead of finding myself I am doing my best
    to find a sitter
For the nice baby banging the Belgian marble with his cup
While I heat the oven up
For the TV dinners.

Last year I had a shampoo and set every week and
Slept an unbroken sleep beneath the Venetian chandelier of our
    discerningly eclectic bedroom but
This year we have a nice baby,
And Gerber's stained bananas in my hair.
And gleaming beneath the Venetian chandelier,
A diaper pail, a Portacrib, and him,
A nice baby, drooling on our antique satin spread
While I smile and say how nice. It is often said
That motherhood is very maturing.

Where Is It Written

Where is it written
That husbands get forty-five-dollar lunches and invitations to
    South America for think conferences while
Wives get Campbell's black bean soup and a trip to the firehouse
    with the third grade and
Where is it written
That husbands get to meet beautiful lady lawyers and beautiful
    lady professors of ancient history and beautiful sculptresses
    and heiresses and poetesses while
Wives get to meet the checker with the acne at the Safeway while
Where is it written
That husbands get a nap and the football game on Sundays while
Wives get to help color in the coloring book and
Where is it written
That husbands get ego gratification, emotional support, and hot
   tea in bed for ten days when they have the sniffles while
Wives get to give it to them?

and if a wife should finally decides
Let him take the shoes to the shoemaker and the children to the
    pediatrician and the dog to the vet while she takes up
    something like brain surgery or transcendental medication.
Where is it written
That she always has to feel
Guilty?

One of our neighbors got themselves a rooster. I'm an early-riser so I kind of like to hear the rooster crow as I'm walking out to my car in the morning.

I suppose I'd feel differently about it if I was a later sleeper.

morning slips in, almost unnoticed

sunrise
through scattered fog
like golden rain

a quiet morning

birds still
sleep

no rustling
in the trees

morning slipping in
almost
unnoticed

until
the neighbor's rooster

announces the
day

Here's Laurie's third poem, Laurie Corzett, our feature poet.

Logic of Evolution

Successful progenitors
survive to sow seed
by force or persuasion
or staying unseen
or banding together
that more may succeed
to improving conditions
enhancing the breed.
But, for successful teamwork
we must
learn to respect, honor, and trust
expect to give and take and share
accept the caring for and care.
In community varied seeds are sown.
Thus is a thriving future grown.
Now, brothers may squabble;
neighbors may scorn.
Barriers built up,
preparations for war.
Who is emboldened by
destruction and blood,
blowing civilizations
back into mud?
Are they kind people
of honor and joy?
Those who can do;
the lacking destroy.
Guns, bombs, words, cruel
contempt, angry sneers,
promoting of pain,
preying on fears,
giving us naught but
unneeded tears
and advancement of certain
unsavory careers.
We can see through the lies,
realize the prize
Here! before our eyes.
Simple. Easy. Free.
Expect, accept, embrace
the abundance
of Peace.

My next two poems are by April Bernard, from her book, Psalms, published in 1993 by W. W. Norton.

Bernard, born in 1956, is an author and teacher from Bennington, Vermont, where she teaches at Bennington College. She is the author of two poetry collections in addition to this one: Swan Electric and Blackbird Bye Bye, and one novel, Pirate Jenny. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals and is included in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English and By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Award.

Psalm of the Spit-Dweller

The wavelets hot against my toes, the distinctive smell: of grouper,
washing bloated carcasses along the sand

Where the log has charred from beach fires, where the grass
has scorched from sun, and the dogs that trotted down the line
together and they said last year they ate a baby

White fish jump frantic into the air, white terns dive frantic
upon them, lozenges of white deserting their elements

Come down upon me now, O wrath implicit in that wall of black
that looms quickly, almost comically, from the north:
But now it is like a lid closing over the greasy white
    and snow-blue eye
of the sky: The lid will close forever

But the wrath is plain, unamused, as is apparent
    once it has passed,
and the spit is two miles shorter than two hours ago

Meanwhile, crazy cottages stuck like bird houses above
    the shifting sand
tell their own Pentateuchal comedy, as it will
some day also please the storm to laugh out loud

