Thinking Out Loud

The Letter Project

2012-01-24T19:13:00.001-08:00

Do you like real letters? I have started a project in which I promise to send any friend a piece of real, handwritten, handmade mail. It could be a postcard, a little piece of art, a poem, a few personal lines, a feather, a tiny gift. If you love real mail and would like to receive something this year in the spirit of friendship, please send me your name and address by private message and then check your mailbox!

Please share with your friends!

Shoulders

2012-01-17T10:20:00.000-08:00

Shoulders
by Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

The Art of Being

2012-01-11T11:35:00.000-08:00

The Art of Being

By Anne Coray

The fern in the rain breathes the silver message.
Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds
and relearn the beauty of absorption.
There is nothing beyond the rotten log
covered with leaves and needles.
Forget the light emerging with its golden wick.
Raise your face to the water-laden frond.
A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.

Long Hand of My Heart

2012-01-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I walk through the doors of the Alzheimer's Unit where my grandmother has lived for the past few years I feel as if all the lead fishing sinkers she and I ever lost together on our fishing trips have suddenly materialized from their mossy lake bed and have attached themselves to my shoes. This feeling makes it difficult to shuffle forward. My boys call the nursing home, "Death's Waiting Room" and I know that many people feel that way. Sometimes I do too. Even though I am thankful for the wonderful care my grandma receives, it will always feel rotten. It shouldn't be this way. Often I get very angry that we live in a world where it is impossible to care for our sick elderly at home- no one can afford to do it. Of course, it would be easier to for me to not visit, to avoid the sadness of the place, but that is what not visiting would be about: me. Who am I to think that I shouldn't have to experience sadness; that I can opt out of what makes me uncomfortable. At some point, that idea- we only deserve happiness and have no obligation to participate in hard things became acceptable and that strikes me as sadder.

As I slog my way through the hallways, towards my grandma's room, I am buffeted by waves of scents, sounds, and other people's memories. Often, residents are in the hallways in wheelchairs, making progress with barely perceptible foot and wheel movements. Sometimes one of the old people will ask me for for help (it is against the rules- you are supposed to get a trained staff person), or ask me a question (I try to answer) or launch into a story (I stop and listen). One of my favorite ladies worked all her life on a farm and is forever worrying about the cow that needs to be milked. Often, to ease her mind, I tell her I took care of it. Sometimes after I tell her this, she smiles and says, "Cock-a-doodle", very matter-of-factly, which I love. Another often pleads that I take the child ( a doll that she holds) home and please watch him for her because she can't keep them there and worries they will get run over by old people in wheelchairs. I don't know what to say to that. I mumble that it will be okay, but she doesn't believe me because she knows it won't.

A tiny, and pinkly wrinkled and very ancient lady who seems to have no eyes has been calling for members of her family for several years. The background of every visit has been populated with her cries. She is surprisingly swift and agile in her wheelchair and so I often feel her little grasping hand clutching mine. I call her the "Daddy come and get me," lady. Usually after determining that I am no one she is looking for, she tosses my hand down in disgust and roars off at top speed, small legs pistoning with purpose,searching in vain for a father she last saw 60 years ago. Today, however,she was stationed in a portable reclining chair parked on the side of the hallway. I realized she must have declined. She was still. Her silence was somehow sadder than her seeking. Her quiet and immobility gave me pause. Then, as I slowly moved on and made my way down the hallway,I heard her say softly ," I am sitting on the long hand of my heart.....and it hurts. I am sitting on the long hand of my heart....and it hurts."

Sometimes When the Light

2011-12-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, When the Light
BY LISEL MUELLER

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

So Little

2011-12-14T07:10:00.000-08:00

So Little
By Czeslaw Milosz

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn’t keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don’t know
What in all that was real.

-Translated by Czeslaw Milosz & Lillian Vallee

In Passing

2011-12-01T06:54:00.000-08:00

In Passing
by Stanley Plumly

On the Canadian side, we're standing far enough away
the Falls look like photography, the roar a radio.

In the real rain, so vertical it fuses with the air,
the boat below us is starting for the caves.

Everyone on deck is dressed in black, braced for weather
and crossing against the current of the river.

They seem lost in the gorge dimensions of the place,
then, in fog, in a moment, gone.

In the Chekhov story,
the lovers live in a cloud, above the sheer witness of a valley.

They call it circumstance. They look up at the open wing
of the sky, or they look down into the future.

Death is a power like any other pull of the earth.
The people in the raingear with the cameras want to see it

from the inside, from behind, from the dark looking into the light.
They want to take its picture, give it size—

how much easier to get lost in the gradations of a large
and yellow leaf drifting its good-bye down one side of the gorge.

There is almost nothing that does not signal loneliness,
then loveliness, then something connecting all we will become.

All around us the luminous passage of the air,
the flat, wet gold of the leaves. I will never love you

more than at this moment, here in October,
the new rain rising slowly from the river.

Yes

2011-11-29T08:36:00.000-08:00

Yes

By Catherine Doty

It's about the blood
banging in the body,
and the brain
lolling in its bed
like a happy baby.
At your touch, the nerve,
that volatile spook tree,
vibrates. The lungs
take up their work
with a giddy vigor.
Tremors in the joints
and tympani,
dust storms
in the canister of sugar.
The coil of ribs
heats up, begins
to glow. Come
here.

2011-11-29T08:31:00.000-08:00

The Thanksgiving Visitor Parts 5-7

2011-11-28T07:20:00.000-08:00

The Thanksgiving Visitor Part 5 (mp3)

The Thanksgiving Visitor Part 6 (mp3)

The Thanksgiving Visitor Part 7 (mp3)

A Rainy Country

2011-11-20T11:06:00.001-08:00

The Thanksgiving Visitor Parts 2-4

2011-11-16T07:07:00.000-08:00

The Thanksgiving Visitor Part 2 (mp3)

The Thanksgiving Visitor Part 3 (mp3)

The Thanksgiving Visitor Part 4 (mp3)

The Thanksgiving Visitor

2011-11-15T19:09:00.001-08:00

The Thanksgiving Visitor Part 1 (mp3)

My November Guest

2011-11-13T06:37:00.000-08:00

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost, “My November Guest”

Nocturne

2011-11-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

Nocturne
by Wayne Miller

Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons
in a broth of wind. Last week
they made a darker sky below the sky.

The houses have swallowed their colors,
and each car moves in the blind sack
of its sound like the slipping of water.

Flowing means falling very slowly—
the river passing under the tracks,
the tracks then buried beneath the road.

