Poetry Thursday, respite from our world

I Saw You

~Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.

I saw you as I passed last night,

    Framed in a sky of gold;

And through the sun’s fast paling light

    You seemed a queen of old,

Whose smile was light to all the world

    Against the crowding dark.

And in my soul a song there purled—

    Re-echoed by the lark.

I saw you as I passed last night,

    Your tresses burnished gold,

While in your eyes a happy bright

    Gleam of your friendship told.

And I went singing on my way;

    On, on into the dark.

But in my heart still shone the day,

    And still—still sang the lark.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 25, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

not Poetry Thursday

The Time Machine
~Laura Kasischke

My mother begged me: Please, please, study
stenography...

Without it
I would have no future, and this

is the future that was lost in time to me

having scoffed at her, refusing
to learn the only skill I’d ever need, the one

I will associate forever now with loss, with her
bald head, her wig, a world
already gone
by the time we had this argument, while

our walls stayed slathered in its pale green.
While we
wore its sweater sets. While we
giddily picked the pineapple
off our hams with toothpicks. Now

I’m lost somewhere between
1937
and 1973. My

time machine, blown off course, just
as my mother knew it would be.

Oh, Mama: forget about me.
You don’t have to forgive
me, but know this, please:

I am
the Stenographer now.
I am
the Secretary you wanted me to be.  I am

the girl who gained the expertise you
knew some day some man would need.

Too late, maybe.
(Evening.)
I’m sick, I think.
You’re dead.
I’m weak.

“And now I’m going to tell you
a little secret.
Get your pen and steno-pad, and sit
down across from me.”

Ready?

The grieving:

It never ends.

You learn a million
tricks, memorize
the symbols &
practice the techniques

and still you wake up every morning
lost inside your
lost machine. Confused, but always
on a journey.

Disordered.

Cut short.

Still moving.

Keep speaking
Mama.
Please.
I’m taking it down
so quickly, so

quickly, even

(perhaps especially)

when I appear

not to be.

I do this naturally.

See? So

naturally
that in the end
no training was ever needed.

None at all.
None at all.

I taught myself so well.

It’s all I can do now.

Copyright © 2017 Laura Kasischke. Used with permission of the author.

So Much in so Few Words, not Poetry Thursday

Tender Buttons [Mildred’s Umbrella]
 ~Gertrude Stein

A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss a restitution.

This poem is in the public domain.

Not Poetry Thursday, But We Still Need Poetry

Elegy for a Year
~Joseph Fasano

Before I watched you die, I watched the dying
falter, their hearts curled and purring in them

like kitfoxes asleep
beside their shadows, their eyes pawed out by the trouble

of their hunger. I was
humbling, Lord, like the taxidermist’s

apprentice. I said
yes, and amen, like the monk brushing

the barley from the veal calf’s
withers, the heft of it

as it leans against his cilice.
Winter, I have watched the lost

lie down among their bodies, clarified
as the birdsong

they have hymned of.
I have heard the earth sing longer than the song.

Come, I said, come
summer, come

after: you were the bull-elk in the moonlight
of my threshold, knocking off the mosses from its antlers

before it backed away, bewildered, into foliage.
You were thin-ribbed, were hawk-

scarred, were few.
Yes, amen, before I heard you giving up

your singing, you were something stumbling hunted
to my open door; you were thinning with the milkweed

of the river. Winter, Wintering, listen: I think of you
long gone now

through the valley, scissoring
your ancient way

through the pitch pines. Not waiting, but the great elk
in the dark door. Not ravens

where they stay, awhile, in furor,
but the lost thing backing out

among the saplings, dancing off the madness
of its antlers. Not stone, not cold

stone, but fire. The wild thing, musk-blooded, at my open
door, wakening and wakening and

wakening, migrations
in the blindness of its wild eyes,

saying Look at them, look at how they have to.
Do something with the wildness that confounds you.

Copyright © 2017 Joseph Fasano. Used with permission of the author.