Psalm of the Surveyor in the Middle Latitudes

It could have been like that -
exactly twelve shades of grey

"O crooked darling, when I lost you
the battlefield was desolate, the smoke across the plains sulphurous
as the miserable miracle of peace settled across the land

I saw it in your eyes: pale eyes, like the eyes of a wolf
not quite right, pale coat like the blond wolves of the north

O my lost, we could have plotted murders together
hand in hand on the sand, long afternoons
of this grey and that grey: the edge of a subway platform, the hem
of a curtain in the picture window

And one day, I swear, we would have killed together,
together silenced the scream, shut the eyes, slacked the tongue

See what has been lost. Wolves scare easily;
or was the last winter too bitter, did you freeze in your den?
I long to press your head to my breast, the blood
you would cough on my freshly ironed, pearl-grey shirt."

I still only shave a couple of times a week, and then reluctantly, but do, now, get my haircut every couple of weeks.

It's just a phase I'm going through.

the haircut

got a haircut
today -

do it a couple
times a year

whether i need it
or not,

even
shaved for the occasion -

there are persons
of a status among the finer folk

who
suggest

i do it more often
both the shave and the haircut

even offering to gather up
among themselves

the six bits
required

but
i say, why,

i bathe every day,
scrub

behind my ears
and between my toes

and, even at my ordorifish worst,
don't stand our from the rest of the herd -

more presentable
they say i should be

and i say
well present this, Sherlock -

i look at myself every day
in the mirror

and have never
once

said to my self
tsk, tsk,

how unpresentable
i am today

in fact
i kinda like the view -

alive and
kicking is what i see,

and that's good enough
for me

And now, here are two poems by Pamela Kircher from her book, Whole Sky, published by Four Way Books in 1996.

According to Kircher's short biography published with her book, she had earned a Bachelor's Degree from Ohio State University, a Master of Library Science from Kent State University and a Master of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers. Her poems had been published widely and she was included in Best American Poetry in 1993 and was the recipient of three Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships and had been, as well, a resident fellow at the MacDowell Colony.

I was unable to google any new information to add to the 1996 bio.

What Some of Us Don't Know

I was five years old and hit my dog over the head with a
board.

A good board for smothering weeds
and bedding slugs behind the garage.

Tomatoes hung at my head back there,
plummeted when I brushed them,
split to juice and pulp and sticky seed.

My sister remembers I hit him,
but not why;
I can't remember
but feel
cold inside my upper arms where someone
takes hold and shakes you,
and in my hipbones even though it happened
in summer. The school was empty then,
or almost so, or should have been.
Something bad

has to happen
for a child to slam a board
against her cocker spaniel's coppery head.

My sister remembers
the board's blunt, truncated arc
and the narrow-bladed yelp.
I can only imagine
before the board I touched
a tomato leaf and hated the smell, it's unbright side
clasping the fruit. Beneath it
a hidden, thin shadow zippering the stalk
from root to tip.
I hated it.

The yelp sliced deep.
The dog went mean.
Sent to the pound he must have chocked in a pen of gas
within a week.

Under the forsythia's fortress of branches
the dog chain nestled link by link by link
into the dirt,
covered deeper,
keeping me.

We Love the Moon So It Shines

There are things seen only
when the lights are off.
Like night shifting its ashes
through the house almost soundlessly
except for a sudden crack then later
a soft thud for all the world
like a shovel breaking a root and a clump of dirt
dropped in a hole. Being buried alive.
How simple. She touches the floor
with one foot, the edge of the bed
with one hand. There she is
in the mirror, hardly a woman at all:
crooked at the waist, one arm long,
one bent. She picks up her dress
from the floor and lays it over the man
in the bed. Let him wake
in the hours that come and find
what his lies have done. The body
of the blue dress as empty
as the lover she has become.
All the rest of her ugly and dumb
as the moon's far face waiting night
after night to turn to the earth
and shine.

And now, poem number four from feature poet Laurie Corzett. I particularly like this one.

