Paula Bohince

[from Paula Bohince's Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, Sarabande, 2008]

Longlegs

Abdomen small as a mole
on a cheek, as magnetic, but mostly near
nothing — transparent limbs
stilt-walking through the cracked-open window and into
the sunroom where Father,
thin as his mattress, tosses on the bony cot.

Longlegs, drawn by such heat
and sweat, wracked inhales,
exhales, tumbles toward his face,

a frail monster unafraid of the lingering smell
of hand-fed pigeons, the kerosene jug's
glistening mouth.

Soon this will all be over, soon . . .

Button at my throat, ruffle
at my feet, I look to its shadow long on the sheet,
then to its body,
a kernel, something to be crushed,

woods' chill seeping in
over all I cannot touch: the unlovely man, the whistle
coming through time, the pond
I'd run from, into his arms.

Emily Wilson

[from Emily Wilson's Micrographia, Iowa, 2009]

Sunset: Rouen?

Just to the left and down from
the central engagements
— clock-tower, vaults of the long mauve bridge
sun and its correlate
swashes come back
to prime, spurred
cathedral, ceding
carmine, chartreuse up against it.
The horses stand in their traces.
Their wagon floats at the dark wharf-fringe.
Fused through the loads, watermarks, persons or poles,
soldered spots that are shadows
or breaks at the junctures of reeds,
scarcely at home in themselves, stationing there,
forced to make reddish banks red
they have been horses —
the fixing of them in grit-grass —
strangely set off.
Ramparts ruck over the underside slips.
What are they waiting for?
The edge of the picture unsettles,
tricks itself forth
like the passage in which is restored
your miniature boy
ritually combed and folded.
A few fawn strokes still to be
harbored as horses.

Toi Derricotte

[from Toi Derricotte's The Empress of the Death House, Lotus, 1991]

The Feeding

My grandmother
haunted the halls
above Webster's Funeral
Home like a red-
gowned ghost. Til dawn
I'd see her spectral
form — henna-hair
blown back,
green eyes:
tameless.

She was proud.
Like God,
I swore I'd love her.
At night we whispered
how we hated mother
and wished that I could
live with her.

In the morning while she slept,
I'd pluck
costume diamonds
form a heart-shaped chest,
try her tortoise combs
and hairpins in my hair.
She'd wake
and take me to her bed.

Maroon-quilted, eider-downed,
I drowned.
Rocking on her wasted breast,
I'd hear her tell me
how she nursed my father
til he was old enough to ask.

Then, she'd draw me
to her — ask me
if she still had milk.
Yes. I said, yes.
Feeding on the sapless
lie,
even now
the taste of emptiness
weights my mouth.

Stephanie Anderson

[from Stephanie Anderson's In the Particular Particular, New Michigan Press, 2007]

Winter Slaughter

My omnivore, we will eat all but
squeal. I brought you home head-first
in sack, sight-weak one. You barged

scrap-fed with acorn and milk.
Grew long in your board slab
pen. I was glad you could not

see the gun as I sharpened the sticking
knives, skinning knives. In February —
crushing rosin under brick and iron.

We boil water over tires; tub-cradle you
and rub with chains. Hand scrape your nooks,
gaff the hoofs, work in the lime.

At last, you hang burnished and clean.
When I go to fill signal lanterns, I will pocket
you paper-wrapped and larded.

Marilyn Hacker

[from "A Conversation with Marilyn Hacker," an Annie Finch interview of Marilyn Hacker, in Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form, eds. Annie Finch and Susan M. Schultz, Textos, 2008]

MH: When Tom Disch and I were doing sonnets, we were doing Shakespearean sonnets where, except for the couplet, you were rhyming with yourself. I wrote the a line and he would write the b line; however, you didn't see the line that was going before yours, you were just told by the other person that "I wrote a line that ends with a preposition indicating direction," or "I have given a proper noun. Follow it with a verb." or "I have given a prepositional phrase that requires a direct object. Provied a direct object." And go on from there. For the couplet, whoever wrote the first line had to give the second person the rhyme. The couplet of one of these sonnets -- and one person wrote one line and the other person wrote the second line without having seen the other line was, "The road reels by in millions of white flashes / like checks from out of state that no one cashes," which I think is a great American couplet. It's published in a tiny little chapbook that we brought out, called Highway Sandwiches.

John Berryman

[a description of John Berryman writing "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" from Paul Mariani's Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, William Morrow, 1990]

Berryman began writing the poem at white heat. Each day he went to his studio to write a single stanza: no more, no less. By then he had hundreds of detached lines and notes, and he worked each piece over, stitching lines together into eight-line stanzas on an erasable, glassine-covered wax pad. He placed the fragments he already had beneath the glassine and then worked at connecting his lines and revising each stanza. At lunchtime he descended to his apartment with his new stanza and read it over and over to Eileen, then returned to the studio to work at it again. At dinner, elated and exhausted, he read the revised stanza to her again.

Joshua Poteat

[from Joshua Poteat's Ornithologies, Anhinga, 2006]

The Angels Continue Turning the Wheels of the Universe Despite Their Ugly Souls
(Malvern Hill Battleground)
                                 — after Alice Aycock

There is truth in the phrase, the dead are at ease under the fields.

Autumn is what seizes it. A field of dried cotton stalks
                 have a grace in the wind only the dead can love,
and so, belief comes simple, rendering not a season
                 but stalk against stalk,

poor cousin-song of crickets,
                 poor furrow-in-the-gut, little nothing-at-all.

At least it will snow soon, goes the cotton's rattled melody,
                 and this field beyond the city, flooded by night,
turns blue in the first frost as the ghosts of past crops
                 bridle upon it.

I give the field ghosts, and the wind eggs them on —
                 corn and sweet potato, tobacco and bean —
hovering the mule-plough of two hundred years.

So much for truth.

