Poem of the Day

I got this one from the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. I would love to hear this sung, but not enough to attempt it myself!

Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday
By Robert Hayden

     Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird,
     His fancy warbler;
     Satan sweet-talked her,
     four bullets hushed her.
     Who would have thought
     she’d end that way?

Four bullets hushed her. And the world a-clang with evil.
Who’s going to make old hardened sinner men tremble now
and the righteous rock?
Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down
to help with struggling and doing without and being colored
all through blue Monday?
Till way next Sunday?

     All those angels
     in their cretonne clouds and finery
     the true believer saw
     when she rared back her head and sang,
     all those angels are surely weeping.
     Who would have thought
     she’d end that way?

Four holes in her heart. The gold works wrecked.
But she looks so natural in her big bronze coffin
among the Broken Hearts and Gates-Ajar,
it’s as if any moment she’d lift her head
from its pillow of chill gardenias
and turn this quiet into shouting Sunday
and make folks forget what she did on Monday.

     Oh, Satan sweet-talked her,
     and four bullets hushed her.
     Lord’s lost Him His diva,
     His fancy warbler’s gone.
     Who would have thought,
     who would have thought she’d end that way?

Current Tea: Diva blend (Ceylon black tea with hints of hazelnut and chocolate)

Today I picked strawberries in my cousin’s pickin’ patch. Then I made jam and bread and a smoothie. YUM! I was delighted to find this poem.

Strawberry on the Drawbridge
By Matthea Harvey

I tried eating one there on the bridge’s fault line, listening out for
the dispatcher’s radio so that I’d know if a ship was coming and the
road was about to split in two—I love when roads give up on going
anywhere and point up towards the heavens. But standing on tiptoe
on that crenellated bit of metal (tongue in groove, groove in tongue)
didn’t give me the right feeling. Ships were few. And it made me
imagine myself being split in two, like St. Simon, martyred length-
wise down the middle, which was a feeling I already knew.

For my experiment, I needed an abandoned drawbridge. I found it
in Delaware. It was no star, with its rusted rivets and peeling paint,
but it was what I was looking for. I got out my orange cones and po-
lice tape and cordoned off the area. As a last touch, I put on a uni-
-form I’d bought at the Salvation Army. Then I made a little mound
of earth right in the center of the bridge and planted my strawberry
plant. I put a bell jar over it and sat next to it, shifting every half
hour so that my shadow wouldn’t block the sun. Sometimes, I sat in
the control box and polished the controls. Finally, one day the plant
sprouted a tiny green strawberry dead center and a week later it was
good and red and round. On that long-anticipated day, I pressed
play on the tape recorder: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right—
here I am, stuck in the middle with you. On the word “middle,” I low-
ered the lever and raised by my best binoculars to my eyes.

The bridge groaned and began to open. Some of the roots went
to the left, some to the right. The bell jar wobbled, then toppled into
the water with a celebratory splash. Soil sifted into the river. And
the strawberry hung there, suspended between its two sets of roots
and stems like an atom in a science experiment. First the skin, with
its little grainy seeds strained, then split. Then as the fleshy part
broke open, I could see the pale V of its interior and when that split
too, the words finally separated into straw and berry and draw and
bridge, and like recombinant DNA, formed new ones. Strawbridge.
Drawberry. In the world they conjured the straw bridges were sharp
and shiny, too delicate to cross, and there in the berry patches were
the artists, islanded at their easels.

Well, for some reason, I am not able to post this poem here (I keep getting an error message). As I can’t find the text online, here’s a link to the post on my livejournal. I will not be censored by WordPress!

I had to laugh over this one…

Mending Sump
By Kenneth Koch

“Hiram, I think the sump is backing up.
The bathroom floor boards for above two weeks
Have seemed soaked through. A little bird, I think
Has wandered into the pipes, and all’s gone wrong.”
“Something there is that doesn’t hump a sump,”
He said; and through his head she saw a cloud
That seemed to twinkle. “Hiram, well,” she said,
“Smith is come home! I saw his face just now
While looking through your head. He’s come to die
Or else to laugh, for hay is dried-up grass
When you’re alone.” He rose, and sniffed the air.
“We’d better leave him in the sump,” he said.

This made me remember reading Christopher Moore’s Coyote Blue, though I don’t think that was one of his better books.

