fragments of contemporary poetry

HOMER'S SEEING-EYE DOG
Most of the time he worked, a sort of sleep
with a purpose, so far as I could tell.
How he got from the dark of sleep
to the dark of waking up I'll never know;
the lax sprawl sleep allowed him
began to set from the edges in,
like a custard, and then he was awake,
me too, of course, wriggling my ears
while he unlocked his bladder and stream
of dopey wake-up jokes. The one
about the wine-dark pee I hated instantly.
I stood at the ready, like a god
in an epic, but there was never much
to do. Oh now and then I'd make a sure
intervention, save a life, whatever.
But my exploits don't interest you
and of his life all I can say is that
when he'd poured out his work
the best of it was gone and then he died.
He was a great man and I loved him.
Not a whimper about his sex life --
how I detest your prurience --
but here's a farewell literary tip:
I myself am the model for Penelope.
Don't snicker, you hairless moron,
I know so well what faithful means
there's not even a word for it in Dog,
I just embody it. ... {excerpt}

"The Kefti come no more.
They bear us no more the oils
and the cedars for coffins.
Their sails are lost." This was their epitaph
along with the recorded black sky
and the ashfall.
Then Egypt forgot the gracious isle
of the olives
and the palaces of the seven kings
where athletes somersaulted
over the spread horns of bulls.
They died in one night, the pillars of the palace

buckling,
great stones cast down, the galleys
beached on the shore, ruin and ashes
assailing men from the sky.
Thera, the burst throat of the world, coughing fire

and brimstone
there to the north, its voice like the
bellowing of a loosed god
long propitiated to no purpose.
We have known it in our own lives--
the fear of the moving atoms, but
these people
endured the actual megaton explosion, and their
remnants
faded from history, while the timeless, practical
Egyptians
regretted a small loss of trade.
Civilizations die as men die, by
accident then. ... {excerpt from Knossos} *Kefti = Cretans

Logan-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua1&oref=slogin

--Urban Poet {a review by}



By WILLIAM LOGAN
Published: June 29, 2008 -- SELECTED POEMS

By Frank O’Hara.

Edited by Mark Ford.

265 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30. -- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/bo...a1&oref=slogin

From the Elephants' Graveyard


Seeking its own level,
the circus elephant's memory
seeps from the mound
that was its body, cooling
in a borrowed barn in Georgia.

Days of rain, days of no water.
Rumbling pleasure, misery, slow healing.
Smells. Routines. The beloved others.
One man's face, tipped into her weak eyes
over and over for years.

An unseen rivulet,
thick as tar distilled
from a forest's record of rings,
it slips through the straw
and the tired farmyard clay,

through compacted layers of marl and schist,
crystal ribs of lizards
and limestone caverns nursing echoes,
and it joins the oily stream
from the elephants' graveyard-- ... {excerpt, from cavewall press}

.....Although I knew the way music can fill a room,
even with loneliness, which is of course a kind
of company. I could swelter through an August

afternoon -- torpor rising from the river -- and listen
to Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson braid variations
on "My Funny Valentine" and feel there in the room

with me the force and weight of what I couldn't
say. What's an emotion anyhow?
Lassitude and sweat lay all about me

like a stubble field, it was so hot and listless,
but I was quick and furtive as a fox
who has his thirty-miles-a-day metabolism

to burn off as ordinary business.
I had about me, after all, the bare eloquence
of the becalmed, the plain speech of the leafless

tree. I had the cunning of my body and a few
bars -- they were enough -- of music. Looking back,
it almost seems as though I could remember --

but this can't be; how could I bear it? --
the future toward which I'd clatter
with that boy tied like a bell around my throat,

a brave man and a coward both,
to break and break my metronomic heart
and just enough to learn to love the blues. {excerpt from "the blues"}

A DISTANCE OF A SHOUT

We lived on the medieval coast
south of warrior kingdoms
during the ancient age of the winds
as they drove all things before them.

Monks from the north came
down our streams floating that was
the year no one ate river fish.

