Tag Archives: contemporary poet

Poetry: ‘All the Right Tools’ and ‘Late Aubade’ by James Richardson

books poetry lit January 31, 2015 Leave a comment

These poems by James Richardson left me weak with wonder and the intense love that only words weaved in the way that perfectly resonates with my particular soul can cause. LOVE.

All the Right Tools

It is aggravating to have to stop writing to fix things. We hope these tools
will get you back to the important work faster.
—Inscription in a toolbox, a gift from my parents, 1973

That good slow tool the sun,
with a trumpeter’s strict breath,
swells hemispheres of fruits
to scarlet or dusk or amber
imperceptibly,
not breaking one.

That good slow tool the moon
pulls the quiet
wide-eyed face of the ocean
to its face,
not a drop through its long fingers
slipping down.

That good slow tool that turns
trees and lives to wreckage
brilliant and strange,
that train so smooth and slow
we hardly know we’re on
is Time, but is there one

slower still
that would reverse
these words and call
your breaths and all
your strayed thoughts home
to be you, standing again?
Late Aubade

after Hardy

So what do you think, Life, it seemed pretty good to me,
though quiet, I guess, and unspectacular.
It’s been so long, I don’t know any more how these things go.
I don’t know what it means that we’ve had this time together.

I get that the coffee, the sunlight on glassware, the Sunday paper
and our studious lightness, not hearing the phone, are iconic
of living regretless in the Now. A Cool that’s beyond me:
I’m having some trouble acting suitably poised and ironic.

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Poetry: No One Goes to Paris in August

books poetry lit January 20, 2015 Leave a comment

A Montparnasse August
with view of the Cimetière. A yard of bones.

We wake to it. Close curtains to it.
Wake to its lanes. Rows of coffin-stones in varying light.

Walking here. Late with shade low, low, long.
We’re passing through, just passing through
neat aisles of gray mausoleums.

(From Paris. Send this postcard. This one.
Calm water lilies. Water lilies.
Nothing colorless.)

It’s morning. Baudelaire’s tomb.
Tree limbs casting shadow west.

This, a lot of time under a looming sky.
Nobody has time like this.
(Time to go to Le Mandarin for coffee
every day. We’re not complaining.
They bring the milk separate.
Watch the passersby on Saint-Germain.)

Nothing to ponder. This is the plight.
Pause by Pigeon in bed with his wife —
both fully dressed.

Pink flowers, pink flowers,
just beneath de Beauvoir’s name.
When she lived she lived two doors down.
Went south in August.

All of us smell of heat all the time.
We are the living. Oh dear!
There are the dead ones there.
Their thoughts more familiar, though.
Lives finished, nearly clear.
And they make it possible for us to go on living
as we do in their blue shade.

-Clarence Major’s forthcoming Selected Poems

Cascade the Generations

books poetry lit February 15, 2014 1 Comment

Water is always with you. You undulate upon its lap until it breaks and you drop into waiting arms and hands. From baths to strides you swim, nourished by the sustenance water gives, just as one day

you may be drawn to its rhythmic code:

despite gravity, water ascends like faith, on bridges of fog and mist, bringing full ladles to rumbling skies that cascade in torrents down mountains and hills, filling the reservoirs of roots in fields and forests and streams, restoring over and over the oceans and seas.

Every moment, water moves forward even as it wills itself back to the clouds— much as one growing progeny within may absorb the ways of water and innately sense that she owns not the child, but rather the charge passing through her,

and the lives to whom this charge is given are renewed once again when this child reaches back and up to the parents of the parents

whose currents brought them here.

-John Middlebrook, Wilderness House Literary Review