Tag Archives: contemporary poetry

Matins

books poetry lit September 22, 2014 Leave a comment

You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?

-Louise Gluck

Ekdekhesthai

books poetry lit September 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Mornings I wake to one place, and at dusk

another. There are many kinds
of sleep. As a child I believed

sleeping with one’s eyes
open was the world

according to John. I called

a ghost, who.
A scarecrow, that.

I wake standing at the window

telling you I don’t see
the fire in the street. I wake
standing in red light

as emergency workers carve a woman
out of steel
horseshoed around the sugar

maple. Sometimes I half
expect to peel a clementine

& find nothing inside.

My mother calls to say
my grandmother just walked down
the hall. My grandmother,
dead for years. I do not know

whether to trust my mother

or the ghost’s side of the story.
All prophets perform
the miracle

of context. As does light.
As do birds in the morning.

-Emilia Phillips, West Branch Wired

Jeez

books poetry lit September 5, 2014 Leave a comment

I’m starting to back away
from the world slowly,

in order to become pure ear.
Air. A mule deer.  Maybe

Karen O. We are who we’ve been
waiting for. What’s taking place

now is free of time—tents
quavering like moon jellies

in the L.A. sky.
Heart’s mind says to itself

I am free to move about.
And also, I am afraid.

We cannot have any unmixed
                                                            emotions, says Yeats.

-Diane Raptosh, White Whale Review

Apologia Litania

books poetry lit August 25, 2014 Leave a comment

Today in Pest’s open air markets there is a sale on holy
water and scapulars, hand-carved chess pieces, and Oriental
spoons whose sole task is to approximate the luxurious

sprawl of the Danube. There are swords upon which I’d throw
myself were it the time and place to throw myself
upon vanity, and fresh fruits. Think of a hitchhiker’s passport

to heaven. But there is a holier water distilled from the tap
and used to clear the ciborium of divinity that she poured
into the mulch insulating the dogwood. What is devotion

more than loyalty to that alternate power truly and ably
able to wound us; worship that it seeks to soak into the roots
of a precious tree. For all my talk of tied-down guns and dying

with my boots on, the way I play Augustus McCrae giving all
of himself to the gangrene to spite his rotting legs, the voices
in which I say A man isn’t a man if he doesn’t have the faculties

with which to kick a pig—for all of that, you have seen me absolutely
ugly as I listen to my father preempt his dying wish in which
he wishes I become a priest: baling bread, smearing ashes, falling

in love with a crisp cassock and phrases like Latens Deitas-–
and you have borne it. My Pillar of Autumn. My Tower
of the Off-Ivory. You said to me yesterday a second time

wounded lover, who else would love you? And no one would.
And I know I do not yet understand this morning’s market
where I’ll guess wrongly under which shell lies the pea.

-John Fenlon Hogan, Linebreak

Drench

books poetry lit July 24, 2014 Leave a comment

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,

wake to the thrum of rain – roped down by rain.

Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass

and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace

has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.

The mountains have had the sense to disappear.

It’s the Celtic temperament – wind, then torrents, then remorse.

Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.

Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,

docks in a pool of shadows all its own.

That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.

Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.

– Anne Stevenson

Break

books poetry lit June 22, 2014 Leave a comment

We put the puzzle together piece
by piece, loving how one curved
notch fits so sweetly with another.
A yellow smudge becomes
the brush of a broom, and two blue arms
fill in the last of the sky.
We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold
the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair
of brown shoes. We do this as the child
circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired
of the neat house, the made bed,
the good food. We let her brood
as we shuffle through the pieces,
setting each one into place with a satisfied
tap, our backs turned for a few hours
to a world that is crumbling, a sky
that is falling, the pieces
we are required to return to.

-Dorianne Laux, Poetry 180

He Lives in an Ark and Dreams

books poetry lit April 16, 2014 Leave a comment
My grandfather’s afraid of fortune and sails the world
In his handkerchief
He waves to the bottles in the sea
And reads their messages
The trenches are overflowing
It’s hard to stay positive
My grandfather’s afraid of the sky
His red kite rests on a cenotaph
My grandfather’s afraid of silence
He cradles the sound of crows
My grandfather’s afraid
Of saying goodbye
-Gabby Dodd-Terrell, age 12, Rattle

Reading of Ilya Kaminksy’s “Maestro”

books poetry lit April 3, 2014 Leave a comment

Have you followed me on Soundcloud? I’ve begun a process of reading favorite poems (mostly from contemporary poets) there. Recently I did a reading of Ilya Kaminsky, whom I had the great honor of seeing in person at a reading in LA.  Kaminsky is a Russian immigrant whose poems deal often with the traumas of his native land, and he’s attained success incredibly early in life because his work absolutely bleeds power and music. I read “Maestro”, the third poem in his Dancing in Odessa collection, which he signed for me.

Canticle of Waitresses, Waiting

books poetry lit March 23, 2014 Leave a comment

This is how we herded by the waitress station,

waiting, as the town, turned down to one by snow,

settled like a gown that smothered all that ailed us.

.

How we first heard about the hostages

on Facebook, and then the town knelt down to zero,

still as snow once it resolves itself to ground.

.

How the sidewalk still needed seeding with rock salt.

How even when a person stands still, they can slip.

.

How we counted the seeds of our blessings.

How our blessings rebounded off the booths like buckshot.

.

How we each sometimes rebound into being

a country of one self.

How we other times are one self of a city.

.

How only below zero can we remember

September as that country where we save daylight

like fat over our muscles.

.

How a woman ran at the chained gym doors

to save her daughter.

How she dropped on the unseeded walk.

How we’ll remember her legs as

a fleet of hummingbirds skidding through snow.

.

How sometimes, to give something a shot means kill it.

How other times it means just close your eyes.

–Saara Myrene Raappana, via Augury Books

Love Song

books poetry lit March 16, 2014 Leave a comment

Love, please don’t lift me up to any­where
Now that I think about it. I don’t lift
Up eas­ily. I’m not “han­dle with care.”
I like ground, grass and grav­ity, a gift

Hallmark should hus­tle. Who is it who’s fly­ing
Where the eagles cry (Do eagles cry?); and who
Wants Joe Cocker if they don’t plan on tying
One on, hot-boxed, until all birds look blue?

To be together is so over­rated—
That’s not my style. Fragile is fine enough
To frac­ture, like an old, disintegrated

Leaf pulled from a worn note­book, per­fo­rated
To sep­a­rate. The eagle’s wing is fluff.
The sky’s not high. Nothing’s exaggerated.

-Erica Dawson, Birmingham Poetry Review