For the Raza, not Poetry Thursday

Dear Buffalo, Dear Zeta or To a Few of My Dead or Nearly Dead Tíos
 ~Joseph Rios

I see my dead father's face in your face.
My furled eyebrow, these puffed cheeks
weep into a pillow of inherited hands.
Tío, I still don't know what to do
with this buffalo body. I crush tea cups
every time I raise them to my pursed lips.
How do I tenderize the meat on my bones?
This morning, I dry heaved a vat of foam
into a toilet in Tampa and found no art in it.
Who tells us we deserve to die?
My Tío, you, the one with a brown beret,
who saw the hydrogen bomb blow
from an aircraft carrier at Bikini Island,
the one with Hep C and a quiet wife,
I don't know if you're still alive,
but I pray this world has softened
you with its firm kneading hands,
that you are still able to ride your bike
up Homsy to the liquor store on Cedar
and can still reach the oranges in the yard.
Tío, mi tío, when you wet the bed,
is it still my Tia's job to change the sheets?
From the kitchen, I see the twelve foot spear
over the maguey. I see its fresh blooms
and know it is about to die. I wonder
if it is better to disappear into Aztlán
or Mazatlán or Mazapan the way you did
or stay in Prather or Marysville and slowly fade
into a sofa chair and reruns of Bonanza.
Is there honor in being shot and skinned? 
      like Ruben?
Hacked up in a hospital for lymphoma research? 
Poked and drained with the swollen face of 
      a failed liver?
How many more fists will be raised until we can 
     no longer,
or better yet, don't have to? I'm tired of thinking 
     these things.
Come back, Tío, or whatever. My mom saved you 
     a plate.
The street dump came by and I got rid of 
     grandpa's clothes.
I found your mesh t-shirt here and I've been 
     wearing it.

Copyright © 2019 by Joseph Rios. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 27, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

Souvenir
~Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Just a rainy day or two
In a windy tower,
That was all I had of you—
Saving half an hour.

Marred by greeting passing groups
In a cinder walk,
Near some naked blackberry hoops
Dim with purple chalk.

I remember three or four
Things you said in spite,
And an ugly coat you wore,
Plaided black and white.

Just a rainy day or two
And a bitter word.
Why do I remember you
As a singing bird?


This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 25, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

The Body Remembers
~Yusef Komunyakaa

I stood on one foot for three minutes & didn’t tilt
the scales. Do you remember how quickly

we scrambled up an oak leaning out over the creek,
how easy to trust the water to break

our glorious leaps? The body remembers
every wish one lives for or doesn’t, or even horror.

Our dance was a rally in sunny leaves, then quick
as anything, Johnny Dickson was up opening

his arms wide in the tallest oak, waving
to the sky, & in the flick of an eye

he was a buffalo fish gigged, pleading
for help, voiceless. Bigger & stronger,

he knew every turn in the creek past his back door,
but now he was cooing like a brown dove

in a trap of twigs. A water-honed spear
of kindling jutted up, as if it were the point

of our folly & humbug on a Sunday afternoon, right?
Five of us carried him home through the thicket,

our feet cutting a new path, running in sleep
years later. We were young as condom-balloons

flowering crabapple trees in double bloom
& had a world of baleful hope & breath.

Does Johnny run fingers over the thick welt
on his belly, days we were still invincible?

Sometimes I spend half a day feeling for bones
in my body, humming a half-forgotten

ballad on a park bench a long ways from home.
The body remembers the berry bushes

heavy with sweetness shivering in a lonely woods,
but I doubt it knows words live longer

than clay & spit of flesh, as rock-bottom love.
Is it easier to remember pleasure

or does hurt ease truest hunger?
That summer, rocking back & forth, uprooting

what’s to come, the shadow of the tree
weighed as much as a man.

Poetry Thursday, for Chila

A Little Bit
 ~Eileen Myles

It’s a little bit
true that the
hole in my jacket
pocket
the breast pocket
yeah all relaxed
has a hole &
pens keep
slipping through
one’s in the lining
but this one
perched
now it’s a writing
bird
silly black out there
wants to
tell its
song. Miguel’s
book was
in the air &
I was on
a train
my feet are cold
and you wouldn’t
be in the
air so
long it doesn’t happen
like this
there’s no climate
in a plane
and I was in one
but not on
earth
my mother
is gone
each thing I do
is a little
bit wrong. I’m willing
to apologize
but they never
help it’s
just pointing
out the hole
& people
forget but I
won’t forget
you

Black and orange like me, part 1 (brainstorming)

The other day I was walking to an event on Princeton campus.

It was an event I had been looking forward to attending. Still, that familiar dread was spreading across my body, radiating out from my heart.

Still, I put one foot in front of the other along my way.

In my mind's eye, I began to see a scene from Out of Africa. It is near the end of the movie. Karen is sitting in her living room on a suitcase. Around her all the possessions she has not sold are in various states of packing. It is a huge room, and she seems small in it. She has the phonograph that Denys gave her, and it is playing something. She is eating dinner or drinking tea. Denys enters the room, and we swoon, hoping he will save her even though he isn't that kind of guy. Instead, she saves herself (again). She asks him if he wants to help her play a game. When she thinks she can't go on, she does one more thing (to make it worse we almost hear her say). And so she asks Denys to dance. She puts on a record, and they dance, first in the room and then outside onto the lawn with whatever was not sold.

