fragments of contemporary poetry

On Reading Crowds and Power



1


Cloven, we are incorporate, our wounds
simple but mysterious. We have
some wherewithal to bide our time on earth.
Endurance is fantastic; ambulances
battling at intersections, the city
intolerably en fête. My reflexes
are words themselves rather than standard
flexures of civil power. In all of this
Cassiopeia's a blessing
as is steady Orion beloved of poets.
Quotidian natures ours for the time being
I do not know
how we should be absolved or what is fate. {first stanza}

The Schooner Flight


1 Adios, Carenage


In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees.
I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard
as I went downhill, and I nearly said:
“Sweep soft, you witch, ’cause she don’t sleep hard,”
but the ***** look through me like I was dead.
A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.
The driver size up my bags with a grin:
“This time, Shabine, like you really gone!”
I ain’t answer the ***, I simply pile in
the back seat and watch the sky burn
above Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the streets, that whole ****ing island. ------------------{1st stanza of this long poem}

Mr. Matthews was asked whether his work was the poetry of experience. He answered: ''Well, it's certainly not the poetry of innocence. Life happens to us whether we have the good sense to be interested in the way it happens to us or not. That's what it means to be alive."

In Memory of the Utah Stars

Each of them must have terrified
his parents by being so big, obsessive
and exact so young, already gone
and leaving, like a big tipper,
that huge changeling's body in his place.
The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.

The year I first saw them play
Malone was a high school freshman,
already too big for any bed,
14, a natural resource.
You have to learn not to
apologize, a form of vanity.
You flare up in the lane, exotic
anywhere else. You roll the ball
off fingers twice as long as your
girlfriend's. Great touch for a big man,
says some jerk. Now they're defunct
and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19,
rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench,
his pet of a body grown sullen
as fast as it grew up.
------------------------------------{excerpt}

from Digging by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

continued here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...ey/poems/12699

From the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University, a slideshow of first editions..... http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/200...how_index.html including Eliot's Prufrock, Levertoff and Plath.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/bo...er=rssuserland -- Super-bibliophile Danowski gives his collection to Emory University.

"Mantilla"

My resurrective verses shed people
and reinforced each summer.
I saw their time as my own time,
I said, this day will penetrate
those other days, using a thorn
to remove a thorn in the harness
of my mind where anyone's touch
stemmed my dreams.

{excerpt}

To the Author of Glare


...but I wander from the main point: the main point is one
among many dots so fine you need a microscope to see them


but then they multiply like germs: the work of the deepest cells
is ergonomically incorrect, but effective nevertheless, like
my footprints in the snow leading to you, who would be my father


if this were a dream and I on the verge of waking up somewhere
other than home: but the hours remain ours, though they
were gone almost as soon as they arrived, hat and coat in hand.


--David Lehman {"Glare" is a poetry collection by A.R.Ammons} {excerpt}

Isla Mujeres

The shoal we saw from the boat was fish;
it parted as I dove through, and formed
again overhead, each fish
like a dancing molecule in a rock.
On the flight to Merida we came down
through clouds that looked like brains
or scrambled eggs, but they were only
wisps and down we came. I'd swim
back up a chimney of fish and break,

already squinting, back into bright air.
If love is curiosity, I loved those fish. ...
{excerpt}

THE UNQUIET CITY
we are succulents
our cool jade arms open
over clean tables our fine bone
china minds pull the strings
of our tongues together we plait
our thoughts with the television
back through the aerials and
transmission towers prodding
through the literal fog
the mechanics of which distance
does not startle us or the ears
pretend to hear the telephone
the page also wearies
us we have taken the meaning
out of things by laying them face to
face in our dictionary of emotions
we are so entirely alone that we
are unaware of it
and we enjoy the religion of solitude
because religions are at base
meaningless and we can turn
from them to a new hobby
to clean ashtrays or emptier
whiskey glasses we the women
of our building Margaret Gladys
Cecily Ida Eileen and I have
the cleanest washing on our block
we are proud and air our sheets
although it's a long time since
any serious stain or passionate figment
seeped through that censorious cloth...
{excerpt}

A Sudden Rain in the Green Mountains



for Jessica Bennett

Plush hills, the raw materials, fall away.

The soaking clay

In which the serried oaks, the picturesque

And swaybacked pines, elected to evolve,

The famous marble in its bare reserve,


Vanish like guesses in these verticals

Whose heft at dusk

Blurs rooks to ridges, veils the bicycles

And splashes where they lean hard into curves.

