POEIN - Poetry, Words, Semantics, Art

Late Night Nonsense

2010-04-13T23:47:00.001-07:00

A Bedtime Poem

To bed, to bed, to bed she said.
To sleep, to sleep, to sleep he screeched.
To dream, to dream, to dream they screamed.
And off they went to bed to sleep to dream of songs beneath the sheets,
to dance and laugh to fly and fall, to paint red fish and climb tall walls,
to spell in numbers and add up words, to make more sense of nonsense birds,
to chase a bandit through the trees, to dress up dinosaurs in fancy tees,
to meet sad ladies and cheery lads, to ride an elephant through baghdad,
all foresaken under heavy lids where adults find freedom being kids.

copyright SA Paige Barnett 2010

That's all she wrote:
i carry you in my pocket in a locket i'm a frog how i love you isn't it telling this is ridiculous oh sleep woe take me away

Objectivism - Does It Work?

2010-01-18T06:00:00.001-08:00

I recently read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and am rereading as an adult her novel, Atlas Shrugged. My joy for these books has encouraged me to look more into her philosophy of Objectivism.

I've included below a number of resources where you can do your own research, as well as some arguments for, against and about Objectivism as it relates to other philosophies which are commonly embraced by current society:

Arguments against Objectivist theory:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF2BFJv8CjQ

Objectivism vs. Existentialism
copyright Atlas Society

Existentialism is not a very unified school of thought. The main existentialists—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre—disagree among themselves on many fundamental philosophical questions. However, it is accurate to say that there are meaningful similarities between Rand's thought and the thought of both Nietzsche and Sartre. In both these case, though, there are also some very significant differences. Rand's views are not especially similar to Kierkegaard's, and they are completely and fundamentally opposed to Heidegger's.

Let us consider some examples:

Nietzsche - Rand

Nietzsche and Rand are both highly critical of the moral ideals of Christianity. They both think that Christian ideals have had a negative influence on secular ethical thought, as well. Both Nietzsche and Rand see utilitarianism and Kantianism, for example, as secular implementations of the Christian value of altruism (the idea that it is morally praiseworthy to sacrifice oneself for others, especially for others in need).

Rand and Nietzsche agree that altruism is bad, but they do not agree on why. Nietzsche thinks that altruism is a sign of a sick and decaying culture that no longer values the talented individual. Unless the talented individual is able to live for his own sake, he will never achieve great things. Rand thinks that altruism is an impracticable moral ideal, one that is equally dangerous for all people: no one can consistently live by altruistic values, because their ultimate result is death. According to Rand, the deeds of great individuals merit praise and economic reward, but they do not mark out great individuals as fundamentally different in their moral or legal standing from more ordinary people. According to Rand, all people have basic rights to life and liberty. By contrast, Nietzsche seems to have thought that the naturally inferior should serve their betters as slaves.

Nietzsche and Rand share a great admiration for the ethical ideals of Ancient Greece. Nietzsche makes eclectic use of ideas from Plato, the Cynics, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics, while Rand explicitly praises both Plato and Aristotle (Rand took Aristotle to be the greatest of all philosophers). Both Nietzsche and Rand would count it as a great improvement if our society were to embrace Aristotle's ethics of human flourishing, though neither would regard this development as the ideal. Aristotle held that the most basic goal for each individual is and ought to be their own happiness or flourishing. In order to flourish, one must practice the moral virtues – temperance, honesty, courage, benevolence – that are components of self-perfection.

However, Nietzsche is opposed to the virtue that Rand identified as the most important virtue of them all: rationality. Although Nietzsche praises scientists and explorers (who are presumably rational) as superior individuals, Nietzsche ultimately sees reason as confining. He says abusive things about Socrates, because Socrates introduced philosophical reflection and thereby made mankind "absurdly rational." Nietzsche's vision of the ideal person is of one who continually creates by destroying, who is guided by primordial feelings, who is reckless and cruel to others. Nietzsche's remarks about cruelty are particularly striking. The healthy individual, uncorrupted by Christian ethics, ought to be able to torture an inferior person for fun without feeling any pang of conscience. Nietzsche writes enthusiastically about the "voluptuous pleasure" of "being allowed to vent [one's] power freely upon one who is powerless" (Genealogy of Morals, II:5).

All this emotionalism and sadism would be anathema to Rand. Her ideal person is not a "whim-worshipper," and he does not take pleasure in other people's suffering. He is rational, productive, and proud. He is a creator of life-promoting values who trades with others to mutual benefit and who lives independently and self-sufficiently – but also in harmony with others – in a rights-based democratic republic.

This difference also comes through in the historical individuals that Nietzsche singles out for praise. Rand would presumably agree with Nietzsche that Goethe and Shakespeare were great individuals; she certainly agreed with him about Dostoyevski and Mark Twain. But when Nietzsche praises Napoleon and other violent conquerors, Rand would dissent: in her view, destructive violence is inimical to human flourishing.

Sartre - Rand

Turning, now, to Sartre: Rand and Sartre seem to agree on several important points. First, they agree that human beings have free will – that no human action is ever completely caused by what happened in the past. Second, they agree that we must create our own values and bring meaning to our own lives through a steadfast commitment to our personal projects. Third, humanity, in Sartre's terms, is "forlorn" – we are alone in the universe, there is no benevolent creator whom we can depend on or look to when deciding how we should live. Finally, both philosophers agree on a technical question in metaphysics, i.e., that consciousness is always oriented towards an independently existent object, so that it is self-evident both that one exists, and also that there is a world, outside.

Despite these similarities, Sartre and Rand are really very different philosophers. They belong to fundamentally different philosophical schools. Sartre is a phenomenologist in the tradition of Edmund Husserl, while Rand is an empirical realist in the tradition of John Locke. So, for example, Rand does not think that consciousness is a kind of nothingness, and she does not think that phenomenology (how things seem from the first-person perspective) is equally reliable "across the board" as a guide to metaphysics and ethics. In addition, their views in politics were very different: Sartre is a socialist, and he counted himself as a "fellow traveler" of the French Communist Party for several years. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the tone of their works is very different. Sartre tends to emphasize the nauseating, disorienting, disturbing aspects of personal freedom and atheism that Rand believes are liberating. But this may not reflect any serious philosophical difference; it may just show that Sartre takes a mischievous delight in shocking the bourgeois Christians in his audience.

Kierkegaard - Rand

The similarities between Rand and the other existentialists are slim. Like Rand, Kierkegaard was a romantic in aesthetics and a fervent individualist. However, his individualism is founded on the private and singular relation between the individual and God. Kierkegaard wrote many of his works in the voices of characters other than himself; each character is associated with a philosophical point of view (not necessarily Kierkegaard's own). Sometimes, these Kierkegaardian pseudonyms make points that agree with Rand's Objectivism (see, for example, the letters of the Judge in Part II of Either / Or condemning the hedonistic lifestyle of Johannes the Seducer). But usually, they do not. Ultimately, Kierkegaard is an evangelical protestant who counsels belief in the absurd. This is entirely incompatible with Rand's Objectivism, which holds that contradictions cannot be true, and that believing things simply because one wants to is a lethally dangerous habit of mind.

Heidegger - Rand

When it comes to Heidegger, we have really reached the end of the line. Heidegger's views are diametrically opposed to Rand's on almost every important philosophical question. Heidegger was opposed to reason and the scientific point of view (i.e., the view that objects have determinate, discoverable natures, independent of our beliefs and desires). He saw this scientific orientation as artificial and misleading. The more primordial point of view, according to him, is the point of view of moody, engaged activity, wherein objects have established meanings, and there is no question what things are or what they are for. Heidegger's metaphysics and epistemology end in a mystical celebration of "Being."

The list of dissimilarities goes on: Heidegger was opposed to technology, and to the technological impulse, i.e., the impulse to control or dominate nature. He held that true individuality is impossible. On his view, we all pick up our values and projects from others, and our "being" any way depends on others being willing to recognize us as being that way. He seems to have been a strict cultural relativist and ethnocentricist: one can only find meaning in the culture that one was born into. One should "be" in accordance with it and not question its mores. In politics, Heidegger was a fascist and an eager supporter of the Nazis. On all these fronts, Heidegger's views are fundamentally and totally opposed to Rand's.

A Presentation of Objectivism and Existentialism by Some Guy Named Nick.

Beyond the Philosophy: Objectivism Applied
This link is an article reviewing Atlas Shrugged at The Atlantic Online applying the ideas expressed in the book to the current political atmosphere.

A Critique of "The Objectivist Ethics" by Michael Huemer

A Master List of Resources on Objectivist Living showing not only objectivist philosophy resources, but applied objectivist living sites.

Latest Read: The Fountain Head

2010-01-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

I recently finished reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which has enticed me to revisit Atlas Shrugged, a story I haven't read in more than 10 years. Ayn Rand certainly knows how to weave a good tale. Her characters are interesting and developed and the plot takes you in different directions, which one doesn't always expect. Part of this is due to the fact that she uses her stories as a medium to promote her philosophy of Objectivism.

I personally enjoy Rand's stories because of the inner-strength she gives her protagonists. I have an affinity for independent, creative people who want to live on their own terms, not defined by societal rules which may cause them to compromise their principles. Rand's book highly emphasizes the ideas of individualism, architecture-both its ability to express individualism and the art as a reflection of what she likes most about her objectivist ideas, the weakness of collective society, and the greatness of competition to bring out the best in people. The Fountainhead is a beautiful presentation of story and philosophy. The only drawback are the long philosophical diatribes she uses repeatedly through her characters to drive her points home. At times these passages are excessive and trying, though far between.

So you as a reader can become more familiar with Ms. Ayn Rand, I've included below a couple different interviews with the author, as well as an early movie trailer for the Fountainhead movie. I have yet to watch the latter, but look forward to doing so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukJiBZ8_4k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swOxKu80JpU

Atlas Shrugged's John Galt Speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_qQt9IrUc0

Next week, resources that debate Objectivism and clarifying the difference between Existentialism and Objectivism, courtesy of the Atlas Society.

