Poem-a-Thon

[Guest]

Openess

by Wislawa Szymborska


Here we are, naked lovers
beautiful to each other – and that’s enough –
the leaves of our eyelids our only covers,
we’re lying amidst deep night.

But they know nothing about us, the know,
the four corners, and the stove nearby us.
Clever shadows also know
The table knows but keeps quiet.

Our teacups know full well
why the tea is getting cold.
And old Swift can surely tell
that his book’s been put on hold.

Even the birds are in the know:
I saw them writing in the sky
brazenly and openly
the very name I call you by

The trees? Could you explain to me
their unrelenting whispering?
The wind may know, you say to me,
but how, is just a mystery.

A moth surprised us through the blinds,
is wings a fuzzy flutter.
Its silent path – see how it winds
in a stubborn holding pattern.

Maybe it sees where our eyes fail
with an insect’s inborn sharpness.
I never sensed, nor could you tell,
that our hearts were aglow in the darkness

 

[tungtied2u]

William Stafford

An Introduction to Some Poems

Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.

Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.

We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.

The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,

Or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.

 

[Tathagata]

.....

 

[cjh]

Wolves In The Street - Stephen Dobyns

Tonight the world wishes to intrude itself
between our nakedness and one desire.
I climb from the bed, walk to the window. Wolves prowl
back and forth between the houses and parked cars.
In their jaws they carry pieces of what they
have captured, sometimes a hand, sometimes a foot.
You lie uncovered on white sheets. I study
your breasts, your thin waist. I try to tell myself
your body is all I have ever wanted.
How long before the world overwhelms us?
You turn toward me, your lips move, wanting to speak.
In the ornate mirror above the bureau,
I see my teeth and snout, my small yellow eyes.
I cannot hear your words for all the barking.

------

I always feel awkward crashing threads. But I'm crashing again. Thanks in advance.

Cracker

 

[tungtied2u]

Forty-one, Alone, No Gerbil

by Sharon Olds

In the strange quiet, I realize
there’s no one else in the house. No bucktooth
mouth pulls at a stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill—
Charlie is dead, the last of our children’s half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-
mogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body like a blueprint
of the understructure for a woman’s body,
so now everything stops for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful call of a young animal.

 

[postobitum]

Sucker for this...

The Heart of the Woman - Yeats

O what to me the little room
that was brimmed up with prayer and rest;
he bade me out into the gloom,
and my breast lies upon his breast.

O what to me my mother's care,
the house where I was safe and warm;
the shadowy blossom of my hair
will hide us from the bitter storm.

O hiding hair and dewy eyes,
I am no more with life and death,
my heart upon his warm heart lies,
my breath is mixed into his breath.

 

[Cerriwiden]

Peter Quince at the Clavier
Wallace Stevens

1

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
waked in the elders by Susanna.

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

2

In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned—
A cymbal crashed,
And roaring horns.


3

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;
And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

4

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebrations of a maiden’s choral.
Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory.
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

 

[Cerriwiden]

Six Significant Landscapes
Wallace Stevens

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

 

[Guest]

I remember singing this in highschool choir



The Wind
by Robert Louis Stevenson

I saw you toss the kites on high
And blow the birds about the sky;
And all around I heard you pass,
Like ladies' skirts across the grass--
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all--
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
O you that are so strong and cold,
O blower, are you young or old?
Are you a beast of field and tree,
Or just a stronger child than me?
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!

 

[tungtied2u]

Pre-Holiday PMS

Poem: "Pre-Holiday PMS," by Ginger Andrews, from An Honest Answer © Story Line Press. Reprinted with permission.

Pre-Holiday PMS

I don't want to be thankful this year.
I don't want to eat turkey and I could care
if I never again tasted
your mother's cornbread stuffing.
I hate sweet potato pie. I hate mini marshmallows.
I hate doing dishes while you watch football.

I hate Christmas. I hate name-drawing.
I hate tree-trimming, gift-wrapping,
and Rudolph the zipper-necked red-nosed reindeer.
I just want to skip the whole merry mess—
unless, of course, you'd like to try
to change my mind. You could start
by telling me I'm pretty and leaving me
your charge cards
and all your cash.

 

[Guest]

Christmas and Dylan Thomas

~ I always pull out the Dylan Thomas at Christmas time ~

If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love

Dylan Thomas

If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

Shall it be male or female? say the cells,
And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.
If I were tickled by the hatching hair,
The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,
The itch of man upon the baby’s thigh,
I would not fear the gallows nor the axe
Nor the crossed sticks of war.

Shall it be male or female? say the fingers
That chalk the walls with green girls and their men.
I would not fear the muscling-in of love
If I were tickled by the urchin hungers
Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.
I would not fear the devil in the loin
Nor the outspoken grave.