It's the least I can do since I cannot for the life of me
                 think of anything but the thin curtains of a hospital room
and an X-ray of my crooked spine pinned to a wall of light,

the sweet milk of vertebrae, my own skull
                 frowning back at me, such a cold cup of jaw,
so white I could have easily drunk myself.

What a desire, to take one's self in, to unravel
                 the body's red yarn shapes and deceive the plague
of boundless hunger, to imagine this cotton field as bone
                 ready for the gin, rib and wrist and collar,

all tenderhearted stars,
                 inexact, held up to the light of no moon, no cloud.

This is me scattered in the furrows, I thought.
This is me, marrowless and fluff, grub-eaten.

I don't believe in much. Not the descent and re-ascent
                 of the soul . . . the palace of the kingdom of the dead . . .

So much for desire.

I have seen those X-rays of Velasquez, the hidden layers
                 illuminated to reveal six ghost-versions of hands along the rim
of an egg bowl, six different plates of fish and garlic,
                 a dwarf's blind face formed into the severed head of a pig,
then back to a dwarf, leaving the pig's wondrous eyes.

A bird later becomes a peach in the mouth of a jug,
                 and this is how I feel about the world at the moment.

Troppo vero, said Pope Innocent in a letter
                 to Velasquez of his portraits. Too faithful.

Representation is all we are in the end, I guess, and then some.

Charred ivory: muller stone: horse-hair:
                 white lead: madder: massicot.
This is me.

It is almost winter, here in the leftover cotton
                 that once held the thousand luminous angels of desire
as they curled inward towards a truth

unlike any flame they had seen.

This must be how the soldiers slept,
                 with the night all around them
and their bodies knowing where it was.

And this must be how the deer moved
                 over the fields long after the battle, drinking frost
from the eyes of the dead with their small pink tongues.

Oh dwarf, oh king, oh skeleton of mine,
                 will I ever feel your wings between my hands again?

Kate Greenstreet

[from Kate Greenstreet's case sensitive, Ahsahta, 2006]

Salt (excerpt)

2 [was known to have been made]

She was on the medicine for grief.
"Even if they don't die, it doesn't help much."

Grit of salt around her chair.
Basically, a question you have to ask yourself.

Can you shut the eye with something in it and continue?
"Most commonly, this transformation takes

the form of disappearances
of persons."

What do we share
that can help us?

"In the very distant
universe,

Objects
even older than light."

Manifold
destiny. A kind of song. Escape

with what you are. Walking,
talking, for a thousand miles . . .

"Some may not need gold, but who
does not need salt?" And sometime after,

felt the need to write.
Wherewith will it be salted?

Why bring it up again? Red eyes,
read for meaning.

The buried ring, marked map, "the consolation
of religion."

Things go together because they are together.
It's a challenge to the spirit that cleans the spirit.

Snow on the cold side
of the fence.

Isn't that the definition
of sense?

Ingeborg Bachman

[from Ingeborg Bachmann's Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems, tr. Peter Filkins, Zephyr, 2006]

March Stars

Still it's too early for sowing. Fields
surface in rain, March stars appear.
Like an afterthought, the universe submits
to familiar equations, such as the light
that falls but leaves the snow untouched.

Under the snow there will also be dust
and, what doesn't disintegrate, the dust's
later nourishment. O wind, picking up.
Again the plows rip open the darkness.
Each new day will want to be longer.

It's on long days that we are sown,
unasked, in those neat and crooked rows,
as stars sink away above. In fields
we thrive or rot without a choice,
submitting to rain and also at last the light

C. P. Cavafy

[from C. P. Cavafy's The Unfinished Poems, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009]

Antiochus the Cyzicene

The people of Syria put up with him:
as long as someone stronger doesn't come along.
And what is "Syria"? It barely comes to half;
what with the little kingdoms, with John Hyrcanus,
with the cities that are declaring their independence.

It seems the realm once began, the historians say,
at the Aegean and went right up to India.
From the Aegean right up to India! Patience.
Let's have a look at those puppets,
the animals he's brought us.

Mary Jo Bang

[from Mary Jo Bang's The Bride of E, Graywolf, 2009]

Death and Disappearance

A plague. The population shaped by the spread.
The meeting with mammals whose bones are not found
Upright anymore. The slow pandemic and its subsequent
Effect. The unusually high rate of devastation.

Winter and spring. Take any year and it's possible to infer
The purple spots on abdomen or limbs.
The overwhelming priority. The impoverishment with
Every outbreak. The corpses in recurrent waves.

A pyre burning the molecular biology
Of the virulent strain and taking with it the haunting evocation
Of a face. A cluster of cases provides whatever
With no knowledge of exactly how. With no possible

Undermining flowering of certainty. The dark outsider status
Of the mechanical animal. Gear churn. Lung bellow.
A foot thumping in the rib cage. Back and forth.
The limited skills for finding what can no longer be seen.

Only a surround where one feels seriously cheated.
As if beat handily. As if exploited. As if a wide variety of poses
That resemble manikins. The fascinating nature of
The stratagems of staggering forward with exhaustion

Into the final further line of inquiry.
The body becoming meat and bone and the iconographic
Culture saturated with reaction. The subject itself
Now manifested in any number of ways as a formless arc.

Swaddled in the basic fact of layers of purpose
That simply become profoundly brutal. The aura escaping
Description except as an empire of trouble where cells line up
To meet the edge where the car takes the body away.

Ana Božičević

[from Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute, Tarpaulin Sky, 2009]

Spoken by a Piece of Gum on the Open-Air Platform

Comes a thing better
than names: this piece of wire
angling from the trash-yard door:

a mobile, a thinness! Early on,
we find out, via stomach:
it's better to be green, or wire, or

gum. Our landscape is all thrust:
skyscrapers. Avalanche. Even
Sebastian —     — Sorry,

that name's an
empty
water bottle. Someday its sound

will be emblem
of my temperance. But now?
it's sorrow.