I am not getting the words right.

But it is that sentiment ... I can't go through one more trauma/emotion/setback, and then I take a breath, and I do.

So, here I was breathing and getting ready to plunge into a room full of rah rah alumni. Black and orange would be sported by all in some fashion (except me... only black and white and a rust jacket I never put on, that was as close to orange and black I could go).

Being on campus is like walking through a graveyard for me.  Unlike my love for visiting cemeteries, walking a graveyard is not a pleasurable sensation. I think of it more like a place where the bones are exposed, not of neat rows of ornate or simple or tender remembrances of beloved people.

The graveyard is like a junkyard of discarded wrecks, you never know what horrifying sight will be around the corner, jolting you back to some memory of trauma. Even if they are not your memories, they sting. The crumpled car, like the one the mothers put out before prom, meant to remind teens that some decisions have irreversible consequence. Worst of all, the trauma may be contained within sweet memories that turned out to be rotten at their core.

Even though I am the only one who appears to catch glimpses of these wrecks or exposed skeletons, my sense is that they demand to be seen.

I hear whispers from every corner, reminding me of my time there, but I suspect that there are other whispers, too, that clamor for attention. "If she can hear the whispers of her own trauma, perhaps she can hear mine, too," they seem to wonder. The pain is palpable, and it can be overwhelming.

Some days I have the strength to listen to the whispers, to let them transport me back to that day or days, to envelope me in the memory whether sweet or sour. Other days, I skirt the university, purposely walk through a newer area (less chance for there to be a memory lingering there) or go out of my way not to touch campus at all, even if it means an extra mile.

Some days, even though I know I will tempt the ghosts, I walk on to campus to something that has been given a chance at new life, like West College now called Morrison Hall. I touch the plaque, take photos of it, try to fit a new memory into that space. Try to give myself some safe spaces to mark my way across campus in future.

Poetry Thursday

Saudade

~John Freeman

means nostalgia, I’m told, but also
nostalgia for what never was. Isn’t it
the same thing? At a café
in Rio flies wreathe my glass.

How you would have loved this: the waiter
sweating his knit shirt dark. Children
loping, in tiny suits or long shorts, dragging
toys and towels to the beach. We talk,

or I talk, and imagine your answer, the heat clouding our view.
Here, again, grief fashioned in its cruelest translation:
my imagined you is all I have left of you.

Poetry Thursday, hummingbirds and souls

Hummingbird

~Robin Becker

I love the whir of the creature come

to visit the pink

flowers in the hanging basket as she does

most August mornings, hours away

from starvation to store

enough energy to survive overnight.

The Aztecs saw the refraction

of incident light on wings

as resurrection of fallen warriors.

In autumn, when daylight decreases

they double their body weight to survive

the flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

On next-to-nothing my mother

flew for 85 years; after her death

she hovered, a bird of bones and air.

Copyright © 2017 Robin Becker. Used with permission of the author.

Happy birthday, sister

 The strands are all there ... 

to the memory, 

nothing is ever lost. 

~Eudora Welty

four years, rambling

When my brother died, a hole opened in the world that I could not fill.  I thought, this is hell.

Boy was I wrong.

I clawed my way to the top of that grief only to be plunged deeper still.

When my sister died, I started to understand just how much more hell there was left to be experienced.

I wish I could say there is something wonderful that has come of so much loss -- anything really.

I have worked as hard as I can to help everyone else through the grief and its aftermath.

But, nothing really works.

I have a few "accomplishments" that I can claim... but none of them actually make it feel better ... or less like hell.

I feel like I am always just treading water, waiting for the next crisis or test.

Someone said to me, it's PTSD, textbook.

I knew that already, of course.

But, when I say it, or even think of it, I am too ashamed to believe it.

Hadn't I always been able to handle loss, disappointment, life? How did I lose my ability to cope?

Oh, yeah, I am coping ... getting out of bed every day, breathing in and out, handling every bit of crisis...

Why does it still feel like hell?  Why does being the one who is still alive feel like hell?

I am not desperately sad anymore, usually.  I mean, I still have bad days. No denying that.

Mostly it is the waiting for the next shoe to drop.  Drop they will ... my days of loss are not going away.  Horrible things keep happening, not just to me, but to everyone.

I am struggling, still.  I want the bad days to be less bad.  I want the good days to be better, less far and few between.

Worst of all, I feel like there should be something that I can do to make it better.

I am sure there is something...

Or that whatever I am doing is just wrong...

Tomorrow is another day.

Poetry Thursday

If love were 
in the flesh 
I would burn 
it out 
with hot irons 
and 
be at peace. 
But it is 
in the soul, 
unreachable.
~K Gibran
Jesus the Son of Man

Sweet Thursday and such...

