Poetry Journal
"I have, not surprisingly, concluded that the closest thing in Western culture to the Middle Way of Buddhism is not any sort of theory or philosophy, but the practice of literature—
reading and writing."
—Jeff Humphries, Reading Emptiness
Entries from December 1, 2005 - January 1, 2006
The Cities Inside Us
The Cities Inside Us
—Alberto Ríos
We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.
We speak words between us that we recognize
But which cannot be looked up.
They are our words.
They come from very far inside our mouths.
You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us
There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people
We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are
But which used to be, as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.
We each take a piece
Through the eye and through the ear.
It's loud inside us, in here, and when we speak
To the outside world
We have to hope that some of that sound
Does not come out, that an arm
Does not reach out
In place of the tongue.
Mark Forrester
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Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry . . .
Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward
an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me
—James Wright
Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.
I climb a slight rise of grass.
I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Carrying small white petals,
Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them.
I close my eyes for a moment and listen.
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins
In the maple trees.
Our Reds
Our Reds
—Philip Levine
Let us bless the three wild Reds
of our school days. Bless how easily
gaunt Vallejo would lose control,
the blood rushing to his depleted face
while his mistress in a torn trench coat
stroked his padded shoulders to calm him.
We'll call him Vallejo after the poet
only because he vaulted into speech
in such a headlong rush. (In truth
his name was Slovakian.) We'll call
her Lupino after the film star
because she was more beautiful
in memory than in fact, her cheeks
drawn over fine bones, her hair
tumbling down from under the beret,
hair we loved and called "dirty blond."
Vallejo would rise in class, unasked,
to interrupt "the tired fascist swill"
the stunned professor was giving out:
"The proper function of a teacher
is to inform the unformed cadres
of the exploited classes regarding
the nature of their enslavement
to an estate sold to the masters
of the means of production." Lupino
would rise quietly beside him to show
solidarity and to begin
her therapy. Two-ton Cohen would
join in flashing his party cards
for all to see and invoking
the sacred triads of Hegel. And we,
the unformed and uninformed, dropped
our pencils and groaned with gladness
to be quit of Aristotle's Ethics,
or the monetary theories
of James K. Polk, and stared into
a future of rotund potential
fulfilled. They are gone now, the three
—Vallejo, Lupino, Cohen—
into an America no one wanted
or something even worse, so bless
their certainties, their fiery voices
we so easily resisted, their tired eyes,
their cheeks flushed with sudden blood,
bless their rhetoric, bless their zeal,
bless their costumes and their cards,
bless their faith in us, especially
that faith, that hideous innocence.
Surfacing
Surfacing
—Sam Taylor
Turning over in sleep, the wavering edges of a body,
delicate as filo dough, the folds
that endlessly encircle—
made of four story buildings;
the hills of San Francisco;
construction workers pacing with orange cones
outside Memphis, a wash of headlights, coffee steam rising
past suede faces;
also the pipes clanking in basements,
lattices of twigs in winter,
peppermint shrimp beneath Atlantic churn
morphing, mid-life, male to female;
and this awareness also, tossed about,
like something drowning, or almost born;
that all of it is one body,
my body. This web of ache that pulls
against the heart, is the heart, the skin,
the world. Also the man asleep
on a grate, Lycea and Grand,
where the merciful steam of hell escapes
to keep him alive, also the waning moon,
the paper napkin in the wind.
April
April
—Jacob Polley
Now there is only the sound of the rain
which is the shape of the streets and the ropes
of overflow knitting at the mouths of drains
and fraying from the gutters' lips as smoke.
Whatever the leaves were saying must wait:
rain has filled the trees with its own sweet word.
There's thunder in the darkened slates
and every pond's jealous eye rolls heavenwards.
You can't charge a page with the hiss, with this
cooling of the city like a new horseshoe.
Hawick, York and Ashley Streets—the dampened-biscuit
smell of a Tuesday afternoon soaked through . . .
The boil and spit of molten pavements. Mirrored brick.
Every patch and fierce strip of grass is lit.
Journey into the Interior
Journey into the Interior
—Theodore Roethke
In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes,
the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring
into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
—Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly.
The Museum of False Starts
The Museum of False Starts
—Kay Ryan
It is incredibly
beautiful but
unfinished—
actually hardly
more than imagined.
There are the beginnings
of a gallery of
ribbon-lovely thoughts
that vanish,
shadowy gardens
briefly visible
at shifting angles,
and, caught
in an ancient ash,
the single spiraling
horn of an otherwise
unfashioned animal.
How I Got Lost So Close to Home
How I Got Lost So Close to Home
—Amy Dryansky
Fear pushes me into the rowboat and tells me how to row.
The oars are worn, bruised by the locks, poor handling,
repetition, salt.
Meanwhile, my mother rolls out the crust for another
apple pie,
pushing down on the widening circle. She's figured out
how to keep the dough from tearing, and I will learn this
from her, as with everything else, through observation.
She's too busy for lessons. And I lose something
in translation,
or distance. Is fear rolling pin or dough? Force or substance?
What transforms the room at night? What snuffs the lamps?
Fear says I do. We argue, but I keep rowing. I am in love
with fear
and fear knows it. I want to climb into fear's lap, unbutton
his shirt,
put my face against his chest. I know it's warm there.
Fear knows
I don't mean this, brays, shows yellow teeth to remind me
he's an ass. You expected Cary Grant, maybe? my
mother asks,
shakes her head, wipes her hands on a dish towel.
I open the door and check the pie so she can't see
how the light has gone out of my face. Wasn't it she
who introduced us? How could I imagine she'd want
anything less
for me, anything other than the best? Fear smiles,
Now you're talking, he says, now we're cooking with gas.
Ellery Street
Ellery Street
—David Ferry
How much too eloquent are the songs we sing: It does not belong Beautiful the snail's body which it bears The old lady who lives next door has terribly scarred legs. There's a fat girl in the apartment across the street. in her hair; it blooms in her hair like a flower dreamed all night, a night- chest flashing like a shield in the summer air; the king going to the drug store.
nothing we tell will tell how beautiful is the body.
even to him or her who lives in it.
laboriously in its way through the long garden.
she bears her body laboriously to the Laundromat.
I can see her unhappiness in the flower she wears
in a garden, like a flower flowering in a dream
blooming cereus. A boy passes by, his bare
all-conquering,
The snail crosses the garden in its dignified silence.
In the House of Fallen Pears
In the House of Fallen Pears
—Miriam Sagan
In the house of fallen pears
No one kissed me
In the house of windfall apples
I received not even a glance
In the house of cosmos and sunflowers
The husband wrote over the wife's words
In the house of the sad poet
A child drowned in the acequia
In the house of stolen peaches
I took one for myself
I did not bring it home to you
I ate it alone, and spit the stone
On to the palm of my hand
Where the lines converge, of life and love
In the house of fallen pears
In the house of the ripe green pears