Today's Poem

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

In Memory of the Rock Band Breaking Circus --Stephanie Burt

You were whiny and socially unacceptable even to loud young men whose first criterion for rock and roll was that it strike someone else as awful and repulsive and you told grim stories about such obscure affairs as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge- laden marathon runner from Zanzibar

who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth

Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate sarcastic showtunes abject similes feel like a piece of burnt black toast for example threaded on a rusty wire followed up by spitting too much time to think by fusillades from rivetguns by cold and awkward bronze reverberant church bells

percussive monotones 4/4 all for

the five or six consumers who enjoyed both the impatience of youth and the pissiness of middle age as if you knew you had to get across your warnings against all our lives as fast as practicable before roommate or friend could get up from a couch to turn them off

We barely remember you in Minnesota we love

our affable Replacements who modeled a more acceptable form of rage who thought of girls and cities boys and beds and homes and cars as flawed but fixable with the right drink right mates and right guitar strings whereas you did not and nothing in your songs resolved except in a certain technical sense as a drill

resolves contests between drywall and screw

Your second bassist took the stage name Flour your second drummer copied a machine Somebody else in your hometown took credit for every sound you taught them how to use I write about you now since nobody else is likely to and since even appalled too-serious flat compliments like these

are better than nothing and because to annoy

perseverate and get under everyone's skin beats the hell out of the real worst thing in the world which is to fade into silence entirely which will never happen to The Ice Machine to "Driving the Dynamite Truck" to The Very Long Fuse to Smoker's Paradise such hard sticks thrown in the eyes of any audience that is

I should say not until it happens to me

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

The Man Who Is Ready --Charles Rafferty

I’m on the brink of daffodils. The backyard snow is full of urine blooms, the mud underneath is ready to be itself. It won’t be long before the planet tilts and the birds roll north like marbles, the sap crawls out of the bedrock. The meadow's sublimation makes me feel like a piece of sky — ready to plummet, ready to rain. Up on the mountain the snowcap wishes toward water — a wildness that doesn't lose pace, no matter the stones crowding its path, no matter the roots of everything. Down here I'm waiting for the ants to arrive with their shifting script, their message from below. I'm ready for this page, this square of softening dirt, for this garden of almost daffodils to bang all my air to bells.

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

The Festival of Almost Getting There --Renée Ashley

At the festival of almost getting there Zeno pokes his head out halfway, asks

directions, half-heartedly, to the train, admits he’s been riding on the tortoise,

been running after arrows to watch them stand still. He understands course, path,

way, even relative position (dichotomize, divide) but motion’s still a figment:

distance halved and halved (split infinity, twin trajectory) the long, long way, and all

that longing (two-fold, doubled) (moments, instants, continuous or discrete) for some

unfamiliar end—such unforgiving progress, portioned, yes, bisected. A half-assed effort?

No, he’s as good as got it. So much struggle and amends. Sure, we’re goddamned tired of

this much waiting, but look! He’s halfway there.

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

Fairy Tale with Laryngitis and Resignation Letter --Jehanne Dubrow

You remember the mermaid makes a deal, her tongue evicted from her throat, and moving is a knife-cut with every step. This is what escape from water means. Dear Colleagues, you write, for weeks I’ve been typing this letter in the bright kingdom of my imagination. Your body is a ship of pain. Pleasure is when you climb the rocks and watch the moonlight touching everywhere you want to go, a silver world called faraway. Dear Colleagues, you write, this place is a few sentences contained by the cursor’s rippling barrier— what happened here is only beaks and brackets, the serif’s liquid stroke. The old story has witches, a prince in love with the surging silence of women, a knife that turns the water red. You write, Dear Colleagues, now these years are filed in the infinite oceans of bureaucracy. Everything bleaches or fades. In other words, goodbye. Sometimes it’s possible to walk, although you’ve been told inside the oyster shell of your heart there is no soul. Creatures like you must end as a spray of salt, green droplets floating breathless in the air.

