12/31/15

PARABLE OF FAITH - Louise Glück

Now, in twilight, on the palace steps
the king asks forgiveness of his lady.

He is not
duplicitous; he has tried to be
true to the moment; is there another way of being
true to the self?

The lady
hides her face, somewhat
assisted by the shadows. She weeps
for her past; when one has a secret life,
one's tears are never explained.

Yet gladly would the king bear
the grief of his lady: his
is the generous heart,
in pain as in joy.

Do you know
what forgiveness means? It means
the world has sinned, the world
must be pardoned—

"A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;" - Stephen Crane

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it—
It was clay.

Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.

A Simple Story - Gwen Harwood

A visiting conductor
     when I was seventeen,
took me back to his hotel room
     to cover the music scene.

I'd written a composition.
     Would wonders never cease –
here was a real musician
     prepared to hold my piece.

He spread my score on the counterpane
     with classic casualness,
and put one hand on the manuscript
     and the other down my dress.

It was hot as hell in The Windsor.
     I said I'd like a drink.
We talked across gin and grapefruit,
     and I heard the ice go clink

as I gazed at the lofty forehead
     of one who led the band,
and guessed at the hoarded sorrows
     no wife could understand.

I dreamed of a soaring passion
     as an egg might dream of flight,
while he read my crude sonata.
     If he'd said, ‘That bar's not right,’

or, ‘Have you thought of a coda?’
     or, ‘Watch that first repeat,’
or, ‘Modulate to the dominant’
     he'd have had me at his feet.

But he shuffled it all together,
     and said, ‘That's lovely, dear,’
as he put it down on the washstand
     in a way that made it clear

that I was no composer.
     And being young and vain,
removed my lovely body
     from one who'd scorned my brain.

I swept off like Miss Virtue
     down dusty Roma Street,
and heard the goods trains whistle
     WHO? WHOOOOOO? in aching heat.

"Living on hope is like being locked in a prison cell and the sun is shining so brightly through the window that your eyes become blind to the bars." - Henry Rollins

Living on hope is like being locked in a prison cell and the sun is
shining so brightly through the window that your eyes become blind
to the bars. As soon as you're blind and drunk on hope, they gotcha.

12/30/15

For a Senior Killed on Prom Night - Gail White

It's useless to pretend you would have been
a genius. I taught you and I know.
You made the team, but others made it win.
A ready smile made up for being slow.

You'd have been ordinary in the end:
the hardest worker someone ever had,
one woman's husband and one man's best friend,
recipient of cards for "world's best dad."

So why, where you'd have been, is there a blank
so huge, a hole where all thoughts go to die?
The world has only lost one of its rank
and file. You didn't even make me cry.

Why do I go outside at one a.m.
and search the stars as though I'd numbered them?

Telemachus' Kindness - Louise Glück

When I was younger I felt
sorry for myself
compulsively; in practical terms,
I had no father; my mother
lived at her loom hypothesizing
her husband's erotic life; gradually
I realized no child on that island had
a different story; my trials
were the general rule, common
to all of us, a bond
among us, therefore
with humanity: what
a life my mother had, without
compassion for my father's
suffering, for a soul
ardent by nature, thus
ravaged by choice, nor had my father
any sense of her courage, subtly
expressed as inaction, being
himself prone to dramatizing,
to acting out: I found
I could share these perceptions
with my closest friends, as they shared
theirs with me, to test them,
to refine them: as a grown man
I can look at my parents
impartially and pity them both: I hope
always to be able to pity them.

"There were things I wanted to tell you" - Henry Rollins

There were things I wanted to tell you
I couldn't get it together
I couldn't get past your eyes
After you were gone it hurt to have kept quiet
So easy to not say what you think
To not do what you want
Hard to take rejection
Easy to hurt someone else and not know it
Easy to make it hard

Telemachus' Guilt - Louise Glück

Patience of the sort my mother
practiced on my father
(which in his self-
absorption he mistook
for tribute though it was in fact
a species of rage--didn't he
ever wonder why he was
so blocked in expressing
his native abandon?): it infected
my childhood. Patiently
she fed me; patiently
she supervised the kindly
slaves who attended me, regardless
of my behavior, an assumption
I tested with increasing
violence. It seemed clear to me
that from her perspective
I didn't exist, since
my actions had
no power to disturb her: I was
the envy of my playmates.
In the decades that followed
I was proud of my father
for staying away
even if he stayed away for
the wrong reasons;
I used to smile
when my mother wept.
I hope now she could
forgive that cruelty; I hope
she understood how like
her own coldness it was,
a means of remaining
separate from what
one loves deeply.

Telemachus' Detachment - Louise Glück

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.

12/16/15

Poem (for Ema) - Nikki Giovanni

though i do wonder
why you intrigue me
i recognize that an exceptional moth
is always drawn
to an exceptional flame

you’re not at all what you appear
to be
though not so very different

i've not learned
the acceptable way of saying
you fascinate me
i’ve not even learned
how to say i like you
without frightening people
away

sometimes i see things
that aren’t really there
like warmth and kindness
when people are mean
but sometimes i see things
like fear and want to soothe it
or fatigue and want to share it
or love and want to receive it

is that weird
you think everyone is weird
though you’re not really hypocritical
you just practice not being
what you want to be
and fail to understand
how others would dare
to be otherwise
that’s weird to me

flames don’t flicker
forever
and moths are born to be burned

it’s an unusual way
to start a friendship
but nothing lasts forever

Love Poem - Richard Brautigan

It’s so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don’t love them
any more



Picture by Unknown, found on Public Domain (if you own the rights and would like it removed, just contact me!). This is the full poem, not an excerpt.

