Poem of the Month

Song of Childhood

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
had no habits,
it often sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair,
and made no faces when photographed.

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?

When the child was a child,
It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding,
and on steamed cauliflower,
and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

It had visualized a clear image of Paradise,
and now can at most guess,
could not conceive of nothingness,
and shudders today at the thought.

When the child was a child,
It played with enthusiasm,
and, now, has just as much excitement as then,
but only when it concerns its work.

When the child was a child,
It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread,
And so it is even now.

When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
it had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so,
It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees
with an elation it still has today,
has a shyness in front of strangers,
and has that even now.
It awaited the first snow,
And waits that way even now.

When the child was a child,
It threw a stick like a lance against a tree,
And it quivers there still today.

-Peter Handke

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Though to meet someone in California

None-the-less, a wedding

Is like meeting them on a movie set.

You are minor actors with a vague background.

Cousin #2 and the best man.

You are the scenery to someone else’s love story.

At best, you are reaching out for each other

Because that is what people do at weddings.

The veil has dropped and you can’t help but

fall into bed with the bride and groom.

-Nina Alvarez

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When I am sleepy, when I watch Monet’s willow from behind the soldier’s arm

When I think how he decided to stay, decided not to fight, to sublimely ignore

the revolution…

I think about how childhood must be, how dreams are, how there must be a place we can go that is not of this world, though it may be in it. How our minds can set their boundaries at the last quivering leaf, the 80^th layer of blue, and then after that, be it war, or want, or misery that lay beyond, all simply fades to black.

-Nina Alvarez

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If you forget me, wear your hair that way
where the bangs are long and the back is curled against your neck.

Dress up with her for Halloween, after all, she is your wife. And when
I check in on you- it will be the for the latest scores.
You didn’t actually go to Harvard. You work at Wegmans.

You never left that one world. The one I left 14 years ago. But
it is me, with my degrees and my postcards, that still peeks over the fence
at your steadiness, solid and unafraid– I loved you then and now.

How do I know? This, for me, is love: unquenchable inferiority forever.

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They don’t teach you in college

how meaning can drain like

ink from a page.

When people are asking you to

grade their papers or

correct their spelling. When all the things you learned

poetry become nothing more than

clerical skills.

-Nina Alvarez

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Dropping a Name

Who were you when they sat around you? You had on a red skirt and braids in your hair. You waxed philosophic while drinking Pierre Joris’ wife’s white wine with a strawberry in it. You were just years out of suburbia but Charles Bernstein was at the party and you thought you should be known to him. You were sleeping with someone – Paul – a poet who turned out to be a beast. And you were leaving for South Africa soon. You had turned your whole world into a Burroughs painting, some interpretation of the Chelsea Hotel but always aware, it was the poor man’s Chelsea, Albany, NY, with poets who posed, with fuzzy eye-browed men of aged notoriety who kissed you on the lips good night. Who listened at you as you got drunker and drunker and spoke to them of meaning. Years later an engaged reporter for a Washington newspaper kissed you on New Years in Philadelphia before reporting on the Mummers Parade. Another night when you were just drunk enough to need to tell him how much it means to write, to read. How it all still matters. Then, like the others, he kisses you and you never see him again.

-Nina Alvarez

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What were we saying

when the plane hit

It was air

that whoosh

We had to trade in things

insert words

We had to hear what we

didn’t want to hear

I have trouble

these days

Its dawning on me

How little all this means

The current catches up and

All those pretty stones gone

There was a pause, when the plane hit

And since then we’ve been unsure

What were we saying?

We had decided to

go somewhere. Do something. But

The whoosh. We didn’t.

-Nina Alvarez

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This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies
And lads and girls;
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls;

This passive place a summer’s nimble mansion,
Where bloom and bees
Fulfilled their oriental circuit,
Then ceased like these.

-Emily Dickinson

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The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth’s bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.

The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.

Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away,

The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
my flower my fin my life my lightness my O.

-Robert Pinsky

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