Sherman Alexie

[from Sherman Alexie's Face, Hanging Loose, 2009]

The Sum of His Parts

Driving home, I ran over a bull snake
And tore it into three pieces.

I didn't mean to kill the thing.
I'd thought it was the thin shadow

Of a telephone pole stretched across the road.
I realized it was a snake

Only after I'd run it over.
Thump, thump:

That's the percussion
Of car tires and snake.

After I ran over it, I stopped,
Left the car idling,

And walked back
To the three pieces of snake.

In death-shock, the head and tail
Thrashed separately

Against the pavement
That had been its warm rock.

The middle piece, strange
And disconnected, did not move.

I said a prayer
To the Snake God,

And wondered if such a God exists.
That's theology.

If the Snake God does exist,
Then it is likely the same

As every other God:
Unreachable.

I didn't want the snake's body to be insulted
By other cars and their drivers,

So I dragged the tail off the road to the west
And the head off the road to the east,

But could not touch the middle piece
Because it was flattened and gory.

Satisfied that I'd shown the snake
Enough respect, I drove away.

But two miles up the road, I turned
Around and traveled back to the snake.

I don't know if there is a Snake Heaven,
But I didn't want the snake to suffer

because of my doubts.
If the snake's three pieces arrived

separately in Heaven,
Would any of them be able to find the others?

I dragged the tail and middle
Across the road and laid them beside the head

Because snake + snake + snake = snake.

Jane Kenyon

[from Jane Kenyon's Otherwise, Graywolf, 1996]

From the Back Steps

A bird begins to sing,
hesitates, like a carpenter
pausing to straighten a nail, then
begins again.
The cat lolls in the shade
under the parked car, his head
in the wheel's path.
I bury the thing I love.

But the cat continues to lie
comfortably, right where he is,
and no one will move the car.
My own violence falls away
like paint peeling from a wall.
I am choosing a new color
to paint my house, though I'm still
not sure what the color will be.


Afternoon in the House

It's quiet here. The cats
sprawl, each
in a favored place.
The geranium leans this way
to see if I'm writing about her:
head all petals, brown
stalks, and those green fans.
So you see,
I am writing about you.

I turn on the radio. Wrong.
Let's not have any noise
in this room, except
the sound of a voice reading a poem.
The cats request
The Meadow Mouse, by Theodore Roethke.

The house settles down on its haunches
for a doze.
I know you are with me, plants,
and cats -- and even so, I'm frightened,
sitting in the middle of perfect possibility.

Douglas Oliver

[from Douglas Oliver's Three Variations on the Theme of Harm, Paladin, 1990]

The Heron

I talk only of voices either real or virtual in my ear:
of shadows, only those that pass over islands' sunny turf
vivid to my eye. But when I come to all my birds,
all I've ever seen, they are too many. I talk of things unseen.

Together, they would pack the sky like moving embroidery
in the white silks, browns and blacks of their great tribe,
endless litters of puppies writhing,
a heavenly roof alive but no progress of flight in it.

Every memory adds to this intricate plot;
starting up redshanks first, and they bank, flashing white,
across a sepia estuary where I felt freedom
in watching their undulating patterns on the air.

They flight down but hold at mid-height: horizontal
stick puppets of the Styx. The black light whitens
with the harmonious wings of swan formations,
the day cast over with their bright feathering.

Behind the swans the sky absolutely fills with starlings
homing to roost as once I saw them over Stonehenge;
gulls flock up and hold there, and brown passeriformes
spring between airspaces and stop of invisible branches.

Millions of birds, crows and daws, teal,
quicker wing-beated than wigeon, among mallard hordes;
swifts print arrows on the pulsating featheriness;
the sky is covered over with the puppy litters.

I can't tell you all the names; I'm worried
about the birds rabbling the sky. D'you suppose
I can avoid even the dusty body of every sparrow,
or every sparrow hawk flipping over a thicket?

Unseen, this nature crowds my mind. If there's pulsation,
it's disturbing; if stasis it's a painting
and all the life goes out; but any sudden switch
between pulse and the static is schizophrenic.

In the foreground of the multifarious flights
one talismanic bird, a heron, lifts to the top
of its single leg and takes off like an umbrella.
Fluff in a corner of the past becomes grey flame.

Its shoulders unshackle and heave, legs become the addendum,
the beak stabs out purposefully from the sunken neck.
It sails. In this flight's brevity,
I find what lives for me among all the dead songs.

Louise Gluck

[from Louise Gluck's A Village Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009]

Confession

He steals sometimes, because they don't have their own tree
and he loves fruit. Not steals exactly —
he pretends he's an animal; he eats off the ground,
as the animals would eat. This is what he tells the priest,
that he doesn't think it should be a sin to take what would just lie there and rot,
this year like every other year.

As a man, as a human being, the priest agrees with the boy,
but as a priest he chastises him, though the penance is light,
so as to not kill off imagination: what he'd give
to a much younger boy who took something that wasn't his.

But the boy objects. He's willing to do the penance
because he likes the priest, but he refuses to believe that Jesus
gave this fig tree to this woman; he wants to know
what Jesus does with all the money he gets from real estate,
not just in this village but in the whole country.

Partly he's joking but partly he's serious
and the priest gets irritated — he's out of his depth with this boy,
he can't explain that though Christ doesn't deal in property,
still the fig tree belongs to the woman, even if she never picks the figs.
Perhaps one day, with the boy's encouragement,
the woman will become a saint and share her fig tree and her big house with strangers,
but for the moment she's a human being whose ancestors built this house.

