Posted in joy, life, nazi, Nina Alvarez, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, ruth stone, sad, words, Write, Writer, writing on 05/12/2008| 1 Comment »
In the Next Galaxy
Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not
have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.
-Ruth Stone
Posted in alvarez, life, nina, philosophy, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Write, Writer, writing on 02/26/2008| 1 Comment »
The purpose of this writing is to pluck the fruit. Les fruits. Des fruits. Fru-its.
Leave me alone, Nietzsche, your aphorisms telling me one way, then the next, your contradictory sentiments, your unphilosophical philosophy, your hardness, which I love too well. I gave my hardness to a bourgeois boy with a doctor wife. Do all rejected people secretly feel they are superior to the one rejecting them?
I came out here, six months ago, in bliss, to write by my parent’s poolside. There was a novel. It was happening.
Oh, good thing no one has married me. Wouldn’t I be the saddest wife? No one wants a sad wife.
My name would be nested at the middle of the table. My big fat father would hover in his muscle shirt. The legs of the tables would attach to my mother in law and sister in law and I would be sacrificed to the family, like a turkey.
I would come here, from across a far distance, to tell you something. I am the voiceless voice, the sin of sons, I am joy in your bosom.
In this time of psychic excesses, what else to do but siphon it into art?
I have heard the call of the miracle cure. It was coming down the long hall. It was effervescent, ever ready. It had a hard hat and hard timing of staying afloat. It couldn’t look at us. It did not have coordinates for directed movement. It was a mass of particles. We did not know where to put it or where to hide it. I was coming, unconsciously, down the corridor of images.
And progress wept. In me. The last of the long gods disappeared, following out a gray cloud to the West. I stood in a field of bodies and screamed my hollow hole to the last chroniclers. They were dancing the dance of Baccus, but had no joy. I felt how still the earth was, and forever would be from this moment.
I felt how good, how golden, I had planned to be. And how the gray skin seemed instead to say, “No one may be golden in a gray world.”
I have no eyes, save the eyes that see particles and parts.
Do you know how important you are to this world? How much they need you? You are not just some schmuck sitting in a suburb and contemplating death. You have the Grand Mission to them. The voice, the help, the responsibility. Sweet succor. Nietzsche said people needed to suffer more, not less.
Beware the handsome voice, the courteous voice, the nascent voice.
Beware the pleasant afternoon, the pleasant morning, the pleasant fuck.
Beware the dream that doesn’t awake you in cold steam, or with hate in your heart.
Beware the dogged doggerel of egolessness.
Beware technique. Beware trend. Beware answers.
The pretty small palms by the blue kidney shaped pool in Seminole, FL are not suburban trees, no suburban water, not suburban sky, but the same self-composed solar system of grandeur as the nebulae and must not be assumed to be pleasant.
The rest of the world cuts out for me.
I waver between jealousy and disdain of those happy actors who act their parts so well.
In cities, love is more intense, because the pain of daily living is nearly excruciating.
I don’t know where to go, or why life should be such a game of shifting floors.
-Nina Alvarez
Posted in life, loss, nature, nothing, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, robert, stay, Write, Writer, writing, tagged death, frost, gold, life, nothing, poem, youth on 11/23/2007| Leave a Comment »
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost
Posted in john, koethe, life, new york, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, poughkeepsie, sally's hair, Write, Writer, writing on 11/16/2007| Leave a Comment »
Sally’s Hair
It’s like living in a light bulb, with the leaves
Like filaments and the sky a shell of thin, transparent glass
Enclosing the late heaven of a summer day, a canopy
Of incandescent blue above the dappled sunlight golden on the grass.
I took the train back from Poughkeepsie to New York
And in the Port Authority, there at the Suburban Transit window,
She asked, “Is this the bus to Princeton?”—which it was.
“Do you know Geoffrey Love?” I said I did. She had the blondest hair,
Which fell across her shoulders, and a dress of almost phosphorescent blue.
She liked Ayn Rand. We went down to the Village for a drink,
Where I contrived to miss the last bus to New Jersey, and at 3 a.m. we
Walked around and found a cheap hotel I hadn’t enough money for
And fooled around on its dilapidated couch. An early morning bus
(She’d come to see her brother), dinner plans and missed connections
And a message on his door about the Jersey shore. Next day
A summer dormitory room, my roommates gone: “Are you,” she asked,
“A hedonist?” I guessed so. Then she had to catch her plane.
Sally—Sally Roche. She called that night from Florida,
And then I never heard from her again. I wonder where she is now,
Who she is now. That was thirty-seven years ago.
And I’m too old to be surprised again. The days are open,
Life conceals no depths, no mysteries, the sky is everywhere,
The leaves are all ablaze with light, the blond light
Of a summer afternoon that made me think again of Sally’s hair.
-John Koethe
Posted in Apollinaire, Guillaume, Guillaume Apollinaire, joy, life, love, mirabeau bridge, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, revell, river, Write, Writer, writing on 11/09/2007| Leave a Comment »
Mirabeau Bridge
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
And lovers
Must I be reminded
Joy came always after pain
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
We’re face to face and hand in hand
While under the bridges
Of embrace expire
Eternal tired tidal eyes
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
Love elapses like the river
Love goes by
Poor life is indolent
And expectation always violent
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
The days and equally the weeks elapse
The past remains the past
Love remains lost
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
-by Guillaume Apollinaire (Translated by Donald Revell)
Posted in learn, life, philosophy, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, reading biographies, soto, venus, words, Write, Writer, writing on 11/01/2007| Leave a Comment »
Reading Biographies
Perhaps Frost was poking his secretary,
The apple core of his good-living chewed
To the bitter seed. Perhaps he buttoned up,
Disgusted with the dead lizard cupped in his palm.