Looming like crowds, such weather makes its world;


Its crash and draft and spate and uniform

Consonant force confirm

Or mean-not that without you there are no

Attainments I can care for or call good-

But that among them, missing you, I know

How much delight, green need ... {excerpt...poem by Stephen Burt} -------

http://bostonreview.net/BR24.1/burt.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/bo...enbach-t.html# ---Review entitled "The Wasted Land" by James Longenbach....of Jorie Graham's new book called "Sea Change" (Poems) subtitle...review dated 4/6/08

The title of this review is "Poet's Choice" by Mary Karr (4/13/08)...there will be no comment by this writer...it seems Nicanor is into "anti-poetry". http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041003233.html

Heather McHugh (b. 1948) from the poem "What He Thought" This poem is more powerful in its entirety by an exponent. Here is an excerpt. "...We last Americans__were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there__we sat and chated, sat and chewed, __till, sensible it was our last__big chance to be poetic, make__our mark, one of us asked__'What's poetry?___Is it the fruits and vegetables and__marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or__the statue there?' Because I was__the glib one. I identified the answer__instantly, I didn't have to think--'The truth is both, it's both,' I blurted out. But that__was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty,__for our underestimated host spoke out,__all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square__because of his offense against__authority, which is to say__the Church. His crime was his belief__the universe does not revolve around__the human being: God is no__fixed point or central government, but rather is__poured in waves through all things. All things__move. 'If God is not the soul itself, he is__the soul of the soul of the world.' Such was__his heresy. The day they brought him__forth to die, they feared he might__incite the crowd (the man was famous__for his eloquence). And so his captors__placed upon his face__an iron mask, in which__he could not speak. That's__how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front__of everyone. And poetry...(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to__the man in gray; he went on__softly)-- poetry is what....he thought, but did not say." 1994 q1

Reviewing Three Portraits
by Madeline DeFrees


Two clocks out of synch watch faces of night
drift by. One face, a lacquered saint, dredged up
from a trunk, wrapped in virgin wool, black
robes of justice trapped in the vault of a bank.
An 18-karat guarantee of stainless steel and

peerless
dentistry, though you'd have to pry the mouth

open
to discover that. A high-priced portrait

photographer
in Chicago crossed her nervous hands on a Rule

Book
and said, "Don't smile!"

Steel girders support the lifted face, the smoky hair
and smoky voice exhaling clouded lines. A

four-wheel
drive studio, props in every back street
and a live camera that really moved. Peeling paint,
thin pulse in the temple, faint warnings of early
snow: shadows, assurance, perspective. Nothing
has been left out of this head shot because it was

not
pretty. He said, "Let your hair blow anywhere it

wants
and go right on shouting your poems."

------------
http://www.pshares.org/issues/articl...marticleID=186
{excerpt} --

Tie Your Heart at Night to Mine

Tie your heart at night to mine, love,
and both will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.

Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly. {excerpt}

In the Land of the Inheritance

"In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes."

Judges 19-21
A foreigner and his *** and concubine
were huddling in the square as night came on;

around them, veil on veil of dust that hoof
and staff and sandal could only disturb enough

to show how calmly it was sifting down
into a darkening sabbath of its own.

Surely here, he thought, among the Benjamites
someone would ask him in to spend the night,

and he, a holy man, the lord's anointed,
chosen among the chosen. But while he waited,

merchants and tradesmen, young and old alike,
all hurried by without a word or look

to their own dwellings as if he wasn't there,
and only the ache from having come so far,

his sharpening hunger and the night's chill
told him he was not invisible.

His concubine kept silent, her veiled head bowed,
since it was her fault they were stranded now:

Hadn't she tried to run away from him
back to her father's house in Bethlehem,

and when he came to get her, her father said,
My son, my son, and gave him wine and bread,

and blessed him, and then told the girl, Go home.
So now he glowered at her. See what you've done,

impious woman, see what your unclean ways
have brought us to, he was about to say

when an old man who pitied their distress
said, "Peace be to you, friend, come to my house,

I'll give you food for hunger, wine for thirst,
come to my house, I'll care for all your wants."

Now as they ate and drank, as their hearts grew merry,
the townsmen gathered together in a fury

outside the old man's house and beat his door,
and yelled, "Old man, give us the sojourner

that we may know him, give him to us now."
The old man pleaded, "Leave the man alone, ...