The priest is pleased to have moved the conversation away from money,
which makes him nervous, and back to words like family or tradition,
where he feels more secure. The boy stares at him —
he knows perfectly well the ways in which he's taken advantage of a senile old lady,
the ways he's tried to charm the priest, to impress him. But he despises
speeches like the one beginning now;
he wants to taunt the priest with his own flight: if he loves family so much,
why didn't the priest marry as his parents married, continue the line from which he came.

But he's silent. The words that mean there will be
no questioning, no trying to reason — those words have been uttered.
"Thank you, Father," he says.

David Bromige

[from David Bromige's Desire: Selected Poems, 1963-1987, Dutton, 1989]

The Romance of the Automobile

It's dark. But there's a moon. You're lonely.
You've got me. You can't stay where you are.
You don't give me a thought, & climb inside
turn me on, & off we go,
me all around you, moving you
while you sit still, up & down
the ground I keep you lifted from,
across the distance that your friends call you.

Though I can't see
with these things much like eyes
I let you find the way.
Let you see what you might hit & miss.
Let you feel you're in control.
Let you make me go so fast
you can't control me quite as well,
or maybe not at all.
So I get you where you go.

And if it's where you planned,
I've sheltered you from what came down,
proved useful, helped save a life maybe,
unless someone like you got in our way.

You've felt a strength, obeying me
while free to think of things along the way.
An irritation or anxiety,
if something's wrong with me,
that is, if I need fixing.

And here we are. You can get out,
and stretch, as though to throw me off,
as though I were around you, yet
I'm evidently not. You've turned me off,
locked me up, pocketed the key
and left me in the dark.
You've got me where you want me.
As if I were a car.

Elizabeth Carothers Herron

[from Elizabeth Carothers Herron's In the Pockets of the Night, 1994]

Window

Bring your ladder. We'll set up a sky,
a mountain in the house. Blue rain
will water the shag rug. Moonlight will spill
and slant through the window
so the bed is milk-white and warm and wet
and I'll have to swim in the covers
sleeping a dream of rainbow and steelhead
spawning. I'll hear the last

of summer whisper holy and familiar names:
coyote bush, sticky monkey flower,
gravenstein, blackberry,
salmon berry, tarweed, quince.
And behind the wind
the warm breath of Indian Summer
autumn on her heels, will puff a haze
of golden heat over the swimming bed, the soaked

shag. Whispers of zucchini squash and roses,
liquid amber turning her leaves with a sweet shudder
Whispers of longer nights and last fling holidays.
Whispers of blacktail buck huffing
around elusive does, and squirrels
stashing the seeds of cones high
in winter hollows. All this
when you cut out the wall and wait
before you put the window in! Your legs
will be rubbery with the rush of it,
the flood of it, the swell and sigh of what
we hardly hear inside. All this, if you
take your big saw and your hammer,
your catspaw and wedge, up the ladder
into my room.

Taha Muhammad Ali

[from Taha Muhammad Ali's So What: New & Selected Poems, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, 1971-2005], Copper Canyon, 2006]

Ambergris

Our traces have all been erased,
our impressions swept away —
and all the remains have been effaced . . .
there isn't a single sign
left to guide us
or show us a thing.
The age has grown old,
the days long,
and I, if not for the lock of your hair,
auburn as the nectar of carob,
and soft as the scent of silk
that was here before,
dozing like Arabian jasmine,
shimmering like the gleam of dawn,
pulsing like a star —
I, if not for that lock of camphor,
would not feel a thing
linking me
to this land.

—

This land is a traitor
and can't be trusted.
This land doesn't remember love.
This land is a whore
holding out a hand to the years,
as it manages a ballroom
on the harbor pier —
it laughs in every language
and bit by bit, with its hip,
feeds all who come to it.

This land denies,
cheats, and betrays us;
its dust can't bear us
and grumbles about us —
resents and detests us.
Its newcomers,
sailors, and usurpers,
uproot the backyard gardens,
burying the trees.

They keep us from looking too long
at the anemone blossom and cyclamen,
and won't allow us to touch the herbs,
the wild artichoke and chicory.

—

Our land makes love to the sailors
and strips naked before the newcomers;
it rests its head along the usurper's thigh,
is disgraced and defiled in its sundry accents;
there seems to be nothing that would bind it to us,
and I — if not for the lock of your hair,
auburn as the nectar of carob,
and soft as the scent of silk,
if not for the camphor,
if not for the musk and the sweet basil,
if not for the ambergris —
I would not know it,
and would not love it,
and would not go near it.

—

Your braid
is the only thing
linking me, like a noose, to this whore.

                                                     10.III.1983

Charles Olson

[from Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems, University of California, 1983]

"at the boundary of the mighty world" H. (T) 620 foll.

                    Now Called Gravel Hill -- dogs eat
                                                             gravel

                    Gravelly hill 'father' Pelops otherwise known as
Mud Face founder of
Dogtown. That sort of 'reason': leave things alone.
As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity
for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody
by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc.
That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill
or any sort of situation for improvement, when
the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden
tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia
let you take a breath of April showers
let's us reason how is the dampness in your
nasal passage -- but I have had lunch
in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to
                    George Girdler Smith
                        'gentleman'
                          1799, for
                            £ 150)

overlooking
'the town'
sitting there like
the Memphite lord of
all Creation

with my back -- with Dogtown
over the Crown of
gravelly hill

It is not bad
to be pissed off

where there is any
condition imposed, by whomever, no matter how close

any
quid pro quo
get out. Gravelly Hill says
leave me be, I am contingent, the end of the world
is the borders
of my being