There was no book of the fores,
no book of the sea, but these
are the places people died. ... {excerpt}

Prayer



Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. ... {excerpt}

Anodyne

I love how it swells
into a temple where it is
held prisoner, where the god
of blame resides. I love
slopes & peaks, the secret
paths that make me selfish.
I love my crooked feet
shaped by vanity & work
shoes made to outlast
belief. The hardness
coupling milk it can't
fashion. I love the lips,
salt & honeycomb on the tongue.
The hair holding off rain
& snow. The white moons
on my fingernails. I love
how everything begs
blood into song & prayer
inside an egg. A ghost
hums through my bones
like Pan's midnight flute
shaping internal laws
beside a troubled river. ... {excerpt}

from COMPAÑERA
(Ana Mendieta)
Compañera
We should have bolted you down like
a piece of iron sculpture and
pointed you in another direction
but you were busy looking for love
in the wrong dictionary
looking for a sweet papa
in the wrong encyclopedia

& now I say to myself
Ana is dead
not alive
not returning
what would she think of that

She arrived in the Apple
to jog around the park
have lunch with friends
create sculpture
install exhibitions
& get intellectual stimulation..... ...{excerpt}

{excerpts from long "list" poem}
Entry Forbidden



[Selections from the International Mail Manual,

"Country Conditions for Mailing," May 2005, U.S.

Postal Service]

Albania
Extravagant clothes and other articles contrary to

Albanians' taste.
Items sent by political emigres.

Algeria
Funeral urns.
Saccharine.

Azerbaijan
Cutting and stabbing arms, knuckledusters, stiletto

blades, balls of paralyzing fluid.
Antlers, and the horns of the species Cervidae .

Bahamas
Radioactive materials.
Skimmed milk in tins.

Bangladesh
Quinine, colored pink.

Belarus
Metallized yarn made with or made of gold thread.
Opium.

Botswana
Honey and preparations of honey including royal

jelly, preserves sweetened with honey, and flypaper.
Prison-made goods.

-------------------------------------------------------

Lesotho
Eau de cologne.
Military uniforms.
Printed matter relating to football pools.

Liechtenstein
Mini-spies (miniature wireless transmitters).

Luxembourg
Postcards embellished with fabrics, embroidery,

spangles, except in sealed envelopes.

Malawi
Aphrodisiacs.
Correspondence concerning fortune telling.

Malaysia
Harpoons.

Maldives
Gunpowder.
Weapons of war.
Intoxicants.
Poisons.
Nitrates.
Pork.
Statues used for worship.
Pornographic material.

Pakistan
Arms, ammunition except when sent on behalf of

the government.

Panama
Pastries.

Paraguay
Tomato juices.
Socks except those made of jersey.

Peru
Underwear.
Communist propaganda.
Contraceptive products.
Dolls.
Waxes and creams for shoes.

San Marino
Albums of any kind (of photographs, postcards,

postage stamps, etc.).
-------------------------------------------------------

Vatican City
Human remains.
Live animals.

Vietnam
Invisible ink, codes, ciphers, symbols or other types

of secret correspondence, and shorthand notes.
Used mosquito nets.
{from the publication, Jubilat}

THE POEM CAT
Sometimes the poem
doesn't want to come;
it hides from the poet
like a playful cat
who has run
under the house
& lurks among slugs,
roots, spiders' eyes,
ledge so long out of the sun
that it is dank
with the breath of the Troll King.

Sometimes the poem
darts away
like a coy lover
who is afraid of being possessed,
of feeling too much,
of losing his essential
loneliness-which he calls
freedom.

Sometimes the poem
can't requite
the poet's passion.

The poem is a dance
between poet & poem,
but sometimes the poem
just won't dance
and lurks on the sidelines
tapping its feet-
iambs, trochees-
out of step with the music
of your mariachi band.

If the poem won't come,
I say: sneak up on it. ... {excerpt}

A Few Words on the Soul

(translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty. ... {excerpt}

IN TEMPORE SENECTUTIS
When I am old
I will not have you look apart
From me, into the cold,
Friend of my heart,
Nor be sad in your remembrance
Of the careless, mad-heart semblance
That the wind hath blown away
When I am old.

When I am old
And the white hot wonder-fire
Unto the world seem cold,
My soul's desire
Know you then that all life's shower,
The rain of the years, that hour
Shall make blow for us one flower,
Including all, when we are old. {first two stanzas of this poem}

.....I have loved my God as a child at heart
That seeketh deep bosoms for rest,
I have loved my God as a maid to man—
But lo, this thing is best:

To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil;
To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond Arcturus' pale.

I have played with God for a woman,
I have staked with my God for truth,
I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed—
His dice be not of ruth.

For I am made as a naked blade,
But hear ye this thing in sooth:

Who loseth to God as man to man
Shall win at the turn of the game.
I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet
But the ending is the same:
Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose
Shall win at the end of the game.

