Mist Valley
At the end of August, when all The letters of the alphabet are waiting, You drop a teabag in a cup. The same few letters making many different words, The same words meaning different things. Often you've rearranged them on the surface of the fridge. Without the surface They're repulsed by one another. Here are the letters. The tea is in your cup. At the end of August, the mind Is neither the pokeweed piercing the grass Nor the grass itself. As Tony Cook says in The Biology of Terrestrial Mollusks The right thing to do is nothing, the place A place of concealment, And the time as often as possible.
James Longenbach
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
Self-Portrait as Letter Addressed to Self
X.X.,
Someday, across glacier, a green horse will ride toward you; despite steam rising from heavy breath, you’ll touch its snout.
When you paired a person’s gait to signature, what lilt signed your step? What tautology, what tense was this body’s hypothesis?
Do you remember your mother’s Strawberry Fruit-Salad Recipe? 2 round Angel Cakes (2 pounds or 4 halves), 16 oz of vanilla pudding, 4 bananas, 2 containers of 8 oz strawberries, 1 big container of whipped cream. Layer and eat.
Your hands shaking, you wrote, “Christ is sentiment.”
A cup cracked through with sky. A saucer planed into the shapes of numbers. Every written thing stripped bare, the more supple formulation of given law.
I told you distance to a thing is the purchase of its reality. Why are people like that for us? The more we love the more physical space our love inhabits & the world’s lightness’ & darkness’ assume the order of human tongue.
Last night we tore & tossed memories into ponds. Geese swam across, pecked the waters. I splashed at them &, after, my hands shook. You stood beside me in a red dress. I wanted to drown you this pretty.
xoxo,
X.X.
J. Michael Martinez
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
RAG SMELL. FIRE
RAG SMELL. FIRE smell. Bed blacked. Bowl. The quiet come from living done. Shadow built the walls, holed and cribbed with light. Vine felt cracks and fingered in. Were sky inside and what the wind-holes left, a wind. Ay walk the last. What were floor heaves rock and root. Flame-eaten walls, rubs of wood, scraps the burn left lickednow licked with dirt.
Joan Houlihan
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
Division Street
". . . Prayer book and Mother, shot themselves
last Sunday."
Gwendolyn Brooks
The spire of Holy Name Cathedral rose like a prayer
above Chicago Avenue. I thumbed a leather-bound book
in catechism class, recited the Hail Mary. Fire and
devils blazed at night. The nuns told my mother
I had a calling. On Scott Street a man lay shot
dead in our alley. It was the Gold Coast. They
prided themselves
on sidewalks safe as shrines. I questioned God,
the last
to leave the room. Riots flared in Cabrini-Green
that Sunday.
Elise Paschen
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
Morning Antlers
Redwinged blackbirds in the cattail pond— today I kicked and flipped a wing in the sand and saw it was a sheared off flicker's. Yesterday's rain has left snow on Tesuque Peak, and the river will widen then dwindle. We step into a house and notice antlers mounted on the wall behind us; a ten-day-old child looks, nurses, and sleeps; his mother smiles but says she cries then cries as emptiness brims up and over. And as actions are rooted in feelings, I see how picking spinach in a field blossoms the picker, how a thoughtless act shears a wing. As we walk out to the car, the daylight is brighter than we knew. We do not believe flames shoot out of a cauldron of days but, looking at the horizon, see flames leap and crown from tree to tree.
Arthur Sze
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
Chirality
If I didn't need to do anything, would I? Would I oscillate in two or three dimensions? Would I summon a beholder and change chirality for "him?" A massless particle passes through the void with no resistance. Ask what it means to pass through the void. Ask how it differs from not passing.
Rae Armantrout
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
Offerings
To the night I offered a flower and the dark sky accepted it like earth, bedding for light. To the desert I offered an apple and the dunes received it like a mouth, speaking for wind. To the installation I offered a tree and the museum planted it like a man, viewing his place. To the ocean I offered a seed and its body dissolved it like time, composing a life.
Howard Altmann
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
The Bean House
. . . humming in the summer haze. Diane christened it the Bean House, Since everything in it came straight from an L.L. Bean Home catalog. It looks out upon two Meadows separated by a stand of trees, and at night, When the heat begins to dissipate and the stars Become visible in the uncontaminated sky, I like to sit here on the deck, listening to the music Wafting from the inside through the sliding patio doors, Listening to the music in my head. It's what I do: The days go by, the days remain the same, dwindling Down to a precious few as I try to write my name In the book of passing days, the book of water. Some Days I go fishing, usually unsuccessfully, casting Gently across a small stream that flows along beneath Some overhanging trees or through a field of cows. Call it late bucolic: this morning I awoke to rain And a late spring chill, with water dripping from the Eaves, the apple trees, the pergola down the hill. No fishing today, as I await the summation Of my interrupted eclogue, waiting on the rain And rhythms of the world for the music to resume, As indeed it does: all things end eventually, No matter how permanent they seem, no matter how Desperately you want them to remain. And now the sun Comes out once more, and life becomes sweet again, Sweet and familiar, on the verge of summer.
John Koethe
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
Tanka Diary [Awakened too early on Saturday morning]
Awakened too early on Saturday morning
by the song of a mockingbird
imitating my clock radio alarm.
*
Walking along the green path with buds
in my ears, too engrossed in the morning news
to listen to the stillness of the garden.
Harryette Mullen
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
Tanka (短歌 “short poem”) is a genre of classical Japanese poetry and one of the major genres of Japanese literature. Earlier known as waka (和歌 “Japanese poem”), Japanese poet and critic Masaoka Shiki created the term tanka in the early twentieth century for his statement that waka should be renewed and modernized.
Mars Poetica
Imagine you're on Mars, looking at earth, a swirl of colors in the distance. Tell us what you miss most, or least. Let your feelings rise to the surface. Skim that surface with a tiny net. Now you're getting the hang of it. Tell us your story slantwise, streetwise, in the disguise of an astronaut in his suit. Tell us something we didn't know before: how words mean things we didn't know we knew.
[also, come to think of it, a cool little meditation]
Wyn Cooper
via Poem-A-Day by Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/345
