Poetry Thread, part two: A Game Of Chess

[T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land, part two.]

So who could possibly love me? Me.

Whole poems were written using this gimmick.

Celery tastes tastes where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.

A green acre is so selfish and so pure and so enlivened.

[Gertrude Stein, from "Tender Buttons"]

Let me call a ghost,
Love, so it be little:
In December we took
No thought for the weather.

Whom shall I now thank
For this wealth of water?
Your heart loves harbors
Where I am a stranger.

...

If a seed grow green
Set a stone upon it
That it learn thereby
Holy Charity.

If you must smile
Always on that other,
Cut me from ear to ear
And we all smile together

--W.S. Merwin

will all the zoobelee zoo
elementary school teachers freeze

and stop chestizin me
with this we hold these truths to be self evident b.s.
cuz i got as much chance of being president
as one of ling lings dc panda cubs
livin to see three days of spring

--Paul Beatty, 1994

Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away!
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.

When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;

Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among;
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.

--"Young and Old", Charles Kingsley

There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.

There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.

And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.

-- "On The Farm", R.S. Thomas

How to Leave the World that Worships Should

Let faxes butter-curl on dusty shelves.
Let junkmail build its castles in the hush
of other people's halls. Let deadlines burst
and flash like glorious fireworks somwhere else.
As hours go softly by, let others curse
the roads where distant drivers queue like sheep.
Let e-mails fly like panicked, tiny birds.
Let phones, unanswered, ring themselves to sleep.

Above, the sky unrolls its telegram,
immense and wordless, simply understood:
you've made your mark like birdtracks in the sand -
now make the air in your lungs your livelihood.
See how each wave arrives at last to heave
itself upon the beach and vanish. Breathe.

---Ros Barber

Who would love you
if you were not six

feet tall, a ruddy face, a
smiling face. You

would walk all night, all
night, and no one, no one

would look at you.

--Robert Creeley

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

--Yusef Komunyakaa

I know the same sun, in a turn
Of earth, will bring morning, grey
As gulls or mice to us. And I know
In my troubled night the owls fly
Over us, wings wide as England,
And their voices will never go away.

--Leslie Norris

...as our voices seem to have gone away....

Ode

Oh roll of stomach fat,
when I sit in the bath
and grasp you with both hands
let me not think disloyal thoughts!
You are so much chocolate, chili
and lemon cheese, such
consummation of pleasure,
I should dance. And you
should jiggle up and down.

Sue Stanford

I think I keep getting put off posting to this thread because it mentions chess in the title and I am rubbish at it.

Jist ti Let Yi No
(from the American of Carlos Williams)

ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij

n thit
yiwurr probbli
hodn back
furthi pahrti

awright
they wur great
thaht stroang
thaht cawld

---Tom Leonard

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line--
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
[cont'd]

—Kenenth Koch

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue

but meant for music?

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

Perhaps both.

Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,

knows it's a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they'd pass her in silence:

so it's not only to say she's
a warm hole. It's a word

in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down

in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis-
gusted, and can't,

it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors

spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly

had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding

keeps on translating:
'Life after life after life goes by

without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.'

-- Denise Levertov

"You ever notice...?", it might as well begin,
And then, a small observation, a quirk:
A summer day, a war, a boorish jerk,
A socially codified routine, women.
Small, because the magazine will run
Only so many lines, and time is short,
And art is long; don't wait for rigor mort-
is to set in. "You ever...?", well, I'm gon-
na guess you have. On this we can agree.
Agreement is the goal. Let's shake hands.
That's so true. I'm your biggest fan.
You spoke to me. No, you spoke for me.
Last time I was this pleased when someone spoke,
A stand-up comic told my favorite joke.

The poem stands on its firm
legs. Its claws are filed, brush
and curry-comb have worked
with the hissing groom to polish

its smooth pelt. All morning, hair
bt hair, I've plucked away each small
excess; remains no trace of
barbering, and all feels natural.

It is conditioned to walk, turn
to the frailest leash, swing
without effort into ecstatic
hunting. Now I am cleaning

the teeth in its lion jaws
with an old brush. I'll set it
wild on the running street, aimed
at the hamstring, the soft throat.

--Leslie Norris

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world seem bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.
Not beautiful or rare in every part.
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

-Edwin Muir

It's quite an odd form. It feels like a sonnet though so that's how I'll think of it. Albeit a near-randomly rhymed one with 15 lines and in irregular iambic pentameter... Hm.