Toe’osh: A Laguna Coyote Story
By Leslie Marmon Silko

for Simon Ortiz, July 1973

In the wintertime
at night
we tell coyote stories
                    and drink Spañada by the stove.
How coyote got his
ratty old fur coat
                    bits of old fur
                    the sparrows stuck on him
                    with dabs of pitch.
That was after he lost his proud original one in a poker game.
anyhow, things like that
are always happening to him,
that’s what he said, anyway.

And it happened to him at Laguna
and Chinle
and Lukachukai too, because coyote got too smart for his own good.

But the Navajos say he won a contest once.
It was to see who could sleep out in a
snowstorm the longest
and coyote waited until chipmunk badger and skunk were all
curled up under the snow
and then he uncovered himself and slept all night
inside
and before morning he got up and went out again
and waited until the others got up before he came
in to take the prize.

Some white men came to Acoma and Laguna a hundred years ago
and they fought over Acoma land and Laguna women, and even now
some of their descendants are howling in
the hills southeast of Laguna.

Charlie Coyote wanted to be governor
and he said that when he got elected
he would run the other men off
the reservation
and keep all the women for himself.

One year
the politicians got fancy
at Laguna.
They went door to door with hams and turkeys
and they gave them to anyone who promised
to vote for them.
On election day all the people
stayed home and ate turkey
and laughed.

The Trans-Western pipeline vice president came
to discuss right-of-way.
The Lagunas let him wait all day long
because he is a busy and important man.
And late in the afternoon they told him
to come back again tomorrow.

They were after the picnic food
that the special dancers left
down below the cliff.
And Toe’osh and his cousins hung themselves
down over the cliff
holding each other’s tail in their mouth making a coyote chain
until someone in the middle farted
and the guy behind him opened his
mouth to say “What stinks?” and they
all went tumbling down, like that.

Howling and roaring
Toe’osh scattered white people
out of bars all over Wisconsin.
He bumped into them at the door
until they said
                    ”Excuse me”
And the way Simon meant it
was for 300 or maybe 400 years.

I’m sorry about the hiatus. I went to visit my parents over the weekend and between busyness and not having wireless access on my laptop, the PotD fell by the wayside.

Eating Alone
By Li-Young Lee

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can’t recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way—left hand braced
on knee, creaky—to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.

I’m visiting my parents this weekend, and my mother was sweet enough to put a rose in my bedroom.

Nobody knows this little Rose—
By Emily Dickinson

Nobody knows this little Rose—
It might a pilgrim be
Did I not take it from the ways
And lift it up to thee.
Only a Bee will miss it—
Only a Butterfly,
Hastening from far journey—
On its breast to lie—
Only a Bird will wonder—
Only a Breeze will sigh—
Ah Little Rose—how easy
For such as thee to die!

I found this one (probably not surprisingly) in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. I like the poem, but I often can’t get past the first line and half: I resemble everyone but myself. Interesting thought…

Self-Portrait
By A.K. Ramanujan

I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
   despite the well-known laws
   of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father.

I do live in the country now, but I haven’t yet met any of these grandfathers.

The Grandfathers
By Donald Justice

          Why will they never sleep?
                    JOHN PEALE BISHOP

Why will they never sleep,
The old ones, the grandfathers?
Always you find them sitting
On ruined porches, deep
Ina the back country, at dusk,
Hawking and spitting.
They might have sat there forever,
Tapping their sticks,
Peevish, discredited gods.
Ask of the traveler how,
At road-end, they will fix
You maybe with the cold
Eye of a snake or a bird
And answer not a word,
Only these blank, oracular
Headshakes or headnods.

I find it fascinating when poems and song lyrics are taken from historical sources such as this.

Captivity
By Louise Erdrich

He (my captor) gave me a bisquit, which I put in my pocket, and not daring to eat it,
buried it under a log, fearing he had put something in it to make me love him.
   —from the narrative of the captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, who was taken prisoner
     by the Wampanoag when Lancaster, Massachusetts, was destroyed, in the year 1676

The stream was swift, and so cold
I thought I would be sliced in two.
But he dragged me from the flood
by the ends of my hair.
I had grown to recognize his face.
I could distinguish it from the others.
There were times I feared I understood
his language, which was not human,
and I knelt to pray for strength.