If I were tickled by the lovers’ rub
That wipes away nor crow’s-foot nor the lock
Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,
Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
Would leave me cold as butter for the flies,
The sea of scums could drown me as it broke
Dead on the sweethearts’ toes.

This world is half the devil’s and my own,
Daft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.
An old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone,
And all the herrings smelling in the sea,
I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail
Wearing the quick away.

And that’s the rub, the only rub that tickles.
The knobbly ape that swings along his sex
From damp love-darkness and the nurse’s twist
Can ever raise the midnight of a chuckle,
Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast
Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six
Feet in the rubbing dust.

And what’s the rub? Death’s feather on the nerve?
Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?
My Jack of Christ, born thorny on the tree?
The words of death are dryer that his stiff,
My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.
I would be tickled by the rub that is:
Man be my metaphor.

 

[Angeline]

What the Dead Fear
Kim Addonizio

On winter nights, the dead
see their photographs slipped
from the windows of wallets,
their letters stuffed in a box
with the clothes for Goodwill.
No one remembers their jokes,
their nervous habits, their dread
of enclosed places.
In these nightmares, the dead feel
the soft nub of the eraser
lightening their bones. They wake up
in a panic, go for a glass of milk
and see the moon, the fresh snow,
the stripped trees.
Maybe they fix a turkey sandwich,
or watch the patterns on the T.V.
It's all a dream anyway.
In a few months
they'll turn the clocks ahead,
and when they sleep they'll know the living
are grieving for them, unbearably lonely
and indifferent to beauty. On these nights
the dead feel better. They rise
in the morning, refreshed, and when the cut
flowers are laid before their names
they smile like shy brides. Thank you,
thank you, they say. You shouldn't have,
they say, but very softly, so it sounds
like the wind, like nothing human.

 

[Angeline]

Full Moon
Kim Addonizio

All over the city
something gets into people.
Women tucking in their kids
close their eyes, think of men
they should have followed off buses.
Girls rouge their cheeks with lipstick,
their bodies telling lies
to anyone who'll listen.
Cars with their lights off glide
under the trees, headed for the ocean.
The men going through garbage cans
rifle Burger King bags for a few
pale fries. They lie down
in doorways. In dreams, their mothers
check their foreheads for fever.
Refugees sit up
studying old photographs they enter
like water, going under.
Moon, take them down.
Desire is a cold drink
that scalds the heart.
Somewhere women are standing
at their windows, like lit candles,
and boys in Army boots
go dancing through the streets,
singing, and shoot
at anything that moves

 

[Angeline]

One More by Kim

I think she's amazing.

Them
Kim Addonizio

That summer they had cars, soft roofs crumpling
over the back seats. Soft, too, the delicate fuzz
on their upper lips and the napes of their necks,
their uneven breath, their tongues tasting
of toothpaste. We stole the liquor
glowing in our parents' cabinet, poured it
over the cool cubes of ice with their hollows
at each end, as though a thumb had pressed
into them. The boys rose, dripping, from long
blue pools, the water slick on their backs
and bellies, a sugary glaze; they sat easily on high
lifeguard chairs, eyes hidden by shades,
or came up behind us to grab the fat we hated
around our waists. For us it was the chaos
of makeup on a bureau, the clothes we tried on
and on, the bras they unhooked, pushed
up, and when they moved their hard
hidden cocks against us we were always
princesses, our legs locked. By then we knew
they would come, climb the tower, slay anything
to get to us. We knew we had what they wanted:
the breasts, the thighs, the damp hairs pressed flat
under our panties. All they asked was that we let them
take it. They would draw it out of us like
sticky taffy, thinner and thinner until it snapped
and they had it. And we would grow up
with that lack, until we learned how to
name it, how to look in their eyes and see nothing
we had not given them; and we could still
have it, we could reach right down into their
bodies and steal it back.

 

[Reltne]

Two Oldies

Neutral Tones
by Thomas Hardy

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro--
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing....

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.



Nature Rarer Uses Yellow
by Emily Dickinson

Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,--
Prodigal of blue,

Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover's words.

 

[Angeline]

Skating in Harlem, Christmas Day

Cynthia Zarin

Beyond the ice-bound stones and bucking trees,
past bewildered Mary, the Meer in snow,
two skating rinks and two black crooked paths

are a battered pair of reading glasses
scratched by the skater's multiplying math.
Beset. I play this game of tic-tac-toe.

Divide, subtract. Who can tell if love surpasses?
Two noughts we've learned make one astonished O--
a hectic night of goats and compasses.

Folly tells the truth by what it's not--
One X equals a fall I'd not forgo.
Are ice and fire the integers we've got?