"There's a Hole in Reality through which We Can Look if We Wish" [Title to Chapter 10 in the book Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck.

Sometimes when I am walking along and I see the clouds part in just the right way, these words pop into my head.

And I remember, like a wave of warm, amber-colored nostalgia rushing over me, this book.

It is a sense memory that makes my heart pump a little faster, of a time when life and happiness were so slippery for me.

When someone who I admired said, you should read this or you should read that. When that kind of recommendation felt like intimacy ... a closeness fifteen year olds crave but have no idea really about what it might mean.

 I confess that I don't really remember all that went on in this book.  Here's what I know for sure: it was in this book that I found out I love quirky characters, and that I feel at home in my mind and others do too!

It might be time to reread this book, and hope it is just as sweet at this point in my life.

--------
P.S. when I was looking for links for this post, I came across this letter from Mr. Steinbeck to his son who was away at boarding school.  Who wouldn't want to get this kind of honesty, introspection and concern in a letter from your mom or pops?

Poetry Thursday (repeat, I think)

 

i carry your heart with me 

(i carry it in my heart) 

i am never without it 

(anywhere i go you go, my dear; 

and whatever is done by only me 

is your doing, my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) 

i want no world

(for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; 

which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

 

-e e cummings

 

 

“[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” Copyright 1952, © 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Source: Poetry (June 1952).

Remembrance & Reinvention

I try not to let 9/11 go by without remembering.

My thoughts always turn to that little fifth grade boy whose dad didn't come home.  Remarkably, he was the only person I knew personally who lost someone in the towers.

I also remember to be grateful that two friends were late to work that day, and so they were in the subway instead of in the building when the first plane hit.  I thank the universe.

I was at a friend's book talk last night, and she was talking about how it is a novel about reinvention.

[Great book, The Paris Key by Juliet Blackwell, you should read it, by the way.]

It struck me that 9/11 for me is also about reinvention.  I am not sure if I have said this here before or not, and I am not in the mood to trudge back through the posts to see if I have.  So, bear with me.

When people ask me why I get divorced, sometimes I tell them the truth (if I have enough time to explain).  I got divorced because of 9/11. 

9/11 was my turning point -- it reminded me that life is too short to be unhappy.

It struck me last night, and again this morning, as I wondered what to write today, that I am at a similar turning point in my life.

I stand at a crossroads, with many choices for ways forward.  The only thing certain is that I cannot go backwards or stay in the unhappiness.

So, thank you 9/11, for reminding me that today is also about reinvention.

May all those souls continue to rest in peace and offer us every year the reminder that life is short.

I will miss this so much ...

And this is why I love Jon Stewart ... tilt away, tilt away ... it is the only way.

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes,  More Daily Show Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

the playlist

The thing about the playlist is that all the songs there are the ones you put there.

Some people may update those songs regularly. 

I don't know if I am just not that person, if I don't have time, or if I don't care...

But I have this little ipod shuffle, the one my friends replaced after the one my cousin gave me was stolen off my sweater as I walked home from the BART.

And the computer that had that playlist music on it died (several times) a while ago.  I still cart its dead, ok just virus infected, body around with me because the playlist is on there. Yes, there are photos and other things that I *might* wish I had with me.  But the big thing is the playlist.

It was my first playlist, she thinks wistfully, as if it were like a first love.

It has so many of my favorites on it ... the first thirty minutes or so are my running songs. I carefully honed them while training for half marathons -- starting out with my upbeat walking/warm up songs to my slowing down/cool down songs and everything in between.

It has my favorite Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Eagles, Bonnie Raitt, Tears for Fears, and SADE (though there are newer favorites not there) and my favorite Los Lobos album (actually the only one of theirs that I like at all). 

It has the Etta James songs that Claudia put on a CD for me -- don't know where that CD is, so ostensibly that is the reason why I won't update this ipod anywhere else.

It reminds me of every place I have ever lived, and all the people I have ever loved.  IT brings me to my knees with the songs of my fifteenth year -- and the pain of that time -- and elicits every kind of passion I have ever felt, for person, place or thing.

It is the playlist that calms me down, revs me up, keeps me moving, helps me settle down, and brings me to tears.  

In the old days, I used to skip around ... but it is always on loop now.  I imagine that it is because there are some old This American Life, Radio Lab and Selected Shorts at the end.  But it is really because it is in the order I honed over time. 

And every time I listen to the songs, I am surprised at how much it affects me emotionally ... and then I remember it's *my* playlist.

p/s I am so off track on my Thursday poetry and quotes, I apologize ... I am thinking about it but not doing anything about it... hoping to be back on track by next week.