{excerpt} -- http://bostonreview.net/BR19.6/inheritance.html

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by quasimodo1

David Eggleton
The Weather Bomb
February began with firewatch skies,
a glare that flared off of hot metal cans,
gangs of lawn-mowers chanting mantras,
and an anticyclone calm which lasted for days.


Then came a sky that swelled like sludge.
Slowly, as if lockjawed, on the bludge,
rain fronted up just to lair about,
before turning whirling dervish on Valentine’s Day.


All night the storm bustled, strong as a haka.
Dawn sobbed out stories of baby raindrops,
backpacked in from the Tasman Sea blast zone,
only to thump down hard on Wellington.


{first stanzas of long poem by New Zealand poet David Eggleton}

---

it seems that you have a great command of expressing the true self of current human being wherever he/she is. It is a mixture of individual and collective feelings and visions that dominate the world as nature leaves it impacts on us - human beings - with our true and factual experiences and actions on daily basis. the language is rhetoric and influential without ambiguity or any sort of distortion. Here, we see a figurative poetic language that truly depicts poetic moments. It could also be a crucible of romantic features and realistic ones where the poet finds every thing beautiful and meaningful.

Best
Dr Abdullah Kurraz

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by quasimodo1

A Sudden Rain in the Green Mountains



for Jessica Bennett

Plush hills, the raw materials, fall away.

The soaking clay

In which the serried oaks, the picturesque

And swaybacked pines, elected to evolve,

The famous marble in its bare reserve,


Vanish like guesses in these verticals

Whose heft at dusk

Blurs rooks to ridges, veils the bicycles

And splashes where they lean hard into curves.

Looming like crowds, such weather makes its world;


Its crash and draft and spate and uniform

Consonant force confirm

Or mean-not that without you there are no

Attainments I can care for or call good-

But that among them, missing you, I know

How much delight, green need ... {excerpt...poem by Stephen Burt} -------

http://bostonreview.net/BR24.1/burt.html

---

a very influential portrait where every thing is poetic mingled with the geo-poetics which is rife in the lines and their meaningful shadows and significant indications or denotations. also, the poem here is composed in a dialogic / conversational manner, with its poetic construction and content. Language is clear and themes are attainable.
Thanks
Best
Dr Abdullah kurraz

To abdullah kurraz: It seems you have a firm grasp on contemporary poetry yourself, Doc. Surely you have a favorite poet you could add to this thread. Thanks for tuning in. q1

Aphorisms Regarding Impatience
by Ellen Hinsey

1.
Mythologies of the End

Each century believing itself poised as if on the

edge of time.




2.
The Meaning of Impatience

Restlessness in time. To imagine that which is not

swiftly accomplished will never be fulfilled.


3.
Displaced Envy

Unable to initiate creation, or manage civilization:

the drive to engineer decreation with perfection.


4.
Perplexing Instincts

The division of the spirit between advancement and

abandon.


5.
The Attraction of the Apocalypse

To control with absolute certainty one thing. And

for it to be the last.


6.
Fragile Vector

The intersection where civilization and

perseverance meet.


{excerpt from the online poetry magazine, Agni}

-The Whole False History of Human Beings-
There are gorgeous castles in France awkward and ponderous
To live in now, tho the owners who did live
In them were all famous and as modern as possible
Then, which meant fireplaces and a square hole in many walls
To lift food up to them or slide poop down, two different holes
On different sides of the cold damp rooms.
Ditto in England. In Ireland there were bigger castles, beautiful monsters,
And what we now think of as Germans wanted them.
These so-called Germans, actually Merovingians, lived in quonset
Huts of straw, branches, and, oh, a little adobe.
They were more warlike than the Nazis and nearly as
Foolish. Boiled dead on the Irish walls their first trip.
(They had many little boats to get there.)
(Numerous survivors of boiling were allowed to return to Merovingia to tell the tale
As a warning.) The tale got the German collective psychic blood boiling
And “naturally” they went back and this time the Irish,
Who were better cleverer viciouser fighters if you can imagine,
Chopped up all but a few, cleverly chopped up
The trunks of bodies besides the obvious appendages and nuts
And dicks, and only a few survivors were allowed
To return to Merovingia to tell the tale. The
Irish made them cast off from Ireland in their little boats
With bags of arms, heads, and the aforementioned creative carvings Of pieces of trunks together with bags of German or Merovingian genitals
But the Germans or Merovingians threw these in the deep sea
While returning to Germany where more collective blood boiled
And they were hysterically stirred up and vowed to do
Things I hesitate to mention here. So, right, they went back
And the Irish ate them all. ... {excerpt, from the Boston Review}

Outsider Art
by Kay Ryan


Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said—
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture. There never
seems to be a surface equal
to the needs of these people. ... {excerpt}

NOTES FROM THE AIR

Selected Later Poems.