Poet of the Week: Sappho

2010-01-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

One of the great Greek lyrists and few known female poets of the ancient world, Sappho was born some time between 630 and 612 BC. She was an aristocrat who married a prosperous merchant, and she had a daughter named Cleis. Her wealth afforded her with the opportunity to live her life as she chose, and she chose to spend it studying the arts on the isle of Lesbos. Learn more about Sappho.

I.
And their feet move
rhythmically, as tender
feet of Cretan girls
danced once around an

altar of love, crushing
a circle in the soft
smooth flowering grass

II.
I have no complaint
prosperity that
the golden Muses
gave me was no
delusion: dead, I
won't be forgotten

III.
To any army wife, in Sardis:

Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some again,
will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.

This is easily proved: did
not Helen --- she who had scanned
the flower of the world's manhood ---

choose as first among men one
who laid Troy's honor in ruin?
warped to his will, forgetting

love due her own blood, her own
child, she wandered far with him.
So Anactoria, although you

being far away forget us,
the dear sound of your footstep
and light glancing in your eyes

would move me more than glitter
of Lydian horse or armored
tread of mainland infantry

IV. The Moon
The stars about the lovely moon
Fade back and vanish very soon,
When, round and full, her silver face
Swims into sight, and lights all space

V. To Evening
O HESPERUS! Thou bringest all things home;
All that the garish day hath scattered wide;
The sheep, the goat, back to the welcome fold;
Thou bring'st the child, too, to his mother's side

VI. To One Who Loved Not Poetry
Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.

VII.
We shall enjoy it
as for him who finds
fault, may silliness
and sorrow take him!

More resources about Sappho.

Poet of the Week: Billy Collins

2009-03-29T23:57:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days. Learn more about Billy Collins.

I. Madmen
They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in--
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

II. On Turning Ten
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

III. The Art Of Drowning
I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

IV. Study In Orange And White
I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene,
but I was still surprised when I found the painting
of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay
among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes
of the French Impressionists.

And I was surprised to notice
after a few minutes of benign staring,
how that woman, stark in profile
and fixed forever in her chair,
began to resemble my own ancient mother
who was now fixed forever in the stars, the air, the earth.

You can understand why he titled the painting
"Arrangement in Gray and Black"
instead of what everyone naturally calls it,
but afterward, as I walked along the river bank,
I imagined how it might have broken
the woman's heart to be demoted from mother
to a mere composition, a study in colorlessness.

As the summer couples leaned into each other
along the quay and the wide, low-slung boats
full of spectators slid up and down the Seine
between the carved stone bridges
and their watery reflections,
I thought: how ridiculous, how off-base.

It would be like Botticelli calling "The Birth of Venus"
"Composition in Blue, Ochre, Green, and Pink,"
or the other way around
like Rothko titling one of his sandwiches of color
"Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn."

Or, as I scanned the menu at the cafe
where I now had come to rest,
it would be like painting something laughable,
like a chef turning on a spit
over a blazing fire in front of an audience of ducks
and calling it "Study in Orange and White."

But by that time, a waiter had appeared
with my glass of Pernod and a clear pitcher of water,
and I sat there thinking of nothing
but the women and men passing by--
mothers and sons walking their small fragile dogs--
and about myself,
a kind of composition in blue and khaki,
and, now that I had poured
some water into the glass, milky-green.

V. Walking Across The Atlantic
I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach
before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic
thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.
I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what
this must look like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.

VI. Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

VII. Some Days
Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

ALSO: Art inspires art. Check out this animated version of Billy Collin's poem, The Dead.

If the video doesn't work, the link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuTNdHadwbk.

Poet of the Week: Charles Baudelaire

2009-03-20T05:00:00.001-07:00

Seven poems for seven days. Learn more about Charles Baudelaire.

I. Evening Harmony
The hour has come at last when, trembling to and fro,
Each flower is a censer sifting its perfume;
The scent and sounds all swirl in evening’s gentle fume;
A melancholy waltz, a languid vertigo!

Each flower is a censer sifting its perfume;
A violin’s vibrato wounds the heart of woe;
A melancholy waltz, a languid vertigo!
The sky, a lofty altar, lovely in the gloom,

A violin’s vibrato wounds the heart of woe,
A tender heart detests the black of nullity,
The sky, a lofty altar, lovely in the gloom;
The sun is drowning in the evening’s blood-red glow.

A tender heart detests the black of nullity,
And lovingly preserves each trace of long ago!
The sun is drowning in the evening’s blood-red glow …
Your memory shines through me like an ostensory!

II. I Love the Naked Ages Long Ago
I love the naked ages long ago
When statues were gilded by Apollo,
When men and women of agility
Could play without lies and anxiety,
And the sky lovingly caressed their spines,
As it exercised its noble machine.
Fertile Cybele, mother of nature, then,
Would not place on her daughters a burden,
But, she-wolf sharing her heart with the people,
Would feed creation from her brown nipples.
Men, elegant and strong, would have the right
To be proud to have beauty named their king;
Virgin fruit free of blemish and cracking,
Whose flesh smooth and firm would summon a bite!
The Poet today, when he would convey
This native grandeur, would not be swept away
By man free and woman natural,
But would feel darkness envelop his soul
Before this black tableau full of loathing.
O malformed monsters crying for clothing!
O ludicrous heads! Torsos needing disguise!
O poor writhing bodies of every wrong size,
Children that the god of the Useful swaths
In the language of bronze and brass!
And women, alas! You shadow your heredity,
You gnaw nourishment from debauchery,
A virgin holds maternal lechery
And all the horrors of fecundity!

We have, it is true, corrupt nations,
Beauty unknown to the radiant ancients:
Faces that gnaw through the heart's cankers,
And talk with the cool beauty of languor;
But these inventions of our backward muses
Are never hindered in their morbid uses
Of the old for profound homage to youth,
—To the young saint, the sweet air, the simple truth,
To the eye as limpid as the water current,
To spread out over all, insouciant
Like the blue sky, the birds and the flowers,
Its perfumes, its songs and its sweet fervors.

Translated by William A. Sigler

III. The Albatross
Often to pass the time on board, the crew
will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
which nonchalently chaperone a ship
across the bitter fathoms of the sea.

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,
as if embarrassed by its clumsiness,
pitiably lets its great white wings
drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

How weak and awkward, even comical
this traveller but lately so adoit -
one deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak,
another mocks the cripple that once flew!

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
riding the storm above the marksman's range;
exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
he cannot walk because of his great wings.

IV. The End of the Day
In all its raucous impudence
Life writhes, cavorts in pallid light,
With little cause or consequence;
And when, with darkling skies, the night

Casts over all its sensuous balm,
Quells hunger's pangs and, in like wise,
Quells shame beneath its pall of calm,
"Aha, at last!" the Poet sighs.

"My mind, my bones, yearn, clamoring
For sweet repose unburdening.
Heart full of dire, funeral thought,

I will lie out; your folds will cling
About me: veils of shadow wrought,
O darkness, cool and comforting!"

V. Travelling Bohemians
The prophetic tribe of the ardent eyes
Yesterday they took the road, holding their babies
On their backs, delivering to fierce appetites
The always ready treasure of pendulous breasts.

The men stick their feet out, waving their guns
Alongside the caravan where they tremble together,
Scanning the sky their eyes are weighted down
In mourning for absent chimeras.

At the bottom of his sandy retreat, a cricket
Watched passing, redoubles his song,
Cybele, who loves, adds more flower,

Makes fountains out of rock and blossoms from desert
Opening up before these travelers in a yawn—
A familiar empire, the inscrutable future.

Translated by William A. Sigler

VI. Windows
Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Across the ocean of roofs I can see a middle-aged woman, her face already lined, who is forever bending over something and who never goes out. Out of her face, her dress, and her gestures, our of practically nothing at all, I have made up this woman's story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep.

If it had been and old man I could have made up his just as well.

And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in some one besides myself.

Perhaps you will say "Are you sure that your story is the really one?" But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?

VII. Spleen
I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes Fénelon's apologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrants' solace in senility,
we cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.

Bonus reading for the Francophile -

Au Lecteur
La sottise, l'erreur, le péché, la lésine,
Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps,
Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords,
Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine.

Poet of the Week: Anne Sexton

2009-03-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days. Learn more about Anne Sexton.

I. Ann Who Was Mad
Anna who was mad,
I have a knife in my armpit.
When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages.
Am I some sort of infection?
Did I make you go insane?
Did I make the sounds go sour?
Did I tell you to climb out the window?
Forgive. Forgive.
Say not I did.
Say not.
Say.

Speak Mary-words into our pillow.
Take me the gangling twelve-year-old
into your sunken lap.
Whisper like a buttercup.
Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.
Take me in.
Take me.
Take.

Give me a report on the condition of my soul.
Give me a complete statement of my actions.
Hand me a jack-in-the-pulpit and let me listen in.
Put me in the stirrups and bring a tour group through.
Number my sins on the grocery list and let me buy.
Did I make you go insane?
Did I turn up your earphone and let a siren drive through?
Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist
who dragged you out like a gold cart?
Did I make you go insane?
From the grave write me, Anna!
You are nothing but ashes but nevertheless
pick up the Parker Pen I gave you.
Write me.
Write.

II. For My Lover, Returning to His Wife
She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
Let's face it, I have been momentary.
vA luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,
done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.
She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.
I give you back your heart.
I give you permission --
for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound --
for the burying of her small red wound alive --
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother's knee, for the stocking,
for the garter belt, for the call --
the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

III. Doors, Doors, Doors
1. Old Man

Old man, it's four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin tail and the wornout tread.

The room will do. All that's left of the old life
is jampacked on shelves from floor to ceiling
like a supermarket: your books, your dead wife
generously fat in her polished frame, the congealing

bowl of cornflakes sagging in their instant milk,
your hot plate and your one luxury, a telephone.
You leave your door open, lounging in maroon silk
and smiling at the other roomers who live alone.
Well, almost alone. Through the old-fashioned wall
the fellow next door has a girl who comes to call.