I do not undstand the world, father.
By the millpond at the end of the garden
There is a man who slouches listening
To the wheel revolving in the stream, only
There is no wheel there to revolve.

He sits in the end of March, but he sits also
In the end of the garden; his hands are in
His pockets. It is not expectation
On which he is intent, nor yesterday
To which he listens. It is a wheel turning.

When I speak, father, it is the world
That I must mention. He does not move
His feet nor so much as raise his head
For fear he should disturb the sound he hears
Like a pain without a cry, when he listens.

I do not think I am fond, father,
Of the way in which always before he listens
He prepares himself by listening. It is
Unequal, father, like the reason
For which the wheel turns, though there is no wheel.

I speak of him, father, because he is
There with his hands in his pockets, in the end
Of the garden, listening to the turning
Wheel that is not there, but it is the world,
Father, that I do not understand.

--W.S. Merwin

(Are your wheels turning? What makes your wheels turn? What do you hear? What do you think W.S. Merwin is saying here? That we are all standing in the garden with our ears turned to things--whatever--that are not there?)

Of course now that I see that it's actually "father" in the first line, well, that changes everything. With "father" in the first line, it's presented as a given, so there's nothing unexpected and surprising about it.

But now that I've noticed the repitition of "father", I think, why is he repeating it? It's not normal at all to repeat that sort of vocative every forty words like that. The only example I can think of where people do that is when they are lecturing a misbehaved child, saying their name often to make sure their attention does not wander very far during the onslaught of words they don't want to hear.

And so the repetition takes on a sinister edge -- father is being lectured to here, and he isn't trusted to pay attention. And of course, since I am reading the poem, and the person who is "supposed" to be reading the poem is father, then I am put in the position of "father", and I am being lectured at. Or I could try to put myself in the lecturer's shoes, and try to enjoy the vicarious thrill of telling father what he ought to know. Or I can stand above the fray and cast judgment on what is going on.

(Of course, I suppose there are other instances where you repeat the name of the person you're speaking to at such a rate -- at the height of passion, say. But the tone of the rest of the text is "I am imparting vital information about the world", not "Baby you so fine", and anyway he is talking to his father, so without any evidence to the contrary let's assume their not making out.)

So the question is, what does this unnatural repitition of "father" do?

(I mean the cheap answer, which might be the "right" answer, is the the old man is in fact "father" [which would confirm my "sinister" interpretation above, since he is repeating it in a very loaded way!].)

So, hey, maybe the father (past) is the old man (future) as well as the speaker (present) - it's all a conversation/musing/poem that goes on within oneself? (I don't think "father" is given any more 'unnatural' repetition than "I" and "old man/him" if you break it down.) And still, the speaker comes back to the first line, his original thought, that he doesn't understand the world. /wheel that is not there, it is the world/ is a pretty key line, which reminds me of "no ideas but in things". From what position can we understand the world if we can't hold a position? We can listen to things, wonder, talk, write, but understand completely - and what would be the point of that anyway, wouldn't that just bring us to a standstill? Okay, that's my latest interpretation, building on what you've said, Chris. Hm?

(Actually, rrrobyn, on rereading, it doesn't ever refer to the man as "old", that was just something my brain put in.)

But it's normal to repeat "I" when talking about something you did, rrrobyn, and it's normal to say "man" or "him" when referring to such a man in such a situation, but it is not normal to repeat the name of the person you speaking to as often as it gets repeated in the poem, rrobyn. I'm doing it here, rrrobyn, to illustrate how odd it is, and I suspect, rrrobyn, that if you weren't aware of why I was doing it it would come off as condescending.

So if you still find the repitition of "father" to be normal English, then we can agree to disagree. But if you agree that it's a bit unusual, I'm curious what you think is going on with it, what effect you think it has.

(I just realized we have derailed the thread a bit. However, it's still about poetry! I'm going to make it up by finding a poem to post. Soon.)

I am not nearly as interested in the father as character (especially since nothing is said about him in the poem, and so anything you could say about him is pure conjecture -- sure, he may be the man, he may be the "I", he may be God, he may be George Washington, he may be Cher for all the poem tells us; to say that the father is probably an amalgam of the characters or that they are the same person in different times or aspects because the poem doesn't tell us anything about the father -- this is surely exchanging the poem as written for the poem you are creating in your head, using the actual poem as a springboard; and while this is fine and you should go ahead and write the poem you are creating and it is good to be creating a poem, it is perhaps best when talking about a poem to stick with what is actually there [and this parenthetical has become a bit meatier and more strident than I really intended it to be, my apologies!]) as I am interested in the effects he gets from how he uses his language. Which is why I keep going back to this "father" thing, because it is odd and interesting and yet I'm not yet convinced it's, shall we say, good.