When a knocking came in the night,
I rose violently toward my reflection
hovering beneath this world. And then

the fluorescent kitchen in the window
like a page I was reading—a face
coming into focus behind it:

my neighbor locked out of his own party,
looking for a phone. I gave him
a beer and the lit pad of numbers

through which he disappeared; I found
I was alone with the voices that bloomed
as he opened the door. It's time

to slip my body beneath the covers,
let it fall down the increments of shale,
let the wind consume every spoon.

My voice unhinging itself from light,
my voice landing in its cradle—.
How terrifying a payphone is

hanging at the end of its cord.
Which is not to be confused with sleep—
sleep gives the body back its mouth.

2011-11-06T13:24:00.000-08:00

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
Away from the noisy crowd
When I see the pale
Stars rising, blooming over the oaks.
I’ll pursue solitary pathways
Through the pale twilit meadows,
With only this one dream:
You come too.
— From “First Poems,” Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnet XVII

2011-11-04T06:10:00.000-07:00

Sonnet XVII

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simple, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way become I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

-Pablo Neruda

Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country

2011-10-31T06:40:00.000-07:00

Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country
By Lola Haskins

That year there were many deaths in the village.
Germs flew like angels from one house to the next
and every family gave up its own. Mothers
died at their mending. Children fell at school.
Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left.
Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one
died. And the angels whispered among themselves.
And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps,
your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck
when all the trees were still. And he would tell us
always, how he had felt that night, on the skin
of his own neck, the angels, passing.

2011-10-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

"Let me change to blue,
Or throw a violet shadow when I will."
— Dylan Thomas, from “It’s Light That Makes the Intervals” in Collected Poems

The Wild Things

2011-10-27T10:34:00.000-07:00

The Wild Things
by John Kinsella and Dorothy Hewett

There were always magpies
in the early morning
swinging from the clothesline
on the edge of the orchard
where the ordered world
of the farm house ended
and the atavistic world began
the wild world where we roamed at will
stretching the wingspan
of a dead hawk between us
not bunched in our flannel petticoats
in bedrooms thick with night terrors
a sitting room stuffed with horsehair
a kitchen hissing with kettles
nothing to do with the rattle of leaves
the crows in the windy tops
and the foxes dancing.
The horses rear in their stalls
the dogs are howling
the cows roll their eyes at the moon
and the bull in the pasture bellows
this may be the world’s last night
don’t waste it.

A Coat

2011-10-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

William Butler Yeats

Mockingbird

2011-10-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

Mockingbird

By Judith Harris

I can hear him,
now, even in darkness,
a trickster under the moon,
bristling his feathers,
sounding as merry
as a man whistling in a straw hat,
or a squeaky gate
to the playground, left ajar
or the jingling of a star,
having wandered too far
from the pasture.

Tumblr, Rain Song, Stalwart Reader

2011-10-21T18:16:00.000-07:00

This is so fun. This is a music maker that I could play with for hours. It was my first post on my new Tumblr page called Stalwart Reader. So many people are sharing such great stuff, I realized I was flooding my Facebook page with too much. Now I can collect all the great things people send and the flotsam and jetsom I would like to share and put them on Tumblr:

http://christinasanantonio.tumblr.com/post/11735578573/mandaflewaway-click-to-make-some-music

All That Time

2011-10-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

All That Time, May Swenson (mp3)

2011-10-20T10:01:00.001-07:00

How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark Autumn evenings come,
And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?
With the music of all thy voices, dumb
In life’s November too!

I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age,
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows,
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose!

— Robert Browning, from “By the Fireside”

Olive Trees

2011-10-19T14:18:00.001-07:00

Olive Trees

By Geoff Page

three or four times
the war moves through
these olive trees
a dry storm
sweeping up the young men
as it passes.

a few seasons on
in the capital
one side looks around
to find the other gone
withdrawn below the ground
with bones and weapons
to wait
in unmarked graves.

the victors
are busy with street names
having won for a while
from all those miles
of twisted olives

the right to remember
their dead.

2011-10-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Weight of Oranges

2011-10-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

The Weight of Oranges

Anne Michaels

My cup’s the same sand colour as bread.
Rain’s the same colour of a building across the street,
its torn red dahlias
and ruined a book propped on the sill.

Rain articulates the skins of everything,
pink of bricks from the fire they baked in,
lizard green leaves,
the wrinkled tongues of pine cones.
It’s accurate the way we never are,
bringing out what’s best
without changing a thing.
Rain that makes beds damp,
our room a cave in the morning,
a tent in late afternoon,
ignites the sound of leaves we miss all winter.
The sound that pulled us to bed…
caught in the undertow of wind in wet leaves.

I’m writing in the sound we woke to,
curtains breathing into a half-dark room.

I’m up early now, walking.
Remember our walks, horizons like lips
barely red at dawn,
how kind the distance seemed?
Letters should be written to send news, to say
send me news, to say
meet me at the train station.
Not these dry tears, to honour us like a tomb.
I’m ashamed of our separation.
I wake in the middle of the night and see “shame”
written in the air like a Bible story.
I dreamed my skin was tattooed,
covered with the words that put me here,
covered in sores, in quarantine—and you know what?
I was afraid to light the lamp and look.

Your husband’s a good builder—I burned
every house we had,
with a few words to start the flames.
Words of wood,
they had no power of their own.
“The important” gave them meaning
and humble with gratitude
they exploded in my face.

Now we’re like planets, holding to each other
from a great distance. When we lay down
oceans flexed their green muscles,
life got busy in the other hemisphere,
the globe tilted, bowing to our power!
Now we’re hundreds of miles apart,
our short arms keep us lonely,
no one hears what’s in my head.
I look old. I’m losing my hair.
Where does lost hair go in this world,
lost eyesight, teeth?
We grow old like rivers, get shrunk and doubled over
until we can’t find the mouth of anything.

It’s March, even the birds
don’t know what to do with themselves.

Sometimes I’m certain those who are happy
know one thing more than us… or one thing less.
The only book I’d write again
is our bodies closing together.
That’s the language that stuns,
scars, breathes into you.
Naked, we had voices!

I want you to promise
we’ll see each other again,
you’ll send a letter.
Promise we’ll be lost together
in our forest, pale birches of our legs.

I hear your voice now—I know,
everyone knows promises come from fear.
People don’t live past each other,
you’re always here with me. Sometimes
I pretend you’re in the other room
until it rains… and then
this is the letter I always write:
The letter I write
when they’re keeping me from home.
I smell your supper steaming in the kitchen.
There are paper bags on the table
with their bottoms melted out
by rain and the weight of oranges.

Another Loss to Stop For

2011-10-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

Another Loss to Stop For

~ by Jill Bialosky

Against such cold and mercurial mornings,
watch the wind whirl one leaf
across the landscape,
then, in a breath, let it go.
The color in the opaque sky
seems almost not to exist.

