Tag Archives: Poem of the Week

December 12, 2012 · 4:52 pm

Poem of the Week: The Palace of Contemplating Departure by Brynn Saito via Alison Mcghee

 

You wandered through my life like a backwards wish
when I was ready for deliverance.

I was ready for release
like a pinball in God’s mouth
like charanga on Tuesdays
like the summer in Shanghai

when we prayed for a rainstorm
and bartered our shame, then we tore open oranges
with four dirty thumbs.

And the forecast said Super
so we chartered a yacht
and we planted a garden on the unbending prow

but the sea said Surrender
with its arms full of salt, and wind shook the seeds
from our shirt coat pockets

so when we washed up on the shoreline of sunlight
near the city of wind
we were broken and thin, like wraiths at a wake.

But you tilted your head up and told me I was wild
so I lifted my life
and I lifted your life

and we wandered through the gate of radiant days
then we married our splendor
in the hall of bright rule.

And I thank you again: you gave madness a chance
and you lassoed the morning
and we met on a Tuesday
in a dance hall in Shanghai
and I left you in a leap year for the coveted shoreline

and you wept like a book when it’s pulled from a well.

But you were the one who told me I was wild
and you were the one who wrestled the angel

and I knew when I left you
that courage was a choice
and memory, a spear,
and the X of destination is etched on my iris
and shifts with the seasons—

don’t think of the phoenix, think of the mountain.

But where will I go now with my tireless wonder?
And when will I again be brave like that?
–
For more information on Brynn Saito, please click here: http://brynnsaito.com/
–
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A big thanks to Alison McGhee for her tireless pursuit of beautiful word castles.

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Aside

Riding Out at Evening – by Linda McCarriston – Poem of the Week via the lovely Alison McGhee

 

At dusk, everything blurs and softens.
From here out over the long valley,
the fields and hills pull up
the first slight sheets of evening,
as, over the next hour,
heavier, darker ones will follow.

Quieted roads predictable deer
browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s
herd of heifers, the kitchen lights
starting in many windows. On horseback
I take it in, neither visitor
nor intruder, but kin passing, closer
and closer to night, its cold streams
rising in the sugarbush and hollow.

Half-aloud, I say to the horse,
or myself, or whoever: let fire not come
to this house, nor that barn,
nor lightning strike the cattle.
Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights
of the rooms convey what they seem to.

And who is to say it is useless
or foolish to ride out in the falling light
alone, wishing, or praying,
for particular good to particular beings,
on one small road in a huge world?
The horse bears along, like grace,

making me better than what I am,
and what I think or say or see
is whole in these moments, is neither
small nor broken. For up, out of
the inscrutable earth, have come my body
and the separate body of the mare:
flawed and aching and wronged. Who then
is better made to say be well, be glad,

or who to long that we, as one,
might course over the entire valley,
over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace
of flight, who presses against her breast,
in grief and tenderness,
the whole weeping body of the world?

–
For more information on Linda McCarriston, please click here:http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/cwla/faculty/corefaculty/lindamccarriston.cfm
–
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October 23, 2012 · 12:53 am
October 12, 2012 · 1:31 pm

Poem of the Week – Match (excerpt) by Brynn Saito via Alison McGhee

You live in a house of sound and you live
with a ghost. The one who stole your heart
also lives in your heart so you cut it out
with a carving knife and send it flying.
You say sometimes you wake and wait
for the god of loneliness to leave you alone.
I say our city is small and teeming
with ghosts and there are no seasons
for hiding. So we let go of the ones
who called us by our names. We make
ourselves new names by tracing letters
in a sand tray with sharp stones.
This is called Patience or Practicing
Solitude or The Wind Will Ruin Everything
but what does it matter let’s go for beauty
every time. You say the price we pay for love
is loss. I say the price we pay for love
is love.

–

Many thanks to Alison McGhee for curating these beautiful poems.
For more information on Brynn Saito, please click here: http://brynnsaito.com/bio/
–
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September 9, 2012 · 4:11 pm

Poem of the Week: First Winter in America by Gregory Djanikian (via Alison McGhee)

I walked out into the January blizzard,
my breath froze into small clouds,
and ice was hanging from the trees.

The dunes were dreamy animals;
I heard shovels striking music.

White eyelashes, white mittens,
I thought I could become
whatever I touched.

A year before, in another language,
I held the desert in my hand,
I tasted the iridescent sea.

Now I stayed quiet, afraid
I would never see it again, the sky
shattered into a million pieces
and falling around me.

I watched my mother inside
walking back and forth in her heavy coat,
and my sister rubbing her hands
to make some kind of spark.

I could imagine furnaces rumbling
all over America, heat rising
through the vents, parching the air.

And I stayed where I was,
someplace I had no name for,
not for the snow or my standing still
and watching it fall

beautiful wreckage
deepening
with hardly a sound.

–
A big thank you to Alison McGhee for artful curation of these beautiful poems.
For more information about Gregory Djanikian, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gregory-djanikian
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August 29, 2012 · 4:50 am

Poem of the Week: Wedding by Emily Rechnitz via the poem gatherer (Alison McGhee)

I stumbled in high heels
across the wood chips
of the Christmas-tree farm
to take my place with the other guests
under coarse pine boughs.

