hoard of poetry

[poetryhoard]

Grace Paley, 'The Poet's Occasional Alternative'

I was going to write a poem I made a pie instead     it took about the same amount of time of course the pie was a final draft    a poem would have had some distance to go      days and weeks and much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking tumbling audience among small trucks and a fire engine on the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie it will have apples and cranberries dried apricots in it    many friends will say     why in the world did you make only one this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable sadnesses I decided to settle this morning for a re- sponsive eatership     I do not want to wait a week     a year    a generation for the right consumer to come along 

[poetryhoard]

X. J. Kennedy, 'September Twelfth, 2001'

Two caught on film who hurtle from the eighty-second floor, choosing between a fireball and to jump holding hands,

aren't us. I wake beside you, stretch, scratch, taste the air, the incredible joy of coffee and the morning light.

Alive, we open eyelids on our pitiful share of time, we bubbles rising and bursting in a boiling pot. 

[poetryhoard]

William Baer, 'Snowflake'

Timing's everything. The vapor rises high in the sky, tossing to and fro, then freezes, suddenly, and crystalizes into a perfect flake of miraculous snow. For countless miles, drifting east above the world, whirling about in a swirling free- for-all, appearing aimless, just like love, but sensing, seeking out, its destiny. Falling to where the two young skaters stand, hand in hand, then flips and dips and whips itself about to ever-so-gently land, a miracle, across her unkissed lips: as he blocks the wind raging from the south, leaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth. 

[poetryhoard]

Jeanne Marie Beaumont, 'Afraid So'

Is it starting to rain? Did the check bounce? Are we out of coffee? Is this going to hurt? Could you lose your job? Did the glass break? Was the baggage misrouted? Will this go on my record? Are you missing much money? Was anyone injured? Is the traffic heavy? Do I have to remove my clothes? Will it leave a scar? Must you go? Will this be in the papers? Is my time up already? Are we seeing the understudy? Will it affect my eyesight? Did all the books burn? Are you still smoking? Is the bone broken? Will I have to put him to sleep? Was the car totaled? Am I responsible for these charges? Are you contagious? Will we have to wait long? Is the runway icy? Was the gun loaded? Could this cause side effects? Do you know who betrayed you? Is the wound infected? Are we lost? Will it get any worse? 

[poetryhoard]

Anonymous, 'Carnation Milk'

Carnation Milk is the best in the land; Here I sit with a can in my hand-- No tits to pull, no hay to pitch, You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch. 

[poetryhoard]

Jane Hirshfield, 'Bone'

The living dog has found the old dog's toy. She brings it to the kitchen, the blue rubber a little cracked from all that time outside. My memories, my counting and expectations, mean nothing to her; my sadness, though, does puzzle her a moment. Then she keeps chewing. Time's instruments are thumb piano, oboe, ocarina, flute, and dog.  Its movements run through her body flawlessly. Only we sing with a catch in the throat. She hears the thought. -- 'Catch?' She's ready. 

[poetryhoard]

Frank Bidart, 'Queer'

Lie to yourself about this and you will forever lie about everything. Everybody already knows everything so you can lie to them. That's what they want. But lie to yourself, what you will lose is yourself. Then you turn into them. * For each gay kid whose adolescence was America in the forties or fifties the primary, the crucial scenario forever is coming out— or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. * Involuted velleities of self-erasure. * Quickly after my parents died, I came out. Foundational narrative designed to confer existence. If I had managed to come out to my mother, she would have blamed not me, but herself. The door through which you were shoved out into the light was self-loathing and terror. * Thank you, terror! You learned early that adults' genteel fantasies about human life were not, for you, life. You think sex is a knife driven into you to teach you that.

