Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts

Friday, September 10, 2021

Aspirational

 I Did Think, Let’s Go About This Slowly

by Mary Oliver

I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.

But, bless us, we didn’t.

Monday, July 26, 2021

Detachment

 

Telemachus’ Detachment 

Louise Gluck

When I was a child looking
at my parents' lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny. 

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Kissing


The Kiss

Stephen Dunn



She pressed her lips to mind.

—a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

Monday, June 07, 2021

A Yellow Summer Dress

Why does this light force me back

   by Jane Kenyon

to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress, and the skirt
made a perfect circle.
                         Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible . . . . The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms, and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
                         And I knew then
that I would have to live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart.

Admittedly

Except for the Body

by Mary Oliver


Except for the body
of someone you love,
including all its expressions
in privacy and in public,
trees, I think,
are the most beautiful
forms on the earth.
Though, admittedly,
if this were a contest,
the trees would come in
an extremely distant second.

Slippery

Road Trip


by Andrea Cohen



Of course we stole

the motel soap. Weren’t

we supposed to? So
we could go home

and try to hold
those slippery

slivers, which,
like everything

we pretended
was ours, touched

us, and vanished?

Monday, December 07, 2020

Think of that.

 Sorrow Is Not My Name

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

      —for Walter Aikens

Ross Gay, "Sorrow Is Not My Name" from Bringing the Shovel Down.  

I'll Make the Fudge

 

My House

Nikki Giovanni


i only want to
be there to kiss you
as you want to be kissed
when you need to be kissed
where i want to kiss you 
cause its my house and i plan to live in it

i really need to hug you
when i want to hug you
as you like to hug me
does this sound like a silly poem

i mean its my house
and i want to fry pork chops
and bake sweet potatoes
and call them yams
cause i run the kitchen
and i can stand the heat

i spent all winter in
carpet stores gathering 
patches so i could make
a quilt
does this really sound
like a silly poem

i mean i want to keep you
warm

and my windows might be dirty
but its my house
and if i can't see out sometimes
they can't see in either

english isn't a good language
to express emotion through
mostly i imagine because people
try to speak english instead
of trying to speak through it
i don't know maybe it is
a silly poem

i'm saying it's my house
and i'll make fudge and call
it love and touch my lips
to the chocolate warmth
and smile at old men and call
it revolution cause what's real
is really real
and i still like men in tight
pants cause everybody has some
thing to give and more
important need something to take

and this is my house and you make me 
happy
so this is your poem

Monday, November 02, 2020

loop de loops

 ODE

By Paisley Rekdal


And now the silver, ripping sound of white on white, the satin,
light snow torn
under wheels, car bang metally grenading, and the wood poles,
whipping, loom—
 
                                     ¤

 

I have always wanted to sing a song of praise
 
for the unscathed: myself
stepping from the fractured car whose black axle’s one inch
from gone; slim pole slicing cable
 
up to sheet metal, seat foam, corduroy
(like butter, the mechanic will later
tell me, poking a stiff finger through the cloth),
to pierce the exact point
 
I was supposed to sit, stopping
because praise begins where pain
transfigures itself,
stoppered by a deeper kind of joy: so I
transfigure myself from driver
 
to survivor, the blessed Lazarine failure
 
bolting up and opening her eyes.
And here are the thousand wrecks
from a life configured in snow before me: myself,
at five, pulled from the burning car seat;
at twelve, bleeding from the scalp
after the car throws me from my bike; at fourteen,
tumbling over the slick hood rushing;
sockets of windows with glass
bashed out into a translucent, toothy ring; lights
and bumpers clipped clean off; tires burst; deer
gravitationally hurled through my windshield; brakes
given out and worse,
 
the icy loop de loops
on roads, the trucker’s 18 fat wheels squealing—
All the ways technology should have killed me
 
and didn’t.
Praise for my death-hungry luck!
And all the manner in which I’ve failed it—
marriage lost,
 
buried in the blanks of white space, my solitude
at the Greyhound station
knowing no one to retrieve me,
carless among the other pressed tight
to their own disaster or boredom—
unbearably young mothers,
 
drifters, boy soldiers
shoulder to shoulder with the insane, weaving
the same thread of conversation back and forth
between ourselves. How
 
could this happen to me
at this age, at this stage, how
did I not notice, and will you put this seat up?
and will you lend me this quarter? and will you
call me a cab when we get back home?
 
The young man in the seat before me, head
full of zigzagging tight braids says,
 
Sure you can dig up that ballot box in Florida
and while you’re at it look up all the bones
buried in the Everglades, repeats it
 
for the amusement of the woman across from him,
who knows a presidential failure like she knows herself,
and when we pass my accident on the road points
and whistles, snickers:  Bet you no one walked away from that one.
 
For this, and for all these things: praise
 
to the white plains of Wyoming, highway coiled
like a length of rime-colored rope; to snow
broiling in the sunlight so that the landscape
takes on a nuclear glow, so bright
 
we have to shield our eyes from it. Praise
for myself playing at morbidity
because I thought I had a right to it
 
as if flesh had to follow spirit
to such a pure depth the bones themselves
could not rest but must be broken, nerves
singed then ripped out, the heart clenched madly in its chest.
 
As if I had nothing except this white earth, this
smashed car to praise
 
what I knew before and know
even better now, the hills
cold as a hip bone and tufted with ice. Praise
to my youth and to my age, praise
 
to ambition and small-mindedness,
the kind I recognize and the kind
I am soon to recognize; praise
 
to self-hatred for it keeps me alive, and praise
for the splinters of delight that can pierce it.
Praise for wood pole, praise for glass.
Praise for muscle, praise for bone.
 