Put on a wool sweater.
Wander in the leaves,
underneath healthy elms.
Hold your child in your arms.

After the dishes are washed,
a kiss still warm at your neck,
put down your pen. Turn out the light.

I know how difficult it is,
always balancing and weighing,
it takes years and many transformations;
and always another loss to stop for,
to send you backwards.

Why do you worry so,
when none of us is spared?

The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct

2011-10-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct
(Alexander Wilson, Wilmington, N.C., 1809)
By David Wagoner

When he walked through town, the wing-shot bird he'd hidden
Inside his coat began to cry like a baby,
High and plaintive and loud as the calls he'd heard
While hunting it in the woods, and goodwives stared
And scurried indoors to guard their own from harm.

And the inkeeper and the goodmen in the tavern
Asked him whether his child was sick, then laughed.
Slapped knees, and laughed as he unswaddled his prize,
His pride and burden: an ivory-billed woodpecker
As big as a crow, still wailing and squealing.

Upstairs, when he let it go in his workroom,
it fell silent at last. He told at dinner
How devoted masters of birds drawn from the life
Must gather their flocks around them with a rifle
And make them live forever inside books.

Later, he found his bedspread covered with plaster
And the bird clinging beside a hole in the wall
Clear through to already-splintered weatherboards
And the sky beyond. While he tied one of its legs
To a table leg, it started wailing again.

And went on wailing as if toward cypress groves
While the artist dew and tinted on fine vellum
Its red cockade, gray claws, and sepia eyes
From which a white edge flowed to the lame wing
Like light flying and ended there in blackness.

He drew and studied for days, eating and dreaming
Fitfully through the dancing and loud drumming
Of an ivory bill that refused pecans and beetles,
Chestnuts and sweet-sour fruit of magnolias,
Riddling his table, slashing his fingers, wailing.

He watched it die, he said, with great regret.

The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct (Alexander Wilson, Wilmington, N.C., 1809 (mp3)

Sufjan Stevens, Great God Bird (mp3)

October

2011-10-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

October

By Don Thompson

I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.

Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.

Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.

This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.

Bernard and Sarah

2011-10-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

Bernard and Sarah
By Henry Taylor

"Hang them where they'll do some good," my grandfather
said, as he placed the dusty photograph
in my father's hands. My father and I stared
at two old people posed stiffly side by side-
my great-great-great-grandparents, in the days
when photography was young, and they were not.
My father thought it out as we drove home.
Deciding that they might do the most good
somewhere out of sight, my father drove
a nail into the back wall of his closet;
they have hung there ever since, brought out
only on such occasions as the marriage
of one of his own children. "I think you ought
to know the stock you're joining with," he says.
Then back they go to the closet, where they hang
keeping their counsel until it is called for.
Yet, through walls, over miles of fields and woods
that flourish still around the farm they cleared,
their eyes light up the closet of my brain
to draw me toward the place I started from,
and when I have come home, they take me in.

Mourning Picture

2011-10-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

Mourning Picture

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker
out under the lilac bush,
and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.
Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,
my doll lies in her wicker pram
gazing at western Massachusetts.
This was our world.
I could remake each shaft of grass
feeling its rasp on my fingers, draw out the map of every lilac leaf
or the net of vines on my father’s
grief-tranced hand.

Out of my head, half-bursting,
still filling, the dream condenses—
shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globe of dew.
Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light
carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,
under high early-summer clouds,
I am Effie, visible and invisible,
remembering and remembered.

They will move from the house,
give the toys and pets away.
Mute and rigid with loss my mother
will ride the train to Baptist Corner,
the silk-spool will run bare.
I tell you, the thread that bound us lies
faint as a web in the dew.
Should I make you, world, again,
could I give back the leaf its skeleton, the air
its early-summer cloud, the house
its noonday presence, shadowless,
and leave this out? I am Effie, you were my dream.

—Adrienne Rich

2011-09-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

http://a2.video3.blip.tv/0360010758569/Csanant-WalnutWoodsWalk571.mp3

2011-09-26T12:03:00.001-07:00

http://a10.video2.blip.tv/12570009463535/Csanant-NightbikeRidingJournalPart2Episode1871.mp3?brs=125&bri=1.3

2011-09-26T11:58:00.000-07:00

http://a10.video2.blip.tv/12570009463362/Csanant-NightBikeJournalPart1Episode1893.mp3?brs=75&bri=0.5

Mockingbird

2011-09-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

From Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved

2011-09-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

From Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved
by Gregory Orr

Resurrection of the body of the beloved,
Which is the world
Which is the poem
Of the world, the poem of the body.

Mortal ourselves and filled with awe,
we gather the scattered limbs
Of Osiris.
That he should live again.
That death not be oblivion.

When I open the book
I hear the poets whisper and weep,
Laugh and lament.

In a thousand languages
They say the same thing:
“We lived. The secret of life
is love, that casts its wing
over all suffering, that takes
in its arms the hurt child,
that rises green from the fallen seed.”

Sadness is there, too.
All the sadness in the world.
Because the tide ebbs,
Because wild waves
Punish the shore
And the small lives lived there.
Because the body is scattered.
Because death is real
And sometimes death is not
Even the worst of it.

If sadness did not run
Like a river through the Book,
Why would we go there?
What would we drink?

Oh, there’s blood enough, and sap
From the stalks. Tears, too.
A raindrop and the dark water
Of bogs. It’s a rich ink.
Indelible, invisible
(hold up the page to the light,
hold the page near a flame).

The world comes into the poem.
The poem comes into the world.
Reciprocity – it all comes down
To that.
As with lovers:
When it’s right you can’t say
Who is kissing whom.

Lighten up, lighten up.
Let go of the heaviness.
Was it a poem from the Book
That so weighed you down?

Impossible. Less than a feather.
Less than the seed a milkweed
Pod releases in the breeze.

Lifted, it drifts out to settle
In a field, with all that’s inside it
Waiting to become
Root and tendril, to come alive.

Now the snow is falling
Even more than an hour ago.
The pine in the backyard
Bows with the weight of it.

Two years ago, my father
Died. What love we had
Hidden under misery,
Weighed down with years
Of silence.

And now,
Maybe the poem can free
Us, maybe the poem can express
The love and let the rest
Slide to the earth as the snow
Does now, freeing the tree
Of its burden.

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but …

If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything.

And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn’t long for us.

No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder.