We were pursued! By God’s agents
or pitch devils, I did not know.
Only that we must march.
Their guns were loaded with swan shot.
I could not suckle and my child’s wail
put them in danger.
He had a woman
with teeth black and glittering.
She fed the child milk of acorns.
The forest closed, the light deepened.

I told myself that I would starve
before I took food from his hands
but I did not starve.
One night
he killed a deer with a young one in her
and gave me to eat of the fawn.
It was so tender,
the bones like the stems of flowers,
that I followed where he took me.
The night was thick. He cut the cord
that bound me to the tree.

After that the birds mocked.
Shadows gaped and roared
and the trees flung down
their sharpened lashes.
He did not notice God’s wrath.
God blasted fire from half-buried stumps.
I hid my face in my dress, fearing He would burn us all
but this, too, passed.

Rescued, I see no truth in things.
My husband drives a thick wedge
through the earth, still it shuts
to him year after year.
My child is fed of the first wheat.
I lay myself to sleep
on a Holland-laced pillowbeer.
I lay to sleep.
And in the dark I see myself
as I was outside their circle.

They knelt on deerskins, some with sticks,
and he led his company in the noise
until I could no longer bear
the thought of how I was.
I stripped a branch
and struck the earth,
in time, begging it to open
to admit me
as he was
and feed me honey from the rock.

I’m off to bed, and though I don’t really want this as my lullaby, I can’t deny that Auden is amazing!

Lullaby
By W.H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

I don’t have anything special to say about this poem. Perhaps because I spent a large part of the day with my parents clearing brush around the pond (that hadn’t been cleared in years!), I’m feeling nostalgic for my youth.

Fern Hill
By Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
  The night above the dingle starry,
    Time let me hail and climb
  Golden in the heyday of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
    Trail with daisies and barley
  Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
  In the sun that is young once only,
    Time let me play and be
  Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
    And the sabbath rang slowly
  In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
  And playing, lovely and watery
    And fire green as grass
  And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
    Flying with the ricks, and the horses
  Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
  Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
    The sky gathered again
  And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
    Out of the whinnying green stable
  On to the fields of praise.

And honored among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
  In the sun born over and over,
    I ran my heedless ways,
  My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
    Before the children green and golden
  Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
  In the moon that is always rising,
    Nor that riding to sleep
  I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
    Time held me green and dying
  Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

I love poems with mythological subjects. The imagery in this poem is rather disgusting, but very vivid and powerful. I very nearly feel sorry for Medusa.

Medusa
By Carol Ann Duffy

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy
grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.

My bride’s breath soured, stank
in the grey bags of my lungs.
I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued,
yellow fanged.
There are bullet tears in my eyes.
Are you terrified?

Be terrified.
It’s you I love,
perfect man, Greek God, my own;
but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray
from home.
So better by for me if you were stone.

I glanced at a buzzing bee,
a dull grey pebbly fell
to the ground.
I glanced at a singing bird,
a handful of dusty gravel
spattered down.

I looked at a ginger cat,
a housebrick
shattered a bowl of milk.
I looked at a snuffling pig,
a boulder rolled
in a heap of shit.

I stared in the mirror.
Love gone bad
showed me a Gorgon.
I stared at a dragon.
Fire spewed
from the mouth of a mountain.

And here you come
with a shield for a heart
and a sword for a tongue
and your girls, your girls.
Wasn’t I beautiful
Wasn’t I fragrant and young?

Look at me now.

Current Tea: wedding chai (Indian black tea blended with cardamom and vanilla)

Now that I live in the country with a large yard and lots of plants, I’m more aware of things like spiders, of which I’ve never been fond. Yesterday there was one crawling on the bunch of lilacs on my dining room table, and I didn’t even kill it. (Big step for me, as one of my greatest fears is waking up with something crawling on me.)

Argiope
By Marge Piercy

Your web spans a distance
of two of my hands spread
turning the space between unrelated
uprights, accidental neighbors, fennel, corn
stalks into a frame. The patterned web
startles me, as if a grasshopper
spoke, as if a moth whispered.
The bold design cannot have
a predatory use: no fly,
no mite or wasp caught by its zigzag
as my gaze is. Thin I see you,
big, much bigger than I feel
spiders ought to be. Black and gold
you are a shiny brooch with legs
of derricks. I remind you
I am a general friend to your
kind. I rescue your kinfolk
from the bathtub fall mornings
before I run the water. I
remind you nervously we are
artisans, we both make out
of what we take in and what
we pass through our guts a patterned
object slung on the world.
I detour your net carefully
picking my way through the
pumpkin vines. The mother
of nightmares fatal and hungry,
you kill for a living. Beauty
is only a sideline, and your mate
approaches you with infinite
caution or you eat him too.
You stare at me, you do not
scuttle or hide, you wait.
I go round and leave you mistress
of your territory, not in
kindness but in awe. Stay
out of my dreams, Hecate
of the garden patch, Argiope.

