Getting Older | Kim Addonizio

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

This week's POTW is brought to you by my pesky exalted Venus in H10 Pisces.

"Sometimes what you remember is their voices again,
coming on inside you like strung lights in your blood,
certain words they'd tongue differently
from anyone else, or your own name
and its surprisingly infinite nuances.
And sometimes you remember their hands,
not touching you but draped over a steering wheel
or cupped briefly around a cigarette,
anywhere you could watch them
in their life apart from you, knowing how
they'd find you later, blind but sure,
and come to rest where you needed them.
You remember the hardness of their bellies,
the soft line of hair that swirls down
toward the cock, the look of each one
that entered you and then withdrew, or lay
quietly inside awhile longer before slipping
away like a girl sneaking out in the middle
of the night, high heels dangling from one hand
as her stockinged feet drew sparks from the rug.
Sometimes you wander the house all day,
the fog outside stalled at the tops
of trees, refusing to rise higher and reveal
the world you hope is still there, the one
in which you're still a woman
some beautiful man might helplessly
move toward. And you remember how one
looked at you the first time you undressed,
how another didn't mind that you cried.
Sometimes it's enough just to say
their names like a rosary, ordinary names
linked by nothing but the fact
that they belong to men who loved you. And finally
you depend on that, you pray it's enough
to last, if it has to, the rest of your life."

http://www.kimaddonizio.com/

To Prove That We Existed Before You Were Born - Charles Harper Webb

Sunday, July 20, 2008

"We'll tell you how your mom worked at the hospital,
"treating" people like the tattered, gray-faced man
who shoves his shopping cart down Verdugo,
muttering to the Tsar. How, between bouts
at my desk, I'd bumble barefoot through the house,
feeding our fish, or patting Marvin, the cat.

Mom will tell how, at her first job, age 16,
she found a dead mouse in Baskin-Robbin's hot fudge,
called the manager at home, and when he didn't
believe her, dropped the chocolate-covered Mickey
on his big desk-blotter, and never returned.
I'll tell about playing The Catacombs, and resurrect

my sunburst Stratocaster from its coffin-case.
I might even tell how I clubbed a Bandido with a mike-
stand when he rushed the stage, and how I'd pull away
from girlfriends in Portland, Billings, Coeur d'Alene,
my red pickup sagging with band gear, and barely see
the road for tears until, in a few miles, the clouds lifted,

a surge of freedom picked me up, and surfing
on its crest, I'd start to sing. You'll hear the way
you heard "Jack the Giant-Killer", and "Snow White",
as if our lives are fairy tales from "olden days".
Your world will be about your friends, your baseball,
your Tickle Me Elmo, or whatever the fad is.

You won't know for many years that the musk
of narcissus on a March day made us feel sexy,
just as it will you. You'd never guess
that, when you were a neural tube, an ember
trying to make a flame, your mom felt sick,
so we went walking on the street we were leaving

to find a better place for you. A north wind
gnawed our lips, but as we walked, holding hands
inside my parka pocket, your mom's nausea lifted,
and my grief to feel you stealing her from me.
Inventing songs about our turtles - Mr. Cow,
Peg Webb, Trout-Boy, and Tammy Faye -

we started laughing, and stopped on the sidewalk
(cracked by the last earthquake), and kissed
as long and desperately as if we were saying goodbye -
kissed the way our parents may have
(since we're both eldest children) - kissed as if
we didn't need you, one last time."

@ poemhunter

Lily Pond - Vicki Feaver

Friday, June 13, 2008

"Thinking of new ways to kill you
and bring you back from the dead,
I try drowning you in the lily pond -

holding your head down
until every bubble of breath
is squeezed from your lungs

and the flat leaves and spiky flowers
float over you like a wreath.
I sit on the stones until I'm numb,

until, among reflections of sky,
water-buttercups, spears of iris,
your face rises to the surface -

a face that was always puffy
and pale, so curiously unchanged.
A wind rocks the waxy flowers, curls

the edges of the leaves. Blue butterfles
appear and vanish like ghosts.
I part the mats of yellow weed

and drag you to the bank, covering
your green algae-stained corpse
with a white sheet. Then, I lift the edge

and climb in underneath -
thumping your chest,
breathing into your mouth."

@ poetryarchive.com
@ Wikipedia

If You Knew | Ellen Bass

Saturday, May 31, 2008

"What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?"