Prologue

Sun and Moon embrace
as one
for brief eternity
all mystery within

Black and White
create gradation
radiate kinetic energy
We can achieve
believe, begin, begin, begin

Gardeners, planting flowers,
planting food,
planting souls in
nurturing soil

Healers
perceiving wounds
to be sewn
relieving loneliness
revealing pain
held in, denied
twisting ardent toil

Teachers
admiring their wards
finding with them
questions, keys and doors;
realizing history is only destiny
when explorations cease;
invitations from space and time
come complete
with choices

A choir of voices
from softest spark
to fervent blaze
Troops of effervescent players
Symphonies,
drums at dawn
Inspiration and instruction
carried forth through song and stage
vibrant murals painting onward age to age
Taking up the challenge of the tale
that twists, turns, meanders
providing kaleidoscopic opportunity
ever to begin again

We had some great rain last week, though turned out not be as wild as predicted.

the elements

i'm watching
it rain
this morning

a modest little
sputter
of drips and drops now

but bigger stuff
is coming,
a fast-moving mass

of yellow
and angry, roiling red
on the radar, a promise

of major storms
coming to my neighborhood
soon -

my immediate intent
is to find a place to watch
it as it passes

a dry place
to appreciate the elements
loosed

to do their elemental thing -

but not for long,
for this will be a busy day
once i allow it to start,

everything i normally do
on Thursdays and Fridays
to be crowded into this one day

so that Friday
can be held free to prepare
for Saturday

a big day
beginning a big weekend -
a family wedding,

two middle-aged longtime
singles
easing into their second union,

the fires of youth, banked,
the storms of first marriages
passed, like the storms

that will whip over us today
and tomorrow, then leave behind
post-rage calm by Saturday,

a day of sunshine and clear skies
and new beginnings,
past tumult surrendering to

the hope of new days

I have three poems by Daisy Zamora, from her book, Riverbed Memory, published by City Lights Publishers in 1988.

Most of the poems in the book were written during the days of the revolution in Nicaragua. At the time, Zamora was program director of clandestine Radio Sandino. Later, she served as Vice-Minister of Culture in the Sandinista government.

I'm going to do something different with these poems. Since they are short, I am posting each poem first in Zamora's original Spanish, followed by an English translation by Barbara Paschke.

Campo Arrasado

La maletade su ropita que guarde con tanto
                    cuidado,
la nina que cruza la calle en brazos de su
                    madre,
o la vision efimera de una mujer prenada
                    esperando bus.

Cualquire encuento / Chispa /Desata la
                    hoguera
de este desprevenido corazon: zacate seco,
                    yesca
que se reduce a cenizas humeantes, a
                    campo arrasado.

Razed Earth

the suitcase full of baby clothes I kept with such
                    care
a little girl crossing the street in her
                    mother's arms,
or a passing glance at a pregnant woman
                    waiting for a bus.

Any encounter / Spark / Unleashes
                    a bonfire
in this unprepared heart: dry fodder,
                    tinder
reduced to smokey ash, to
                    razed earth.

Voces Amadas

Aquella tarde que llamaste a Maria Mercedes
descubri en tu voz la voz de tu padre
a quien nunca concoci.

Hubo un instante
que hablaste con una voz que no era tuya.

Una voz.

               eco de otra voz
que to hermana mayor, Gladys
               recordaria
o tu madre (si viviera)
habria reconocido de inmediato.

Beloved Voices

That afternoon when you called Maria Mercedes
I discovered in your voice the voice of your father
whom I never knew.

There was a moment
when you spoke with a voice that wasn't yours.

A voice

               echo of another voice
that your older sister, Gladys,
               would remember
or your mother (if she were living)
would have recognized immediately.

El Gato

No se sabe como aparecio.
En las mananas se estira al sol
o miramos ondular su silueta
tras el vidrio opaco de la ventana.

Ingrimo, como nosotros:
"una pareja expuesta al dardo..."

Es tierra de nadie, machol sin duena,
gato de contil
               que sobrevive
               cazando cucarachas
                    y algun raton.

