“The Hobos” – Maurice Manning

07Dec09
One boy says he is going back home to sleep in a real bed.
The other boy sits down on the dirty ballast and strokes
a matchbox with one finger, flicking a stick of yellow flame
into the weeds. A red dog is crouched beside him with six feet
of knotted clothesline tied around its neck. The night-time smells
like creosote and shirtless boys, mixed with june bugs and grease.

Earlier, they had met a man who was building a fire in a tin can;
he was scratching himself all over and telling a joke about chickens.
The boys got afraid of the laughing man with the pin-head scabs;
they became scared of getting their legs cut off and lonliness.

But still the second boy says: I swear I’ll jump on the very next train and you
might never see me again! The first boy looks back: Yo pants
is on fire – and keeps on walking. The first boy is a baby-skinned black boy
with big arms. The other boy is skinny as a rail and sings like the rain.

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“Clearing” – Christian Wiman

09Oct09

It was when I walked lost
in the burn and rust
of late October that I turned
near dusk toward the leaf-screened
light of a green clearing in the trees.
In the untracked and roadless open
I saw an intact but wide open house,
half-standing and half-lost
to unsuffered seasons of wind
and frost: warped tin and broken stone,
old wood combed by the incurious sun.
The broad wall to the stark north,
each caulked chink and the solid hearth
dark with all the unremembered fires
that in the long nights quietly died,
implied a life of bare solitude
and hardship, little to hold
and less to keep, aching days
and welcome sleep in the mind-clearing cold.
And yet the wide sky, the wildflowered ground
and the sound of the wind
in the burn and rust of late October
as the days shortened and the leaves turned
must have been heartening, too,
to one who walked out of the trees
into a green clearing that he knew.
If you could find this place,
or even for one moment feel
in the world-riddled remnants
what I felt there
the mild but gathering air, see the leaves
that with one good blast would go,
you could believe
that standing in a late weave of light and shade
a man could suddenly want his life,
feel it blaze in him and mean,
as for a moment I believed,
before I walked on.


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From “What I Know” – Christian Wiman

09Oct09

“Don’t touch. Don’t cry. Think good things. Pray.

[...]

The things my father told me must be true:
There are some places where you cannot play.
These fields go farther than you think they do.“


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“Revenant” – Christian Wiman

09Oct09

She loved the fevered air, the green delirium
in the leaves as a late wind whipped and quickened -
a storm cloud glut with color like a plum.
Nothing could keep her from the fields then,
from waiting braced alone in the breaking heat
while lightening flared and disappeared around her,
thunder rattling the windows. I remember
the stories I heard my relatives repeat
of how spirits spoke through her clearest words,
her sudden eloquent confusion, trapped eyes,
the storms she loved because they were not hers:
her white face under the unburdening skies
upturned to feel the burn that never came:
that furious insight and the end of pain.


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From “DrugFace” – Erica Dawson

09Oct09

IV May cause drowsiness

And down comes baby, now,
Though the cow has yet to jump the moon
And I rock, fast, without the tune
Of “Rockabye.” Allow

Me this: no sleep, but a slump,
No haze but the blurry fix of my
Depression. Like a damselfly
At rest, I’ll fold as (thump

Thump thump) my heart retards.
My head goes numb until I think
Nothing (no food or ride, no drink)
But picture birthday cards –

Big clown, bright carousel -
Signed Mom, by Dad, when Mom was sick
As me. There’s Love and Rica-Tic.
I was born, Mom says, to tell

Tall tale, born storied song
And dance who fancies make-believe,
Scheherazade, recitative;
Says, You remember wrong;

Says, Fine. I say Daughter
Knows monkeyshine. The a.m. train
Accompanies my verse and rain
With a whistle in the water,

Far off and lonely, subdued
As a dampered note, and yet (Ta-dum!)
Like the evening’s perfect requiem.
Mom, hear my gratitude.

She tells me I exude
Great Soul, and I want no reprieve,
As Shakespeare warned us sleep would thieve
Us of the magnitude

Of our own company.
This company loves misery.
And that’s beatitude. That’s chi,
DrugFace synecdoche;

It’s equilibrium
And a little death, like apnea,
A breathless beat inside the joie
De vivre, or dreams in dumb

Slumber. I’ll doze drug free
So I can know it all: loose joints,
My sweat-wet thighs, stiff hair in points,
And Mom in mourning. I’ll be

Big-Eyed Afraid, then tasting
My throat and teeth as my throat expands
In a squeaky gulp that never lands.
Whose breath is it I’m wasting?