For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil.
Whom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail. -- {excerpt from "Ballad for Gloom"}

Poetry April 2008 Atlantic Monthly




The Day I Saw the Emperor’s Clay Soldiers

The day I saw the emperor’s clay soldiers
I thought I understood the end of things—
blank faces staring back from 2,000 years.
A farmer found them; I found the farmer
in my father, grandfather, lost since
the Depression days of hominy pots.

My lost fathers are clay now too,
contained, kept from me by a wine-velvet
rope sagging between brass stanchions.
If I reach across, will the alarm sound,
lights flash, uniformed guards push me back?
I thought I understood the end of things.

The day I saw the emperor’s clay soldiers
I wanted to be the electrician who
installs lights above the exhibits.
I know my father’s best side, or knew,
though it makes me dizzy to remember.
I’ve never understood the end of things.

We’re hollow men too, my fathers and I.
We never talked, even when we had
the chance—maybe afraid of the echo.
But 2,000 years is a long time
to wait, even for still, curt clay soldiers
who surely understand the end of things. ... {excerpt, from the Atlantic}

A POETRY READING AT WEST POINT
I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?

Question and answer time.
"Sir," a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
"Sir" again. "Why do your poems give
me a headache when I try

to understand them?" he asked. "Do
you want that?" I have a gift for
gentle jokes to defuse tension,
but this was not the time to use it.
"I try to write as well as I can
what it feels like to be human," ... {excerpt}

EXCERPT FROM "RABBIT MAN"
3.


you saw death like the black legs of your mother

like the bent teeth of your retarded sister

like the wet smell of light in a fish's eye.

you saw death riding without a car or credit cards.

you saw death creeping waddling like the fat women

you hated.

you saw Jesus could not save you.


god's hand is creased with the smell of burnt hair and

hot grease,

she hears you tell your sons don't get no

black nappy-head woman.

her titties sag down sad snakes that crawl up your legs

till your penis talks and with blind sight you see

the two daughters you left in the desert without water.

oh death knows you and invites you for dinner,

rolls out the driveway like a coupe de ville,

is a snake-tongued daughter who turns on you,

is a thirsty rabbit choking on a lonely road.

death is an ax in an elevator rising to the sun.

death is god's egg.

death is a daughter who eats.

you are the table now the wet black earth lays upon--

you are dinner for dirt,

a cadillac spinning back to a one-room shack.

you are the rabbit released from fear,

the circle broken by sun

the handle of a buried ax,

head rolling thru the desert

like tumbleweed--

back to Neptune

Cyprus, I'm coming to you


You reach out your strong arms
Drawing me to you.
I long to bury myself in the fresh green
Folds of your skirt;
Smell your earthy musk about me,
Filling the air, filling me totally with you,
Soothing the hurt and healing me;
Your red-brown body soaking up my tears,
The whisper of your voice telling me that
I belong and am loved;
That I will leave you stronger.
Cyprus – I’m coming to you,
I’m coming to cry large salt tears into your oceans,
To allow you to envelop me with your darkness
And reassure me that she has not
Completely destroyed me.
I’m coming to sit with you and tell you everything.
I know you will understand.
You’ll soothe my aching soul
As I bare it to you; ... {excerpt}



[28 February 1990] -- http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/ma...d.asp?id-12340

Weathers

It’s freezing in the desert but there’s nothing there to freeze.
The ground slides & swells. Where have you been buried?

Under which dune did you say? In the morning winter leaves.
Hush I can hear the aphids aphony & almost a word in the wind.

Time. Shovels. I’m late. I’m latent. I lost my list.
It was only "difference." Hailstone a lodestone on a leather lace.

Is there a certain lack of polarity? Is it family? Here I am.
In the cold moon’s blast zone on clean sand & up is the deep murk.

Up licks my foreign shores. Tide of light. Hailstone beckoning
me to the brown ground. Something there, deep in the drift.

It’s a piece of snow. Where have you been buried oasis,
O trace H2O? Hush already I can see evening leaving.

Atop this cactus the bees are hibernating. Hush they are dreaming
their communal dream, nothing. Sweet dreams. A storm took you here.