Cat

No one knows where he came from.
In the morning he stretches in the sun,
or we watch his silhouette undulate
behind the opaque glass in the window.

Lonely like us;
"a couple struck by an arrow..."

He's no one's property, does as he pleases,
this charcoal cat
               who survives
               catching cockroaches
                    and an occasional rat.

Some questions just need to be answered.

Some, maybe not.

why do we eat cows but we do not eat dogs?

why do we eat cows
but we do not eat
dogs?

is it because we've seen
the thrashing legs
and heard the muted yelps
of dogs adreaming,
while never have we seen
a dreaming cow?

is it because we see a likeness
to ourselves in the dog,
in its spirit and curiosity and
sense of fun
and play;
never seeing the same
in a cow, no cow playing chase,
tugging on an old sock, no cow
gamboling in its field?

is it because
dogs fight when attacked
while cows go quietly
to slaughter?

is it because a dog
will protect us,
while a cow will never even notice
we are in danger
and wouldn't do anything about it
if they did?

is it because
when we look into the eyes
of a dog
we see a recognition of ourselves
while the cow's eyes
show us only a reflection?

is it because we think dogs
are smarter
than cows, their fiercely
active minds
always alert and ready to
jump on anything
that attracts their attention? -
is it because their attention
can be attracted,
unlike cows who live in a docile,
placid world, a zen world
where they ride the waves
of the eternal one, the ultimate
buddhist of the fields
having found the serenity
of grass and sky while
all else fades? - could this be why
in some places
dogs are eaten and cows revered?

these are some of the questions
that plague me
whenever i think about
the practice of vegetarianism,
the principle reason why
i strive
to think of the practice of
vegetarianism
as seldom
as
possible

I'm sure Laurie Corzett will be back with us in future posts, but in the meantime, here's her last poem for this week.

of days past

They were Republicans, Goldwater Republicans.
He was really a libertarian, and enjoyed explaining why.
She was a stay with our leader and prosperity
Eisenhower liberal wanna-be elite.

Broad labels to secure, to bind
little lives. Little ways of coping through the days.

It's all about the vignettes, when no one's watching.
The mind's eye snaps a photograph
to pull out from time to time,
to remember that we were, were becoming
were believing and trying to understand
all the waves and illusions.

Something moves in my vision.
A wing, a wave of hair,
A blossom in the wind?
Something.
There is a wisdom and
a mystery.
There is more than meets the eye.
There is emotion,
brewing up a storm.

Staying, curled up in a warm blanket
Sipping cocoa
Watching the storm outside.
Affixed to the fascination
of the flame dancing,
of the wind wilding,
of the window between.

There are days when all I can do is listen.
The words aren't there to speak.
There are days when the bubbling stew
Speaks to me,
And the comfort
Is all that I
can bear.

Next, I have two poets from the book, The KGB Bar Book of Poems published by HarperCollins. The poems are from readings during the first three seasons of the KGB Bar poetry series: spring 1997, fall 1997, and spring 1998. The KGB Bar, located in New York's East Village, has been hosting weekly poetry readings since its opening in 1993.

The first of the two poets from the book is Lawrence Joseph. Born in Detroit in 1948, Joseph was educated at the University of Michigan, Cambridge University and the University of Michigan Law School. He received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and, at the time of his reading at KGB Bar in 1997, was a professor of law at St. John's University. He has published several volumes of poetry, including Shouting at No One which won the Starrett Prize in 1983.

When One Is Feeling One's Way

I

the sky was red and the earth got hot,
hot, like a hundred degrees, I mean.
"Stay cool." the monk was said to have said,
"you've got a long way yet to go." A monk,
say, of Hue, who,. to protest the killing
of innocents, is dragging an altar onto
- yes it was, downtown, Woodward Avenue.
So what else is new? One new
voice mail message. A woman, a certain woman,
recently has been seen
rubbing both eyes with the palms of her hands

II

Two things, two things that are
interesting, are history and grammar.
Down in among the foundations of
the intelligence the chemistries
of words. "Those fault lines of risk
buried deep in the global financial
landscape..." What of it. Nothing but
the same resistance since
the time of Gracchi, that against
private interests' arrogation
of the common wealth - against
the turgid, precious language of pseudo-erudition,
false-voiced God-talkers and power freaks,
thugs, that's what they are, with no idea
what it is they're bringing down.