We’ve been having a number of thunderstorms here lately, so I thought I’d share this one in an effort to make them stop via reverse psychology. (What? It’s possible such a technique could have an effect on the weather!)

Come Thunder
By Christopher Okigbo

Now that the triumphant march has entered the last street corners,
Remember, O dancers, the thunder among the clouds…

Now that laughter, broken in two, hangs tremulous between the teeth,
Remember, O Dancers, the lightning beyond the earth…

The smell of blood already floats in the lavender-mist of the afternoon.
The death sentence lies in ambush along the corridors of power;
And a great fearful thing already tugs at the cables of the open air,
A nebula immense and immeasurable, a night of deep waters—
An iron dream unnamed and unprintable, a path of stone.

The drowsy heads of the pods in barren farmlands witness it,
The homesteads abandoned in this century’s brush fire witness it:
The myriad eyes of deserted corn cobs in burning barns witness it:
Magic birds with the miracle of lightning flash on their feathers…

The arrows of God tremble at the gates of light,
The drums of curfew pander to a dance of death;

And the secret thing in its heaving
Threatens with iron mask
The last lighted torch of the century…

Oops! I just realized that I’d originally posted a Robert Lowell poem I’d previously posted. Here’s a substitution.

Last Things
By William Meredith

For Robert Lowell

               I

In the tunnel of woods, as the road
Winds up through the freckled light, a porcupine,
Larger than life, crosses the road.
He moves with the difficulty of relics—
Possum, armadillo, horseshoe crab.
To us they seem creatures arthritic with time,
Winding joylessly down like burnt-out galaxies.
In all their slowness we see no dignity,
Only a want of scale.
Having crossed the road oblivious, he falls off
Deliberately and without grace into the ferns.

               II

In another state are hills as choppy as lake water
And, on a hillside there,
Is a junkyard of old cars, kept for the parts—
Fenders and chassis and the engine blocks
Right there in the field, smaller parts in bins
In a shed by the side of the road. Cows graze
Among the widely spaced rows,
Which are irregular only as an old orchard is,
Following the contours of the hill.
The tops of the cars are bright colors still
And as pretty as bottles hung on a bare tree
Or painted cinder blocks in a garden.
Cars the same age are parked on the road like cannibals.

               III

At the edge of a harbor, in a field
That faces the ocean they came by and left by,
Statues of soldiers and governors and their queen
Lie where the Africans put them.
Unbewildered, not without understanding,
The marble countenances look at the green
Continent; they did their best; plunderers
Were fewer among them than men of honor.
But no one comes for them, though they have been offered.
With chipped extremities, in a chipped regalia
They lie at angles of unaccustomed ease.
In the parks and squares of England are set up
Bolder, more dreadful shapes of the ego,
While African lichen confers an antique grandeur
On these, from whom men have withheld it.

               IV

At the edge of the Greek world, I think, was a cliff
To which fallen gods were chained, immortal.
Time is without forgiveness, but intermittently
He sends the old, sentimental, hungry
Vulture compassion to gnaw on the stone
Vitals of each of us, even the young, as if
To ready each of us, even the old, for an unthinkable
Event he foresees for each of us—a reckoning, our own.

I read this in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and I think it’s great! I love how the thoughts and ideas evolve and, though I’m not a good writer or painter, I can certainly understand how the end result of something is often nothing like the initial plans.

Why I Am Not a Painter
By Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Here’s another one my poetry pal sent me. I thought it was amazing, and then my aunt e-mailed me to tell me about it. With three such recommendations, I hope it appeals to you, too!

The Star Market
By Marie Howe

The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
The old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat—
looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,
could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

As fate would have it, my poetry pal sent me some new poems, which arrived today. I’m always amazed by Richard Wilbur’s descriptive power in a relatively small number of words.

