Poem of the Day

I found this one in 180 More (surprise!) and I thought I’d post it because it’s been raining here for several days and is supposed to keep raining all week. I can’t say that I’ve spent any time outside brooding over my sucky life, though. (ha ha ha)

Why it Often Rains in the Movies
By Lawrence Raab

Because so much consequential thinking
happens in the rain. A steady mist
to recall departures, a bitter downpour
for betrayal. As if the first thing
a man wants to do when he learns his wife
is sleeping with his best friend, and has been
for years, the very first thing
is not to make a drink, and drink it,
and make another, but to walk outside
into bad weather. It’s true
that the way we look doesn’t always
reveal our feelings. Which is a problem
for the movies. And why somebody has to smash
a mirror, for example, to show he’s angry
and full of self-hate, whereas actual people
rarely do this. And rarely sit on benches
in the pouring rain to weep. Is he wondering
why he didn’t see it long ago? Is he wondering
if in fact he did, and lied to himself?
And perhaps she also saw the many ways
he’d allowed himself to be deceived. In this city
it will rain all night. So the three of them
return to their houses, and the wife
and her lover go upstairs to bed
while the husband takes a small black pistol
from a drawer, turns it over in his hands,
the puts it back. Thus demonstrating
his inability to respond to passion
with passion. But we don’t want him
to shoot his wife, or his friend, or himself.
And we’ve begun to suspect
that none of this is going to work out,
that we’ll leave the theater feeling
vaguely cheated, just as the movie,
turning away from the husband’s sorrow,
leaves him to be a man who must continue,
day after day, to walk outside into the rain,
outside and back again, since now there can be
nowhere in this world for him to rest.

I read this one in 180 More. As a big Johnny Cash fan, I was intrigued by the title. Here’s a link to the Hurt video on YouTube. The song lyrics (among others) are alluded to in this poem. If you haven’t listened to much of Johnny Cash’s music, I can’t recommend it enough! Whatever you’re interested in, it’s possible he’s done something that will appeal to you: rockabilly, Gospel, country, folk, etc.

To Roanoke with Johnny Cash
By Bob Hicok

Mist became rain became fog was mist
reborn every few miles on a road
made of s and z, of switchback

and falling into mountains of night
would have been easy and who
would have known until flames

and nobody, even then. I played his life
over and over, not so much song
as moan of a needle and the bite,

the hole it eats through the arm
and drove faster to the murmur
of this dead and crow-dressed man,

voice of prison and heroin and the bible
as turned by murdering hands.
And the road was the color of him

and the night was blind but the mist
turned blaze in headlights as I haunted
myself with one of the last songs

he sang, about what else, about pain
and death and regret and the fall
that was the soul of the man.

I’ve been on hiatus for so long, that I feel I need to share poems from my favorites, so here’s one from NSN.

Alone
By Naomi Shihab Nye

He grows used to the sound of the floor
Not yet   Not yet   each evening
right before the news comes on.

Then the killing and the stabbing
and the beating and the crashing.
Turn it off. There’s a smudge on the wall,
a Jesus with a blazing heart.

His coffee cup waits
upside down on its plate.
The shape of dinner tastes upside down.
He eats whatever the nurse-lady left him,
the hamburger in its three-day shirt.
Sometimes he doesn’t know the name
of what he eats.

He hauls his body to the porch,
sinks his eyes into the weeds.
A hose curls in the lilies.
If he could reach it,
make it down
those three crooked steps…

When his wife died he was very quiet
for one day. Then he smiled
and smiled with his two teeth
for the bad time they had
that was over.

His tongue could sound Soledad or Solamente
for his bones and his blood and his few good hairs.

When the drop of water on the white sink
meets the next drop and they are joining,
he thinks of other ways to spend this life
that he didn’t do. He would like to meet them.

This one was shared by a poetry buddy from GoodReads. I like the idea of used books, but I will confess that sometimes I don’t really enjoy the odors associated with them. I like to think of the different people that may have read the book, though.

Used Books
By Sarah Jane Sloat

I like them dog-eared and lawnsoft,
and savor the character of winestain
and thumbsmudge,

the tear-warp between pages,
scrawl lolling down margins,

x’s, question and check marks
scratched out as anchors.

They kindle affinity with readers
who’ve leafed through before, house

a kinship of signatures, conjuring towns
and streets in states I’ll never visit.

They preach the economy of timber
and purses, while scribbled dates

evoke evenings spent couch-lounging
through past springs and winters.

Though they come off the press crisp
and unsullied, I like them used

for the gust of tinder and sawdust,
the waft of feathers adrift in a hayloft.

I turn the yellow hem of the pages,
a hue half neon, half tubercular,

like the wallpaper of a motel
nicotine-thick with confessions

where with the fray, I find repose
under covers well plumbed
and sepulchral.