So, to be rude and blunt (but in hopefully a friendly way), do you think the poem is not interesting enough on its own?

The problem with a kitten is THAT
Eventually it becomes a CAT.

Now, even in a poem this small and silly there are some interesting things you can say about it. And some of those things are clearly "right" (it's a rhymed couplet) and some are hard to argue with (the poem gets a lot of its power from rhyming "cat" with a word that is both common and unexpected, the poem is humorous, the poem is describing something about cat life that is patently true). There are some things that are "wrong" (it's in French) and some things that are hard to support (this is the greatest poem ever written, this should have been extended to a sonnet). And there are a whole bunch of things in between that can be debated (whether this is indeed the problem with kittens, what the effect of capitalizing the end-rhymes is, the tendency of English to fall into pentameter, the awkwardness of the "ua" sound in "eventually", the relative merit of light verse) and which can't really be resolved to "right" or "wrong".

But as rrrobyn points out, people can (and often do, and are I believe often taught they should) claim the poem is saying or doing things that they have no real evidence of in the poem. That "Anecdote of the Jar" example is a good one. Similarly, it would be straining things to suggest that since the poem is talking about a kitten growing up and becoming less appealing, that this is generalizable and Nash is bemoaning how, say, the problem with children is that eventually they become adults. There's just nothing in the poem to support that generalization (although if you disagree, feel free to argue otherwise, I guess!). Similarly, to look at the poem and say that it is suggesting that time passes and ruins once-wonderful things, well, no, again, it doesn't really say that at all. It says that it ruins kittens, and there's nothing suggesting that this is meant to indicate anything larger. If there other poems of his on similar themes of time reducing the value of something or someone, then yes, you could claim it to be a theme of his work. But it's just not in the poem!

And similarly, with the Merwin poem, saying things like "the narrator and the father and the man are all the same person" or "the father is not there just as the wheel and water aren't there" -- well, these may be what Merwin had in mind, but if so, he expected us to be telepathic; there's nothing to indicate either in the poem. And if that is the direction you take the poem, well, of course that's fine -- it's completely great if a poem or any piece of writing jogs you into thinking about other things, in making connections between other things that you have been thinking about -- but then you are no longer talking about the poem, but instead you're talking about things that are, at best, tangentially related. If you're actually pondering the notion that things grow old and grow less valuable, then of course the Ogden poem gives an example of that idea that is pithy and great; but that doesn't mean that the poem is saying that generalized idea.

And so: If every time you talk about the poem you do it in terms of things that are not in the poem, it seems as if the poem isn't so much what you're interested in as the things you were already thinking about that the poem reminded you of.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Someone (I can't remember who) once said that the poem exists in the white spaces between the words. Is this only a pretentious--even meaningless--idea, or is there something to it? I sort of think its true....

The Swan

This drudgery of trudging through things
yet undone, heavily, as if bound,
is like the swan's not fully created walking.

And dying, this no longer being able
to grasp the ground we stand on every day,
is like the swan's anxious letting itself down --:

into the waters, which accept it gently
and, as if happy and already in the past,
draw away under it, ripple upon ripple,
while it, now utterly quiet and sure
and ever more mature and regal
and composed, consents to glide.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

"Snow" -- Louis MacNeice

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Poet laureate marks royal wedding
The furore surrounding the wedding of Camilla Parker Bowles to Prince Charles is dealt with by poet laureate Andrew Motion in his poem for the occasion.
Spring Wedding describes the marriage as a "piece of news", while he talks of the "scandal-flywheel whirring round".

The troubled history of the pair's relationship is also dealt with.

Mr Motion told the BBC he had tried to acknowledge the range of feelings people felt about the marriage.

He said the relationship "was now running its proper course" and he had used the image of a stream to convey the difficulties the couple had faced.

Prince Charles had sent him a letter, and the couple "seemed to like it very much", he added.

Andrew Motion has been poet laureate since 1999.

Spring Wedding

I took your news outdoors, and strolled a while
In silence on my square of garden-ground
Where I could dim the roar of arguments,
Ignore the scandal-flywheel whirring round,

And hear instead the green fuse in the flower
Ignite, the breeze stretch out a shadow-hand

To ruffle blossom on its sticking points,
The blackbirds sing, and singing take their stand.