Read aloud: Sweeping the Cemetery by David Lee Garrison

2011-09-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

http://audioboo.fm/boos/473254-sweeping-the-cemetery

Top of My Lungs

2011-09-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

Top of My Lungs

By Natalie Goldberg

Even though I am unhappy
I come home singing at the top of my lungs
Shovel off the new snow and shove it on the old
Open the useless screened porch door
and take off my big boots
There are fried eggs
yellow as pearls
The old bed I dive into like a warm whale
The phone ringing
that duck on the wall
And even though I am unhappy
I sleep with the peace of flying angels
And even though I am sad
my wallet's empty
I buy the best soap
And even though my heart is hurting
out of sure will
I come home singing with the last night wind
and the first morning star
and the canary
and the summer that was killed below our house

I walk down to the Rainbow Café
call my Catholic friend Mary to come
have a drink and eat a turkey sandwich
The down coat I wear all winter still has the goose feathers
from a hundred flying birds
They let us smoke at our small table
Mary will always meet me here
They fill your glasses with the most sparking water
for free
and the cold moon rises over the marquee
of the Suburban World theater

So even though I am unhappy
I throw back my old goat throat
and sing slowly
"Oh my darlin' Clementine"
by the beautiful lake in Minnesota
as the pressure of the black night cold
moves in on us from all ten directions
I sing to the moon above the lake
"You are lost and gone forever"
calling the pure beast of loneliness down from the sky
with the old American song haunting city lights
"Dreadful sorry Clementine"
and though the very earth has swelled up
like an elephant with pain
I stand on its back singing
in this sad universe
where one lover leaves another for all time
and nothing to say with your feet on the ground.

Tin Ear

2011-08-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

Tin Ear
By Peter Schmitt

We stood at attention as she moved
with a kind of Groucho shuffle
down our line, her trained music
teacher's ear passing by
our ten- and eleven-year-old mouths
open to some song now forgotten.
And as she held her momentary
pause in front of me, I peered
from the corner of my eye
to hers, and knew the truth
I had suspected.
In the following days,
as certain of our peers
disappeared at appointed hours
for the Chorus, something in me
was already closing shop.
Indeed, to this day
I still clam up
for the national anthem
in crowded stadiums, draw
disapproving alumni stares
as I smile the length of school songs,
and even hum and clap
through "Happy Birthday," creating
a diversion—all lest I send
the collective pitch
careening headlong into dissonance.
It's only in the choice acoustics
of shower and sealed car
that I can finally give voice
to that heart deep within me
that is pure, tonally perfect, music.
But when the water stops running
and the radio's off, I can remember
that day in class,
when I knew for the first time
that mine would be a world of words
without melody, where refrain
means do not join,
where I'm ready to sing
in a key no one has ever heard.

The Work

2011-08-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

The Work
By Robert Penick

The plumbing is undone
at one end of the house
like my childhood train set
and how the trains never came back.
My father's tools are scattered
through these rooms and I wonder
how long it would take him
to sort things out.
To couple the pipes and
make the equation.

I have outshone my father
in one vital respect:
I screwed this job up
in half the time
he would have needed
to actually complete it.
Somewhere he is shaking his head
and giving me that ancient look,
the one shot from
fathers to sons
forever.

Closed Swimming Pool

2011-08-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

Closed Swimming Pool
By Tony Hoagland

There's nothing sadder than an empty swimming pool
with a fence around it,

the deep end no longer deep, the blue paint
knocked off like crust
to show the chalky plaster underneath.

Someone call those experts
at making things completely disappear!

They may have pumped it out but they didn't get
the ghostly vapor trails of shrieking eight year olds
running barefoot on the slick cement-

or the rustling pages of the glamour magazines
in the laps of sunburned mothers.

They drained it dry and then the sky and time
filled it part way up again with rain

that turned into a scuzzy pit
for catching windblown trash and leaves.

It is obscene
to come out on a walk and to find this thing,

to stand there with your fingers poking through chain link
and look into the forsaken pit of it.

I pause there with my friend and we feel
like a couple of animals looking through the fence

at the zoo that we escaped from long ago-

a grey wind ruffling the trash bags in the trees
and a bolted-on black sign disclaiming liability:

meaning childhood is over now;

Even in memory it has been prohibited.

The Connoisseuse of Slugs

2011-08-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Connoisseuse of Slugs
By Sharon Olds

When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those gold bodies,
translucent strangers glistening along the
stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
but I was not interested in that. What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug forgot I was there
and sent its antennae up out of its
head, the glimmering umber horns
rising like telescopes, until finally the
sensitive knobs would pop out the
ends, delicate and intimate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.

For the Chipmunk in My Yard

2011-08-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

For the Chipmunk in My Yard
By Robert Gibb

I think he knows I’m alive, having come down
The three steps of the back porch
And given me a good once over. All afternoon
He’s been moving back and forth,
Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,
While all about him the great fields tumble
To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky
To be where he is, wild with all that happens.
He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows
Living in the blond heart of the wheat.
This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires
Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots,
Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter
On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help

2011-07-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

By April Lindner

The burnt church up the street yawns to the sky,
its empty windows edged in soot, its portals
boarded up and slathered with graffiti,
oily layers, urgent but illegible.
All that can be plundered has been, all
but the carapace—the hollow bell tower,
the fieldstone box that once served as a nave.
The tidy row of homes that line this block
have tended lawns and scalloped bathtub shrines.
Each front porch holds a chair where no one sits.
Those who live here triple lock their doors
day and night. Some mornings they step out
to find a smoking car stripped to its skeleton
abandoned at the curb. Most afternoons
the street is still but for a mourning dove
and gangs of pigeons picking through the grass.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help is gray,
a dead incisor in a wary smile.
A crevice in her wall allows a glimpse
into the chancel, where a sodden mattress
and dirty blanket indicate that someone
finds this place a sanctuary still,
takes his rest here, held and held apart
from passers by, their cruelties and their kindnesses,
watched over by the night’s blind congregation,
by the blank eyes of a concrete saint.

Doing Laundry on Sunday

2011-07-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

Doing Laundry on Sunday

By Brigit Pegeen Kelly

So this is the Sabbath, the stillness
in the garden, magnolia
bells drying damp petticoats

over the porch rail, while bicycle
wheels thrum and the full-breasted tulips
open their pink blouses

for the hands that pressed them first
as bulbs into the earth.
Bread, too, cools on the sill,

and finches scatter bees
by the Shell Station where a boy
in blue denim watches oil

spread in phosphorescent scarves
over the cement. He dips
his brush into a bucket and begins

to scrub, making slow circles
and stopping to splash water on the children
who, hours before it opens,

juggle bean bags outside Gantsy’s
Ice Cream Parlor,
while they wait for color to drench their tongues,

as I wait for water to bloom
behind me—white foam, as of magnolias,
as of green and yellow

birds bathing in leaves—wait,
as always, for the day, like bread, to rise
and, with movement

imperceptible, accomplish everything.