Skating backwards tells another story--
the risky star above the freezing town,
a way to walk on water and not drown.

 

[Angeline]

Embraceable You
Ron Padgett

I don't mind Walt Whitman's saying
"I contain multitudes," in fact I like it,
but all I can imagine myself saying is
"I contain a sandwich and some coffee and a throb."
Maybe I should throw my arms out and sing
"Oh grab hold of everything and hug tight!
Then clouds, books, barometer, eyes wider
and wider, come crashing through
and leave me shattered on the floor,
a mess of jolly jumping molocules!"

 

[Angeline]

Lullabye
W.H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

 

[writtenword]

City sidewalk

On a crowded city sidewalk one can feel alone as loneliness sets the tone.
Many people pass, many faces all hurrying to their appointed places.
Some smile, some frown, some don't even notice me in this busy town.
Thousands of people live here but I do not know anyone.
People as far as I can see.
So many people I wish one would talk to me.

 

[tungtied2u]

so you want to be a writer?
Charles Bukowski

so you want to be a writer?
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in
you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

 

[tarablackwood22]

Sheri Reynolds

from Bitterroot Landing

For as long as I remember
I’ve searched for things to worship—
bits of rock, storm fronts, bugs
with turquoise glitter on their wings.

But rocks chip, storms churn themselves
out, and bugs can be crushed
with a heel or a raindrop.

Gods change colors, and spin
themselves new garments
every day. The most I hope for now
is to be allowed to watch……

If you study the moon too hard, too long,
it will fall down luminous upon you.
And with the moon in your eyes
and moon anchoring your feet,
you can never see the stars again.

I’m looking for the place
where worship finds balance,
where it does not debase me
or exalt me so high I can’t return.

Gods change colors, and spin
themselves new garments
every day. I want to be able
to stand in awe of them,
one at a time.

 

[Tathagata]

A world of dew
and within every dewdrop
a world of struggle --
Issa


Call it loneliness,
that deep, beautiful color
no one can describe:
over these dark mountains,
the gathering autumn dusk. --
Jakuren

 

[tungtied2u]

That Silent Evening

by Galway Kinnell

That Silent Evening

I will go back to that silent evening
when we lay together and talked in low, silent voices,
while outside slow lumps of soft snow
fell, hushing as they got near the ground,
with a fire in the room, in which centuries
of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up,
without a crackle, into morning light.
Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep.
When we got home we turned and looked back
at our tracks twining out of the woods,
where the branches we brushed against let fall
puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence,
like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch
among the trees, which is the sound that dies
inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge
hits it off center telling everything inside
it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up
but without arms and so to our eyes lonesome,
and yet also - how could we know this? - happy!
in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow,
not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing
not to meet until heaven, but here and there
making slubby kissing stops in the field,
our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch.
Everything that happens here is really little more,
if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths,
are almost ready, already, to bandage the one
whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when
we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches
from this moment to that. Then I will go back
to that silent evening, when the past just managed
to overlap the future, if only by a trace,
and the light doubles and shines
through the dark the sparkling that heavens the earth.

 

[tarablackwood22]

Sheri Reynolds

A world of dew
and within every dewdrop
a world of struggle --
Issa


Call it loneliness,
that deep, beautiful color
no one can describe:
over these dark mountains,
the gathering autumn dusk. --
Jakuren

from Bitterroot Landing


For as long as I can remember,
I’ve searched for things to worship.
I’ve found gods in crickets
and gods reflected in tiny cricket eyes.
I’ve met gods already dead,
gods too young to save me.

Once I prayed with palms turned up,
ready to receive.

That bleak creator spit in my hands.

I’ve learned to say thank you.
I’ve learned to mean it.

Gods change colors and spin themselves
new garments every day. Once, a god
showed me her faded scar. When I
poked it, she said “Ouch.” Then she
let me drink her breast milk until dawn.

When you kneel to kiss a god’s firm foot,
find toes shaped like your own,
what can you do but worship?

 

[annaswirls]

RECONCILIATION-Czeslaw Milosz

RECONCILIATION


Late, the time of humbling reconciliation
With himself, arrived for him.
"Yes" --he said--"I was created
To be a poet and nothing more.
I did not know anything else to do,
Greatly ashamed but unable to change my fate."


The poet: one who constantly thinks of something else.
His absentmindedness drives his people to despair.
Maybe he does not even have any human feelings.


But, after all, why should it not be so?
In human diversity a mutation, variation
Is also needed. Let us visit the poet
In his little house in a somewhat faded suburb
Where he raises rabbits, prepares vodka with herbs,
And records on tape his hermetic verses.


Czeslaw Milosz