Twice a week at noon during their lunch hour
they puase by your door to peer into your world.
They speak sadly as if the wine they carry would sour
or as if the mattress would not keep them curled

together, extravagantly young in their tight lock.
Old man, you are their father holding court
in the dingy hall until their alarm clock
rings and unwinds them. You unstopper the quart

of brandy you've saved, examining the small print
in the telephone book. The phone in your lap is all
that's left of your family name. Like a Romanoff prince
you stay the same in your small alcove off the hall.
Castaway, your time is a flat sea that doesn't stop,
with no new land to make for and no new stories to swap.

2. Seamstress

I'm at pains to know what else I could have done
but move him out of his parish, him being my son;

him being the only one at home since his Pa
left us to beat the Japs at Okinawa.

I put the gold star up in the front window
beside the flag. Alterations is what I know

and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
When my boy had the fever and the bad dreams

I paid for the clinic exam and a pack of lies.
As a youngster his private parts were undersize.

I thought of his Pa, that muscly old laugh he had
and the boy was thin as a moth, but never once bad,

as smart as a rooster! To hear some neighbors tell,
Your kid! He'll go far. He'll marry well.

So when he talked of taking the cloth, I thought
I'd talk him out of it. You're all I got,

I told him. For six years he studied up. I prayed
against God Himself for my boy. But he stayed.

Christ was a hornet inside his head. I guess
I'd better stitch the zipper in this dress.

I guess I'll get along. I always did.
Across the hall from me's an old invalid,

aside of him, a young one -- he carries on
with a girl who pretends she comes to use the john.

The old one with the bad breath and his bed all mussed,
he smiles and talks to them. He's got some crust.

Sure as hell, what else could I have done
but pack up and move in here, him being my son?

3. Young Girl

Dear love, as simple as some distant evil
we walk a little drunk up these three flughts
where you tacked a Dufy print above your army cot.

The thin apartment doors on the way up will
not tell us. We are saying, we have our rights
and let them see the sandwiches and wine we bought

for we do not explain my husband's insane abuse
and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled
or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead.
Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.

Both a little drunk in the afternoon
with the forgotten smart of August on our skin
we hold hands as if we were still children who trudge

up the wooden tower, on up past that close platoon
of doors, past the dear old man who always asks us in
and the one who sews like a wasp and will not budge.

Climbing the dark halls, I ignore their papers and pails,
the twelve coats of rubbish of someone else's dim life.
Tell them need is an excuse for love. Tell them need prevails.
Tell them I remake and smooth your bed and am your wife.

IV. The Moss of His Skin
"Young girls in old Arabia were often buried alive next
to their fathers, apparently as sacrifice to the goddesses
of the tribes..."

--Harold Feldman, "Children of the Desert" Psychoanalysis
and Psychoanalytic Review, Fall 1958

It was only important
to smile and hold still,
to lie down beside him
and to rest awhile,
to be folded up together
as if we were silk,
to sink from the eyes of mother
and not to talk.
The black room took us
like a cave or a mouth
or an indoor belly.
I held my breath
and daddy was there,
his thumbs, his fat skull,
his teeth, his hair growing
like a field or a shawl.
I lay by the moss
of his skin until
it grew strange. My sisters
will never know that I fall
out of myself and pretend
that Allah will not see
how I hold my daddy
like an old stone tree.

V. To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph
Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wintgs on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that feel back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

VI. The Twelve Dancing Princesses
If you danced from midnight
to six A.M. who would understand?

The runaway boy
who chucks it all
to live on the Boston Common
on speed and saltines,
pissing in the duck pond,
rapping with the street priest,
trading talk like blows,
another missing person,
would understand.

The paralytic's wife
who takes her love to town,
sitting on the bar stool,
downing stingers and peanuts,
singing "That ole Ace down in the hole,"
would understand.

The passengers
from Boston to Paris
watching the movie with dawn
coming up like statues of honey,
having partaken of champagne and steak
while the world turned like a toy globe,
those murderers of the nightgown
would understand.

The amnesiac
who tunes into a new neighborhood,
having misplaced the past,
having thrown out someone else's
credit cards and monogrammed watch,
would understand.

The drunken poet
(a genius by daylight)
who places long-distance calls
at three A.M. and then lets you sit
holding the phone while he vomits
(he calls it "The Night of the Long Knives")
getting his kicks out of the death call,
would understand.

The insomniac
listening to his heart
thumping like a June bug,
listening on his transistor
to Long John Nebel arguing from New York,
lying on his bed like a stone table,
would understand.

The night nurse
with her eyes slit like Venetian blinds,
she of the tubes and the plasma,
listening to the heart monitor,
the death cricket bleeping,
she who calls you "we"
and keeps vigil like a ballistic missile,
would understand.

Once
this king had twelve daughters,
each more beautiful than the other.
They slept together, bed by bed
in a kind of girls' dormitory.
At night the king locked and bolted the door
. How could they possibly escape?
Yet each morning their shoes
were danced to pieces.
Each was as worn as an old jockstrap.
The king sent out a proclamation
that anyone who could discover
where the princesses did their dancing
could take his pick of the litter.
However there was a catch.
If he failed, he would pay with his life.
Well, so it goes.

Many princes tried,
each sitting outside the dormitory,
the door ajar so he could observe
what enchantment came over the shoes.
But each time the twelve dancing princesses
gave the snoopy man a Mickey Finn
and so he was beheaded.
Poof! Like a basketball.

It so happened that a poor soldier
heard about these strange goings on
and decided to give it a try.
On his way to the castle
he met an old old woman.
Age, for a change, was of some use.
She wasn't stuffed in a nursing home.
She told him not to drink a drop of wine
and gave him a cloak that would make
him invisible when the right time came.
And thus he sat outside the dorm.
The oldest princess brought him some wine
but he fastened a sponge beneath his chin,
looking the opposite of Andy Gump.

The sponge soaked up the wine,
and thus he stayed awake.
He feigned sleep however
and the princesses sprang out of their beds
and fussed around like a Miss America Contest.
Then the eldest went to her bed
and knocked upon it and it sank into the earth.
They descended down the opening
one after the other. They crafty soldier
put on his invisisble cloak and followed.
Yikes, said the youngest daughter,
something just stepped on my dress.
But the oldest thought it just a nail.

Next stood an avenue of trees,
each leaf make of sterling silver.
The soldier took a leaf for proof.
The youngest heard the branch break
and said, Oof! Who goes there?
But the oldest said, Those are
the royal trumpets playing triumphantly.
The next trees were made of diamonds.
He took one that flickered like Tinkerbell
and the youngest said: Wait up! He is here!
But the oldest said: Trumpets, my dear.

Next they came to a lake where lay
twelve boats with twelve enchanted princes
waiting to row them to the underground castle.
The soldier sat in the youngest's boat
and the boat was as heavy as if an icebox
had been added but the prince did not suspect.

Next came the ball where the shoes did duty.
The princesses danced like taxi girls at Roseland
as if those tickets would run right out.
They were painted in kisses with their secret hair
and though the soldier drank from their cups
they drank down their youth with nary a thought.

Cruets of champagne and cups full of rubies.
They danced until morning and the sun came up
naked and angry and so they returned
by the same strange route. The soldier
went forward through the dormitory and into
his waiting chair to feign his druggy sleep.
That morning the soldier, his eyes fiery
like blood in a wound, his purpose brutal
as if facing a battle, hurried with his answer
as if to the Sphinx. The shoes! The shoes!
The soldier told. He brought forth
the silver leaf, the diamond the size of a plum.

He had won. The dancing shoes would dance
no more. The princesses were torn from
their night life like a baby from its pacifier.
Because he was old he picked the eldest.
At the wedding the princesses averted their eyes
and sagged like old sweatshirts.
Now the runaways would run no more and never
again would their hair be tangled into diamonds,
never again their shoes worn down to a laugh,
never the bed falling down into purgatory
to let them climb in after
with their Lucifer kicking.

VII. Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

If you're having trouble viewing, go to the video on YouTube.

Poet of the Week: Gwendolyn Brooks

2009-03-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

Seven poems for seven days. Find out more about Gwendolyn Brooks.

I. The Crazy Woman
I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

I'll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I'll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."

II. A Sunset of a City
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.

I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it?? Somebody wanted to joke.

III. We Real Cool
THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

IV. My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Til After Hell
I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.

V. Garbageman: The Man with the Orderly Mind
What do you think of us in fuzzy endeavor, you whose directions are

sterling, whose lunge is straight?

Can you make a reason, how can you pardon us who memorize the rules and never score?

Who memorize the rules from your own text but never quite transfer them to the game,

Who never quite receive the whistling ball, who gawk, begin to absorb the crowd's own roar.

Is earnest enough, may earnest attract or lead to light;

Is light enough, if hands in clumsy frenzy, flimsy whimsically, enlist;

Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades?

Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.

VI. The Bean Eaters
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

VII. Sadie and Maud
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Poet of the Week: Carl Sandburg

2009-02-25T05:00:00.000-08:00

Seven poems for seven days. Learn more about Carl Sandburg.

I. Skyscraper
BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
grappling plans of business and questions of women
in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
and each name standing for a face written across
with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
the building just the same as the master-men who
rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
empties its men and women who go away and eat
and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers
work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money
is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
and has a soul.

II. A Coin
YOUR western heads here cast on money,
You are the two that fade away together,
Partners in the mist.

Lunging buffalo shoulder,
Lean Indian face,
We who come after where you are gone
Salute your forms on the new nickel.

You are
To us:
The past.

Runners
On the prairie:
Good-by.

III. The Walking Man of Rodin
LEGS hold a torso away from the earth.
And a regular high poem of legs is here.
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear
And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.
You make us
Proud of our legs, old man.

And you left off the head here,
The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles.

IV. Happiness
I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children
and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

V. Nigger
I AM the nigger.
Singer of songs,
Dancer…
Softer than fluff of cotton…
Harder than dark earth
Roads beaten in the sun
By the bare feet of slaves…
Foam of teeth … breaking crash of laughter…
Red love of the blood of woman,
White love of the tumbling pickaninnies…
Lazy love of the banjo thrum…
Sweated and driven for the harvest-wage,
Loud laugher with hands like hams,
Fists toughened on the handles,
Smiling the slumber dreams of old jungles,
Crazy as the sun and dew and dripping, heaving life of the jungle,
Brooding and muttering with memories of shackles:
I am the nigger.
Look at me.
I am the nigger.