EllenBass.com

Going There - Jack Gilbert

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

- Jack Gilbert, "Going There"

J. Gilbert (Wikipedia)
J. Gilbert (poets.org)

Transformations | Joy Harjo

Friday, April 18, 2008

This poem is a letter to tell you that I have smelled the hatred you
have tried to find me with; you would like to destroy me. Bone splin-
tered in the eye of one you choose to name your enemy won't make
it better for you to see. It could take a thousand years if you name it
that way, but then, to see after all that time, never could anything
be so clear. Memory has many forms. When I think of early winter I
think of a blackbird laughing in the frozen air; guards a piece of
light. (I saw the whole world caught in that sound, the sun stopped
for a moment because of tough belief.) I don't know what that has
to do with what I am trying to tell you except that I know you can
turn a poem into something else. This poem could be a bear tread-
ing the far northern tundra, smelling the air for sweet alive meat.
Or a piece of seaweed stumbling in the sea. Or a blackbird, laugh-
ing. What I mean is that hatred can be turned into something else,
if you have the right words, the right meanings, buried in that ten-
der place in your heart where the most precious animals live. Down
the street an ambulance has come to rescue an old man who is
slowly losing his life. Not many can see that he is already becoming
the backyard tree he has tended for years, before he moves on. He is
not sad, but compassionate for the fears moving around him.

That's what I mean to tell you. On the other side of the place you
live stands a dark woman. She has been trying to talk to you for
years. You have called the same name in the middle of a night-
mare, from the center of miracles. She is beautiful.
This is your hatred back. She loves you.

-Joy Harjo

Martín Espada - Rednecks

Friday, March 28, 2008

At Scot Gas, Darnestown Road,
the high school boys
pumping gas
would snicker at the rednecks.
Every Saturday night there was Earl,
puckering his liquor-smashed face
to announce that he was driving
across the bridge, a bridge spanning
only the whiskey river
that bubbled in his stomach.
Earl's car, one side crumpled like his nose,
would circle closely around the pumps,
turn signal winking relentlessly.

Another pickup truck morning,
and rednecks. Loitering
in our red uniforms, we watched
as a pickup rumbled through.
We expected: "Fill it with no-lead, boy,
and gimme a cash ticket."
We expected the farmer with sideburns
and a pompadour.
We, with new diplomas framed
at home, never expected the woman.
Her face was a purple rubber mask
melting off her head, scars rippling down
where the fire seared her freak face,
leaving her a carnival where high school boys
paid a quarter to look, and look away.

No one took the pump. The farmer saw us standing
in our red uniforms, a regiment of illiterate conscripts.
Still watching us, he leaned across the seat of the truck
and kissed her. He kissed her
all over her happy ruined face, kissed her
as I pumped the gas and scraped the windshield
and measured the oil, he kept kissing her.

-Martín Espada, Rednecks

Michael Goldman - Report on Human Beings

Friday, February 29, 2008

this is an old favorite of mine.

You know about desks and noses,
proteins, mortgages, orchestras,
nationalities, contraceptives;
you have your own ruins and records,
but they won't tell you
what we were like.

We were distinguished
by our interest in scenery;
we could look at things for hours
without using them or breaking them-
and there was a touch of desperation, not to be found
in any other animal,
in the looks of love we directed
at our children.

We were treacherous of course.
Like anything here-
winds, dogs, the sun-
we could turn against you unexpectedly,
we could let you down.
But what was remarkable about us
and which you will not believe
is that we alone,
with the exception of a few pets
who probably learned it from us,
when betrayed
were frequently surprised.

We were one of a million species
who continually cried out
or silently wept with pain.
I am proud that we alone resented
taking part in the chorus.

Yes, some of us
liked to cause pain.
Yes, most of us
sometimes
liked to cause pain,
but I am proud that most of us
were ashamed
afterward.

Our love of poetry would have amused you;
we were so proud of language
we thought we invented it
(and thus failed to notice
the speech of animals,
the birds' repeated warnings,
the whispered intelligence
of mutant cells).

We did invent boredom,
a fruitful state.
It hid the size of our desires.
We were spared many murders,
many religions
because we could say "I'm bored."
A kind of clarity
came when we said it
and we could go to Paris or the movies,
give useful parties, master languages,
rather than sink our teeth in our lover's throat
or shake till things felt right again.

Out of the same pulsing world
you know,
out of gases, whorls,
fronds, fellers, jellies,
we devised hard edges,
strings of infinite tension stretched
to guide us.
The mind's pure snowflake
was on our map.
Lines, angles, outlines
not to be found in rocks or seas
or living matter
or in the holes of space,
how strange these shapes must look to you,
at odds with everything,
uncanny, broken from the flow,
I think they must be for you
what we call art.

What was most wonderful about us
was our kindness
but of this it is impossible to speak.
Only someone who knows our cruelty,
who knows the fears we always lived with,
fear of inside and outside, smooth and rough,
soft and hard, wet and dry, touch and no touch,
only someone who understands the great place we built
on the axis of time
out of fear and cruelty and called history,
only those who have lived in anger
of a great modern city,
who saw the traffic in the morning
and the police at night
can know how heartbreaking
our kindness was.

