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Appetite
by Maxine Kumin
I eat these wild red raspberries still warm from the sun and smelling faintly of jewelweed in memory of my father
tucking the napkin under his chin and bending over an ironstone bowl of the bright drupelets awash in cream
my father with the sigh of a man who has seen all and been redeemed said time after time as he lifted his spoon
men kill for this.
John Green Takes His Warner, New Hampshire, Neighbor to a Red Sox Game
Everett down the hill's
52 and trim. No beer gut.
Raises beef, corn, hay, cuts
cordwood between harvests.
Goes to bed at 8 and falls
into sleep like a parachutist.
He's never been to a ballgame.
He's never been to Boston though
he went over to Portland Maine
one time ten, fifteen years ago.
In Sullivan Square, they
luck out, find a space
for John's car, take
the T to Fenway Park.
The famous T!
A kind of underground trolley.
Runs in the dark.
No motorman that Ev can see.
Jammed with other sports fans.
John has to show him
how to put the token in.
How to press with his hips
to go through the turnstile.
How to stand back while
the doors whoosh shut.
How to grab a strap
as the car pitches forward.
How to push out
with the surging crowd.
Afterward Ev says the game's
a whole lot better on tv.
Too many fans.
Too many other folks for him.
"John Green Takes His Warner, New Hampshire, Neighbor to a Red Sox Game," by Maxine Kumin from The Long Marriage (W.W. Norton).
Spesso i poeti si occupano di ellissi. È ciò che omettiamo che è importante.
Maxine Kumin
Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems, with a foreword by Maxine Kumin, Houghton Mifflin Company Boston. 1999.
E dopo, il compromesso.
I corpi riprendono i loro confini.
Queste gambe, ad esempio, sono mie.
Le tue braccia ti riportano a te.
I cucchiai delle nostre dita, le labbra
riconoscono il loro possessore.
Le lenzuola sbadigliano, una porta
insensatamente sbatte
e nel cielo, cantilenando
un aereo scende.
Niente è cambiato, se non che
c’è stato un momento in cui
il lupo, il lupo mercante
che sta a guardia del sè
si è sdraiato sereno, e si è messo a dormire.
I want to apologize for all the snow falling in this poem so early in the season. Falling on the calendar of bad news. Already we have had snow lucid, snow surprising, snow bees and lambswool snow. Already snows of exaltation have covered some scars. Larks and the likes of paisleys went up. But lately the sky is letting down large-print flakes of old age. Loving this poor place, wanting to stay on, we have endured an elegiac snow of whitest jade, subdued biographical snows and public storms, official and profuse.
Even if the world is ending you can tell it's February by the architecture of the pastures. Snow falls on the pregnant mares, is followed by a thaw, and then refreezes so that everywhere their hill upheaves into a glass mountain. The horses skid, stiff-legged, correct position, break through the crust and stand around disconsolate lipping wisps of hay. Animals are said to be soulless. Unable to anticipate.
No mail today. No newspapers. The phone's dead. Bombs and grenades, the newly disappeared, a kidnapped ear, go unrecorded but the foals flutter inside them warm wet bags that carry them eleven months in the dark. It seems they lie transversely, thick as logs. The outcome is well known. If there's an April in the last frail snow of April they will knock hard to be born.
Getting Through by Maxine Kumin
How It Was: Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton, from Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems
Tell me, black heart, twelve white lies.
Maxine Kumin, It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Breakup; from ‘Tell Me, Black Heart’, ed. Jerry Williams