VI. Masses
Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide maneuvers, I stood silent;
Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant over the horizon’s grass, I was full of thoughts.
Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers, mothers lifting their children—these all I touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.
And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the darkness of night—and all broken, humble ruins of nations.

VII. Working Girls
THE WORKING GIRLS in the morning are going to work--
long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores
and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped
lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.
Each morning as I move through this river of young-
woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all
going, so many with a peach bloom of young years
on them and laughter of red lips and memories in
their eyes of dances the night before and plays and
walks.

Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and
so here are always the others, those who have been
over the way, the women who know each one the
end of life's gamble for her, the meaning and the
clew, the how and the why of the dances and the
arms that passed around their waists and the fingers
that played in their hair.

Faces go by written over: "I know it all, I know where
the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories,"
and the feet of these move slower and they
have wisdom where the others have beauty.
So the green and the gray move in the early morning
on the downtown streets.

Poet of the Week: Mary Oliver

2009-01-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

Last week, we posted a few poems of Elizabeth Alexander, inaugural poet. This week, we are posting a few selected works of Mary Oliver, one of America's best-selling poets as reported in the NY Times .

Thank you Ms. Oliver for speaking to the hearts of so many readers.

I. The Swan
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

© Mary Oliver. From The Paris Review # 124, Fall, 1992.

II. Mockingbirds
This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing

better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.

In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door

to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,

but gods.
It is my favorite story--
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give

but their willingness
to be attentive--
but for this alone
the gods loved them

and blessed them--
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water

from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,

and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down--
but still they asked for nothing

but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.

Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning--
whatever it was I said

I would be doing--
I was standing
at the edge of the field--
I was hurrying

through my own soul,
opening its dark doors--
I was leaning out;
I was listening.

Copyright © 1994 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; February 1994; Mockingbirds; Volume 273, No. 2; page 80.

III. Breakage
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

© Mary Oliver. From Poetry, August 2003.

IV. White Eyes
In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
shoves and pushes
among the branches.
Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,
but he's restless—
he has an idea,
and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings
as long as he stays awake.
But his big, round music, after all,
is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.
In the pine-crown
he makes his nest,
he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,
I only imagine his glittering beak
tucked in a white wing
while the clouds—

which he has summoned
from the north—
which he has taught
to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
into the world below
like stars, or the feathers
of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
that is asleep now, and silent—
that has turned itself
into snow.

© Mary Oliver. From Poetry, October 2002.

V. A Visitor
My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open

and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.

from Dream Work (1986). © Mary Oliver.

VI. The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

VII. The Buddha's Last Instruction
"Make of yourself a light "
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal - a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Poet of the Week: Elizabeth Alexander

2009-01-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

Poetry is experiencing a renaissance. At least more people are reading poetry again, and the election of Mr. Obama is helping a bit, too. Mr. Obama has selected an inaugural poet, the NY Times reported yesterday, following a tradition created by John F. Kennedy. The poet he selected is Elizabeth Alexander.

In honor of the inaugural poet, here are a few of her poems:

I. Blues
I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, 'til
my face is creased and swollen,
'til my lips are dry and hot. I
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.
Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday
I am still in my nightgown, the one
with the lace trim listing because
I have not mended it. Many days
I do not exercise, only
consider it, then rub my curdy
belly and lie down. Even
my poems are lazy. I use
syllabics instead of iambs,
prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme,
write briefly while others go
for pages. And yesterday,
for example, I did not work at all!
I got in my car and I drove
to factory outlet stores, purchased
stockings and panties and socks
with my father's money.

To think, in childhood I missed only
one day of school per year. I went
to ballet class four days a week
at four-forty-five and on
Saturdays, beginning always
with plie, ending with curtsy.
To think, I knew only industry,
the industry of my race
and of immigrants, the radio
tuned always to the station
that said, Line up your summer
job months in advance. Work hard
and do not shame your family,
who worked hard to give you what you have.
There is no sin but sloth. Burn
to a wick and keep moving.

I avoided sleep for years,
up at night replaying
evening news stories about
nearby jailbreaks, fat people
who ate fried chicken and woke up
dead. In sleep I am looking
for poems in the shape of open
V's of birds flying in formation,
or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

II. Haircut
I get off the IRT in front of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture after riding an early Amtrak
from Philly to get a hair cut at what used to be the Harlem "Y" barbershop. It gets me in at ten to ten.
Waiting, I eat fish cakes at the Pam Pam and listen to the ladies call out orders: bacon-biscuit twice,
scrambled scrambled fried, over easy, grits, country sausage on the side. Hugh is late. He shampoos me,
says "I can't remember, Girlfriend, are you tender-headed?" From the chair I notice the mural behind me
in the mirror. I know those overlapped sepia shadows, a Renaissance rainforest, Aaron Douglas! Hugh tells
me he didn't use primer and the chlorine eats the colors every day. He clips and combs and I tell him how
my favorite Douglas is called "Building More Stately Mansions," and he tells me how fly I'd look in a Salt 'n'
Pepa 'do, how he trained in Japan.
Clip clip, clip clip. I imagine a whoosh each time my hair lands on the floor and the noises of small brown
mammals. I remember, my father! He used to get his hair cut here, learned to swim in the caustic water,
played pool and basketball. He cuts his own hair now. My grandfather worked seventy-five years in
Harlem building more stately mansions. I was born two blocks away and then we moved.
None of that seems to relate to today. This is not my turf, despite the other grandfather and great-aunt who
sewed hearts back into black chests after Saturday night stabbings on this exact corner, the great-uncle who
made a mosaic down the street, both grandmothers. What am I always listening for in Harlem? A voice
that says, "This is your place, too," as faintly as the shadows in the mural? The accents are unfamiliar; all
my New York kin are dead. I never knew Fats Waller but what do I do with knowing he used to play with a
ham and a bottle of gin atop his piano; never went to Olivia's House of Beauty but I know Olivia, who lives
in St. Thomas, now, and who exactly am I, anyway, finding myself in these ghostly, Douglas shadows while
real ghosts walk around me, talk about my stuff in the subway, yell at me not to butt the line, beg me, beg
me, for my money?
What is black culture? I read the writing on the wall on the side of the "Y" as I always have: "Harlem Plays
the Best Ball in the World." I look in the mirror and see my face in the mural with a new haircut. I am a
New York girl; I am a New York woman; I am a flygirl with a new hair cut in New York City in a mural
that is dying every day.

III. Vernal Observations
The forsythia cascades quiver

No breeze blowing any where else?

Gazing, again, ah the blossoms

A goldfinch constructing her nest!

IV. Ladders
Filene's department store
near nineteen-fifty-three:
An Aunt Jemima floor
display. Red bandanna,

Apron holding white rolls
of black fat fast against
the bubbling pancakes, bowls
and bowls of pale batter.

This is what Donna sees,
across the "Cookwares" floor,
and hears "Donnessa?" Please,
This can not be my aunt.

Father's long-gone sister,
nineteen-fifty-three. "Girl?"
Had they lost her, missed her?
This is not the question.

This must not be my aunt.
Jemima? Pays the rent.
Family mirrors haunt
their own reflections.

Ladders. Sisters. Nieces.
As soon as a live Jemima
as a buck-eyed rhesus
monkey. Girl? Answer me.

NEXT WEEK: MARY OLIVER

An All Hallow's Eve Poem

2008-10-31T13:30:00.000-07:00

by Stephanie Barnett
copyright 2008

Wally knockered knickers hitched in hobo bags
Hoofing trails aplenty, heroes, pirates, hags
Polly pocket pickers wrapping at the door
Saccharine bounty spoils, Victor hunts for more
Chuckle budget fidget slams on the gong
Oopsadaisy patience sings OompaLoompa's song
Herald cries for Mary, Trumpets sqwak "Anon!"
Waiting on the porch stoop, a flashlight for a wand
Doodle bugs seek candy Greet Casper in the night
Four and 20 monkeys give us quite the fright
Heavel hoe a princess, Rock a dandy loon
Runty little werewolves howling at the moon
Trick a little lady, trip her up the stairs
Wanton witches wary dole the treats with care
Herd the kittens homeward, sleep tugging lidded eyes
Wistful dreams of morrow and candy mountains' size
Wimpled mischief lays to rest, pathways dark descending
Luna mists a drifty tune, hallow's eve is ending

Poet of the Week: Kahlil Gibran

2008-10-12T01:34:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days by Kahlil Gibran.

I. Joy and Sorrow

Then a woman said, 'Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.'
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that hold your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, 'Joy is greater than sorrow,' and others say, 'Nay, sorrow is the greater.'
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

II. Buying and Selling

And a merchant said, 'Speak to us of Buying and Selling.'
And he answered and said:
To you the earth yields her fruit, and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied.
Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.
When in the market place you toilers of the sea and fields and vineyards meet the weavers and the potters and the gatherers of spices, -
Invoke then the master spirit of the earth, to come into your midst and sanctify the scales and the reckoning that weighs value against value.

And suffer not the barren-handed to take part in your transactions, who would sell their words for your labour.
To such men you should say, 'Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net; For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us.'
And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players, - buy of their gifts also.
For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.
And before you leave the marketplace, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.
For the master spirit of the earth shall not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the needs of the least of you are satisfied.

III. Reason and Passion

And the priestess spoke again and said: 'Speak to us of Reason and Passion.'
And he answered saying:
Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.
Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.
But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or our rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion; that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.
I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house.
Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.
Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows - then let your heart say in silence, 'God rests in reason.'
And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, - then let your heart say in awe, 'God moves in passion.'
And since you are a breath In God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

IV. Eating and Drinking

Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said, 'Speak to us of Eating and Drinking.'
And he said:
Would that you could live on the fragerance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship,
And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in many.
When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
'By the same power that slays you, I to am slain; and I too shall be consumed. For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.'
And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
'Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.'
And in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of your vineyard for the winepress, say in you heart,
'I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress,
And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels.'
And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup;
And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress.