And his woman? She was as large as Gilbraltar,
A chunk of cheese in each armpit.
She took a deep breath
And wiggled the goose of her tasty fanny
Into the kitchen. There, she poured pancakes
Onto a skillet as old as this country,
And Frost, a pioneer for all writers,
Picked up his beaver-thrashed pencil and proclaimed,
O Sweet Youth, etc.
I don’t know how to read
Biographies, the dead words of dead writers
Etched on my eyes, then gone. I read them,
And drive my car recklessly through leaves,
The cushion for my own eventual death.
Sure, I reflect, like a chip of mirror,
And then I forget them, these subjects,
These writers with lungs and straight-A penmanship.
They’re of no use. I’m not saved
By the repetitions of jealousy and all-day drinking.
Wind frisked the trees, hair fell like wheat,
And the liver, saddlebag of disease,
Bulged with inoperable knots.
I touch my own hip, then hobble home
Where a pumpkin glows in a window.
Birds shrug into their coats of dirt.
Crickets stop the violin action of their thighs.
A fire is built, and I’m lit in the living room.
I’m a democrat, I slur to the couch,
And add, Venus is a star and fly trap.
Thank God, I’ve learned nothing.
– Gary Soto
Posted in life, Michael Ryan, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, thirty, wake, Write, Writer, writing on 09/22/2007| Leave a Comment »
Poem at Thirty
The rich little kids across the street
twist their swings in knots. Near me,
on the porch, wasps jazz old nesting tunes
and don’t get wild over human sweat.
This is the first summer of my middle life.
I ought to be content. The mindless harsh
process of history; with its diverse murders
and starvations, its whippings, humiliations,
child-tyrants, and beasts, I don’t care for
or understand. Nor do I understand
restlessness that sometimes stops my sleep.
Waking, those mornings, is like being thrown from a train.
All you know comes to falling:
the body, in its witless crooning for solidity,
keeps heading for the ground.
There is no air, no sound, nothing
but dumb insistence of body weight
coming down, and there is no thought of love,
or passing time, or don’t want to be alone.
Probably one hundred thousand impressions
wrinkle the brain in a moment like this,
but if you could think about it
you’d admit the world goes on in any case,
roars on, in fact, without you, on its endless iron track.
But most mornings I ease awake:
also a falling,
but delicate as an agile wing
no one may touch with hands,
a transparent wing like a distant moan
arriving disembodied of pleasure or pain,
a wing that dissolves on the tongue,
a wing that has never flown.
Because I’ve awakened like this,
I think I could love myself quietly
and let the world go on.
So today I watched a pudgy neighbor
edge her lawn, and heard the small blade whine;
I saw her husband, the briefcase man,
whiz off in his Mercedes without a glance.
I believe I’m beginning to understand
that I don’t know what such things mean:
stupid pain or pure tranquillity,
desire’s dull ache or conquering the body,
the need to say we and be known to someone
or what I see in myself as I sit here alone.
The sun glares most mornings
like an executive’s thick pinky diamond,
and slowly the dark backs off
This is one reason this morning I awakened.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
Some fine people I’ve known swirl to me
in airy forms like just so much hot dust.
They have all moved through in dreams.
A lover’s smell, the gut laugh of a friend,
become hard to recall as a particular wind.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
Like the deep vacuum in sleep, nothing
holds you up or knocks you down, only
it doesn’t end in waking but goes on and on.
The tangles of place, the floating in time,
you must accept gently like a favorite dream.
If you can’t, and you don’t, the mind
unlocks the mind. Madness, with his lewd grin,
always waits outside the window, always
wanting to come in. I’ve gone out before,
both to slit his throat and to kiss his hand.
No one can tell you how to be alone:
Watch tiny explosions as flowers break ground;
hear the children giggle, rapid and clean.
It’s hard to care about ordinary things.
Doesn’t pain expand from lack of change?
I can’t grasp exactly the feelings of anyone.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
At thirty the body begins to slow down.
Does that make for the quiet on this porch,
a chemical ability to relax and watch?
If a kid bounces her pelvis against a chain-link fence,
bounces so metal sings
and it seems she must be hurting herself
how old must I get before I tell her to stop?
Right now, I let her do it.
She’s so beautiful in her filthy T-shirt
and gym shorts, her hair swings with each clang,
and she can do no wrong.
I let her do it as background music
to storm clouds moving in like a dark army.
I let her do it as a fond wish for myself
I feel the vibration of the fence
as a wasp feels voices on a pane of glass.
The song in it I can’t make out.
This day, then, ends in rain
but almost everyone will live through it.
Tomorrow’s thousands losing their loved ones
have not yet stepped into never being the same again.
Maybe the sun’s first light will hit me
in those moments, but I’d gladly wake to feel it:
the dramatic opening of a day,
clean blood pumping from the heart.
-Michael Ryan
Poem of the Month 