Found Letter

2011-07-06T08:25:00.000-07:00

Found Letter
By Joshua Weiner

What makes for a happier life, Josh, comes to this:
Gifts freely given, that you never earned;
Open affection with your wife and kids;
Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit;
Few days in court, with little consequence;
A quiet mind, a strong body, short hours
In the office; close friends who speak the truth;
Good food, cooked simply; a memory that’s rich
Enough to build the future with; a bed
In which to love, read, dream, and re-imagine love;
A warm, dry field for laying down in sleep,
And sleep to trim the long night coming;
Knowledge of who you are, the wish to be
None other; freedom to forget the time;
To know the soul exceeds where it’s confined
Yet does not seek the terms of its release,
Like a child’s kite catching at the wind
That flies because the hand holds tight the line.

Fireflies

2011-07-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

Fireflies
By Marilyn Kallet

In the dry summer field at nightfall,
fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light.
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,
capturing lightning-bugs,
with a blossom of the hand
letting them go. Lightness returns,
an airy motion over the ground
you remember from Ring Around the Rosie.
If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies
again, not part of your stories,
as unaware of you as sleep, being
beautiful and quiet all around you.

July 4th

2011-07-04T07:39:00.000-07:00

July 4th
By Marc Jampole

And the three-year-old at the picnic
said she wanted to play the violin
and I said, just like Joe Venuti
and she said, you’re a Joe Venuti
and I said, you’re a Joe Venuti
and she pulled a tuft of grass and said,
here's some Joe Venuti
and she pointed to a sparrow scratching in the dust
and said, there’s a Joe Venuti
and from a plastic bag she dumped
a bunch of Joe Venutis
and barbecue flames caressed the grilling Joe Venutis
and men threw the Joe Venuti, popping their gloves,
while women slurped the Joe Venuti and spit the seeds
and the sun played hide and seek in dissipating Joe Venutis
and through poplar branches Joe Venuti shadows danced
across the baby’s sleeping smile.

Later, like Marcus Aurelius
observing models of human behavior,
we watched the ducks glide away
after the bread was gone.

A Different God for City Girls

2011-07-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

A Different God for City Girls
By Susan Elbe

When my friend said she had seen God’s face,
I wondered if it was an old man’s,
backlit by a playground’s night-game lights,
wondered if it was a woman’s,
fan of silver pins glittering between her lips
as she knelt on cold linoleum
turning up dress hems for money.
My friend said you can only see God’s face askance.
She said it terrified her
like the sleek and planet-eyed sea lion
whose yawn reveals a cavern of sharp teeth.
I prayed for a glimpse, but only saw
what God wanted me to see, a scarped skyline,
hard angles spangled with small panes of light.

Meaning

2011-06-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

Meaning

By Czeslaw Milosz

When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.

One's Ship Comes In

2011-06-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

One’s Ship Comes In
By Joe Paddock

I swear
my way now will be
to continue without
plan or hope, to accept
the drift of things, to shift
from endless effort
to joy in, say,
that robin, plunging
into the mossy shallows
of my bird bath and
splashing madly till
the air shines with spray.
Joy it will be, say,
in Nancy, pretty in pink
and rumpled T-shirt,
rubbing sleep from her eyes, or
joy even in
just this breathing, free
of fright and clutch, knowing
how one’s ship comes in
with each such breath.

This Was Once A Love Poem

2011-06-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

This Was Once a Love Poem
by Jane Hirshfield

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

Dawn Revisited

2011-06-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

Dawn Revisited
By Rita Dove

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits -
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.

The Altar

2011-06-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

The Altar
By Charles Simic

The plastic statue of the Virgin
On top of a bedroom dresser
With a blackened mirror
From a bad-dream grooming salon.

Two pebbles from the grave of a rock star,
A small, grinning windup monkey,
A bronze Egyptian coin
And a red movie-ticket stub.

A splotch of sunlight on the framed
Communion photograph of a boy
With the eyes of someone
Who will drown in a lake real soon.

An altar dignifying the god of chance.
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.

Yard Work

2011-06-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

Yard Work
By Don Thompson

My leaf blower lifted the blackbird—
wings still spread, weightless,
floating on the loud, electric wind
almost as if it were alive.

Three or four times it flew,
but fell again, sideslipped down
like a kite with no string,
so I gave up. . . I had work to do,

and when the dust I raised
had settled in that other world
under the rose bushes, the ants
came back to finish theirs.

Singing Voice

2011-06-07T14:28:00.000-07:00

Singing Voice
By Kenneth Rexroth

Once, camping on a high bluff
Above the Fox River, when
I was about fourteen years
Old, on a full moonlit night
Crowded with whippoorwills and
Frogs, I lay awake long past
Midnight watching the moon move
Through the half drowned stars. Suddenly
I heard, far away on the warm
Air a high clear soprano,
Purer than the purest boy's
Voice, singing, "Tuck me to sleep
In my old 'Tucky home."
She was in an open car
Speeding along the winding
Dipping highway beneath me.
A few seconds later
An old touring car full of
Boys and girls rushed by under
Me, the soprano rising
Full and clear and now close by
I could hear the others singing
Softly behind her voice. Then
Rising and falling with the
Twisting road the song closed, soft
In the night. Over thirty
Years have gone by but I have
Never forgotten. Again
And again, driving on a
Lonely moonlit road, or waking
In a warm murmurous night,
I hear that voice singing that
Common song like an
Angelic memory.

Ghosts

2011-06-05T08:42:00.000-07:00

Ghosts
By Joshua Michael Stewart
from Vintage Gray

If you've gone through life without experiencing
rejection,death will make it up to you.
The only signs of your existence: a small child
sipping tea with an imaginary friend, the family dog
jerking his head from sleep, ears perked
in the direction of an empty room. No wonder
the dead drop plates,slam doors, thump their feet.

I'm thinking myself lifeless, sick of the living-
how they flaunt their solid bodies, carelessly
spill blood down the sink as if warmth
were easily obtained. I'd miss the tiny city thriving
beneath my skin, the business of survival. Crave
Duck Breasts with Calvados, and applewood burning.
But it's the ability to imagine, the art of ignorance
I'd pine for above all things. Perhaps this is why
apparitions often haunt our dreams. It's not our lives
they want but our nescience-another chance, a gift,
which is to wonder what happens when you die.

Sweeping the Cemetery

2011-06-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

Sweeping the Cemetery

By David Lee Garrison

I swept young lovers back
into their dormitories
by midnight after Saturday
dances. Tall trees
and overgrown shrubberies
made the hill darker than dark
where their whispers floated
on humidity, perfume, and sweat.
My footsteps were the threat
that raised them from the dead,
roused those apparitions
mixing lust and dread
among the headstones.
One night I caught a couple
on a marble bed, told them
in my sternest voice
to get on home.
When they were gone,
I lay down in their place
and watched the stars die
deep in space.

