Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

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/

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

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

 
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