I can even tell you
where I run out; and you can find
out. I lie here
so many feet up
from the end of an old creek
which used to run off
the Otter ponds. There is a bridge
of old heavy slab stones
still crossing the creek on
the 'Back Road' about three rods
from where I do end northerly, and from my Crown
you may observe, in fact Jeremiah Millett's
generous pasture
which, in fact, in the first 'house'
(of Dogtown) is a part of the slide of
my back, to the East: it isn't so decisive
how one thing does end
and another begin to be very obviously dull about it
I should like to take the time to be dull
there is obviously much to be done and the fire department
rushed up here one day -- they called it
Bull Field in the newspaper -- when just that
side of me I am talking about,
which belonged to Jeremiah Millett
and rises up rather sharply
-- it became Mr Pulsifer's and then,
1799, the property of the town
of Gloucester -- was burned off.
My point is, the end of myself,
happens, on the east side (Erechthonios)
to be the beginning of another set
of circumstance. The road,
which has gone aroundme, swings
just beyond where Jeremiah Millett had his house
and there's a big rock about ends my being,
properly, swings
to the northeast, and makes its way
generally staying northeast in direction
to Dogtown's Square or the rear of
William Smallman's
house where rocks pile up
darkness, in a cleft in the earth
made of a perfect pavement
                    Dogtown Square
of rocks alone March, the holy month
                     (the holy month,
                      LXIII
of nothing but black granite turned
every piece,
downward, to darkness,
to chill and darkness. From which the height above it even
in such a fearful congery
with a dominant rock like a small mountain
above the Hellmouth the back of Smallmans is
that this source and end of the way from the town into
the woods is only -- as I am the beginning, and Gaia's
child -- katavothra. Here you enter
darkness. Far away from me, to the northeast,
and higher than I, you enter
the Mount,
which looks merry,
and you go up into it
feels the very same as the corner
where the rocks all are
even smoking a cigarette on the mount
nothing around you, not even the sky
relieves the pressure of this declivity
which is so rich and packed.
It is Hell's mouth
where Dogtown ends
(on the lower
of two roads into
the woods.
I am the beginning
on this side
nearest the town
and it -- this paved hole in the earth
is the end (boundary
Disappear.

Paul Guest

[from Paul Guest's Notes for My Body Double, University of Nebraska, 2007]

At Last

All day I wanted, I ached, to tell
you of the rabbit dead in the road
and how the whole day I marked
time with its evisceration —
if at first I had touched its flank
or its sleek ears tucked back,
I would have taken the last measure
of its warmth. The ghost
of its abortive bound would be near.
And later when its torso
began to show, when its pelt was peeled
and its innards unspooled,
I didn't grieve. Flies had come
and in their noise, in their work,
they glittered. The flesh
seemed to sink with the sun
and I thought to tell you
that night at the door,
taking whatever you held
into my arms, at last I've kept
vigil over something,
over ruin, come see, come see, come see.
In the cuff of the wind
white petals sloughed
from the branches of the gnarled dogwood,
the tree I was taught
Christ's cross was cut from.
If once I believed
in so much holy ruin,
there was none to be found there.
And this was right.
In the matted entrails
of the slaughtered,
whoever thought to know the future
in the slick, wet coils
never saw me keeping watch
in the failing light
for the dead to vanish and you to appear.

H. D.

[from H. D.'s Collected Poems, 1912-1944, New Directions, 1986]

Hermes of the Ways

The hard sand breaks,
and the grains of it
are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it,
the wind,
playing on the wide shore,
piles little ridges,
and the great waves
break over it.

But more than the many-foamed ways
of the sea,
I know him
of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
who awaits.

Dubious,
facing three ways,
welcoming wayfarers,
he whom the sea-orchard
shelters from the west,
from the east
weathers sea-wind;
fronts the great dunes.

Wind rushes
over the dunes,
and the coarse, salt-crusted grass
answers.

Heu,
it whips round my ankles!

II

Small is
this white stream,
flowing below ground
from the poplar-shaded hill,
but the water is sweet.

Apples on the small trees
are hard,
too small,
too late ripened
by a desperate sun
that struggles through sea-mist.

The boughs of the trees
are twisted
by many bafflings;
twisted are
the small-leafed boughs.

But the shadow of them
is not the shadow of the mast head
nor of the torn sails.

Hermes, Hermes,
the great sea foamed,
gnashed its teeth about me;
but you have waited,
where sea-grass tangles with
shore-grass.

Robert Bly

[from Robert Bly's My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, Harper Collins, 2005]

Hiding in a Drop of Water

It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for
A while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.
I am ready to praise all the great musicians.

Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.
Surely you must have realized this from hearing
The way the strings cry out no matter who hits them.

From the great oak trees in the yard in October,
Leaves fall for hours each day. Every night
A thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.

Still we know that at any second the soul can stand
Up and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up
Riding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.

It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.
It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water
That lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.

Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
Stops turning, you will still be way up
There, swinging in your seat and laughing.

Eknath Easwaran

[from Eknath Easwaran's The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Volume 3: To Love Is to Know Me, Nilgiri, 1988]

Living in separateness means being dominated by private urges, trying to have our own way and do only what we like, unable to see what cries out to be done for the welfare of the world around us. When this darkness becomes deep enough, we can't see which direction to go; we will always be losing our way, never coming out at all. When we decide to say no to private, personal urges, we start to enter a world of light where the path is clear. We know where we are going, and we can travel safely and surely.

Barbara Guest

[from Barbara Guest's Collected Poems, ed. Hadley Haden Guest, Wesleyan, 2008]

Cape Canaveral

Fixed in my new wig
the green grass side
                hanging down
I impart to my silences
                operas.

Climate cannot impair
                neither the gray clouds nor the black waters
the change in my hair.

Covered with straw or alabaster
I'm inured against weather.
The vixen's glare, the tear on the flesh
covered continent where the snake
withers happily and the nude deer
antler glitters, neither shares
my rifled ocean growth
                polar and spare.

Eyes open
       spinning pockets
for the glass harpoons
       lying under my lids
       icy as summers

Nose ridges
       where the glaciers melt
into my autumnal winter-fed cheek
hiding its shudder in this kelp
                glued
                cracked as the air.