V. Clothes

And the weaver said, 'Speak to us of Clothes.'
And he answered:
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment,
For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.
Some of you say, 'It is the north wind who has woven the clothes to wear.'
But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.
And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

VI. Houses

A mason came forth and said, 'Speak to us of Houses.'
And he answered and said:
Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone.
Your house is your larger body.
It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless.
Does not your house dream? And dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?
Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.
Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.
But these things are not yet to be.
In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together. And that fear shall endure a little longer. A little longer shall your city walls separate your hearths from your fields.
And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?
Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.
Though its hands are silken, its heart is of iron.
It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh.
It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.
It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.
You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.
You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.
And though of magnificence and splendour, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

VII. Pain

And a woman spoke, saying, 'Tell us of Pain.'
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

Orchestra of Light

2008-09-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

DRAFT 1 - Feedback is welcome; I'll be looking to cut out redundant descriptions, cut down overuse of certain words, and flesh out the story where more or less may be needed. Happy reading and thanks!

by Stephanie Paige Barnett
copyright 2008

The statement of my evening, a good book, a bottle of wine, the pondering of my human condition – the result of an emotionally induced cocktail, is punctuated by the music of the neighboring apartment building’s lights. Someone in 4B is using their bathroom. 5C’s inhabitants just stepped out for the evening. The television in 2A warbles in hues of blues and greens. Windows everywhere are popping with light, on and off, on and off, on and off in the humming rhythm of my warped and depressed life.

Alex walked out on me. The events of the evening deepen my draws on my glass, and the contents of my 1976 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, which I had reserved for a spectacular special occasion, are quickly drained of their resources. Bad occasions are special occasions, too, yes? Well, fuck him. He obviously wasn’t in it for the long haul.

Alex and I met five years ago at a friend’s party. I had just finished wrapping a movie with Matt Vancil, the hottest new director in the business, and my credits as producer were drawing attention. I was hot, and I knew it.

“Yeah, so we just wrapped yesterday. This is huge for us. We have interest from three different studios. The potential is HUGE!”

The guy I was talking to was hanging on every word. He’d had enough beer to make him considerate, but not enough that he lost that cool charismatic machismo that I went wild for. Unfortunately, he didn’t have many gray matter cells to speak of, but I didn’t care. I just wanted someone to experience my charge. I was flaming hot and wanted someone to burn in hell with me.

“You know, potential doesn’t amount to much.”

I pitched around to the voice at my back with lightening speed. “Excuse me? I didn’t catch that comment underneath your wet blanket. Say that again?”

“I said you’re full of shit and you know it. So let me buy you a drink and we’ll have one of the few real conversations in this place tonight.” He was 6’3” with brown curly hair, blue eyes, a broad build, and the ever present hint of an amused smile. I was immediately drawn to his aloof, collected air that was complicated by an obvious intelligence held by an elite global membership. I may not have been his peer in this regard, but I was his superior emotionally and socially, and he knew it as soon as he spotted me across the room. We were a caustic complement to one another that only the reaction of sodium, chlorine gas, and water could foreshadow.

That night led to many drinks, a sunrise on the beach, a breakfast of waffles at the local diner, and 72 hours of the finest sex ever to be seen on the face of the planet. The next day, I flew out to Colorado to work on my next project and Alex went back to his wife and software job living the sweet life in Seattle’s Queen Anne hills. He had told me about his wife on the way to the airport.

“So when will I get to see you again? With all the overtime you software guys must put in, I’m sure you’ve earned enough comp-time to fly out to Colorado for a ski weekend, eh?”

He hadn’t been silent, but it was the first time he skipped a beat since I’d met him. “Alright, Mr. Cool, what is it? You don’t like flying? You’re the mail boy in your office, so you really don’t have vacation time? You—“

“I’m married. I have no kids. I have a dog named Marly. He’s a black lab chow mix. I own my home. My parents are dead. Hers aren’t. Her name is Elizabeth. She was my high school sweet heart. We broke up in college and got married the year after I graduated. She adores me….And I hate her. No that’s too strong. I despise her. I ache for her to leave me, but she lives in a soulfully happy oblivion of which I take no part. We live mentally on separate continents, and I keep a suitcase packed and stashed away in the garage in the case that one day I might actually have the guts to leave this wonderful, gracious, beautiful woman in order to find my own happiness.” He stopped abruptly and continued his course to the airport. In the two beats between my next breath and his confession he managed to take a sip of his Starbucks mug with the nonchalance of daily routine.

Breathe. I remember telling myself to breathe. My body in a moment’s time had forgotten it needed air in order to function. Breathe. My lungs expanded. Breathe. My throat expanded, and somewhere in the distance my ears detected a growing, booming rumble.

“Are you okay?” He looked panic. My shock had let loose a deep groan unfettered by breath or conscious awareness. With my forehead leaning against the window, I watched fellow cars darting down the wide I-5 corridor wondering who else might be having a similar experience in this moment. I was a fool. I was a fool for being so arrogant in the first place and I was a fool for being charmed by one who knew how to keep me off a pedestal. I moaned inconsolably for the better part of five minutes while Alex’s convertible Audi made its final approach to the SeaTac airport. It was only when I saw the sign for the cell phone waiting lot that I stopped.

“Pull over,” I said.

“What?”

“Go to the god damned cell phone lot!” I shouted.

He shot across three lanes and made a seemingly swift and easy maneuver into the waiting area. It was dark and masses of cars were waiting in the stalls. I had 30 minutes until I needed to be at the airport. It was a domestic flight, and I always aired on the side of caution. Since 9-11 you never knew what to expect. Besides, I had bad airport karma. I was always stopped and searched or asked to step aside and go through the line again. It never failed. Understanding this lot in life, I always gave myself extra time.

Alex shut off the engine, but left the lights on. I’m not sure if he did it for his own protection. The silence was deafening. He reached for the radio, but froze when I raged, “FUCK YOU!”

I don’t know how I managed to do so, but I pounced out of my seat and on top of the man pounding on his chest as hard as I could. He caught me at the wrists. His grip hurt and I knocked my elbow hard against his window. Somehow he managed to get my arms down to my side. He was much stronger than me which made me furious and I leaned over and bit his shoulder. Yelping from the pain, one of his hands went instinctually to the bite leaving one of my arms free. I grabbed his seat lever knocking him backwards. I fell on top of him and we knocked heads. The next moment we found ourselves kissing frantically, struggling with clothes in an awkward position, trying to avoid the horn on the steering console. Fortunately for us his windows were tinted so no one could see inside the car.

The sex of the last 72 hours was no contest for this carnal grudge match. Both of us came more than once, and in the end, we were bloodied and bruised. It was unclear who was the winner or the loser. Maybe it was the both of us. No matter, I made my plane on time and was only stopped once in the security line.

I didn’t exchange information with Alex. One night stands are not my standard mode of operation, and after his driver’s side confession there just didn’t seem any point. If Cindy ever had another huge party, I’d probably see him there anyway.

My best friend, Sarah, put me up in her home in Colorado Springs while I was on project. She’s a pilot for a puddle-jumper airline and loves what she does. We first met in junior high algebra class. With so much history, the two of us are more like sisters than anything. This documentary sponsored by a major cable channel was the perfect opportunity for us to spend some significant time together in years. Following the Alex incident, I don’t know what I would’ve done without her.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes, Sarah. I’m sure. It must’ve been the car. There’s no other way it could’ve happened.” Sarah was on an overnight in Chicago. Her flights usually took her away for four or five days at a time and then she’d be home for three or four. I didn’t like to call her while she was away since I was staying with her and we spent so much time together when she was home, but today was the exception. “I’ve taken four tests. They’re all positive. It’s been three months already. What am I going to do?!”

“Calm down. Calm down. Obviously having a drink right now isn’t an option, so let’s think about this for a minute. Have you talked to Alex at all since you left Seattle?”

“No, not a chance.”

“Does his opinion matter in this situation to you?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. No! Look, he wasn’t open and honest with me. He doesn’t get a choice in this matter, but I do. Fuck him! Fuck him….” I wasn’t happy. I’d been thinking about Alex since the moment I laid eyes on him. What is it about a guy that can make a grown woman’s decision-making skills as elusive and formless as gas. My heart had ached for him since I left, and my passion for this documentary about the evangelical church in the United States had faded like the dishwater brown hair of my second assistant. We were over budget and over our timeline and there was nothing I could seem to do about it. The project was a failure, I was a failure, and I had failed myself because of my inability to concentrate on simple day-to-day activities. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t noticed I was pregnant.

I’d never wanted kids, but suddenly I was faced with the stark reality of my situation. I was 33 years old, unmarried with no prospects. I wasn’t getting any younger. With the status of my current project, it was unclear what the future held for my entertainment career. I had no vision. Entertainment was something I did. It was fun. It was killing time. It paid the bills. I always thought it would lead me around the world, which is the one thing I ever truly loved: traveling. It did and it didn’t though and I learned quickly I’d need to find something else to achieve that dream. I hadn’t trusted love since my boyfriend of six years left me for a woman who actually wanted to marry him. And I was living a nomadic lifestyle, following the trail of my job wherever that led. I didn’t own a car, a home, a storage space. Nothing. I stayed with friends or in hotels. I visited my parents from time to time who kept a few boxes of my things from school in their attic. All of the clothes I owned fit in two suitcases. Suddenly, here I was facing the possibility of another living me. I was scared.

“Oh shit! Oh shit, Sarah, what am I going to do?! Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit—“

“Dagny! Snap out of it! Get a grip. You are a grown woman. This happens to us all the time. You are going to deal with it, that’s what you’re going to do, and I’m going to help you. Now first thing is first, do you want to tell Alex before or after you have made a decision?” Sarah could always be counted on in times of distress.

“After.”

“Do you or do you not need to make a decision?”

“Still need to make a decision.”

“And after you have made the decision, do you or do you not want to tell Alex?”

“I’ll decide that later.”

“Okay. There. Now go over to the cupboard by refrigerator, and in the back left corner you’ll find some special tea from Korea. This is therapeutic stuff, the good stuff. You’ll only need two balls. Brew some of that, and then go take a nap. I’ll call you in a couple hours when I land in Lincoln. We good?”