78 RPM

2011-05-31T07:05:00.000-07:00

78 RPM
By Jeff Daniel Marion

In the back of the junkhouse
stacked on a cardtable covered
by a ragged bedspread, they rest,
black platters whose music once
crackled, hissed with a static
like shuffling feet, fox trot or two-step,
the slow dance of the needle
riding its merry-go-round,
my mother’s head nestled
on my father’s shoulder as they
turned, lost in the sway of sounds,
summer nights and faraway
places, the syncopation of time
waltzing them to a world
they never dreamed, dance
of then to the dust of now.

To Hear the Falling World

2011-05-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

To Hear the Falling World

Only if I move my arm a certain way,
it comes back.
Or the way the light bends in the trees
this time of year,
so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.
I carry this in my body, seed
in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.
But they guard me, these small pains,
from growing sure
of myself and perhaps forgetting.

~ Jane Hirshfield ~

Turning Forty

2011-05-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

Turning Forty
By Kevin Griffith

At times it's like there is a small planet
inside me. And on this planet,
there are many small wars, yet none
big enough to make a real difference.
The major countries—mind and heart—have
called a truce for now. If this planet had a ruler,
no one remembers him well. All
decisions are made by committee.
Yet there are a few pictures of the old dictator—
how youthful he looked on his big horse,
how bright his eyes.
He was ready to conquer the world.

Ghost in the Land of Skeletons

2011-05-26T07:09:00.000-07:00

Ghost in the Land of Skeletons
By Christopher Kennedy

for Russell Edson

If not for flesh's pretty paint, we're just a bunch of skeletons, working hard to deny the fact of bones. Teeth remind me that we die. That's why I never smile, except when looking at a picture of a ghost, captured by a camera lens, in a book about the paranormal. When someone takes a picture of a spirit, it gives me hope. I admire the ones who refuse to go away. Lovers scorned and criminals burned. I love the dead little girl who plays in her yard, a spectral game of hide and seek. It's the fact they don't know they're dead that appeals to me most. Like a man once said to me, Do you ever feel like you're a ghost? Sure, I answered, every day. He laughed at that and disappeared. All I could think was he beat me.

Safe

2011-05-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

Safe
By Steven Huff

You used to be able to flag a ride in this country.
Impossible now—everyone is afraid
of strangers. Well, there was fear then too,
and it was mutual: drivers versus hitchhikers.
And we rode without seat belts,
insurance or beliefs. People
would see me far ahead on a hill like a seedling,
watch me grow in the windshield
and not know they were going to stop until
they got right up to me. Maybe they wanted
company or thought I’d give them
some excitement. It was the age
of impulse, of lonesome knee jerks. An old woman
stopped, blew smoke in my face
and after I was already in her car she asked me
if I wanted a ride. I’m telling you.
Late one night a construction boss pulled over.
One of his crew had been hit
by the mob, he said as he drove, distraught
and needing to talk to someone.
We rode around for a long time.
He said, I never wore a gun to a funeral before,
but they’ve gotta be after me too.
Then he looked at me and patted the bulge
in his coat. Don’t worry, he said, you’re safe.

Everybody

2011-05-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

Everybody

By Marie Sheppard Williams

I stood at a bus corner
one afternoon, waiting
for the #2. An old
guy stood waiting too.
I stared at him. He
caught my stare, grinned,
gap-toothed. Will you
sign my coat? he said.
Held out a pen. He wore
a dirty canvas coat that
had signatures all over
it, hundreds, maybe
thousands.
I’m trying
to get everybody, he
said.
I signed. On a
little space on a pocket.
Sometimes I remember:
I am one of everybody.

The Yellow Bowl

2011-05-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

The Yellow Bowl

By Rachel Contreni Flynn

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.

The World as It Is

2011-05-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

The World as It is

By Carolyn Miller

No ladders, no descending angels, no voice
out of the whirlwind, no rending
of the veil, or chariot in the sky—only
water rising and falling in breathing springs
and seeping up through limestone, aquifers filling
and flowing over, russet stands of prairie grass
and dark pupils of black-eyed Susans. Only
the fixed and wandering stars: Orion rising sideways,
Jupiter traversing the southwest like a great firefly,
Venus trembling and faceted in the west—and the moon,
appearing suddenly over your shoulder, brimming
and ovoid, ripe with light, lifting slowly, deliberately,
wobbling slightly, while far below, the faithful sea
rises up and follows.

The Owl

2011-05-20T06:30:00.000-07:00

The Owl
By Wendy Videlock

Beneath her nest,
a shrew's head,
a finch's beak
and the bones
of a quail attest

the owl devours
the hour,
and disregards
the rest.

Dirge Without Music

2011-05-18T08:03:00.000-07:00

Dirge Without Music
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the cold ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind.
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains_but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love_
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind,
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

The Paleontologist’s Blind Date

2011-05-17T06:20:00.000-07:00

The Paleontologist’s Blind Date

By Philip Memmer

You have such lovely bones, he says,
holding my face in his hands,

and although I can almost feel
the stone and the sand

sifting away, his fingers
like the softest of brushes,

I realize after this touch
he would know me

years from now, even
in the dark, even

without my skin.Thank you, I smile—

then I close the door
and never call him again.

Wax Lips

2011-05-16T05:57:00.000-07:00

Wax Lips
By Cynthia Rylant

Todd’s Hardware was dust and a monkey—
a real one, on the second floor—
and Mrs. Todd there behind the glass cases.
We stepped over buckets of nails and lawnmowers
to get to the candy counter in the back,
and pointed at the red wax lips,
and Mary Janes,
and straws full of purple sugar.
Said goodbye to Mrs. Todd, she white-faced and silent,
and walked the streets of Beaver,
our teeth sunk hard in the wax,
and big red lips worth kissing.

Early Sunday Morning

2011-05-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

Early Sunday Morning
By Edward Hirsch

I used to mock my father and his chums
for getting up early on Sunday morning
and drinking coffee at a local spot
but now I’m one of those chumps.

No one cares about my old humiliations
but they go on dragging through my sleep
like a string of empty tin cans rattling
behind an abandoned car.

It’s like this: just when you think
you have forgotten that red-haired girl
who left you stranded in a parking lot
forty years ago, you wake up

early enough to see her disappearing
around the corner of your dream
on someone else’s motorcycle
roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit
café full of early morning risers
where the windows are covered with soot
and the coffee is warm and bitter.

One Certain Thing

2011-05-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

The One Certain Thing
By Peter Cooley

A day will come I’ll watch you reading this.
I’ll look up from these words I’m writing now—
this line I’m standing on, I’ll be right here,
alive again. I’ll breathe on you this breath.
Touch this word now, that one. Warm, isn’t it?