Jed Rasula

[from Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum, National Council of Teachers of English, 1996]

the attenuated lyric personalism that is the dominant workshop mode has constricted the range of expression and blotted out the diversity of ethnopoetic traditions. John Koethe's analysis is astute: "Writing programs are not usually 'schools,'" he points out. But, "[i]n the absence of explicitly articulated theoretical principles regarding the nature and purpose of poetry, they inculcate, by default, a poetics of the 'individual voice' that valorizes authenticity and fidelity to its origins in prepoetic experience or emotion." In other words, ethnic diversity at the applicant and trainee level does not automatically translate into poetic diversity. So the writing programs have become a safe haven, a refuge from the sociocultural perplexities signified by "theory" and "postmodernism" (not to mention "late capitalism"), promoting a return to the now paradoxically reassuring anxieties of self-doubt.

Lucia Perillo

[from Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant, Copper Canyon, 2009]

Snowstorm with Inmates and Dogs

The prison kennel's tin roof howls
while the dogs romp outside through the flakes.
The inmates trained a dog to lift my legs --
for months they rolled the concrete floor
in wheelchairs, simulating.

Through a window I watch them cartwheel now,
gray sweatpants rising against the whitened hill
traversed by wire asterisks and coils.
At first I feared they pitied me,
the way I flinched at the building's smell.

Now the tin roof howls, the lights go off
to the sound of locking doors. Go on, breathe --
no way the machinery of my lungs
is going to plow the county road.
Didn't I try to run over a guy,

spurned love being the kindling stick that rubbed
against his IOUs? Easy to land here,
anyone could -- though I think laughter
would elude me, no matter what the weather.
Compared to calculating how far to the road.

Signs there say: CORRECTIONS CENTER DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.
My instructions were: Accept no notes or photographs,
and restrict the conversation to such topics as
how to teach the dog to nudge
the light switch with his nose.

Now the women let their snowballs fly -- as if
the past were a simple matter that could splat and melt.
Only my red dog turns his head
toward the pines beyond the final fence
before the generator chugs to life.

poets who have won the MacArthur

[my thanks to Emily Lloyd for this list]

Despite my raging joy that Heather McHugh has won half a million dollars, I deplore prize giving of all kinds because of the implied value judgments, politics, social bias, cultural pressure, category exclusions, etc.

Below is a chronological list of poets who have won the MacArthur.

How many of these poets have you heard of? How many have you read? How many have taught you things you value? What do your answers say about your position in or out of the poetry mainstream? What poets are not on the list who would be on your list? What is your response to the enthronement of poets (or anyone) in this fashion?

I highly recommend Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum for a fascinating contrarian view of the poetry policy makers of the 20th century.

Poets who have won the MacArthur:

A.R. Ammons
Joseph Brodsky
Derek Walcott
Robert Penn Warren
Brad Leithauser
A.K. Ramanujan
Robert Hass
Charles Simic
Galway Kinnell
John Ashbery
Daryl Hine
Jay Wright
Douglas Crase
Richard Kenney
Mark Strand
May Swenson
Allen Grossman
Jorie Graham
John Hollander
Alice Fulton
Eleanor Wilner
Amy Clampitt
Irving Feldman
Thom Gunn
Ann Lauterbach
Jim Powell
Adrienne Rich
Sandra Cisneros
Richard Howard
Thylias Moss
Susan Stewart
Linda Bierds
Edward Hirsch
Ishmael Reed
Campbell McGrath
Anne Carson
Lucia Perillo
C.D. Wright
Peter Cole
Heather McHugh

Karen Volkman

[from Karen Volkman's Crash's Law, Norton, 1996]

Persephone at Home

No good reflecting on what might have been
if I'd been different -- no straying
after foreign flowers, no hunger
for bitter fruit. In the beginning --

such a child -- I thought it punishment,
not fate. It is daylight I miss
mainly. What we are granted of sun here
is a dim relentless red. I wander

the reeking river, I pat
fat Cerberus on his many manic heads.
The moldy skiff makes its incessant
prompt arrivals, so efficient,

our dutiful Charon growling orders
from the prow. Huge-eyed, uncomprehending,
the new recruits stare round. Wives still
clutching their washing, wailing children,

soldiers blood-stained and battered
from the latest engagement.
Then that blessed briny sip, welcome
oblivion -- they're blank as babies.

All nights the shrieks of the tortured serenade
our marriage bed. Once it lulled
me rigid. For years after that
first celebrated rape,

I lay cold beneath his coldness,
stiff in his stiff embrace.
I'll give no prince to this kingdom.
That thing is dead.

For years, he broke me for it.
For years, I bled and bled.
That was then. Queen
of his blasphemous backwater,

I make my claim. On earth,
I am virginal abundance, fat and full.
Here, bony and empty, I straddle
my killer, my captor, my grief, my bane,

and tear and take
the torn lip, the raked neck, the aching thighs,
that will remind me
through the long black morning

I am alive.


White Lily

Gnomish in its rounded hunch
of greeny folds, three-fourths of the year
it resembles a weed. Now spring's

unseasonable heat
brings vindication. Trumpet
over frilled, frail trumpet

spills its bone-white notes
in April air. Below, in shadow --
shrunken, overawed -- skulks

the novice rosebush
we rooted in the fall. This
spendthrift, who's squandered

brilliant buds for months,
today knows the earthy weight
of morning-after. Our double

hibiscus, also, pinkly plumed,
succumbed to a plumber's truck
that veered too soon. But the lily

in her straight ascetic's
rigid pose, white as the ember
of a low, enduring fire

takes her pleasure like
the wife of the pastor
come to bed -- prim in her cotton frock

throughout the day, precise
in her firm instructions
to the maid, who cradled

in the rough caress of muslin sheets
bares her stoic shoulders to the room
and seizes in her strong white legs

the truant moon.