[poetryhoard]

Jan Zwicky, 'The Geology of Norway'

But when his last night in Norway came, on 10 December, he greeted it with some relief, writing that it was perfectly possible that he would never return - Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein I have wanted there to be  no story. I have wanted only facts. At any given point in time there cannot be a story: time,  except as now, does not exist. A given point in space  is the compression of desire. The difference between this point and some place else is a matter of degree. This is what compression is: a geologic epoch rendered to a slice of rock you hold between  your finger and your thumb. That is a fact.  Stories are merely theories. Theories are dreams. A dream  is a carving knife and the scar it opens in the world is history. The process of compression gives off thought. I have wanted the geology of light. They tell me despair is a sin. I believe them. The hand moving is the hand thinking, and despair says the body does not exist. Something to do with bellies and fingers pressing gut to ebony, thumbs on keys. Even the hand writing is the hand thinking. I wanted speech like diamond because I knew that music meant too much. And the fact is, the earth is not a perfect sphere. And the fact is, it is half-liquid. And the fact is there are gravitational anomalies. The continents congeal, and crack, and float like scum on cooling custard. And the fact is, the fact is, and you might think the fact is we will never get to the bottom of it, but you would be wrong. There is a solid inner core. Fifteen hundred miles across, iron alloy, the pressure on each square inch of its heart  is nearly thirty thousand tons. That's what I wanted: words made of that: language that could bend light. Evil is not darkness, it is noise. It crowds out possibility, which is to say it crowds out silence. History is full of it, it says that no one listens. The sound of wind in leaves, that was what puzzled me, it took me years to understand that it was music. Into silence, a gesture. A sentence: that it speaks. This is the mystery: meaning. Not that these folds of rock exist but that their beauty, here, now, nails us to the sky. The afternoon blue light in the fjord.  Did I tell you I can understand the villagers? Being, I have come to think, is music; or perhaps it's silence. I cannot say. Love, I'm pretty sure, is light. You know, it isn't what I came for, this bewilderment by beauty. I came to find a word, the perfect syllable, to make it reach up, grab meaning by the throat and squeeze it till it spoke to me. How else to anchor memory? I wanted language  to hold me still, to be a rock, I wanted to become a rock myself. I thought if I could find, and say, the perfect word, I'd nail mind to the world, and find release. The hand moving is the hand thinking. what I didn't know: even the continents have no place by earth. These mountains: once higher  than the Himalayas. Formed in the pucker of a supercontinental kiss, when Europe floated south of the equator and you could hike from Norway down through Greenland to the peaks of Appalachia. Before Iceland existed. Before the Mediterranean evaporated. Before it filled again. Before the Rockies were dreamt of. And before these mountains, the rock raised in them chewed by ice that snowed from water in which no fish had swum. And before that ice, the almost speechless stretch of the Precambrian: two billion years, the planet swathed in air that had no oxygen, the Baltic Shield older, they think, than life. So I was wrong. This doesn't mean that meaning is a bluff. History, that's what  confuses us. Time  is not linear, but it's real. The rock beneath us drifts, and will, until the slow cacophony of magma cools and locks the continents in place. Then weather, light, and gravity will be the only things that move. And will they understand? Will they have a name for us? - Those perfect changeless plains, those deserts, the beach that was this mountain, and the tide that rolls for miles across its vacant slope.

[poetryhoard]

Brian Patten, 'Sometimes It Happens'

And sometimes it happens that you are friends and then You are not friends, And friendship has passed. And whole days are lost and among them A fountain empties itself. And sometimes it happens that you are loved and then You are not loved, And love is past. And whole days are lost and among them A fountain empties itself into the grass. And sometimes you want to speak to her and then You do not want to speak, Then the opportunity has passed. Your dreams flare up, they suddenly vanish. And also it happens that there is nowhere to go and then There is somewhere to go, Then you have bypassed. And the years flare up and are gone, Quicker than a minute. So you have nothing. You wonder if these things matter and then As soon you begin to wonder if these things matter They cease to matter, And caring is past. And a fountain empties itself into the grass.