I took your news outdoors, and found the Spring
Had honoured all its promises to start
Disclosing how the principles of earth
Can make a common purpose with the heart.

The heart which slips and sidles like a stream
Weighed down by winter-wreckage near its source -
But given time, and come the clearing rain,
Breaks loose to revel in its proper course.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/4427239.stm

Published: 2005/04/09 08:22:54 GMT

PIETA

And so I see your feet again, Jesus,
which then were the feet of a young man
when shyly I undressed them and washed them;
how they were entangled in my hair,
like white deer in the thornbush.

And I see your never-loved limbs
for the first time, in this night of love.
We never lay down together
and now we have only adoring and watching over.

But look, your hands are torn--
beloved, not from me, not from any bites of mine.
Your heart is open and anyone can enter:
It should have been the way in for me alone.

Now you are tired and your tired mouth
has no desire for my aching mouth--
O Jesus, Jesus, when was our hour?
How we both wonderfully perish.

--Rilke

And again:

THE QUIETING OF MARY
WITH THE RESURRECTED ONE

What they felt then: is it not
above all other mysteries the sweetest
and yet still earthly:
when he, pale from the grave,
his burdens laid down, went to her:
arisen in all places.
Oh, first to her. How they
inexpressably began to heal.
Yes, to heal: that simple. They felt no need
to touch each other strongly.
He placed his hand, which next
would be eternal, for scarcely
a second on her womanly shoulder.
And they began
quietly as trees in spring
in infinite simultaneity
their season
of ultimate communing.

--also Rilke

Rilke has some wonderful lines: Who, if I screamed out, would hear me
among the hierarchies of angels? And if one should suddenly take me to his heart: I would perish... Every angel is terrifying....

Just a moment you stand in our unheated room
naked, skin perked, cigarette smoke
hatching from your mouth.
Perhaps most I'd like to die alone, not

together as we've said, noon after noon
in bed, sluiced with sleep and love.
I want the high grass of pain
and grazing through pain

[...]

from "Love Poem with Lies and Selfishness" by Dean Young, published in Design with X Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

This is the projectionist's nightmare:
A bird finds its way into the cinema,
finds the beam, flies down it,
smashes into a screen depicting a garden,
a sunset and two people being nice to each other.
Real blood, real intestines, slither down the likeness of a tree.
'This is no good,' screams the audience,
'This is not what we came to see.'

[...]

from "The Buried Life" by Matthew Arnold

"At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy
frozen rats
for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed
your pet boa constrictor"
back home in Grosse Pointe,
or in Grosse Point Park,

while the free nation of rats
in Detroit emerges
from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars
and junked cars, and gathers
to flow at twilight
like a river the color of pavement,

and crawls over bedrooms and groceries
and through broken
school windows to eat the crayon
from drawings of rats-
and no in Detroit understands
how rats are delicious in Dearborn.

If only we could communicate, if only
the boa constrictors of Southfield
would slither down I-94,
turn north on the Lodge Expressway,
and head for Eighth Street, to eat
out for a change. Instead, tomorrow,

a man from Birmingham enters
a pet shop in Detroit
to buy a frozen German shepherd
for six dollars and fifty cents
to feed his pet cheetah,
guarding the compound at home.

Oh, they arrive all day, in their
locked cars, buying
schoolyards, bridges, buses
churches, and Ethnic Festivals;
they buy a frozen Texaco station
for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents

to feed to an imported London taxi
in Huntington Woods;
they buy Tiger Stadium,
frozen, to feed to the Little League
in Grosse Ile. They bring everything
home, frozen solid

as pig iron, to the six-car garages
of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods,
Farmington, Grosse Pointe
Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor-
and they ingest
everything, and fall asleep, and lie

coiled in the sun, while the city
thaws in the stomach and slides
to the small intestine, where enzymes
break down molecules of protein
to amino acids, which enter
the cold bloodstream

--Donald Hall

And because I have such things on my mind somewhat lately:

Wedding

From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions....
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.

--Alice Oswald

:)

Of the hay in the barn
and the hound in the field

of the bay in the sound, of the
sound of the hound in the field

of the back of the field of the
bay and the front of the field

of the back of the hound and the
front of the hound and the sound
of the hound when he bays at
the sound in the field

with the baying of hounds at the
baying of arms in the field

of the hound on the page in the
sound of the hound in the field

of the hay that unrests near
the hound in the barn in the field

of the bend in the barn in the
sound of the hound in the bay
by the barn in the field.