“Yeah, Sarah, thanks.”

“Okay, Mesmer, I’ll talk to you later.”

“Bye, chica.” There was a hard click on the other end that disconnected our call. In a catatonic haze, I moved zombie precision through Sarah’s immaculately sterile house. Sliding beneath the downy covers of her guestroom bed, I fell swiftly asleep with the heavy burden of decisions to be made.

Four months later, I was in Seattle working as an adjunct faculty member in the film department of the local university. Wendy, my sister, had bought a cute, two-story, turn-of-the-century, mason-style home in the University district. My rent check helped her to pay the mortgage while her boyfriend was away in Afghanistan. He’d been deployed more than a year ago, but the military kept extending his service. There didn’t seem to be a clear end in sight. She always made sure his side of the bed had a clean pillowcase, and that his clothes were freshly washed in case he came home. Since he was in the Special Forces, she didn’t hear from him much because of the security issues. But, as a teacher and soccer coach, she kept herself distracted with the kids at school, and when she wasn’t working, her many friends would take her out to keep her mind off Chad.

One Friday, Wendy had a leave day for teachers. We were going to meet for coffee at the University Avenue Starbucks, but she called and canceled. The café was packed. I was lucky I’d arrived before the lunch rush. Reading over the illiterate blathering of an obviously lazy student, a shadow grayed out the lines of the paragraphs. Looking up, my eyes met the figure of Alex, still with laughing eyes, still strikingly beautiful as beauty goes for men.

“I thought that was you,” he said. “Wow, you look glowing. Colorado really did good for you. How’ve you been?”

He hadn’t seen my belly. In a flowing black top it was conspicuously tucked away beneath the table.

“I’m….well. Thank you.” My nether regions were aching. What was it about this man? I wanted to flay open my chest and envelop him. I began to shaking and had to put down my herbal tea so he wouldn’t notice.

“Well, I know we didn’t part on the best of terms….but, if you’d like to grab a drink some time, or something, you should give me a call.” He wrote down his cell number on the back of his business card and set it on the table. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Alright, well, later.” I just looked at him. When he realized a response wasn’t coming he made a beeline for the front door. I put my mind back on my papers and forgot about him, as much as I could.

Walking out of the café that afternoon there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and there was Alex. He’d been waiting outside at one of the sidewalk tables. It had rained at least twice since we’d spoken that morning, and his clothes smelled damp and musty.

“Look,” he said. “I know this is crazy, but I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind. I went home that day you left and told my wife we needed to talk. She’d been having an affair for the past year. We were both really relieved that the truth came out. Our divorce was finalized two months ago. Though I’m disappointed that she got the dog, I can’t thank you enough. And I wanted to ask you if you wanted to go out sometime.”

His cool veneer from the night of the party had disappeared. His speech, though not memorized, had been plowed through with the steady speed of a high speed train and evident fear. His eyes were closed through it all. Now, he really looked at me for the first time since he dropped me at the airport. “Oh my god! Oh wow, you’re….congratulations! I’m sorry I should have asked if you were in a relationship.”

“I’m not.”

“Oh, sorry to hear that. When are the two of you expecting?”

“About eight weeks from now.”

“Oh.” Silence. Then his eyes widened as his brain did the math. “Oh!”

“Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s yours.”

“Oh.” The lines on his forehead eased down over those sea blue eyes in relief. He ran a hand through his hair and dodged my gaze. “That’s not what I meant, you know. I…uh…”

“Yeah right.” I spun around and continued my path toward the bus stop. He stayed firmly planted on the sidewalk looking after me I suppose.

Fifteen minutes later Alex’s Audi cruised up to the bus stop curb. “Can I give you a ride?”

“I can’t guarantee the same thing will happen this time,” I said. “There isn’t room for all three of us.” He chuckled awkwardly. I chucked my bags packed with student papers into his nonexistent backseat and told him where to drop me off.

Arriving at my sister’s, he spoke to me for the first time since I’d gotten into his car, “So is the baby mine?”

I grabbed my things. Only after I was securely out of his car, did I answer, “Yes.”

With the car still running he leapt to my side and blocked the front gate. His breath was heavy and his chest moved swiftly up and down from the pressure. Sweet, tangy hints of his deodorant or cologne blew past my nostrils. The top buttons of his loose beach-bum-goes to-to-the-office Gap work shirt look revealed a hairless chest on a naturally hairless body. I couldn’t help but shiver at the thought. Alex thought I was cold.

“Here, let’s get you inside.” I let him escort me up to the stoop and open the front door. Johnny, Wendy’s bull mastiff, was there to greet us. Her hackles rose at the site and smell of Alex.

“It’s okay, girl. Just let her sniff you and she’ll be fine. Do you want some coffee?” I realized the stupidity of my offer since we’d both just come from a café, but then again he was still a little damp.

“I’d love some.” The two of us talked all evening, catching up, filling in the details, asking questions, and we didn’t stop talking. Alex stayed the night and never left. We decided to get married the night before our daughter, Eliza Carol, was born. Shortly after we called our parents I went into labor. A justice of the peace came down to my labor and delivery unit where two nurses were our witnesses. Jen Mize, one of the nurses, has since become a very dear friend.

The first year of our marriage was the happiest newlyweds could be. I moved out of my sister’s into an apartment with Alex on Capitol Hill. Yes there were late nights and early mornings with the baby, but Alex and I were like rabbits, absolutely in love with each other, with Eliza, and this wonderful life that we’d created for ourselves. The madness came on gradually.

By the end of our second year, Alex was away on business trips every other week. The software firm that contracted with Microsoft was sending him to India. Life was busy, we were tired, but we made it work. By the third year, those trips were a month at a time. On a couple different occasions I’d brought up taking the family with him. I wasn’t teaching during the summers and was up for a sabbatical now that I’d become a regular professor. It made me uncomfortable that he never warmed to the idea, but I lived with his excuses. In the fourth year, Alex lost interest in me altogether. I think he serviced me occasionally just to get me to shut up. Then, one day, he came home and, not unexpectedly, asked for a divorce. He wasn’t happy. He was on the verge of despising me. He felt trapped. I felt like I was caught up in someone else’s story and realized that I was. I didn’t fight him. He was so predictable.

Today, my divorce papers came. I’m sitting on the back porch drinking wine watching the evening conduct the orchestra of lights. Elizabeth, Alex’s first wife and I had dinner earlier. It’s become a regular thing between us. She has a son and a daughter herself, both Alex’s. There was no dog Marly. Elizabeth didn’t have an affair. She’d just met a man who wanted to spend time with her. It had been a refreshing change of pace. The rest of what Alex said was true, he did despise her and he did keep an escape suitcase packed. Elizabeth had found it six months before he asked her for a divorce. She knew it would be coming.

Sipping at my wine, it’s hard to believe the difference in where I was four years ago and right now. I never envisioned myself here. Heck, I never envisioned myself anywhere. That’s changed a little. The most important person to me in the world is sleeping soundly in that next room. And four days from this moment, her brown curly hair, deep blue eyes, and toothy smile are going to experience Paris for the first time.

I finger the travel guidebook that sits on the table.

So will I.

Poet of the Week: Ezra Pound

2008-07-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days. Ezra Pound was one of the great influential poets of ee cummings and many others. Learn more about Ezra Pound.

I. Dance Figure
For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee

Dark-eyed,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandalled,
There is none like thee among the dancers,
None with swift feet.
I have not found thee in the tents,
In the broken darkness.
I have not found thee at the well-head
Among the women with pitchers.
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;
Thy face as a river with lights.

White as an almond are thy shoulders;
As new almonds stripped from the husk.
They guard thee not with eunuchs;
Not with bars of copper.

Gilt turquoise and silver are in the place of thy rest.
A brown robe, with threads of gold woven in
patterns, hast thou gathered about thee,
O Nathat-Ikanaie, 'Tree-at-the-river'.

As a rillet among the sedge are thy hands upon me;
Thy fingers a frosted stream.

Thy maidens are white like pebbles;
Their music about thee!

There is none like thee among the dancers;
None with swift feet.

II. Grace Before Song
Lord God of heaven that with mercy dight
Th'alternate prayer wheel of the night and light
Eternal hath to thee, and in whose sight
Our days as rain drops in the sea surge fall,

As bright white drops upon a leaden sea
Grant so my songs to this grey folk may be:

As drops that dream and gleam and falling catch the sun
Evan'scent mirrors every opal one
Of such his splendor as their compass is,
So, bold My Songs, seek ye such death as this.

III. Ezra on the Strike
Wal, Thanksgivin' do be comin' round.
With the price of turkeys on the bound,
And coal, by gum! Thet were just found,
Is surely gettin' cheaper.

The winds will soon begin to howl,
And winter, in its yearly growl,
Across the medders begin to prowl,
And Jack Frost gettin' deeper.

By shucks! It seems to me,
That you I orter be
Thankful, that our Ted could see
A way to operate it.

I sez to Mandy, sure, sez I,
I'll bet thet air patch o' rye
Thet he'll squash 'em by-and-by,
And he did, by cricket!

No use talkin', he's the man -
One of the best thet ever ran,
Fer didn't I turn Republican
One o' the fust?

I 'lowed as how he'd beat the rest,
But old Si Perkins, he hemmed and guessed,
And sed as how it wuzn't best
To meddle with the trust.

IV. In the Old Age of Soul
I do not choose to dream; there cometh on me
Some strange old lust for deeds.
As to the nerveless hand of some old warrior
The sword-hilt or the war-worn wonted helmet
Brings momentary life and long-fled cunning,
So to my soul grown old -
Grown old with many a jousting, many a foray,
Grown old with namy a hither-coming and hence-going -
Till now they send him dreams and no more deed;
So doth he flame again with might for action,
Forgetful of the council of elders,
Forgetful that who rules doth no more battle,
Forgetful that such might no more cleaves to him
So doth he flame again toward valiant doing.

V. L'Art
Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

VI. Statement of Being
I am a grave poetic hen
That lays poetic eggs
And to enhance my temperament
A little quiet begs.

We make the yolk philosophy,
True beauty the albumen.
And then gum on a shell of form
To make the screed sound human.