[poetryhoard]

Billy Collins, 'Rooms'

After three days of steady, inconsolable rain, I walk through the rooms of the house wondering which would be best to die in. The study is an obvious choice with its thick carpet and soothing paint, its overstuffed chair preferable  to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.  And the kitchen has a certain appeal— it seems he was boiling water for tea, the inspector will offer, holding up the melted kettle. Then there is the dining room, just the place to end up facedown at one end of its long table in a half-written letter or the bedroom with its mix of sex and sleep, upright against the headboard, a book having slipped to the floor— make it Mrs. Dolloway, which I have yet to read.  Dead on the carpet, dead on the tiles, dead on the stone cold floor— it’s starting to sound like a ballad sung in a pub by a man with a coal red face.  It’s all the fault of the freezing rain which is flicking against the windows, but when it finally lets up and gives way to broken clouds and a warm breeze, when the trees stand dripping in the light,  I will quit these dark, angular rooms and drive along a country road into the larger rooms of the world, so vast and speckled, so full of ink and sorrow— a road that cuts through bare woods and tangles of red and yellow bittersweet these late November days. And maybe under the fallen wayside leaves  there is hidden a nest of mice, each one no bigger than a thumb, a thumb with closed eyes, a thumb with whiskers and a tail, each one contemplating the sweetness of grass and startling brevity of life.

[poetryhoard]

Sharon Olds, 'Known To Be Left'

If I pass a mirror, I turn away, I do not want to look at her, and she does not want to be seen. Sometimes I don’t see how I’m going to go on doing this. Often, when I feel that way, within a few minutes I am crying, remembering his body, or an area of it, his backside often, a part of him perfect to think of, luscious, not too detailed, and his back turned to me. After tears, the heart is less sore, as if some goddess of humanness within us has caressed us with a gush of tenderness. I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how. I am so ashamed before my friends–to be known to be left by the one who supposedly knew me best, each hour is a room of shame, and I am swimming, swimming, holding my head up, smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed, like being naked with the clothed, or being a child, having to try to behave while hating the terms of your life. In me now there’s a being of sheer hate, like an angel of hate. On the badminton lawn, she got her one shot, pure as an arrow, while through the eyelets of my blouse the no-see-ums bit the flesh that no one else cares to touch. In the mirror, the torso looks like a pin-up hives martyr or a cream pitcher speckled with henbit, pussy paws, full of the milk of human kindness and unkindness, and no one cares to drink. But look! I am starting to give him up! I believe he is not coming back. Something has died, inside me, believing that, like the death of a crone in one twin bed as a child is born in the other. Have faith, old heart. What is living, anyway, but dying.

[poetryhoard]

Stanislaw Barańczak, “If porcelain, then only the kind”

“If porcelain, then only the kind”

Stanisław Barańczak Translated from the Polish by Frank Kujawinski

If porcelain, then only the kind you won’t miss under the shoe of a mover or the tread of a tank; if a chair, then not too comfortable, lest there be regret in getting up and leaving; if clothing, then just so much as can fit in a suitcase, if books, then those which can be carried in the memory, if plans, then those which can be overlooked when the time comes for the next move to another street, continent, historical period or world: who told you that you were permitted to settle in? who told you that this or that would last forever? did no one ever tell you that you will never in the world feel at home in the world?

[poetryhoard]

Ellen Bass, 'Relax'

Bad things are going to happen. Your tomatoes will grow a fungus and your cat will get run over. Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream melting in the car and throw your blue cashmere sweater in the drier. Your husband will sleep with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling out of her blouse. Or your wife will remember she's a lesbian and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat— the one you never really liked—will contract a disease that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth every four hours, for a month. Your parents will die. No matter how many vitamins you take, how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys, your hair and your memory. If your daughter doesn't plug her heart into every live socket she passes, you'll come home to find your son has emptied your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb, and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money. There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger. When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below. And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice. She looks up, down, at the mice. Then she eats the strawberry. So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat, slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel and crack your hip. You'll be lonely. Oh taste how sweet and tart the red juice is, how the tiny seeds crunch between your teeth.