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.

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.