III

A pause. Any evening, every evening.
When one is feeling one's way,
the pattern is small and complex.
At center, a moral issue, but composed,
and first. Looks to me like,
across the train yards a blurred sun
setting behind the high ground
on the other side of the Hudson,
overhead purple and pink.
A changing set of marginal options.
Whole lots of amplified light.

IV

Oh, I get the idea. That image
the focal point of a concave mirror,
is old.

And that which is unintermitted
and fragile, wild and fragile (there,
behind the freighter’s yellow puffs
of smoke; God, no, I haven’t
forgotten it) is, I said, still
fragile, still proud.

My second poet from the KGB Bar is Charlie Smith. Born in Georgia in 1947, Smith grew up in the South, attended eastern schools, and settled in New York City. He has published four books of poems and six books of fiction. He read at KGB in 1998.

Santa Monica

Someone was writing this incredibly personal poem
and I was reading it over his shoulder
Santa Monica was in the poem
but you could hardly tell
and the devastating loss of integrity
his wife ranting
his cowardice - these were in the poem
and he was sweating as he wrote it
and looking around as if for spies
I am amazed he didn't see me
but sometimes they look right through you
he went on writing his act of contrition
and memory
expressing his extreme embarrassment and sorrow
at how he selfishly used loved ones, etc
lost the money and the house
sat in the car out in the driveway the last morning
and couldn't think where to go
until someone, a cop maybe, suggested
he go get something to et, and then after that he drove
to Kansas. There was a weeping blue cypress in the poem
and at one point he was very accurate about how it feels
when on the street the beloved turns you away.
Sometimes, he wrote, I stand unnoticed at a counter waiting.
At last the woman looks at me and asks what.
It was a struggle, for both of us, to get to the next part.

I had the opportunity to enjoy the event of a family wedding last week. It was a nice unpretentious ceremony and it was good to get together with family and I certainly wish the best to the bride and groom, but one particular moment in the ceremony set me to thinking and, as always, that set me to writing a poem.

till death do you part, amen

the ceremony
was about over

and the preacher
was saying

well,
you are married now

where there was two
the is now one

together
until one of you dies

and i'm thinking
wow

talk about a dearth
of options

what an old-fashioned
set of choices

but we know
it's not the way anymore

now
it's more like

till i get tired
of looking at your stupid

ugly face in the morning
do we part, or,

till your boobs sag
do we part

or, till i get my degree
and can support myself on my own

do we part, or until i get a really hot secretary,
or a really hunky pool boy do we part