Anne Waldman

[from Anne Waldman's Manatee/Humanity, Penguin Books, 2009]

& in the dream it was wolves all the way down,
             wolf pack thrashing & gnawing at the corpses of other animals
cannibal heaven
misunderstood
a small splash, a chill

an eye caught
trapped!
stare!
quick!
             shift!
metallic shimmer
   cloaks & hoods of the imposters
rent apart by wolves
   "I am a youth with golden cymbals dancing"
then one, turns
              to me as in blame
would you come to my rescue?

reliable humans? would you?
  notice animals dressed as humans now, imposter humans

             strewn out on the charnel ground, clothed
battered & trying to be animal again, scratch wolf-eyes off the facade of human


images of many ravage sites flash by
       as if there is atavistic memory
creation of a perceptual world of death & destruction
long evolutionary gestation of death & destruction

                      we stopped to observe (my companion always with me now);
cougar, head snapped
entrails ripped out . . . & spread all around
those parts not eaten
cougar cups eviscerated, killer instinct or survival

what can we learn from the predatory nature of other animals
to surround the bison
down the cattle

the other way around, you said
we came first
                  so like them . . .

we in our sweet-smelling realm so like them--
pack of wolves


                        & all breaths escape to exhale in the continued plight of
wolves, loyal in their pack abode, cunning
bright-eyed ones

                               wolfskin!
                                                    ride over me tonight

& manatee
you can't mix a human monster ever enough to aid the manatee

surely our conscious plans have precursors in animal brains

Charles Olson

Proprioception

 

Physiology:                    the surface (senses—the 'skin': of 'Human

                                      Universe') the body itself—proper—one's own

                                      'corpus': PROPRIOCEPTION the cavity of the body,

                                      in which the organs are slung: the viscera, or

                                      interoceptive, the old 'psychology' of feeling,

                                      the heart; of desire, the liver; of sympathy, the

                                      'bowels'; of courage—the kidney etc—gall,

                                      (Stasis—or as in Chaucer only, spoofed)             

 

                         Today:  movement, at any cost. Kinesthesia: beat (nik)

                                      the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles,

                                      tendons, joints, and are stimulated by bodily

                                      tensions (—or relaxations of same). Violence:

                                      knives/anything, to get the body in.

 

To which

PROPRIOCEPTION:     the data of depth sensibility/the 'body' of us as

                                      object which spontaneously or of its own order

                                      produces experience of, 'depth' Viz

                                      SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM

      BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES

 

'Psychology':                 the surface: consciousness as ego and thus no flow

                                      because the 'senses' of same are all that sd contact

                                      area is valuable for, to report in to central. In-

THE WORKING            spection, followed hard on heels by, judgment

     'OUT' OF                  (judicium, dotha: cry, if you must/all feeling may

'PROJECTION'             flow, is all which can count, at sd point. Direction

                                      outward is sorrow, or joy. Or participation: active

                                      social life, like, for no other reason than that—

                                      social life, in the present. Wash the ego out, in its

                                      own 'bath' (os)

 

                                      The 'cavity'/cave: probably the 'Unconscious'? That

                                      is, the interior empty place filled with 'organs'? for

                                      'functions'?

 

                                      The advantage is to 'place' the thing, instead of

                                      it wallowing around sort of outside, in the

THE 'PLACE'                universe, like, when the experience of it is intero-

      OF THE                  ceptive: it is inside us/& at the same time does

'UNCONSCIOUS'         not feel literally identical with our own physical or

                                      mortal self (the part that can die). In this sense

                                      likewise the heart, etc, the small intestine etc, are

                                      or can be felt as—and literally they can be—

                                      transferred. Or substituted for. Etc. The organs.—

                                      Probably also why the old psychology was chiefly

                                      visceral; neither dream, nor the unconscious, was

                                      then known as such. Or allowably inside, like.

 

'ACTION'—OR, AGAIN, 'MOVEMENT'

 

                                      This 'demonstration' then leads to the same third,

                                      or corpus, thing or 'place,' the

 

                                                 proprious-ception

                                                 'one's own'-ception

 

                                      the 'body' itself as, by movement of its own tis-

                                      sues, giving the data of, depth. Here, then, wld be

    the soul is                  what is left out? Or what is psysiologically even

proprioceptive               the 'hard' (solid, palpable), that one's life is

                                      informed from and by one's owl literal body—

                                      as well, that is, as the whole inner mechanism,

                                      which keeps us so damn busy (like eating, sleeping,

                                      urinating, dying there, by deterioration of sd

                                      'functions' of sd 'organs')—that this mid-thing

                                      between, which is what gets 'buried,' like, the

                                      flesh? bones, muscles, ligaments, etc., what one

                                      uses, literally, to get about etc

                                                                       that this is 'central,' that is—in

                                      this 1/2 of the picture—what they call the SOUL,

                                      the intermediary, the intervening thing, the inter-

                                      ruptor, the resistor. The self.

 

    The gain:                   to have a third term, so that movement or action

                                      is 'home.' Neither the Unconscious nor Projection

                                      (here used to remove the false opposition of

                                      'Conscious'; 'consciousness' is self) have a home

                                      unless the DEPTH implicit in physical being—

                                      built-in space-time specifics, and moving (by

                                      movement of 'its own')    —is asserted, or found-

                                      out as such. Thus the advantage of the value

                                      'proprioception.' As such.

 

                                      The 'soul' then is equally 'physical.' Is the self.

    its own                       Is such, 'corpus.' Or—to levy the gain psychology          

  perception                   from 1900, or 1885, did supply until it didn't

                                      (date? 1948?)—the three terms wld be:

 

                                      surface (senses) projection

                                      cavity (organs—here read 'archtypes')

                                      unconscious the body itself—consciousness:

                                      implicit accuracy, from its own energy as a state of

                                      implicit motion.