Your hive of snakeskins & spiny things. Sweet dreams bees.
Every morning winter ferments. Agent my eyes. May the bulb

of winter be planted deep enough not to burn may the blossom
return may the pollen swell & slide may the nectar mollify

*

There once was a hole in a stone.
Try as we might we could not see
to the other side. I put my
hand in the equator. It was
wet & quite warm. I placed my toe,
my leg, in the glazed equator.
My clothes listed from a brassy
hook in the wooden tie upright
in a stone. The air much cooler
now than the equator. My hips
slipped into the flat line of the
equator. You basking under
your tiara of succulents
on a stone, toying with a stone.
My red beard spread on the skin of
the equator. I drank of the
equator. The salt in that line.
I lowered my brain into the
planar equator. You began
to slide & swell above my sure
face, calcified, the equator.
I love you I hummed I can’t swim

{excerpt}

My friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a ****head or a snake

They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you

And you will disappear into your own rage
into your own insanity
into your own poverty
into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
and then ashes

The ruling class will tell you that
there is no ruling class
as they organize their liberal supporters into
white supremist lynch mobs
organize their children into
ku klux klan gangs
organize their police into killer cops
organize their propaganda into
a devise to ossify us with angel dust
pre-occupy us with western symbols in
african hair styles
innoculate us with hate
institutionalize us with ignorance
hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed
to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away
And we are programmed to self destruct
to fragment
to get buried under covert intelligence operations of
unintelligent committees impulsed toward death
And there it is

The enemies polishing their penises between
oil wells at the pentagon
the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances
the old folks dying of starvation
the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs
the lifeblood of the earth almost dead in
the greedy mouth of imperialism
And my friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a ****head or a snake ...

{excerpt from poem, "There It Is", also recorded in a jazz album of the same name...1982)

http://www.theparisreview.com/viewin...hp/prmMID/3944 --

Return to Interview Archive Index


ARCHIBALD MACLEISH The Art of Poetry No. 18

Issue 58, Summer 1974
View a manuscript page
Download a PDF of the full interview

WALT MCDONALD~





ADVICE I WISH I'D BEEN TOLD



-------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------


Over the years, I've heard good advice from others;

I wish they had told me sooner. Probably they did,

but I didn't listen. What I'm about to say is what I

constantly urge myself to do. I offer these

comments to save us time, to help us strip off some

ankle weights of language. The difference between

second place and first place in the high jump,

between the silver and the gold, is only about an

inch. Ah, but "How glorious that inch / And that

split-second longer in the air before the fall"

(Robert Francis, "Excellence").


1. Resist Abstractions, and They Will Flee from You

General and abstract statements are easy to say,

and usually flat. They don't show; they tell.

Imagine friends stepping out into the hall and

seeing something vivid and specific, then coming

back into your room and summarizing all the

specific, sensuous details they saw in abstract,

general statements — like any of these: "He was a

distinguished-looking man." "She looked angry."

"She treated others with justice." "He had a strange

way of fixing his hair." "He gave her costly gifts."

"She reacted in a negative way."
I understand these claims — but I don't see or

feel them as richly as I wish I could. The power of

language is in vivid specifics that make us see — or

hear, and feel, through sensuous images. A plot

summary is not as vivid or powerful as seeing the

movie. In order to make any of those statements

quoted above, the writers might have seen specific

details, but — instead of sharing them with readers

— they have "ab-stracted" (drawn conclusions from,

or taken from) their impressions and given us only

the abstract notions of the experience —

"distinguished-looking," "justice," "a negative way."
These are the kind of easy abstractions I'm likely

to make in first drafts — when I'm simply trying to

find a few lines for a poem. But go beyond first

thoughts. I urge you to reach, to work hard; don't

sit down like a couch potato, comfortable with the

easy abstractions of your mind's first draft. A poem

works best, for me, when the writer doesn't tell, but

when he or she invents combinations of specific

words to show us old facts in new ways. Poems

with too many abstractions and not enough images

tell about something, but don't move me as much

as they could.
Abstractions and generalizations are like chunks

of lead tossed on a pond of water — " the art of

sinking in poetry." Abstractions are hired assassins;

they're paid to hold you hostage, to keep you

bound to your couch, in house arrest. They don't

want you to travel, to see the vivid images of other

regions; they hope you won't discover what you're

missing. Now let's stop and admit some obvious

facts about the craft of writing:
1) There are no rules. All I can do is describe

what works for me in the best poems I read. All I

can do is share the best advice I can to help you

write better poems; all I can promise is to focus on

what I admire.