By John Ashbery.

364 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95. -- Review entitled "But I Digress" written by Langdon Hammer, nytimes Sunday book review, 4/20/08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/bo...2&oref=slogin#

Heart's Needle
by W. D. Snodgrass

For Cynthia

When Suibhe would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, "Your father is dead." "I'm sorry to hear it," he said. "Your mother is dead," said the lad. "All pity for me has gone out of the world." "Your sister, too, is dead." "The mild sun rests on every ditch," he said; "a sister loves even though not loved." "Suibhne, your daughter is dead." "And an only daughter is the needle of the heart." "And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you 'Daddy' he is dead." "Aye," said Suibhne, "that's the drop that brings a man to the ground."
He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles.

—after The Middle-Irish Romance
The Madness of Suibhne

1

Child of my winter, born
When the new fallen soldiers froze
In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,
When I was torn

By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind
To that cold war where, lost, I could not find
My peace in my will,

All those days we could keep
Your mind a landscape of new snow
Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,
His fields asleep

In their smooth covering, white
As quilts to warm the resting bed
Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread
For me to write,

continued here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15302

Good to see you on this thread, JBI. Havn't thought about W.D.Snodgrass in years. Thanks for the link.q1

Just Walking Around by John Ashbery


.....Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other. {excerpt}

Repulsive Theory



Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it's got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth, ... {excerpt}

John Colburn
BURNING UP

for Frank Stanford and for Nicaragua

Dawn came and there was something like a great

ear

behind the sun.

Ashes drifted down though nothing had burned.

I wanted to shine like a fish.

Supposedly there are people who

will not burn in a fire.

Biblical people.

I carried my bucket.

Dead men pumped water from

the center of the earth.

We all drank it.

More ashes arrived.

We caught them on our tongues,

angels of next time receiving the body.

The earth tumbled then,

the pump handle creaked.

When soldiers came, we ran.

Like always.

I did a snake dance into the culvert.

Soldiers were afraid of ghosts.

A tongue is like a fish worn dull,

shine gone.

Day after day pieces of wood

floated down the river.

What were they building down there, at the end?

They were building a cross.

They were building a bird to fly us out.

They were building a new city

for the dead to lead from

and the soldiers were blind to it.

By noon the ghosts were gone.

The pump handle creaked, but no water.

When the soldiers came back I changed.

I became an angel of next time.

I said the words and

scales fell from my fish tongue

but the giant ear was stone.

Soldiers drifted like ashes.

I told them:

Downriver, they are building

wings that will not burn in a fire

and you are right to hide.

Put down your guns.
-------------------------------------------------------{excerpt}

http://www.jubilat.org/n8/colburn.html

Turtle
by Kay Ryan


..... Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things. {excerpt}

from LONELINESS by Lee Ann Roripaugh

My father made me keep
the bright orange Sanka cans,
with holes in the lids
for ventilation, on
the back porch overnight.
But by morning, sunlight
had steeped my frogs
like tea bags, their bodies
hot to touch as I laid
them out under
the Nanking Cherry trees
and tried to revive them
with cold water
from the garden hose.
When my father took
them away to bury,
my mother asked me not
to cry. That night
was the Fourth of July,
and my mother and father
and I went up to the attic
to watch the fireworks,
each with a plate-sized
circle of watermelon.
continued here: http://www.usd.edu/engl/faculty/roripaugh.cfm

She seems stylistically traditional, but her foundation in the traditions and experiences of Japanese immigrants in America makes her a very interesting, and insightful poet.

COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS

By Aram Saroyan.