Young Orchard
By Richard Wilbur

These trees came to stay.
Planted at intervals of
Thirty feet each way,

Each one stands alone
Where it is to live and die.
Still, when they are grown

To full size, these trees
Will blend their crowns, and hum with
Meditating bees.

Meanwhile, see how they
Rise against their rootedness
On a gusty day,

Nodding one and all
To one another, as they
Rise again and fall,

Swept by flutterings
So that they appear a great
Consort of sweet strings.

I came across this in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry a while ago and immediately fell in love with it. One of my poetry pals celebrated his 80th birthday a couple weeks ago and I couldn’t be there for the shindig, but I made a page for his birthday scrapbook. I included this poem and the picture below (which I actually created by biting holes in pieces of paper on which I’d written some of our favorite poems). I get chills every single time I read the first three lines of this poem.

Eating Poetry
By Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Pink: Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver
Blue: Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye
Orange: The Waking by Theodore Roethke
Green: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Current Tea: chocolate ginger rooibos (rooibos, flavored with cocoa bits, ginger, barley, and mint)

I’m having a little trouble getting into a schedule, can you tell?

Garden
By H.D.

I

You are clear
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail.

I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.

If I could break you
I could break a tree.

If I could stir
I could break a tree—
I could break you.

II

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

I got my internet hooked up yesterday, and now I’m struggling to catch up on things and make all the necessary moving updates.

The Colossus
By Sylvia Plath

I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It’s worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue spots and bails of Lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull-plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stoke
To create such ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a kneel
On the black stones of landing.

The PotD will very likely be on hiatus until sometime next week when I get internet access in the new house. I remember walking through a culvert with my mom when I was little because it was the “shortcut” to the trail to climb Prospect Mountain.

Kneeling Down to Peer into a Culvert
By Robert Bly

I kneel down to peer into a culvert.
The other end seems far away.
One cone of light floats in the shadowed water.
This is how our children will look when we are dead.

I kneel near floating shadowy water.
On my knees, I am half inside the tunnel—
blue sky widens the far end—
darkened by the shadowy insides of the steel.

Are they all born? I walk on farther;
out in the plowing I see a lake newly made.
I have seen this lake before…. It is a lake
I return to each time my children are grown.

I have fathered so many children and returned
to that lake—grayish flat slate banks,
low arctic bushes. I am a water-serpent throwing water drops
off my head. My gray loops trail behind me.

How long I live there alone! For a thousand years
I am alone, with no duties, living as I live.
Then one morning a head like mine pokes from the water.
I fight—it’s time, it’s right—and am torn to pieces fighting.

Current Tea: wedding chai (Indian black tea blended with cardamom and vanilla)

Another from the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

If We Must Die
By Claude McKay

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Sometimes I regret giving up piano lessons in eighth grade…

The Piano Tuner’s Wife
By Karl Shapiro

That note comes clear, like water running clear,
Then the next higher note, and up and up
And more and more, with now and then a chord,
The highest notes like tapping a tile with a hammer,
Now and again an arpeggio, a theme
As if the keyboard spoke to the one key,
Saying, No interval is exactly true,
And the note whines slightly and then truly sings.

She sits on the sofa reading a book she has brought,
A ray of sunlight on her white hair.
She is here because he is blind. She drives.
It is almost a platitude to say
That she leads him from piano to piano.
And this continues for about an hour,
Building bridges from both sides of the void,
Coasting the chasms of the harmonies.

And in conclusion,
When there is no more audible dissent,
He plays his comprehensive keyboard song,
The loud proud paradigm,
The one work of art without content.

It was such a lovely day yesterday and I was very aware of how lucky I am. I didn’t overhear any whispering conversations among the flora, but I did have wonderful panoramic views of the mountains and a lovely garden tour.

Aware
By Denise Levertov

When I found the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
             My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
                                     I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.

It’s been a little while since we’ve had one from Margaret Atwood. She’s so awesome!

How To Tell One Country From Another
By Margaret Atwood

Whether is it possible to become lost.

Whether one tree looks like another.
Whether there is water all around
the edges or not. Whether
there are edges or whether
there are just insects.

Whether the insects bite,
whether you would die
from the bites of insects.
Whether you would die.

Whether you would die for your country.
Whether anyone in the country would die for your country.
Let’s be honest here.
A layer of snow, a layer of granite, a layer of snow.
What you think lies under the snow.
What you think lies.

Whether you think white on white is a state of mind
or blue on blue or green on green.
Whether you think there is a state,
of mind.