or, till next thursday
do we part

or, till one or both of us
sobers up

do we part

~~~~

i don't get it

going on 33 years tuning in
sametime-samestation every day

i'm just not a person who understands
all this serial polygamy business -

it's not that i'm against divorce
it's that i don't understand

why it would be so terrible
for gay people to get married

when half the people who
can get married

can't stay that way and it's curious
that the places where people are most

against
gay people getting married

are the same places
where married people are least likely

to stay that way
and the difference i think

between the places where
people are least likely to stay married

which would be those same places where
bibles and gay people are most enthusiastically

thumped
and those places where people

are most likely to stay married
once getting that way

is the good old liberal
philosophy

of shacking up
which i would support as a new

law, replacing the old "defense of marriage act"
which outlaws gay marriage

with a new "shacking up in defense of marriage act"
which would outlaw marriage for everyone

until they have lived together as a couple
with their proposed spouse for at least

20 years, having raised at least two children,
putting at least one of them through college -

such a couple will, in my opinion,
by then be truly ready and prepared

for a "till death do us part"
scenario

this is my opinion, and i stand behind it,
but i think it best we not discuss such

out of the box thinking
with my wife

Next, I have two poets from The Spoon River Poetry Review, Winter/Spring 2007 edition.

The first of the poets is John Guzlowski.

Born in 1948 in a refugee came in Germany after World War II, Guzlowski came to the Unites States with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents were slave laborers in Nazi Germany and he grew up in Chicago amid a community of death camp survivors and refugees from the expanding Soviet empire that followed the war. Retired from Eastern Illinois University, he continues to write about his parents and the other displacement suvivors. These poems appear in his books Lightning and Ashes and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

Fussy Eaters

Fifty years later, my mother says,
Johnny, remember how you wouldn't eat
the good Polish sausage your father brought
from Starchek's Deli? Such a fussy eater

and your sister Donna was worse. In the camps,
she would chew on a stick from morning
to night and beg on her knees to get
some of the breast milk I was saving for you

because the doctor said you were a goner.
Not till I came to America did I understand
what he meant by this word. A goner - yes.
But in America, Donna wouldn't eat

the sweet cabbage with vinegar and onions
or the dumplings cooked with hot butter.
Only ten, she'd look me hard in the eyes
like I was a stone dropped from the sky

and say, I can't eat this Polack food.
It's gray and tough and laced with veins that steal
my breath away so much I feel like choking.
And I would say too her, but you'd eat

Marzipani, and one time I slapped her
and gave her five dollars - this in a time
when you'd work hard all day for five dollars -
and she went to Rickey's Restaurant
and ate meatloaf and mashed potatoes
and came home and was sick in the toilet.
This made me happy, and I said to her,
Now, you'll eat my cooking. Now, you'll like it.

The next poem is by Christian Knoeller.

Knoeller is an associate professor of English education at Purdue University in Indiana. He offers undergraduate courses for preservice secondary English licensure candidates on teaching writing and literature as well as graduate seminars on writing processes.

Having Sung with the Dead

what if the old metaphors
have it wrong, the talk
of rivers crossed flight
song and nobody really

knows what's become of you
who burned still believing
in peace Christ we know
more about the far side

of the moon there's so
much the living have
to contend with a woman
I once loved shows up

at the oddest moments
in dreams still talking
as if she never left ready
for the next step whatever

that means maybe just
breakfast you see we're all
in such a hurry here it's
hard to explain sometimes

things pass us by before
you know it everybody
feels this way at least
if you listen to the silly

country station where love
betrayed is cliche as if
we never learn but
what have i got

to complain about right
sure it's too cold again
the ground's slick
with ice and the days

keep getting shorter
what's that to the stories
you could tell it's true
we owe you our lives

I'll finish off the week with a cat story.

in the land of cat

still dark
when i left this morning
and despite the light freeze

the cats were at their usual station
on the front porch,
waiting to be fed,

the three of them
assuming their customary
stations,

Billy Goat pacing with
her normal
impatient enthusiasm,

George, ever the shy boy,
hiding
behind the esperanzas,

and Mama,
fierce Mama, waiting in the shadows
for her private serving,

hers and hers alone, since she does not
suffer any kind of maternal nostalgia,
the kids are mere survivors

from another existence
as far as she's concerned,
a mistake

from a previous life
and any attempt by either
to approach her pile of food

is quickly met
by a hiss and a raised paw
claws extended

i sit in the cold
and talk to the three of them,
though only Billy Goat

talks back,
but i expect no more,
for like us, each has it's nature

and is true to it -
this is just the way it is
every morning

as i have my few moments
in the land
of cat

That's it for our first outing in February. As usual, everything here belongs to its makers. My stuff is available for use, with proper credit as to source.

I'm allen itz. For better or worse, it's mine.

3 Comments:

at 4:54 AM kino said...

Hey Amna, have read couple of Ur poems....all are Great...well done!!
But Ur poem "The real love of the mother and the child" is amazing. It touched me. lovely theme !

WELL DONE !! :)

at 12:55 PM Anonymous said...

Lovely poems and seems to me that u r one that person who is an optimist

at 12:57 PM Anonymous said...

Nor fame nor power nor love nor lesiure
Others i see whom these surround smiling they live and call life pleasure
to me that cup has been delt into another measure

P.B shelly

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