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

The Tyger --William Blake

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

Much Madness is divinest Sense - (620) --Emily Dickinson

Much Madness is divinest Sense - To a discerning Eye - Much Sense - the starkest Madness - ’Tis the Majority In this, as all, prevail - Assent - and you are sane - Demur - you’re straightway dangerous - And handled with a Chain -

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

In Case of Complete Reversal --Kay Ryan

Born into each seed is a small anti-seed useful in case of some complete reversal: a tiny but powerful kit for adapting it to the unimaginable. If we could crack the fineness of the shell we’d see the bundled minuses stacked as in a safe, ready for use if things don’t go well.

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

Esther

--W. S. Merwin

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

Caesar

--Jim Powell

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

Macha --Monica McClure

All my feelings are different and this one is the most

Of all places here where women once retired from the men for fear of boring them

I am so bloody in my own bath of wild hairs that I couldn't possibly join you tonight for that colonial thing

Heroin or whore Babylon or Bethlehem

No matter what I'm followed by mosquitos

Flitting dicks who want me to teach them about themselves

But everything I know is contained in capsules of macha that break down in my bloodstream

And I wouldn't recommend it for the fairer sex who should buck up and study up on their condition

I used to feel sick for all my sloth but not anymore

In wanting to please I have sinned In leaning in I have sinned

In breaking in two I feel sin So

Vete ya A haircut and a hard cock is all I need

To govern a family My rod

cutting them down supplicant on the ground

For I was the first real white girl ever born in this country of flat skulls

That's why I'm so cocky with my staff

and my rule rock hard and inconsistent with my favor

The mouths of L'Age d'Or sucked well at my pre-war stockings before cocktail hour

Bells rang and trays of mosquitos were served with tarts

We hadn't meant to kill them with La Macha which includes but is not limited to:

a goddess religion unfaultering at the altar of shade an erotics of object-identification and compassion extending beyond the grave

My sister and I drank mournfully but afterwards we still danced all night

wearing quite literally bedazzled bustiers and veils of a dead boy's smoke

que mala after beating their macho dead in ultra-feminine swoops

How do they want us to think of them now our brothers haviing left so little charisma behind

on the internet to aggrandize

Such small mosquitos And though we are mourning we are still so macha

as we chip the thin teeth of traitors and huff the scent of babies and slap each other on the asses and father seven times and punish the bull with its own marbled horns

But though we're cocky we are still martyrs My sister says quita la macha and I'm like why

It's okay to make up slogans in the spirit of revolution and she's like ok but

after you systematically destroy machismo you must put his teeth to gnash at your engorged breasts for any sort of catagenesis to occur

and I'm like that could be hot But it isn't the new love conceived by and for macha

or is it? idk idk either i really dk

So we taught our brothers all these methods of cameo that they may take a small symbol of macha to wear around their necks to the part of culture where the money used to be kept

May they remember the strength of their mother's biceps as they show mercy to their fathers who are teleological

till the end of supremacy which is the beginning of macha

Kiss the black lips that feed you the corn hips that rock you and blight the prayers after you've said them

Santa Mala Madre de Mala ruega por nosotros pecadores ahora y en la ahora de nuestra muerte

Hand me my beads War without end Amén

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

From My Tenth Year

--Tom Frazier

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

Ithaka --Constantine Cavafy --Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley

As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonia ns, Cyclops, angry Poseidon-don 't be afraid of them: you'll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonia ns, Cyclops, wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind- as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you're destined for. But don't hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you're old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you've gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Original Greek:

Ιθάκη

Σα βγεις στον πηγαιμό για την Ιθάκη, να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος, γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις. Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας, τον θυμωμένο Ποσειδώνα μη φοβάσαι, τέτοια στον δρόμο σου ποτέ σου δεν θα βρείς, αν μέν' η σκέψις σου υψηλή, αν εκλεκτή συγκίνησις το πνεύμα και το σώμα σου αγγίζει. Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας, τον άγριο Ποσειδώνα δεν θα συναντήσεις, αν δεν τους κουβανείς μες στην ψυχή σου, αν η ψυχή σου δεν τους στήνει εμπρός σου.