I pull the covers up,
Blink fast until the night-light dances
In afterglows and second chances
And reflects inside my cup

Of water still, untouched
And sweating in a single drop.
I pick it up like it’s a prop,
A moment’s weeping clutched

With a fingertip and placed
Against my eye. When the tear won’t fall,
I choke and cough and start to bawl.
And if a breath erased

It all, inhaled the tears
And pushed my concave belly out,
(Look Me!) I’d lose the will to shout
And hold it in. So here’s

DrugFace. My makeup smears
In two black streaks across my spit-
and salt-wet cheeks. And this is it.
I was born big-voiced, with ears

Made for my lonely din
Of Daughter’s Daughter, Flesh and Bone,
And the only name I’ve always known.
The world’s outside. I’m in.


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“Song” – Ernest Hilbert

09Oct09

A song for those who learn forgotten, slow
Skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce,
By hard, dark, oily machines, and the din
Of duplicates shipped by the millions, stowed
In cavernous depots to be dispersed
To each home, used once, and then binned.
This is for those who weave by hand, who brew
Their own suds, and roll their own smokes, hammer
Together shelves, print on presses, plant gardens
In vacant lots, raise beams, fire pots, the few
Who challenge the swift, transient tenor
Of the age, the lonely sincere wardens,
The last, noble pull of old ways restored,
Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.


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“A Sad Last Number for the Gentlemen at the Tavern” – Ernest Hilbert

09Oct09

This one is for all the aging fuck-ups,
The guys who can’t get their shit in one bag,
Can’t find a job much less get there on time.
They struggle to grind tires out of deep ruts,
But they slide back in. They will always lag
In the long race, skid down while others climb.
There are, as a rule, women, kids, and pets
Who learn not to depend on them so much,
Who go on with their lives, nurse their grudges.
What keeps these men from growing up? What gets
Dropped behind them? Something must make them flinch
From life’s harsh contours, its many judges:
As if they prefer to remain children,
More loved, and more easily forgiven.


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“A Letter” – Anthony Hecht

30May09
               I have been wondering
       What you are thinking about, and by now suppose
               It is certainly not me.
       But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering
               Blood knows what it knows.
It talks to itself all night, like a sliding moonlit sea.
 
               Of course, it is talking of you.
       At dawn, when the ocean has netted its catch of lights,
               The sun plants one lithe foot
       On that spill of mirrors, but the blood goes worming through
               Its warm Arabian nights
Naming your pounding name again in the dark heart-root.
 
               Who shall, of course, be nameless.
       Anyway, I should want you to know I have done my best,
               As I’m sure you have, too.
       Others are bound to us, the gentle and blameless
               Whose names are not confessed
In the ceaseless palaver. My dearest, the unquarried blue
 
               Of those depths is all but blinding.
       You may remember that once you brought my boys
               Two little woolly birds.
       Yesterday the older one asked for you upon finding
               Your thrush among his toys.
And the tides welled about me, and I could find no words.
 
               There is not much else to tell.
       One tries one’s best to continue as before,
               Doing some little good.
       But I would have you know that all is not well
               With a man dead set to ignore
The endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood.
(Collected Earlier Poems, 48) 

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“For My Husband” – Ellen Bryant Voigt

24Apr09

Is it a dream,
the way we huddle over the board,
our fingers touching on the slick button?
The Ouija stammers under so much doubt,
finally reaches L, then O,
pauses under its lettered heaven,
and as it veers toward loss and the long past
that lodges with us, you press toward love,
and the disk stalls
                                   outside
a cry is loosened from the bay,
but you are looking for two swans
on a glass lake, a decade of roses -
oh my lonely, my precious loaf,
can’t we say outloud the parent word,
longing,
                whose sad head
looms over any choice you make.


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“The Medium” – Ellen Bryant Voigt

24Apr09

[...]

 

“I was their tether,
the incompleted dead, the stubborn ones,
who will not forestall my own soul’s slow erasure.

After my bones are put on their shelf
there will come the usual solstice,
not pain but the absence of pain,
terrible, unwarranted.
And then the second death:

a stranger will sleep in this bed without dreams;
will wrap himself against the evening’s chill;
will credit the wind with my whispers;
will straighten the portrait again and again
without revelation;
hearing nothing, believing nothing.”


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