You are the person come to clean my room;
you are whichever of my three children
opens the drawer here where this poem will go
in a few minutes when I’ve had my say.

These are the words from immortality.
No one stands between us now except Death:
I enter it entirely writing this.
I have to tell you I am not alone.
Watching you read, Eternity’s with me.
We like to watch you read. Read us again.

Spinning

2011-05-13T12:25:00.000-07:00

Spinning

By Kevin Griffith

I hold my two-year-old son
under his arms and start to twirl.
His feet sway away from me
and the day becomes a blur.
Everything I own is flying into space:
yard toys, sandbox, tools,
garage and house,
and, finally, the years of my life.

When we stop, my son is a grown man,
and I am very old. We stagger
back into each other's arms
one last time, two lost friends
heavy with drink,
remembering the good old days.

Denial

2011-05-12T06:42:00.000-07:00

Denial

By Patricia Frolander

He called it “his ranch,”
yet each winter day found her beside him
feeding hay to hungry cows.

In summer heat
you would find her in the hayfield—
cutting, raking, baling, stacking.

In between she kept the books,
cooked, cleaned
laundered, fed bum lambs.

Garden rows straight,
canned jars of food
lined cellar walls.

Then she died.
I asked him how he would manage.
“Just like I always have,” he said.

Crochet

2011-05-11T06:10:00.000-07:00

Crochet
By Jan Mordenski

Even after darkness closed her eyes  
my mother could crochet.  
Her hands would walk the rows of wool  
turning, bending, to a woolen music.

The dye lots were registered in memory:  
appleskin, chocolate, porcelain pan,  
the stitches remembered like faded rhymes:  
pineapple, sunflower, window pane, shell.

Tied to our lives those past years  
by merely a soft colored yarn,  
she’d sit for hours, her dark lips  
moving as if reciting prayers,  
coaching the sighted hands.

Rain

2011-05-10T07:13:00.001-07:00

Rain
By Peter Everwine

Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.

On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest

2011-05-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest

By Jeff Worley

This one got tired
of lugging his fortress
wherever he went,
was done with duck and cover
at every explosion
through rustling leaves
of fox and dog and skunk.
Said au revoir to the ritual
of pulling himself together. . .

I imagine him waiting
for the cover of darkness
to let down his hinged drawbridge.
He wanted, after so many
protracted years of caution,
to dance naked and nimble
as a flame under the moon—
even if dancing just once
was all that the teeth
of the forest would allow.

Love Like Salt

2011-05-08T06:49:00.000-07:00

Love Like Salt

By Lisel Mueller

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.

The Whistle

2011-05-07T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Whistle
By Kathy Mangan

You could whistle me home from anywhere
in the neighborhood; avenues away,
I’d pick out your clear, alternating pair
of notes, the signal to quit my child’s play
and run back to our house for supper,
or a Saturday trip to the hardware store.
Unthrottled, wavering in the upper
reaches, your trilled summons traveled farther
than our few blocks. I’ve learned too, how your heart’s
radius extends, though its beat
has stopped. Still, some days a sudden fear darts
through me, whether it’s my own city street
I hurry across, or at a corner in an unknown
town: the high, vacant air arrests me—where’s home?

Summer Job

2011-05-06T07:02:00.002-07:00

Summer Job

By Richard Hoffman

“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss,
once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”
he said, “he gets to middle age—and by the way,
he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until
he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him five
more years until that craziness peters out, and now
he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what it’s all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”

Faith

2011-05-05T06:43:00.001-07:00

Faith

By Judy Loest

Leaves drift from the cemetery oaks onto late grass,
Sun-singed, smelling like straw, the insides of old barns.
The stone angel's prayer is uninterrupted by the sleeping
Vagrant at her feet, the lone squirrel, furtive amid the litter.

Someone once said my great-grandmother, on the day she died,
rose from her bed where she had lain, paralyzed and mute
For two years following a stroke, and dressed herself—the good
Sunday dress of black crepe, cotton stockings, sensible, lace-up shoes.

I imagine her coiling her long white braid in the silent house,
Lying back down on top of the quilt and folding her hands,
Satisfied. I imagine her born-again daughters, brought up
In that tent-revival religion, called in from kitchens and fields
To stand dismayed by her bed like the sisters of Lazarus,
Waiting for her to breathe, to rise again and tell them what to do.

Here, no cross escapes the erosion of age, no voice breaks
The silence; the only certainty in the crow's flight
Or the sun's measured descent is the coming of winter.
Even the angel's outstretched arms offer only a formulated
Grace, her blind blessings as indiscriminate as acorns,
Falling on each of us, the departed and the leaving.

Hurry

2011-05-04T06:53:00.001-07:00

Hurry
By Marie Howe

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

Baby Wrens' Voices

2011-05-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

Baby Wrens’ Voices
Thomas R. Smith

I am a student of wrens.
When the mother bird returns
to her brood, beak squirming
with winged breakfast, a shrill
clamor rises like jingling
from tiny, high-pitched bells.
Who’d have guessed such a small
house contained so many voices?
The sound they make is the pure sound
of life’s hunger. Who hangs our house
in the world’s branches, and listens
when we sing from our hunger?
Because I love best those songs
that shake the house of the singer,
I am a student of wrens.

The Peace of Wild Things

2011-05-02T06:13:00.001-07:00

The Peace of Wild Things

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Mysterious Neighbors

2011-05-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

Mysterious Neighbors

By Connie Wanek

Country people rise early
as their distant lights testify.
They don’t hold water in common. Each house
has a personal source, like a bank account,
a stone vault. Some share eggs,
some share expertise,
and some won’t even wave.
A walk for the mail elevates the heart rate.
Last November I saw a woman down the road
walk out to her mailbox dressed in blaze orange
cap to boot, a cautious soul.
Bullets can’t read her No Trespassing sign.
Strange to think they’re in the air
like lead bees with a fatal sting.
Our neighbor across the road sits in his kitchen
with his rifle handy and the window open.
You never know when. Once
he shot a trophy with his barrel resting on the sill.
He’s in his seventies, born here, joined the Navy,
came back. Hard work never hurt a man
until suddenly he was another broken tool.
His silhouette against the dawn
droops as though drought-stricken, each step
deliberate, down the driveway to his black mailbox,
prying it open. Checking a trap.

The Aunts

2011-04-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Aunts

By Joyce Sutphen

I like it when they get together
and talk in voices that sound
like apple trees and grape vines,

and some of them wear hats
and go to Arizona in the winter,
and they all like to play cards.

They will always be the ones
who say “It is time to go now,”
even as we linger at the door,

or stand by the waiting cars, they
remember someone—an uncle we
never knew—and sigh, all

of them together, like wind
in the oak trees behind the farm
where they grew up—a place

I remember—especially
the hen house and the soft
clucking that filled the sunlit yard.