Let me put it this way.
One of us said, "I think
our life is not as good
as the mind warrants,"
another, "It is hard
to be alone and alive at the same time."
To understand these statements
you would have to be human.

Our destruction as a species
was accidental.
Characteristically
we blamed it on ourselves,
which neither the eagle
nor the dinosaur would do.

Look closely around you,
study your instruments,
scan the night sky.
We were alien.
Nothing in the universe
resembles us.

The Sun Never Says - Hafiz

Friday, February 22, 2008

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe Me."

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.

Everything, by Srikanth Reddy

Friday, February 8, 2008

Thanks to my mega block, you've all been spared from having to read my own poetry, but I still read other's work every day and am discovering new poets constantly. So every Friday I'm going to try to get a new poem up here; it's not necessarily new, but just a poem that I especially enjoyed that week. I hope you like it!

Everything, by Srikanth Reddy

She was watching the solar eclipse
through a piece of broken bottle

when he left home.
He found a blue kite in the forest

on the day she lay down
with a sailor. When his name changed,

she stitched a cloud to a quilt
made of rags. They did not meet,

so they never could be parted.
So she finished her prayer,

& he folded his map of the sea.

Reddy's debut, "Facts for Visitors," on UCPress

poetry in general, and "PERSEPHONE : Reprise" by Diane di Prima

Friday, January 25, 2008

I've always said that I understand why most people don't read or enjoy poetry, and that's the truth. There are a lot of people in the world who immediately close their minds to anything they view as "vulnerable" (I'm about to use this word a lot) or "melodramatic," and considering the bullshit we're all forced to read and "interpret" in high school (I grew up in Western Mass, so for us it was Emily Dickinson) I don't blame or fault anyone for dismissing poetry if they do.

But that also means I hold an extra special place in my heart for the people who DO love it. I feel like, maybe foolishly, I can be more honest and share more of myself with people who appreciate good poetry. I think it speaks to a soul softness rarely found in people anymore (especially folks in my generation). We're such a masculine society now that there doesn't seem to be any more room for simplicity, beauty and vulnerability, not with all the extra room we seem to now need for sex and war and misogyny. What most people don't realize is that what most see as "weakness" is actually an amazing source of stregnth. Saul Williams, in his amazing letter to Oprah Winfrey concerning whether or not hip hop emcees can also be called poets, had this to say about vulnerability as power:

"You may recall that in immediate response to the attacks of September 11th, our president took the national stage to say to the American public and the world that we would "...show no sign of vulnerability". Here is the same word that distinguishes poets from rappers, but in its history, more accurately, women from men. To make such a statement is to align oneself with the ideology that instills in us a sense of vulnerability meaning "weakness". And these meanings all take their place under the heading of what we consciously or subconsciously characterize as traits of the feminine. The weapon of mass destruction is the one that asserts that a holy trinity would be a father, a male child, and a ghost when common sense tells us that the holiest of trinities would be a mother, a father, and a child: Family. The vulnerability that we see as weakness is the saving grace of the drunken driver who because of their drunken/vulnerable state survives the fatal accident that kills the passengers in the approaching vehicle who tighten their grip and show no physical vulnerability in the face of their fear. Vulnerability is also the saving grace of the skate boarder who attempts a trick and remembers to stay loose and not tense during their fall. Likewise, vulnerability has been the saving grace of the African American struggle as we have been whipped, jailed, spat upon, called names, and killed, yet continue to strive forward, mostly non-violently, towards our highest goals. But today we are at a crossroads, because the institutions that have sold us the crosses we wear around our necks are the most overt in the denigration of women and thus humanity. That is why I write you today, Ms. Winfrey. We cannot address the root of what plagues Hip Hop without addressing the root of what plagues today's society and the world." (read the rest of his amazing letter here)

That being said, I read a poem this morning that made me cry. Even though I've been blocked myself and unable to write for nearly a year now, I still make it a point to read poetry every day. I feel like it keeps me grounded in who I was and am. Granted, as a pregnant lady it's not terribly difficult to make me cry, but this poem seems special to me. Maybe it's subject matter concerning my current condition, maybe it's the amazingly strong bond I have with my own mother, but I feel like this poem speaks a truth about femininity that's often dismissed.

PERSEPHONE : Reprise, Diane di Prima

one "life" is not more real than the other
not in "deflowering" do we come
into bloom; we have been always


there at the fluid boundary of Hades
we spring continuously into life & death
this is the province of the co-emergent mother
this is the daughter, sixteen, wrathful & ready


nor is the daughter separate from the mother
fruit within fruit; a sweetness
known only at the source where the fountain
                                           divides
                                           becomes itself
where fruit & seed & flower dance equally
exchanging shapes         exchanging essences


there is no knife can sever me from her
where I go down to bleed, to birth, to die