277 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse. Paper, $20.
Review entitled "Lighght Verse" by Richard Hell-----This book collects nearly all the poems Aram Saroyan wrote in the 1960s, when he was in his early 20s and, as he put it, “the only person available at a typewriter who didn’t have some predetermined use in mind for it.” The resulting pages, tapped in Aram Saroyan by his typewriter, were succinct. Saroyan was the master of the one-word poem. But his works were as musical and meaningful as more conventional poetry, too, and a lot more amusing. The minimal poems were eye openers, ear openers and mind openers, and no one else was doing anything much like them at the time, and no one has since. {Thanks to JBI for introducing Lee Ann Roripaugh, at least to this reader}





277 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse. Paper, $20.
"Granted — as Saroyan has — he was smoking a lot of grass at the time. But every second person in the United States was, and is, on something or other often enough. The grass factor is interesting because: 1) it’s typical of the era, always an interesting dimension of art; 2) one realizes it couldn’t be an unfair advantage, since no one else wrote like he did; and 3) the reader’s knowledge of it confers a nice extra little psychedelic ting to the pages." {April 27, 2008 nytimes book review section} http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/bo...2&oref=slogin#

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/events.html

In a Bottle


... (That lyre should be

Administered a serum! Every last lackluster mist,
Each lactose-lacking mother, can be fixed! No fear!) From human
City rooms a mush of doctorable suburb issues forth–degrees

In marrow-clog, amounts in mottlement. Kreme de la
Kreme! (Officially OK for all of us to be superlative, I’m pretty
Sure, as long as the kids take all their tele-tablets

And the wellness store takes spelling
From the FCC. It’s thanks to lawyers
We have settlements at all, of course,

And thanks to governors your class in governmentalese–it is
Required–and wired!–let’s give our nation’s CEO a great
Big hand! A chip for every memory loss and shoulder! No need

Ever to recollect, or be alone, or die. The message is
The middleman!) But now, beneath exclamatory notice
(although not the one duck’s jaundiced eye) three bugs in a bottle–

Their brains unwashed, their feelers fine–begin (with
Morseless expertise) to conjugate,
And multiply.----------------------------------------- http://www.drunkenboat.com/db3/mchugh/bottle.html

Birthday

for John



.....It is the porous border of summer,
mirage of trees, clouds
floating like years over the mountains.
He has traveled far in his heart
to come to this full quiet
to witness weather stepping
across the lake toward him
like an ordinary saint bringing the news:
another whole day, loved. {second stanza}


http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/29/zimmerman.html

Editor's Note




Dear Friends of The Cortland Review,

We were already several weeks behind our publication schedule when many of you wrote to express your concern. You gave us at The Cortland Review a sense of community that motivated our volunteers to push forward, and just as we were putting the finishing touches on the issue, two planes flew into the nearby World Trade Center and stopped the world. Suddenly our issue, weeks overdue, was utterly insignificant.

Like all of you, we were caught up in confusion and uncertainty. Then many of you wrote to us again, this time inquiring about and praying for our safety. Our feeling of community grew stronger, and you helped us bring structure back to our lives. The Cortland Review is a labor of love, and we thank you for your overwhelming support, for showing us that we are a meaningful part of your lives.

Now it is time for us to show that you are a meaningful part of ours. Our hearts and prayers are with the families and friends of those who are still missing or have been lost in this terrible tragedy, and the rest of you who, like us, are still stunned by it. In a nation strengthened by unity and getting back to business, we hope you find comfort and healing in the poetry among our pages.

Thank you.

God Bless America.

Guy Shahar
Editor-in-Chief

Tenderness and Rot
by Kay Ryan


Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.


No lessons
can be drawn
from this however. ... {excerpt} -- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch....html?id=30582

Living in Curved Space
Susan Terris



She inhales stars until she is light-filled
and can bat-wing above the dark earth. ...

...Another out-of-body sequence and
her flanks fur, throat chuffs, tail grows

Below the high dam, the real Abu-Simbil lies.
Below the sea, the lighthouse of Pharos.

There are worlds, too--under lava, under ice--
where no tree falls and no sound is heard.

What is hidden will not again be visible. She
seeks refuge in these places: angles of repose

where salmon turn to seagulls and a hand
may, to infinity, hold a pen and draw itself.


{excerpt}

Caps

.....The storybook boy attempts the simple gesture
of baring his head for his emperor,
but another hat has appeared.
This happens over and over.
Who does not share his despair of simplicity,
of acting clearly and with dignity?
And what pleasure can we find in the caps,
brightly feathered and infinitely various,
that pile up so high they bury us?



-- Kay Ryan {excerpt}