VII. The River Merchant's Wife
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.

Bonus material:
The Needle
Come, or the stellar tide will slip away.
Eastward avoid the hour of its decline,
Now! for the needle trembles in my soul!

Here have we had the vantage, the good hour.
Here we have had our day, your day and mine.
Come now, before this power
That bears us up, shall turn against the pole.
Mock not the flood of stars, the thing's to be.
O Love, come now, this land turns evil slowly.
The waves bore in, soon will they bear away.

The treasure is ours, make we fast land with it.
Move we and take the tide, with its next favour,
Abide
Under some neutral force
Until this course turneth aside.

Poet of the Week: Jorge Luis Borges

2008-07-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days. Learn more about Jorge Luis Borges.

I. The Art of Poetry
To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

II. El Instante
Dónde estarán los siglos, dónde el sueño
de espadas que los tártaros soñaron,
dónde los fuertes muros que allanaron,
dónde el Árbol de Adán y el otro Leño?
El presente está solo. La memoria
erige el tiempo. Sucesión y engaño
es la rutina del reloj. El año
no es menos vano que la vana historia.
Entre el alba y la noche hay un abismo
de agonías, de luces, de cuidados;
el rostro que se mira en los gastados
espejos de la noche no es el mismo.
El hoy fugaz es tenue y es eterno;
otro Cielo no esperes, ni otro Infierno.

III. The Other Tiger
A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.

It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.

We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

IV. To a Cat
Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law,
we look for you in vain;
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past,
the love of the distrustful hand.
You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.

V. History of the Night
Throughout the course of th generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

VI. Limits
Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

VII.
We are the time. We are the famous
metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure.

We are the water, not the hard diamond,
the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.

We are the river and we are that greek
that looks himself into the river. His reflection
changes into the waters of the changing mirror,
into the crystal that changes like the fire.

We are the vain predetermined river,
in his travel to his sea.

The shadows have surrounded him.
Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away.

Memory does not stamp his own coin.

However, there is something that stays
however, there is something that bemoans.

Bonus material --
Instantes (Instants)
If I were able to live my life anew,
In the next I would try to commit more errors.
I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more.
I would be more foolish than I've been,
In fact, I would take few things seriously.
I would be less hygienic.
I would run more risks, take more vacations,
contemplate more sunsets,
climb more mountains, swim more rivers.
I would go to more places where I've never been,
I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans,
I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.

I was one of those people that lived sensibly
and prolifically each minute of his life;
Of course I had moments of happiness.
If I could go back I would try
to have only good moments.

Because if you didn't know, of that is life made:
only of moments; Don't lose the now.

I was one of those that never
went anywhere without a thermometer,
a hot-water bottle,
an umbrella, and a parachute;
If I could live again, I would travel lighter.

If I could live again,
I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring
and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends.
I would take more cart rides,
contemplate more dawns,
and play with more children,
If I had another life ahead of me.

But already you see, I am 85,
and I know that I am dying.

(Translated from Spanish by myself [Jorge Luis Borges])

Alternate Translation: Instants
If I could live again my life,
In the next - I'll try,-
to make more mistakes,
I won't try to be so perfect,
I'll be more relaxed,
I'll be more full - than I am now,
In fact, I'll take fewer things seriously,
I'll be less hygenic,
I'll take more risks,
I'll take more trips,
I'll watch more sunsets,
I'll climb more mountains,
I'll swim more rivers,
I'll go to more places - I've never been,
I'll eat more ice creams and less (lime) beans,
I'll have more real problems - and less imaginary
ones,
I was one of those people who live
prudent and prolific lives -
each minute of his life,
Of course that I had moments of joy -
but,if I could go back I'll try to have only good moments,

If you don't know - thats what life is made of,
Don't lose the now!

I was one of those who never goes anywhere
without a thermometer,
without a hot-water bottle,
and without an umbrella and without a parachute,

If I could live again - I will travel light,
If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet
at the beginning of spring till
the end of autumn,
I'll ride more carts,
I'll watch more sunrises and play with more children,
If I have the life to live - but now I am 85,
- and I know that I am dying ...

Poet of the Week: Dorothy Parker

2008-06-28T16:44:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days. To learn more about Dorothy Parker, her life, and writing go to PoemHunter.org.

I. A Well-Worn Story
In April, in April,My one love came along,
And I ran the slope of my high hill
To follow a thread of song.

His eyes were hard as porphyry
With looking on cruel lands;
His voice went slipping over me
Like terrible silver hands.

Together we trod the secret lane
And walked the muttering town.
I wore my heart like a wet, red stain
On the breast of a velvet gown.

In April, in April,
My love went whistling by,
And I stumbled here to my high hill
Along the way of a lie.

Now what should I do in this place
But sit and count the chimes,
And splash cold water on my face
And spoil a page with rhymes?

II. A Certain Lady
Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,
And drink your rushing words with eager lips,
And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips.
When you rehearse your list of loves to me,
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed.
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see
The thousand little deaths my heart has died.
And you believe, so well I know my part,
That I am gay as morning, light as snow,
And all the straining things within my heart
You'll never know.

Oh, I can laugh and listen, when we meet,
And you bring tales of fresh adventurings, --
Of ladies delicately indiscreet,
Of lingering hands, and gently whispered things.
And you are pleased with me, and strive anew
To sing me sagas of your late delights.
Thus do you want me -- marveling, gay, and true,
Nor do you see my staring eyes of nights.
And when, in search of novelty, you stray,
Oh, I can kiss you blithely as you go ....
And what goes on, my love, while you're away,
You'll never know.

III. Faute de Mieux
Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme-
I never said they feed my heart,
But still they pass my time.

IV. I Know I Have Been Happiest
I know I have been happiest at your side;
But what is done, is done, and all's to be.
And small the good, to linger dolefully-
Gayly it lived, and gallantly it died.
I will not make you songs of hearts denied,
And you, being man, would have no tears of me,
And should I offer you fidelity,
You'd be, I think, a little terrified.
Yet this the need of woman, this her curse:
To range her little gifts, and give, and give,
Because the throb of giving's sweet to bear.
To you, who never begged me vows or verse,
My gift shall be my absence, while I live;
But after that, my dear, I cannot swear.

V. Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom
Daily dawns another day;
I must up, to make my way.
Though I dress and drink and eat,
Move my fingers and my feet,
Learn a little, here and there,
Weep and laugh and sweat and swear,
Hear a song, or watch a stage,
Leave some words upon a page,
Claim a foe, or hail a friend-
Bed awaits me at the end.

Though I go in pride and strength,
I'll come back to bed at length.
Though I walk in blinded woe,
Back to bed I'm bound to go.
High my heart, or bowed my head,
All my days but lead to bed.
Up, and out, and on; and then
Ever back to bed again,
Summer, Winter, Spring, and Fall-
I'm a fool to rise at all!

VI. The Flaw in Paganism
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

VII. Words of Comfort to be Scratched on a Mirror
Helen of Troy had a wandering glance;
Sappho's restriction was only the sky;
Ninon was ever the chatter of France;
But oh, what a good girl am I!

Bonus material -
Theory
Into love and out again,
Thus I went, and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen-
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
Some one dropped me on my head?

Poet of the Week: Sherman Alexie

2008-06-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days. To learn more about Sherman Alexie, go to his website.

I. 7. Jonah
We've been planning the revolution for years.
We have weapons and white friends, but I fear
Indians have forgotten how to survive.
It's a complicated song and dance. Late at night
we practice. We pound invisible drums. We sing
with our mouths closed. Silence is the thing
we must learn to fear. This is the plan.
One night, we will slip from our beds and stand
together. We will stamp our feet in unison
and sing the same song loudly with strong lungs
and hearts. We will sing the old songs.
Cousins, this is not where we belong.
Way, ya, hi, yo. Way, ya, hi, yo.
Way, ya, hi, yo. Way, ya, hi, yo.
Cousins, remember how we sang and danced back then.
During the revolution, we will find our music again.

II. poverty of mirrors
You wake these mornings alone and nothing
can be forgiven; you drink the last
swallow of warm beer from the can
beside the bed, tell the stranger sleeping
on the floor to go home. It's too easy

to be no one with nothing to do, only
slightly worried about the light bill
more concerned with how dark day gets.

You walk alone on moist pavement wondering
what color rain is in the country.
Does the world out there revolve around rooms
without doors or windows? Centering the mirror
you found in the trash, walls seem closer
and you can never find the right way

out, so you open the fridge again
for a beer, find only rancid milk and drink it
whole. This all tastes too familiar.

III. What the Orphan Inherits
Language

I dreamed I was digging your grave
with my bare heands. I touched your face
and skin fell in thin strips to the ground

until only your tongue remained whole.
I hung it to smoke with the deer
for seven days. It tasted thick and greasy

sinew gripped my tongue tight. I rose
to walk naked through the fire. I spoke
English. I was not consumed.

Names

I do not have an Indian name.
The wind never spoke to my mother
when I was born. My heart was hidden

beneath the shells of walnuts switched
back and forth. I have to cheat to feel
the beating of drums in my chest.

Alcohol

"For bringing us the horse
we could almost forgive you
for bringing us whisky."

Time

We measure time leaning
out car windows shattering
beer bottles off road signs.

Tradition

Indian boys
sinewy and doe-eyed
frozen in headlights.

IV. I Would Steal Horses
For Kari

for you, if there were any left,
give a dozen of the best
to your father, the auto mechanic
in the small town where you were born

and where he will die sometime by dark.
I am afraid of his hands, which have
rebuilt more of the small parts
of this world than I ever will.

I would sign treaties for you, take
every promise as the last lie, the last
point after which we both refuse the exact.

I would wrap us both in old blankets
hold every disease tight against our skin.

V. Little Big Man
I got eyes, Jack, that can see
an ant moving along the horizon
can pull four bottles shattering
down from the sky and recognize
the eyes of a blind man

who told me once, The future is yours
and I believed him until he left me
without a campfire, without an axe
to chop down a tree and build myself
a chair, house, cold drink.

Jack, how much pain is thre
in the world? I think there's only one kind
and we all keep moving around it in circles
like clumsy pioneers, over the same ground
until the landscape becomes so familiar
we settle down and call it home.