--

http://wwwstage.valpo.edu/english/vpr/mcdonaldes

say.html

Jayne Cortez -- States of Motion -----------------

Sun Ra left the planet traveling in a pyramid made

of metal keys Willie Mae Thornton sailed away in

an extra large moisture-proof harmonica Pauline

Johnson flew off to the meeting in her brass

trimmed telephone Thelonious Monk withdrew

seated in a space ship shaped like a piano Art

Blakey departed in a great wood & stainless steel

bass drum Esther Phillips bowed out in a nasal

sounding chrome microphone Charles Tyler,

George Adams & Clifford Jordan reached another

realm riding in receptacles constructed like

saxaphones Okot p'Bitek shoved off in an attache

case full of songs, books & whiskey Leon Damas

hit the road in a big black banjo Andre Lorde

departed while wrapped in her book jackets Dizzy

Gillespie zoomed off in a sweet chariot shaped like

a trumpet Miles Davis left in a magnificent

copper mute Marietta Damas vacated the terrain

in one beautiful house filled with folkloric &

electronic gadgets Romare Bearden crossed over

the rainbow in a blimp made of his collages &

etchings Norman Lewis pushed away from the

shore in a vault shaped like a bicycle ....{excerpt

from this poem by Jayne Cortez, poet and jazz

songwriter}

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/200...POD_index.html

Review/Music; Setting Agitprop Poetry To the Beat of Current Jazz

By JON PARELES
Published: March 25, 1991 "On Wednesday and Thursday nights, S.O.B.'s presented agitprop poets with a beat, politically committed performers whose music saves them from didacticism. Jayne Cortez's poetry, which praises 'revolutionary commitment' and warns of environmental and social catastrophe, has attracted some of the best musicians in contemporary jazz; Macka B., a British reggae toaster (rapper) and singer, performed with Robotiks, a lean four-piece band, as the Mad Professor mixed the sound and added the electronic effects of dub reggae." - ------"Ms. Cortez is a poet, not a rapper, chanting and reciting in a determined voice that sometimes rises in a girlish lilt. She has hooked her poetry to Ornette Coleman's kind of funk -- a bristling, prismatic, harmonically unconstrained surge of riffs and propulsion." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...+Cortez&st=nyt

".....Winter
wears her well-earned warrior’s clothes,
a season wearing thinner, wetter,
colder, but still and ever green, here—
she’d not leave her leaves, not shed
what’s hers though the southerly
tried and tries to whistle them away.
And since this is my comedy
of ears, in one and in the other’s
fate’s to trip again, I’ll claim:
the body is both bread and breed,
as words well said are planted seed
and grow so where we tread is treed,
where each line read remains the reed
on which the note is played when pressed
to lips, mouth, self-ordained as priest,
weds wed to we’d and weed and so
with word grown one forever as even
the dead remain in deed, wound round
and round in these wet sheets of wind." {excerpt from Dreaming in New Zealand}

STANDARDIZATION
When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;

Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop
With horror at the house not made with hands
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup
Another pure theosophist demands

Rebirth in other, less industrial stars
Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars
And celluloid and rubber are unknown;

When from his vegetable Sunday School
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool
About the "Standardization of the Race";

I see, stooping among her orchard trees,
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in,
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees,
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.

For there is no manufacturer competes
With her in the mass production of shapes and things.
Over and over she gathers and repeats
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings. ... {excerpt}

Morningside Heights, July



Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil. I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells **** in Farsi.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon. ... {excerpt}

http://poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0...em_181087.html








Louise Glück’s most recent collection of poems,

Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), was a 2006

National Book Award finalist. She lives in

Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Yale.


Midsummer
by Louise Glück


On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear

off  the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new

bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off  the high rocks — bodies crowding

the water.


The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool

and wet,
marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never

saw,
buildings in cities far away.


On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the

rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was

what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began

to pair off
but always there were a few left at the

end — sometimes they’d keep watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each

other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No

one wanted to be them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night

their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate.


At the beginning and at the end, though, we were

all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children

were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we

knew the nights we’d meet
and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the

end of summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all

that kissing.


And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as

being alone.
The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking

cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren’t there.


And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the

front steps in the morning,
eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor

to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out

in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the

mountain was built.


And then the day faded. We were dreaming,

waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the

shadows lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining

about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.


Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be

meeting later.
And you thought of  walking into the woods and

lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the

water.
And though sometimes you couldn’t see the

person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person. ... {excerpt}

Self-Analysis

The poet is a forger who forges so completely that he forges even the

feeling he truly feels as pain. And




those who read his poems feel absolutely, not his two separate pains,

but only the pain that they do not feel.