[Lisa Jarnot]

Best of all is to be idle,
And especially on a Thursday,
And to sip wine while studying the light:
The way it ages, yellows, turns ashen
And then hesitates forever
On the threshold of the night
That could be bringing the first frost.
[...]

from 'Against Whatever It Is That's Encroaching' by Charles Simic

INAUGURATION DAY: JANUARY 1953

The snow had buried Stuyvesant.
The subways drummed the vaults. I heard
the El's green girders charge on Third,
Manhattan's truss of adamant,
that groaned in ermine, slummed on want. ...
Cyclonic zero of the word,
God of our armies, who interred
Cold Harbor's blue immortals, Grant!
Horseman, your sword is in the groove!

Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move.
Look, the fixed stars, all just alike
as lack-land atoms, split apart,
and the Republic summons Ike,
the mausoleum in her heart.

[Robert Lowell]

BTW - they are quite lovely

A Game of Chess
by Robert Porter St. John

We played at chess one wintry night
Beside the fire, that warm and bright
Was mirrored in her hazel eyes;
Methought a gleam from Paradise
Outshone the back-log's flickering light.

The hand that took my queen was white,
I trembled at its gentle might;
Nor sweeter game could Love devise --
We played at chess.

I scarce could see to play aright,
I took a pawn and lost a knight,
And then she gazed with mild surprise --
She said I was not shrewd nor wise;
And yet, to me, with strange delight
We played at chess.

She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt.
Someone she loved once passes by - too late

to feign indifference to that casual nod.
"How nice," et cetera. "Time holds great surprises."
From his neat head unquestionably rises
a small balloon ... "but for the grace of God ..."

They stand a while in flickering light, rehearsing
the children's names and birthdays. "It's so sweet
to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive,"
she says to his departing smile. Then, nursing
the youngest child, sits staring at her feet.
To the wind she says, "They have eaten me alive."

[I am led to believe this is by Paul Goodman.]

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin -

'Unknown seaman' - the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men's lips,

Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.

ON YOUR MARK
My hand was marked in October
on the last hot afternoon of the year.
My hands, they are full of them. Hot days
and marks alike. They tell much more
than my jittery tongue, my torrential pen.
When folks say ‘I’ve got more _____ in this little pinky…’
they’re right. Our lives accumulate their weight in extremities,
and our littlest appendages house what we value most – or what
we ought. Pinkies don’t talk much about their holdings. They’re
bullied day-in day-out by big, thick, dense pointers. The guys
that can say ‘There, look.’ and ‘Fuck you.’ easy as pie. But pinkies
are also the only part of us that remains childlike. We’d like to
pretend we are still awed, still broken, still bubbling, still selfless,
still so much to reach…but at this age it is all affectation.
When’s the last time you sat around seeing
how high you could throw a ball? You’d
probably love it, but only in remembering loving it.
Would you be able to catch it again without a pinky?
Maybe, but you’d look pretty stupid.

[poems a friend of mine sent the other day]

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

- Louis MacNeice -

There is one patch of ice, a northeast circle,
Sharply darker than the rest. I think
In spring this part'll liquefy first; the murk'll
Percolate its lively inner stink

Loaded with food. Ma llard, milady swim
Thereon.
           The rocks are all so quiet now.
No magpie. Light is neither bright nor dim.
Two cidgers circumnavigate, and how

To get from here to April's popping goodies?
Just walk and dream. Follow that script of Woody's.

[Jack Collom]

A splat of mud and stones electrolaced
Began to crawl.

Somersaulted out on a cord of blood
Hit a climax of discomfiture
And recompsed itself to rot.

Make me an animal better than that.

[Catherine Wagner]

Old men
move me.
The way courage is asked of them
to walk.
The way they still wear hats
and tip them for a lady.
How their collars stand out from their thin necks.
How they are careful to balance their heads.
How they do not complain
but, if you ask, might say,
"Most horrible!" and grin.
How they wear Hush Puppies, walk silently,
practicing to be ghosts.
How their hair grows so white and thin
it lies on their frail skulls like light.
How when they are alone, their spindle fingers
make gestures, speak in silence.
How their mouths work, remembering.
How their eyes, their eyes look far, far off,
seeing something I do not yet know what.

--Norah Pollard

- howard moss

Good luck!