A Word That is a Prayer

2011-04-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

The Word That Is a Prayer
By Ellery Akers

One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

Stealing Lilacs

2011-04-27T09:23:00.000-07:00

Stealing Lilacs

By Alice N. Persons

A guaranteed miracle,
it happens for two weeks each May,
this bounty of riches
where McMansion, trailer,
the humblest driveway
burst with color—pale lavender,
purple, darker plum—
and glorious scent.
This morning a battered station wagon
drew up on my street
and a very fat woman got out
and starting tearing branches
from my neighbor's tall old lilac—
grabbing, snapping stems, heaving
armloads of purple sprays
into her beater.
A tangle of kids' arms and legs
writhed in the car.
I almost opened the screen door
to say something,
but couldn't begrudge her theft,
or the impulse
to steal such beauty.
Just this once,
there is enough for everyone.

To My Brother Miguel In Memoriam

2011-04-26T06:36:00.000-07:00

To My Brother Miguel In Memoriam

By Cesar Vallejo

Brother, today I sit on the brick bench of the house,
where you make a bottomless emptiness.
I remember we used to play at this hour, and mama
caressed us: "But, sons..."

Now I go hide
as before, from all evening
lectures, and I trust you not to give me away.
Through the parlor, the vestibule, the corridors.
Later, you hide, and I do not give you away.
I remember we made ourselves cry,
brother, from so much laughing.

Miguel, you went into hiding
one night in August, toward dawn,
but, instead of chuckling, you were sad.
And the twin heart of those dead evenings
grew annoyed at not finding you. And now
a shadow falls on my soul.

Listen, brother, don't be late
coming out. All right? Mama might worry.

How to See Deer

2011-04-25T07:28:00.001-07:00

How to See Deer

By Philip Booth

Forget roadside crossings.
Go nowhere with guns.
Go elsewhere your own way,

lonely and wanting. Or
stay and be early:
next to deep woods

inhabit old orchards.
All clearings promise.
Sunrise is good,

and fog before sun.
Expect nothing always;
find your luck slowly.

Wait out the windfall.
Take your good time
to learn to read ferns;

make like a turtle:
downhill toward slow water.
Instructed by heron,

drink the pure silence.
Be compassed by wind.
If you quiver like aspen

trust your quick nature:
let your ear teach you
which way to listen.

You've come to assume
protective color; now
colors reform to

new shapes in your eye.
You've learned by now
to wait without waiting;

as if it were dusk
look into light falling;
in deep relief

things even out. Be
careless of nothing. See
what you see.

Happiness

2011-04-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

Happiness

by Jane Kenyon

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Singing in the Toyota

2011-04-23T06:46:00.000-07:00

Singing in the Toyota

By David Etter

I've been booed in the shower,
put down on the patio, ridiculed at the beach,
but when I sing in the car,
I get nothing but approval:
big smiles from the dashboard,
handclaps from the windshield wipers,
cheers from the steering wheel.
Even though I'm no Sinatra,
no Nat King Cole of the tollways,
I can croon along on every song
the Delco radio serves up,
and when I get going good
on some old favorite,
like "I've Got You Under My Skin"
or maybe "Answer Me, My Love,"
I start to see my name in lights.
The face in the mirror is mine.
I have a captive audience.
And I can do me better than me.

Sonnet for 6 a.m.

2011-04-22T07:29:00.000-07:00

Sonnet for six a.m.

By Colleen Barry

The sheets are white and rising, falling slow
and steady over bodies slack and bent,
our legs like gum. the night is dealt this blow—
how obvious, smooth—the careful breeze and scent
of rain on gutters, pavement, windows bare
and glowing chests undone by dawn are more
like sideways basins, open mouths in air
where tiny balmy sighs are caught, then pour
the shade of blue that deepens under eyes
like breathing—sleepy lover’s breath, ours, now—
it colors arms, the smalls of backs, our thighs,
this morning; softly starts a day with how
the heaped strain of yearning masses sleeps
while, apart, hushed, warm—it seeps.

What I Believe

2011-04-21T06:35:00.000-07:00

What I Believe

by Michael Blumenthal

I believe there is no justice,
but that cottongrass and bunchberry
grow on the mountain.

I believe that a scorpion's sting
will kill a man,
but that his wife will remarry.

I believe that, the older we get,
the weaker the body,
but the stronger the soul.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in an empty bed,
the air consoles you.

I believe that no one is spared
the darkness,
and no one gets all of it.

I believe we all drown eventually
in a sea of our making,
but that the land belongs to someone else.

I believe in destiny.
And I believe in free will.

I believe that, when all
the clocks break,
time goes on without them.

And I believe that whatever
pulls us under,
will do so gently.

so as not to disturb anyone,
so as not to interfere
with what we believe in.

Roosts

2011-04-20T07:37:00.000-07:00

Roosts

By Christian Ward

Everything roosts
in something,

the nesting rain
tells me. Swans

stitch new habitats
out of the river

and reeds, the moon
moves in a sack

of sky. Conversations
huddle in the colour

coded nerves of a pay
phone. My baby son

rests his head against
my chest, the sound

of a bird that has travelled
far echoing in his breathing,

followed by rustling,
as if building shelter.

The Art of Disappearing

2011-04-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Art of Disappearing

By Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

Beans and Franks

2011-04-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

Beans and Franks

by Donald Hall

When Newberry's closed
in Franklin, New Hampshire—homely lime front
on Main Street, among the closed
storefronts of this mill town depressed
since nineteen twenty-nine;
with its lunch counter for beans and franks
and coleslaw; with its
bins of peanuts, counters of acrylic,
hair nets, underwear, workshirts,
marbled notebooks, Bic pens, plastic
toys, and cheap sneakers;
where Marjorie worked ten years at the iron
cash register, Alcibide
Monbouquet pushed a broom at night.
and Mr. Smith managed—
we learned that a man from Beverly
Hills owned it, who never saw
the streets of Franklin, New Hampshire,
and drew with a well-groomed hand
a line through "Franklin, New Hampshire."

Prayer Chain

2011-04-17T08:26:00.000-07:00

Prayer Chain

by Tim Nolan

My mother called to tell me
about an old classmate of mine who

was dying on the parish prayer chain—
or was very sick—or destitute—

or it had not worked out—the marriage—
or the kids were all on drugs—and

all the old mothers were praying intensely
for all the pain of their children

and for life—they were praying for life—
in their quiet rooms—sipping decaf coffee—

I bet they've been praying for me at times—
so I'll find my way—so I won't rob a bank—

I'll take them—the mystical prayers of old mothers—
it matters—all this patient and purposeful love.