Να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος. Πολλά τα καλοκαιρινά πρωϊά να είναι που με τι ευχαρίστησι, με τι χαρά θα μπαίνεις σε λιμένας πρωτοειδωμένους· να σταματήσεις σ' εμπορεία Φοινικικά, και τες καλές πραγμάτειες ν' αποκτήσεις, σεντέφια και κοράλλια, κεχριμπάρια κ' έβενους, και ηδονικά μυρωδικά κάθε λογής, όσο μπορείς πιο άφθονα ηδονικά μυρωδικά· σε πόλεις Αιγυπτιακές πολλές να πας, να μάθεις και να μάθεις απ' τους σπουδασμένους.

Πάντα στον νου σου νάχεις την Ιθάκη. Το φθάσιμον εκεί είν' ο προορισμός σου. Αλλά μη βιάζεις το ταξίδι διόλου. Καλλίτερα χρόνια πολλά να διαρκέσει· και γέρος πια ν' αράξεις στο νησί, πλούσιος με όσα κέρδισες στον δρόμο, μη προσδοκώντας πλούτη να σε δώσει η Ιθάκη.

Η Ιθάκη σ' έδωσε το ωραίο ταξίδι. Χωρίς αυτήν δεν θάβγαινες στον δρόμο. Αλλο δεν έχει να σε δώσει πια.

Κι αν πτωχική την βρεις, η Ιθάκη δεν σε γέλασε. Ετσι σοφός που έγινες, με τόση πείρα, ήδη θα το κατάλαβες η Ιθάκες τι σημαίνουν.

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

Mud Season --Tess Taylor

We unstave the winter’s tangle. Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.

We unplay the summer’s blight. Rotted on the vine, black fruit

swings free of the strings that bound it. In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,)

grotesque extruded peppers. We prod half-thawed mucky things.

In the sky, starlings eddying. Tomorrow, snow again, old silence.

Today, the creaking icy puller. Last night I woke

to wild unfrozen prattle. Rain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue.

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

They buried their son last winter --Serhiy Zahdan --translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

They buried their son last winter. Strange weather for winter—rain, thunder. They buried him quietly—everybody’s busy. Who did he fight for? I asked. We don’t know, they say. He fought for someone, they say, but who—who knows? Will it change anything, they say, what’s the point now? I would have asked him myself, but now—there’s no need. And he wouldn’t reply—he was buried without his head.

It’s the third year of war; they’re repairing the bridges. I know so many things about you, but who’d listen? I know, for example, the song you used to sing. I know your sister. I always had a thing for her. I know what you were afraid of, and why, even. Who you met that winter, what you told him. The sky gleams, full of ashes, every night now. You always played for a neighboring school. But who did you fight for?

To come here every year, to weed dry grass. To dig the earth every year—heavy, lifeless. To see the calm after tragedy every year. To insist you didn’t shoot at us, at your people. The birds disappear behind waves of rain. To ask forgiveness for your sins. But what do I know about your sins? To beg the rain to finally stop. It’s easier for birds, who know nothing of salvation, the soul.

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

In the Sanatorium --Anya Silver

It was after the war. My father lay in an Austrian sanatorium, his lungs full of tuberculosis. Next to him, a young Soviet veteran needed to confess to another Russian. He had done something terrible, he said. In Kharkov, before the Germans came. Under orders, he had taken enemies of the state, shoved them between two stopped trains, and burned them to death. Then swept away remains. Could he ever be forgiven for such a sin?

How could he know, that tormented man, that my father’s father was one of the dead? What chance that these two men would lie, shushed to sleep by nurses, bed to bed?

My father, unable to respond, simply averted his head, refusing to grant comfort. Riven, six more decades, between two ghosts: one wasted from coughing, pale; one burning. Both beyond any word he might have spoken.

[jshoulson]

Today's Poem

Myth --Bohdan-Ihor Antonych --Translated from Ukrainian by Ivan Petryshyn

As if in ancient pre-aryan books,- The horseshoe, the boat and the dart. In an oak wood, there shine silver troops, The Sanskrit words rustling in the heart.

Blond and high-browed, are marching the old tribes, And horses and long ships are their mates. In the sky, there shine bright stars’ flags in the height, As if a crossing of the winged swords’ blades.