The sky is bright as a bowl on a nurse’s table today.
 
And the sun gleams into it as our bus slides by,
the light of us a wash of gold illuminating
bodies lost, bodies regained; gleaming
 
like my heart here, on this earth,
bloody and still beating.



Paisley Rekdal, "Ode" from The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

Sunday, November 01, 2020

A Necessary Fiction

Notes on reading eros: the bittersweet by anne carson



He seems to me equal to gods that man

who opposite you

sits and listens close

to your sweet speaking


and lovely laughing--oh it

puts the heart in my chest on wings

for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking 

is left in me


no: tongue breaks, and thin

fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears


and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass

I am and dead--or almost

I seem to me.


Sappho, fragment 31


"It is a poem about the lover's mind in the act of constructing desire for itself."

"There are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible. . . . The difference between what is and what could be is visible."



***



"A space must be maintained or desire ends."


As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,

high on the highest branch and the applepickers

     forgot--

well, no they didn't forget--were not able to reach

. . .


Sappho, fragment 105a


"The poem is incomplete, perfectly."

". . . this poem acts out the experience of eros. . . . Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger. From her inchoate little poem we learn several thins about eros. The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time)."



***



"Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can."



***



"Words do have edges. So do you."

"There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. The seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost. . . . All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you know see.Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual."

"Desire changes the lover. . . . The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before."



***



"In writing, beauty prefers an edge."



***


"Let us superimpose on the question 'What does the lover want from love' the questions 'What does the reader want from reading? What is the writer's desire?' Novels are the answer."



***



"To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist's aim."


"Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love."


***


"All lovers believe they are inventing love."

"The novelists who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing."



***



"Written letters have the presence and authority of a third person, who is witness, judge and conduit of erotic charges. Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet. Letters construct the space of desire and kindle in those contradictory emotions that keep the lover alert to his own impasse. Letters arrest and complicate an existing two-term situation by conjuring a third person who is not literally there, making suddenly visible the difference between what is. . . . and what could be. . . . From within letters, Eros acts."



***


"As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges--toward something else, something not yet grasped. The unplucked apple, the beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so."


***



"Sokrates' central argument, as he goes on to reevaluate madness, is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and indeed divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. Such incursions formally instruct and enrich our lives in society; no prophet or healer or poet could practice his art if he did not lose his mind, Sokrates says (244a-45). Madness is the instrument of such intelligence. More to the point, erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul."

"When you fall in love you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting (251-52). It is the beginning of what you are meant to be."


***



"In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space. . . . When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires."




Monday, August 03, 2020

Victory

Hoops

 

Boredom crouches on his ten-year-old shoulders,

both left and right

Little devils that hiss and spit discontent

 

He is a little asshole, in his big sister’s words,

tapping his microphone

Click, click, click, click, click-click

Click

to wrestle his brain and wreck the Zoom class.

 

He mocks his online math tutor,

trolls synchronous Zoom meetings,

Hates, hates, click. click click click. Click.

 

He makes us feel

Irritation,  

carry his cross,

share the spite

 

Except on the hardwood court

Under the hoop,

Balls and feet drown out

his internal censor

He is on the run

His brain calculates

the angle of a shot,

distance over time of a pass

high in the air,

launched full speed

at his hands

on the run toward the goal

his breath thick inside his mask, 

The buzzer, the clock, the score

parents six feet down the sideline.

 

He runs until a sidestich cripples him, then runs some more. He is good on defense.

 

Suddenly a teammate falls, clutches a shin.

I look down at my phone and then lookup

And there is my asshole kid

On a knee

his back to me, number 11.

9 boys kneel around the fallen athlete.

 

There is my son.

 I know it’s the first time

He has been pulled into this gesture.

I feel his puzzlement.

I see his compliance.

This is why I am here, alone, in my knock-off N95 face mask.

This is why I drove to New Hampshire.

To sit on the floor in an airless gym, hot with the sweat of pandemic,

Surrounded by hard-breathing boys and girls

 

For this moment, my restless boy,

becomes

still, more than who he was.

He stopped the constant motor and

does nothing, nothing, nothing,

but kneel.

 

Losing by twenty points,

victory.

We laugh all the way home. So glad.

Tuesday, May 05, 2020

This is not mine, nor the entire poem.

Reticent Sonnet

A pronoun is a kind of withdrawal from naming.
Because naming is heavy, naming may be slightly shaming.
We live much more lightly than this,
we address ourselves allusively in our minds –as “I” or “we” or “one” – 
part of a system that argues with shadow, 
like Venetian blinds.
Speaking of Venice, called “the Shakespeare of cities” by a friend of mine,
reminds me of how often the Sonnets misprint their for thine:

beware the fog in Venice.
Beware those footsteps that stop in a hush.
I used to think I would grow up to be a person whose reasoning was deep,
instead I became a kind of brush.
I brush words against words. So do we follow ourselves out of youth,
brushing, brushing, brushing wild grapes onto truth.


Saturday, April 18, 2020

A NAME



A NAME
by Ada Limón


When Eve walked among
the animals and named them--
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer--
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, name me.





Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Ms. Miller was Proto-Twitterian









Why We Oppose Pockets for Women

 - 1874-1942


1. Because pockets are not a natural right.
2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.
3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.
4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.
5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.
6. Because it would destroy man’s chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.
7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.
8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.