And thus, diverting the understanding, the wind-up train we call the

heart runs along its track.

Fernando Pessoa



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/bo...d-letters.html

There are two line indents that Lit-Net can't produce, L4 and L12

Prayer


Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. ...{excerpt}

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/...t-Laureate.php Finally a great modern poet gets some recognition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/bo...pagewanted=all -- Some samples of her work, nyt web extra.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/bo...tml?ref=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. ... {exceprt}

What a great thread, Quasi. There are so many wonderful contemporary poets out there, it is difficult to come in contact with them all independently.


The Lord and the General Din of the World


The kids are shrieking at the edge of the pool,
their angelic faces twisting. They like
to shriek—they like to make the Great Dane bellow.
When he cannot stand it any longer, he jumps
the wall and chases them, still screaming, in.

And under all this now a steady grating—
A plastic bottle of blue cheese dressing
Scraping up against the concrete gutter,
Bobbing off the aqua, sun-flicked waves
The kids have made by jumping.

And there’s a man here from Afghanistan
who hasn’t cut his greasy hair since he was driven mad.
His name is Simon. He looks just like The Christ.
Walks up and down beside the pool, oblivious
To screams and barking. He gestures as he talks,
Whispers and pontificates. No one is listening.

Lord, is the general din of the world your own?
Something that is good in me is crumbling… {excerpt}

To the Memory



of J.S. Bach because on bad nights
I take my three brown dogs to bed
with a box of crackers, which we share
while I sing them their favorite song:

Sheep may safely graze on pasture
when their shepherd guards them well.
Sheep may safely graze on pasture…

I have lived by how this is funny.
I address myself to the dead now.

My body thinks she is the moon—the moon
as remembered against the metal bars
of a bridge whose arc we trust
the more the less we can.

From a distance the cars move to music.
From a distance the world sings back.

My body thinks she is the moon
but she is a clown and I
am all music and unbearably
weighted down. ... {excerpt}


© Jane Mead

IMMANENCE



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Antibellum Plantation, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia



We leave the one-room schoolhouse
with the double meaning of its woodenness
spelled out in ranks of hair-shirt oaken
benches and plank-top desks without a blemish
of utility. No inkwells, no pencil minders to give
them purpose. It is a place of the truly elementary—
of bone-tired inertia and of rote, and educative homilies
about the patriot saints. On the slatted wall
above the teacher's desk, the Father of His Country
still presides from the unfinished portrait
by Gilbert Stuart. Disembodied head, dead white
on a black ground of rusty satin. It speaks to dark eternity,
bright virtue: the mythic cherry tree; the bitter winter
of faithfulness, Philadelphia locked up like an English gaol;
the patience to stick till the screw turned tight
at Yorktown. Did the hardness or the homilies prepare
those boys of 1850 for Sunday strolls to come,
ranked like Continentals, into the rifle's obliterating jaws?

My wife has four-leaf clover on her mind.
I've never seen one, and she abhors the vacuum
of my skepticism. She prays that God will let us find
this unicorn of flora, and as we walk the well-groomed lawn,
she plucks one up, a tiny Intercession. Yet there's another:
I stoop, incredulous, and here it is, the four plump lobes
like the fingers of a cartoon hand. I laugh the sinner's
incongruous guffaw, while she thanks God, He
who helps our unbelief. I think how I want to be with her
when lightning X-rays open spaces, or the car knifes
across four lanes of highway, the shattering median,
the onrushing flail of steel. Then I recall those war-
dead Southern boys, bent to their hard-assed catechism,
their Calvinist Lives of the Saints—
three hundred thousand war-dead boys. ... {excerpt}

[from the Valparaiso Poetry Review]

IN THE VILLAGE OF MY ANCESTORS


.....Unknown old men and women
Appropriate the names
Of young men and women from my memory

I ask one of them
Tell me for God's sake
Is George the Wolf still living

That's me he answers
With a voice from the next world

I touch his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes
To tell me if I'm living too {excerpt}

CIVILIZATION
Send your army home to their wives and children.
It is late. Your soldiers are burdened, thirsty.
Lock the doors, the windows, and here in darkness
lie down beside me.

Speak of anything we possess in common:
ground or law or sense. Only speak it softly.
Spiders crawl the crevices. Violent voices
ruin their balance,

and they’ll fall – intuit – upon our faces,
where I fear them most. But you’ve heard this terror,
and my midnight phobias always move you –
cause to remain here. ... {excerpt}