In a coned damsel cap
the bride glimmered
through the woods, materialized
at the altar microphone.

In the barbecue line
his mother whispered on my neck,
“I thought you would be the one!”

I watched the bride and groom
shake hands, stared at his profile
til it buzzed, remembering
2 a.m. behind the high school
when we rocked on a blanket
rubbing jeans into jeans
until the moon jumped and I fell
off the hill slowly, a diamond in glycerine.

I remember walking down a road to meet him,
how the air tingled, in love
with how I looked in my underwear,
dancing in front of his mirror.

–

Thanks to Alison McGhee for her curation of these beautiful poems.

I could not find any recent information on Emily Rechnitz and her poetry – anyone out there in the know, please update me.
–
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July 29, 2012 · 5:32 pm

Poem of the Week: The Dubliners by Patrick Cavanaugh (via Alison McGhee)

(love love this one)

On Raglan Road of an autumn day
I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare
That I might one day rue
I saw the danger and I passed
Along the enchanted way
And said let grief be a fallen leaf
At the dawning of the day

On Grafton Street in November
We tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen
The worth of passion’s pledge
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts
And I not making hay
Oh I loved too much and by such by such
Is happiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind
I gave her the secret signs
Known to the artists who have known
The true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint I did not stint
I gave her poems to say
With her own name there
And her own dark hair
Like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet
I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should
A creature made of clay
When the angel woos the clay
He’ll lose his wings at the dawn of day

–

A big thank you to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these poems.
For more information on Patrick Kavanagh, please click here:http://www.tcd.ie/English/patrickkavanagh/life.html
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July 20, 2012 · 7:24 pm

Poem of the Week – The Mystical Rose by Adélia Prado (translated from the Brazilian Portuguese by Ellen Doré Watson) via Alison McGhee

The first time
I became conscious of form,
I said to my mother:
“Dona Armanda has a basket in her kitchen
where she keeps tomatoes and onions”
and began fretting that even lovely things
eventually spoil,
until one day I wrote:
“It was here in this room that my father died,
here that he wound the clock
and rested his elbows
on what he thought was the windowsill
but was the threshold of death.”
I understood that words grouped like that
made it possible to live without
the things they describe,
that my father was returning, indestructible.
It was as if someone had painted a picture
of Dona Armanda’s basket and said:
“Now you can eat the fruit.”
So, there is order in the world!
—where does it come from?
And why does order, which is joy itself,
and bathes in a different light
than the light of day,
make the soul sad?
We must protect the world from time’s corrosion,
cheat time itself.
And so I kept writing: “My father died in this room …
Night, you can come on down,
your blackness can’t erase this memory.”
That was my first poem.

–

A big thanks to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these poems.
For more information on Adelia Prado, please click here: http://bombsite.com/articles/2289
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June 14, 2012 · 4:56 am

Poem of the Week: A Blessing from My Sixteen Years’ Son by Mary Karr

They’re all gorgeous but this one especially so.

 

I have this son who assembled inside me
during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,
in a heartbeat. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.
Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.
Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.
Sixteen years and not a bone broken,
not a single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small.
He’s a slouching six foot three,
with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson’s “Self Reliance”
with profound belligerence.
A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go brr,
or an Afro’d boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell –
creatures strange as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel
arcane as any oracle’s. Bruce claims school
is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman
willing to do stuff she’ll regret.
They’ve come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral.
Someday soon, the tether
will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed
the car fender, then rode home
in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

and Dad screw up so much?
He’d let me tuck him in,
my grandmother’s wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t
blame us, I said. You’re your own
idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy
took it hard. He’d found my son
awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he’d draped his own coat
over her shaking shoulders. My fault,
he’d confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.

–

A big thank you to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these fantastically beautiful poems.
For more information on Mary Karr, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-karr
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May 3, 2012 · 7:26 pm

Poem of the Week – What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably
fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes
have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we
spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight
pours through.

The open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and
I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street,
the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying
along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my
wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called
that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to
pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss – we want more and more and
then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the
window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing
so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m
speechless:
I am living, I remember you.

–
A big warm thank you to Alison McGhee for lovingly curating and sharing these beautiful poems.
For more information on Marie Howe, please click here: http://www.mariehowe.com/
–
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April 19, 2012 · 5:25 am

Poem of the Week: The Best Moment of the Night by Tony Hoagland

(I love this poem in particular – thx for sharing Alison McGhee:)

You had a moment with the dog,
down near the base of the butcher-block table
just as the party was getting started.

Just as the guests were bringing in
their potluck salads and vegetarian lasagna,
setting them down on the buffet,

you had an unforeseeable exchange of warmth
with this scruffy, bug-eyed creature
who let you scratch his ears.

He lives down there, among the high heels
and the cowboy boots, below the human roar
rising to its boil up above. Like his, your evening

is just beginning –but you
are lonelier than him. You think
that if you disappeared tonight,

you would not be missed for years;
yet here, the licking of the hands and face;
and here, the baring of the vulnerable belly.

You are still panting, and alive, and seeking love;
yet no one who knows you
knows, somehow,

about your wet, black nose,
or that you can wag your tail.

–
For more information on Tony Hoagland, please click here:http://www.tonyhoagland.com/
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