How many clothes you have to take off
before you can make love.
This I think is important:
the undoing of buttons, the gradual shedding
of one color after another. It leads
to the belief that what you see is not
what you get.

Whether there are preliminaries,
hallways, vestibules,
basements, furnaces,
chesterfields, silences
between sentences, between pieces
of furniture, parasites in your eyes,
drinkable water.

Whether there has ever been
an invading army.
Whether, if there were an invading army,
you would collaborate.
Poor boy, you’d say, he looks cold
standing out there, and he’s only twenty.
From his point of view this must be hell.

A fur coat is what he needs,
a cup of tea, a cup of coffee,
a warm body.
Whether on the contrary
you’d slit his throat in his sleep
or in yours. I ask you.

So, you are a nice person.
You would behave well.
What you mean by behaving well.
When the outline of a man
whose face you cannot see
appears at your bedroom window,
whether you would shoot.
If you had a gun, that is.
Whether you would have a gun.
It goes on.

This has no personal relevance, given the horrible storm we had in Austin the other night, but it was in the file so I’m sharing it for contrast. I love the descriptions and imagery.

The Drought
By Gary Soto

The clouds shouldered a path up the mountains
East of Ocampo, and then descended,
Scraping their bellies gray on the cracked shingles of slate.

They entered the valley, and passed the roads that went
Trackless, the houses blown open, their cellars creaking
And lined with the bottles that held their breath for years.

They passed the fields where the trees dried thin as hat racks
And the plow’s tooth bit the earth for what endured.
But what continued were the wind that plucked the birds spineless

And the young who left with a few seeds in each pocket,
Their belts tightened on the fifth notch of hunger—
Under the sky that deafened from listening for rain.

Current Tea: midnight snack (herbal tisane with apple bits, chamomile blossoms, cinnamon, flavoring)

My power went out at about midnight, during a humdinger of a storm, and it was only restored sometime between 5:30 and 8:30pm tonight (I went out to dinner someplace with lights and air conditioning!). Also, I’m embarking on a cross country move tomorrow so the PotD may continue during transit, or it may not. I’ll do my best!

Isle of Mull, Scotland
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Because by now we know everything is not so green elsewhere.

The cities tied their nooses around our necks,
we let them without even seeing.

Not even feeling our breath soften
as clumps of shed wool scattered across days.

Not even. This even-ing, balance beam of light on green,
the widely lifted land, resonance of moor
winding down to water, the full of it. Days of cows
and sheep bending their heads.

We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.

Where else do we ever have to go, and why?

We haven’t heard from Adrienne Rich in a while. I might also take this opportunity to highly recommend Eve Curie’s biography of her famous mother Marie, entitled Madame Curie. She was an amazing woman and it’s a wonderful story.

Power
By Adrienne Rich

Living   in the earth-deposits   of our history

Today a backhoe divulged   out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle   amber   perfect   a hundred-year-old
cure for fever   or melancholy   a tonic
for living on this earth   in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered   from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years   by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin   of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold   a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman   denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds   came   from the same source as her power

Current Tea: wedding chai (Indian black tea blended with cardamom and vanilla)

I read this in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and it’s certainly a bit of a departure for me. I’m sharing it since the last two lines made me laugh.

Reading Pornography in Old Age
By Howard Nemerov

Unbridled licentiousness with no holds barred,
Immediate and mutual lust, satisfiable
In the heat, upon demand, aroused again
And satisfied again, lechery unlimited.

Till space runs out at the bottom of the page
And another pair of lovers, forever young,
Prepotent, endlessly receptive, renews
The daylong, nightlong, interminable grind.

How decent it is, and how unlike our lives
Where “fuck you” is a term of vengeful scorn
And the murmur of “sorry, partner” as often heard
As ever in mixed doubles or at bridge.

Though I suspect the stuff is written by
Elderly homosexuals manacled to their
Machines, it’s mildly touching all the same,
A reminiscence of the life that was in Eden

Before the Fall, when we were beautiful
And shameless, and untouched by memory:
Before we were driven out to the laboring world
Of the money and the garbage and the kids

In which we read this nonsense and are moved
At all that was always lost for good, in which
We think about sex obsessively except
During the act, when our minds tend to wander.

Current Tea: iced Thai chai (green tea blended with coconut, ginger and lemongrass)