Seems like everybody wants to be an Indian.
Why should you be any different, Jack?
Still, when you rub the red dirt off your pale nose
your little insanities vanish.
Listen: the proof is glass.
When an Indian looks through a window
it's like a mirror. When the Indian looks
into a mirror, it's like a window.

I know you have dreams, Jack. We all want
an acre of land, love, and a full stomach.
Without that, we couldn't listen to the wind
without anger. But I've been sitting in a cold room
watching stars through a hole in the roof.
That bright star to the north doesn't have a name
I know. Like everything else, it will break my heart.

VI. At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School
the football field rises
to meet the mesa. Indian boys
gallop across the grass, against
the beginnings of their body.
On those Saturday afternoons,
unbroken horses gather to watch

their sons growing larger
in the small parts of the world.
Everyone is the quarterback.

There is no thin man in a big hat
writing down all the names
in two columns: winners and losers.

This is the eternal football game,
Indians versus Indians. All the Skins
in the wooden bleachers fancydancing,

stomping red dust straight down
into nothing. Before the game is over,
the eighth-grade girls' track team

comes running, circling the field,
their thin and brown legs echoing
wild horses, wild horses, wild horses.

VII. Crow Testament
1
Cain lifts Crow, that heavy black bird
and strikes down Abel.

Damn, says Crow, I guess
this is just the beginning.

2
The white man, disguised
as a falcon, swoops in
and yet again steals a salmon
from Crow's talons.

Damn, says Crow, if I could swim
I would have fled this country years ago.

3
The Crow God as depicted
in all of the reliable Crow bibles
looks exactly like a Crow.

Damn, says Crow, this makes it
so much easier to worship myself.

4
Among the ashes of Jericho,
Crow sacrifices his firstborn son.

Damn, says Crow, a million nests
are soaked with blood.

5
When Crows fight Crows
the sky fills with beaks and talons.

Damn, says Crow, it's raining feathers.

6
Crow flies around the reservation
and collects empty beer bottles

but they are so heavy
he can only carry one at a time.

So, one by one, he returns them
but gets only five cents a bottle.

Damn, says Crow, redemption
is not easy.

7
Crow rides a pale horse
into a crowded powwow
but none of the Indian panic.

Damn, says Crow, I guess
they already live near the end of the world.

Poet of the Week: Elizabeth Bishop

2008-06-14T16:42:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days. Learn more about Ms. Bishop at Poets.org.

I. Sonnet (1928)
I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

II. Chemin de Fer
Alone on the railroad track
I walked with pounding heart.
The ties were too close together
or maybe too far apart.

The scenery was impoverished:
scrub-pine and oak; beyond
its mingled gray-green foliage
I saw the little pond

where the dirty old hermit lives,
lie like an old tear
holding onto its injuries
lucidly year after year.

The hermit shot off his shot-gun
and the tree by his cabin shook.
Over the pond went a ripple
The pet hen went chook-chook.

"Love should be put into action!"
screamed the old hermit.
Across the pond an echo
tried and tried to confirm it.

III. Cirque d'Hiver
Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,
fit for a king of several centuries back.
A little circus horse with real white hair.
His eyes are glossy black.
He bears a little dancer on his back.

She stands upon her toes and turns and turns.
A slanting spray of artificial roses
is stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.
Above her head she poses
another spray of artificial roses.

His mane and tail are straight from Chirico.
He has a formal, melancholy soul.
He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes through his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.
He is the more intelligent by far.
Facing each other rather desperately—
his eye is like a star—
we stare and say, "Well, we have come this far."

IV. Argument
Days that cannot bring you near
or will not,
Distance trying to appear
something more obstinate,
argue argue argue with me
endlessly
neither proving you less wanted nor less dear.

Distance: Remember all that land
beneath the plane;
that coastline
of dim beaches deep in sand
stretching indistinguishably
all the way,
all the way to where my reasons end?

Days: And think
of all those cluttered instruments,
one to a fact,
canceling each other's experience;
how they were
like some hideous calendar
"Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc."

The intimidating sound
of these voices
we must separately find
can and shall be vanquished:
Days and Distance disarrayed again
and gone...

V. Manners
For a Child of 1918

My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
"Be sure to remember to always
speak to everyone you meet."

We met a stranger on foot.
My grandfather's whip tapped his hat.
"Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day."
And I said it and bowed where I sat.

Then we overtook a boy we knew
with his big pet crow on his shoulder.
"Always offer everyone a ride;
don't forget that when you get older,"

my grandfather said. So Willy
climbed up with us, but the crow
gave a "Caw!" and flew off. I was worried.
How would he know where to go?

But he flew a little way at a time
from fence post to fence post, ahead;
and when Willy whistled he answered.
"A fine bird," my grandfather said,

"and he's well brought up. See, he answers
nicely when he's spoken to.
Man or beast, that's good manners.
Be sure that you both always do."

When automobiles went by,
the dust hid the people's faces,
but we shouted "Good day! Good day!
Fine day!" at the top of our voices.

When we came to Hustler Hill,
he said that the mare was tired,
so we all got down and walked,
as our good manners required.

VI. Letter to N.Y.
For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

VII. The Weed
I dreamed that dead, and meditating,
I lay upon a grave, or bed,
(at least, some cold and close-built bower).
In the cold heart, its final thought
stood frozen, drawn immense and clear,
stiff and idle as I was there;
and we remained unchanged together
for a year, a minute, an hour.
Suddenly there was a motion,
as startling, there, to every sense
as an explosion. Then it dropped
to insistent, cautious creeping
in the region of the heart,
prodding me from desperate sleep.
I raised my head. A slight young weed
had pushed up through the heart and its
green head was nodding on the breast.
(All this was in the dark.)
It grew an inch like a blade of grass;
next, one leaf shot out of its side
a twisting, waving flag, and then
two leaves moved like a semaphore.
The stem grew thick. The nervous roots
reached to each side; the graceful head
changed its position mysteriously,
since there was neither sun nor moon
to catch its young attention.
The rooted heart began to change
(not beat) and then it split apart
and from it broke a flood of water.
Two rivers glanced off from the sides,
one to the right, one to the left,
two rushing, half-clear streams,
(the ribs made of them two cascades)
which assuredly, smooth as glass,
went off through the fine black grains of earth.
The weed was almost swept away;
it struggled with its leaves,
lifting them fringed with heavy drops.
A few drops fell upon my face
and in my eyes, so I could see
(or, in that black place, thought I saw)
that each drop contained a light,
a small, illuminated scene;
the weed-deflected stream was made
itself of racing images.
(As if a river should carry all
the scenes that it had once reflected
shut in its waters, and not floating
on momentary surfaces.)
The weed stood in the severed heart.
"What are you doing there?" I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: "I grow," it said,
"but to divide your heart again."

Latest Read: Arab in America

2008-06-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

Author: Toufic El Rassi
Category: Graphic Novel
Publisher: Last Gasp
Pages: 118

Arab in America is an autobiographical account of a man born in Beirut, growing up in middle America, and his personal evolution to find his identity. It's a story raw with emotion that meanders to and fro because it lacks a general plot. This is both a drawback that weakens the overall effect of the book on the reader and a strength. The drawback lies mainly in the fact that parts of the book move away from the storyline to share accounts of other American-based Arabs' post-9/11 experience. The strength in this situation is two-part: one, it's educational, and two, the reader tastes the exploratory period personally experienced by the author. Yes, these text heavy accounts can be rather pedantic, but for a reader who knows little about Middle Eastern history it's extremely informative.

The art of graphic novels and comics is a literary medium akin in presentation to the theater or movies. The written story acts as subtitles to a foreign film or the speaking parts of an old silent film. Readers watch the story evolve through pictures and, like the movies, prefer to be shown what's going on versus told about the story the author is attempting to relate. This is where El Rassi's story fails at times, dawdling character development and losing reader interest.

Overall, Arab in America was generally enjoyable and a very quick read. The book provides a summarial introduction to Arab culture and history, and due to it's simplicity, is a great beginner book for people just getting into the graphic novel genre. Another good "starter" graphic novel is Blankets by Craig Thompson. Graphic novels with similar topics to Arab in America include Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Embroideries.

Poet of the Week: ee cummings

2008-06-06T16:36:00.000-07:00

Seven poems for seven days of the week. This is the first of a new weekly feature. e.e. cummings is this blogger's favorite poet. You can learn more about his life and work at Poets.org.

I.
as freedom is a breakfastfood
or truth can live with right and wrong
or molehills are from mountains made
-long enough and just so long
will being pay the rent of seem
and genius please the talentgang
and water most encourage flame

as hatracks into peachtrees grow
or hopes dance best on bald men's hair
and every finger is a toe
and any courage is a fear
-long enough and just so long
will the impure think all things pure
and hornets wail by children stung

or as the seeing are the blind
and robins never welcome spring
nor flatfolk prove their world is round
nor dingsters die at break of dong
and common's rare and millstones float
-long enough and just so long
tomorrow will not be too late

worms are the words but joy's the voice
down shall go which and up come who
breasts will be breasts and thighs will be thighs
deeds cannot dream what dreams can do
-time is a tree (this life one leaf)
but love is the sky and i am for you
just so long and long enough

II.
you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

III.
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves,since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

-before leaving my room
i turn,and(stooping
through the morning)kiss
this pillow,dear
where our heads lived and were.

IV.
if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a little behind you

then people will say
"Along this road i saw a princess pass
on her way to meet her lover(it was
toward nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants."

V.
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

VI.
If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice and a lie warn't a lie,
Life would be delight,-
But things couldn't go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn't be I.

If earth was heaven, and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I'd be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn't be you.

If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee
Things would seem fair,-
Yet they'd all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn't be we.

VII.
it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when(being fool to fancy)i have deemed

with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds

the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always)and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;

moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination,when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:

one pierced moment whiter than the rest

-turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

Bonus Material:
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best,
night and day, to make you everybody else
means to fight the hardest battle which any
human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

how fortunate are you and i, whose home
is timelessness: we have wandered down
from fragrant mountains of eternal now
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day (or maybe even less)