 

                 identity,         therefore (the universe is one) is supplied; and the

                                      abstract-primitive character of the real (asserted)

                                      is 'placed': projection is discrimination (of the

                                      object from the subject) and the unconscious is the

                                      universe flowing-in, inside.

 

David St. John

[from David St. John's Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems, 1994, Harper Collins]

Slow Dance

It's like the riddle Tolstoy
Put to his son, pacing off the long fields
Deepening in ice. Or the little song
Of Anna's heels, knocking
Through the cold ballroom. It's the relief
A rain enters in a diary, left open under the sky.
The night releases
Its stars, & the birds the new morning. It is an act of grace
& disgust. A gesture of light:
The lamp turned low in the window, the harvest
Fire across the far warp of the land. The somber
Cadence of boots returns. A village
Pocked with soldiers, the dishes rattling in the cupboard
As an old serving woman carries a huge, silver spoon
Into the room & as she polishes she holds it just
So in the light, & the fat
Of her jowls
Goes taut in the reflection. It's what shapes
The sag of those cheeks, & has
Nothing to do with death though it is as simple, & insistent.
Like a coat too tight at the shoulders, or a bedroom
Weary of its single guest. At last, a body
Is spent by sleep: A dream stealing the arms, the legs.
A lover who has left you
Walking constantly away, beyond that stand
Of bare, autumnal trees: Vague & loose. Yet, it's only
The dirt that consoles the root. You must begin
Again to move, towards the icy sill. A small
Girl behind a hedge of snow
Working a stick puppet so furiously the passersby bump
Into one another, watching the stiff arms
Fling out to either side, & the nervous goose-step, the dances
Going on, & on
Though the girl is growing cold in her thin coat & silver
Leotard. She lays her cheek to the frozen bank
& lets the puppet sprawl upon her,
Across her face, & a single man is left twirling very
Slowly, until the street
Is empty of everything but snow. The snow
Falling, & the puppet. That girl. You close the window,
& for the night's affair slip on the gloves
Sewn of the delicate
Hides of mice. They are like the redemption
Of a drastic weather: Your boat
Put out too soon to sea,
Come back. Like the last testimony, & trace of desire. Or,
How your blouse considers your breasts,
How your lips preface your tongue, & how a man
Assigns a silence to his words. We know lovers who quarrel
At a party stay in the cool trajectory
Of the other's glance,
Spinning through pockets of conversation, sliding in & out
Of the little gaps between us all until they brush or stand at last
Back to back, & the one hooks
An ankle around the other's foot. Even the woman
Undressing to music on a stage & the man going home the longest
Way after a night of drinking remember
The brave lyric of a heel-&-toe. As we remember the young
Acolyte tipping
The flame to the farthest candle & turning
To the congregation, twirling his gold & white satin
Skirts so that everyone can see his woolen socks & rough shoes
Thick as the hunter's boots that disappear & rise
Again in the tall rice
Of the marsh. The dogs, the heavy musk of duck. How the leaves
Introduce us to the tree. How the tree signals
The season, & we begin
Once more to move: Place to place. Hand
To smoother & more lovely hand. A slow dance. To get along
You toss your corsage onto the waters turning
Under the fountain, & walk back
To the haze of men & women, the lazy amber & pink lanterns
Where you will wait for nothing more than the slight gesture
Of a hand, asking
For this slow dance, & another thick & breathless night.
Yet, you want none of it. Only, to return
To the countryside. The fields & long grasses:
The scent of your son's hair, & his face
Against your side,
As the cattle knock against the walls of the barn
Like the awkward dancers in this room
You must leave, knowing the leaving as the casual
& careful betrayal of what comes
Too easily, but not without its cost, like an old white
Wine out of its bottle, or the pages
Sliding from a worn hymnal. At home, you walk
With your son under your arm, asking of his day, & how
It went, & he begins the story
How he balanced on the sheer hem of a rock, to pick that shock
Of aster nodding in the vase, in the hall. You pull him closer
& turn your back to any other life. You want
Only the peace of walking in the first light of morning,
As the petals of ice bunch one
Upon another at the lip of the iron pump & soon a whole blossom
Hangs above the trough, a crowd of children teasing it
With sticks until the pale neck snaps, & flakes spray everyone,
& everyone simply dances away.


Leap of Faith

No less fabulous than the carved marble inner
Ear of a lost Michelangelo & more
Blinding than the multiple courts & interior facets
Of a black diamond held up in broken moonlight

This final geography acknowledges its trunks of
Ebony & its boughs of summer rain

Though there at the gate where Dante burned his
Initials into the face of the oak shield
I hesitated before following the switchback trail up
To the precipice overlooking the canyon the abyss
So relished by philosophy & when I saw you
On the opposite cliff in your long cape & gold
Shoes with frayed thin ribbons snaking up your ankles

Like anyone approaching from the foot of a bridge
I simply stepped toward you & below the bones
Of the fallen shone in the lightning & the prayers

& certainly it was there in that country
Braced between twin brackets of stone I saw only one
Belief remains for a man whose life is spared by

A faith more insupportable than air

C. Dale Young

What C. Dale Young learned from Susan Hahn at Triquarterly.

Sixty Some

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Jed Rasula

[from Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum, National Council of Teachers of English, 1996]

The dominant modern institutions, according to Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, are colonization, psychiatry, and pedagogy, which focus and bring into line the renegade tendencies of the masses, the unconscious, and the child, respectively. The society of the spectacle engineers these elements into a coherent ideological motif, that of the nation, which is therefore less a polity than a fantasy. The fantasy is certified in its purity as a hegemonic "voice" at that point when individual members of the society or group appear to spontaneously exhibit the rules of order, the principles of cohesion, and reiterate in almost ritual fashion a miraculous unity of individual utterance and collective sentiment. This is the birth of the poetry workshop.

Sixty Some

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