Untitled - Franz Wright

Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still your strange elderly child.

You Must Accept - Kate Light

You must accept that’s who he really is.
You must accept you cannot be his
unless he is yours. No compromise.
He is a canvas on which paint never dries;
a clay that never sets, steel that bends
in a breeze, a melody that when it ends
no one can whistle. He is not who
you thought. He’s not. He is a shoe
that walks away: “I will not go where you
want to go.” “Why, then, are you a shoe?”
“I’m not. I have the sole of a lover
but don’t know what love is.” “Discover
it, then.” “Will I have to go where you go?”
“Sometimes.” “Be patient with you?” “Yes.” “Then, no.”
You have to hear what he is telling you
and see what he is; how it is killing you.

At Dusk - Gösta Ågren

I will be forgotten,
he thinks. Oblivion is
a deep mother. No one
will touch you there; no one
will forget you any more.

Advice - Gösta Ågren

When the silence begins to feel
oppressive
people ought to talk to one another; otherwise
it will stop.

12/11/15

It's Good To Be Here - Alden Nowlan

I'm in trouble, she said
to him. That was the first
time in history that anyone
had ever spoken of me.

It was 1932 when she
was just fourteen years old
and men like him
worked all day for
one stinking dollar.

There's quinine, she said.
That's bullshit, he told her.

Then she cried and then
for a long time neither of them
said anything at all and then
their voices kept rising until
they were screaming at each other
and then there was another long silence and then
they began to talk very quietly and at last he said
well, I guess we'll just have to make the best of it.

While I lay curled up,
my heart beating,
in the darkness inside her.

Delay - Elizabeth Jennings

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

To the One Upstairs - Charles Simic

Boss of all bosses of the universe.
Mr. know-it-all, wheeler-dealer, wire-puller,
And whatever else you're good at.
Go ahead, shuffle your zeros tonight.
Dip in ink the comets' tails.
Staple the night with starlight.

You'd be better off reading coffee dregs,
Thumbing the pages of the Farmer's Almanac.
But no! You love to put on airs,
And cultivate your famous serenity
While you sit behind your big desk
With zilch in your in-tray, zilch
In your out-tray,
And all of eternity spread around you.

Doesn't it give you the creeps
To hear them begging you on their knees,
Sputtering endearments,
As if you were an inflatable, life-size doll?
Tell them to button up and go to bed.
Stop pretending you're too busy to take notice.

Your hands are empty and so are your eyes.
There's nothing to put your signature to,
Even if you knew your own name,
Or believed the ones I keep inventing,
As I scribble this note to you in the dark.

Homage to Isaac Newton - Janos Pilinszky

We commit what we do not commit,
and we do not commit what we commit.
Somewhere there is a terrible silence.
Towards that we gravitate.

Habits - Nikki Giovanni

i haven’t written a poem in so long
i may have forgotten how
unless writing a poem
is like riding a bike
or swimming upstream
or loving you
it may be a habit that once acquired
is never lost

but you say i’m foolish
of course you love me
but being loved of course
is not the same as being loved because
or being loved despite
or being loved

if you love me why
do i feel so lonely
and why do i always wake up alone
and why am i practicing
not having you to love
i never loved you that way

remains - Charles Bukowski

things are good as I am not dead yet
and the rats move in the beercans,
the papersacks shuffle like small dogs,
and her photographs are stuck onto a painting
by a dead German and she too is dead
and it took 14 years to know her
and if they give me another 14
I will know her yet . . .
her photos stuck over the glass
neither move nor speak,
but I even have her voice on tape,
and she speaks some evenings,
her again
so real she laughs
says the thousand things,
the one thing I always ignored;
this will never leave me:
that I had love
and love died;
a photo and a piece of tape
is not much, I have learned late,
but give me 14 days or 14 years,
I will kill any man
who would touch or take
whatever's left.

Poem To Be Read at 3 a.m. - Donald Justice

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town of Ladora
At 3 a.m.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on

One Art - Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

There is no greater crime than leaving - Bertolt Brecht


There is no greater crime than leaving.
In friends, what do you count on? Not on what they do.
You never can tell what they will do. Not on what they are. That
May change. Only on this: their not leaving.
He who cannot leave cannot stay. He who has a pass
In his pocket – will he stay when the attack begins? Perhaps
He will not stay.
If it goes badly with me, perhaps he will stay. But if it goes
Badly with him, perhaps he will leave.
Fighters are poor people. They cannot leave. When the attack
Begins they cannot leave.
He who stays is known. He who has left was not known. What left
Is different from what was here.
Before we go into battle I must know: have you a pass
In your coat pocket? Is a plane waiting for you behind the battlefield?
How many defeats do you want to survive? Can I send you away?
Well, then, let’s not go into battle.

Lamium - Louise Glück

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.

The Geranium - Theodore Roethke

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine--
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!--
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--
And that was scary--
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.