Baby-Tick, Baby-Tock

Man, I must be getting old. I keep finding all these poems about having children and I don't reject them out of hand as "mommy poems." My biological clock is out to get me.

The History of Mothers of Sons

Lisa Furmanski

All sons sleep next to mothers, then alone, then with others
Eventually, all our sons bare molars, incisors
Meanwhile, mothers are wingless things in a room of stairs
A gymnasium of bars and ropes, small arms hauling self over self


Mothers hum nonsense, driving here
and there (Here! There!) in hollow steeds, mothers reflecting
how faint reflections shiver over the road
All the deafening musts along the way


Mothers favor the moon—hook-hung and mirroring the sun—
there, in a berry bramble, calm as a stone


This is enough to wrench our hand out of his
and simply devour him, though he exceeds even the tallest grass


Every mother recalls a lullaby, and the elegy blowing through it

PoemBowl 12

Here's the last match-up of the second round! Soon, my pretties, it will all be over...

Notes on the Act of Love

Matt Quarterman

Sadness sings, melancholy mumbles.
Hold hands, but don’t touch faces.
Your embraces should look warm, but never be tight,
lest buttons and pins stretch too far.
Careful choreography helps.
Hold the false ring carefully, or carry another to spare –
lovers should never stoop.
Your gestures should be broad but calculated,
and in your rage don’t pound
too forcefully on the stairs – plywood gives quite easily.


Worry about any lack of nervousness or concern,
and then make use of the downstairs lavatory.
Respond to all the tired, half-remembered lines
and standard jokes with an air of wryness.
Never let on how seriously you take yourself.
When laughter breaks loose in the midst of
all your angst, treat it as you would an amusing line:
pause for a moment to give the jokers peace.
Think very hard at all times, but concentrate
where they do.
Kiss lightly – the makeup smears.
Always carry a reminder of your own mortality:
it will be thought or prophecy.
There is a final gasp before dying.
Let there always be a last breath – 
poetry demands it.
And after the short bow, and the doublet hangs prettily,
and the poison and dagger lie closed in their boxes,
and the morning opens,
never ever look your former paramour
in the eye.


And if you manage to learn something
of love in the process –
tell no-one. And try to forget.

"This delicate dance we do"

Matt Quarterman

This delicate dance we do –
contrived, surely, the steps long set
(a pavanne perhaps, or a courtly step)
but the emotion shines through
in unexpected moments.
And there is still, as always,
some limited freedom in the moves.
The reverential hush dancers 
hold their bodies in
is fitting for even such a 
commonplace routine.
At its best, these exchanges 
are proof enough of grace,
artificial courtesy keeps
violent transactions in their place.
As we brush past each other
with a nod and a bow,
these social graces may be
more than elegance
and give even these mundane exchanges
some hint, however removed,
of the holy.

Click here to choose a winner!

It's just the wasted years so close behind

No lecture on these, just an intriguing juxtaposition. The first one is short and newer, the second is a much-anthologized classic and pretty long. And yes, I know I already posted it, but you didn't read it very well the first time.

A Non-Christian on Sunday

Amy Gerstler

Now we heathens have the town to ourselves.
We lie around, munching award-winning pickles
and hunks of coarse, seeded bread smeared
with soft, sweet cheese. The streets seem
deserted, as if Godzilla had been sighted
on the horizon, kicking down skyscrapers
and flattening cabs. Only two people
are lined up to see a popular movie
in which the good guy and the bad guy trade
faces. Churches burst into song. Trees wish
for a big wind. Burnt bacon and domestic tension
scent the air. So do whiffs of lawn mower exhaust
mixed with the colorless blood of clipped hedges.
For whatever's about to come crashing down
on our heads, be it bliss-filled or heinous,
make us grateful, OK? Hints of the savior's
flavor buzz on our tongues, like crumbs
of a sleeping pill shaped like a snowflake.

Sunday Morning

Wallace Stevens

1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.


2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.


3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.


4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.


5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.


6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.


7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feel shall manifest.


8
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.




And a bonus for you if you made it this far!

Saturday Spooky: Two Daniels

There's a long history of poetry about, for and to the dead. One might conceivably argue that all poetry is, considering the audience we write for today won't be alive in a century. Unless cryogenics isn't just a crazy fool's errand and Walt Disney is the wisest among us.


But here's something pretty explicitly supernatural, though in this poem it's not the dead but the living that creep me out.

Daniel

David Orr

On the day we moved in, the pings, bumps, and snaps
Were scary, it's true, but probably normal;
A house accepting new patterns of weight
With protest, the way no conviction goes gently.
We laughed a little, and called it "our spirit."


Later that night, when the power conked out
And the kids were crying, the ghost got a name,
"Daniel," and a history of whispered exploits,
All of them harmless, like nursery rhymes,
Or like the little fibs we tell ourselves
To explain why this or that has led to suffering.


Pretty soon, we were using him for everything.
When the Christmas tree fell, it was "Daniel";
When my wife lost her ring, it was "Daniel";
When the kids forgot to feed the goldfish
And it turned up dead, its eyes silvered over
Like water shadowed under sheets of ice,


Well, that became Daniel too, which was curious;
And pauses me now as I make the long walk
Down the hall to the bathroom in darkness,
And hear, in soft concert, the sound of my footfalls
Answered at once by my children's voices


Still calling to Daniel behind their door.










This has nothing in common with the poem but a title. But it's so awesome.

Saturday Silly: A Whangdang Howdy-Do!

If you think of Agamemnon, hero and leader of the Greek forces at Troy, you probably think of this.

Or maybe this:

Or for the great unwashed:

But I think this Shakespearean sonnet gets it just about right.

Agamemnon Before Troy

John Frederick Nims

Er will bloss zeigen, wie es

eigentlich gewesen ist—Ranke

(He merely wants to point out 

how it actually happened.)

A-traipsin’ from a shindig, I unsaddles—
Three floozies an’ a blatherin’ buckaroo
Wangled the whole caboodle, and skedaddles.
You in cahoots with thet shebang, skidoo!—
Seein’ if yer the critters I suspecion,
You varmints ain’t a-goin’ to hotfoot far.
Sartin galoots is sp’ilin’ for conniptions—
Wal, they’s a posse hustlin’ here an’ thar


Fixin’ to put to the kibosh on the shenanigans
By landin’ scalawags in the calaboose.
Hornswoggled! sich palaver with bamboozlin’
Coyotes gits my dander up! Vamoose
Totin’ spondulicks an’ the cutie too!
They’re itchin’ fer a whangdang howdy-do!

Saturday Suck: More Than a Stammer

Jimmy Stewart is one of my favorite actors. I'm not talking "favorite classic movie actor" or "probably should be on the list because he's such a well-known actor." I mean watching a Jimmy Stewart movie will rivet me to my seat. Sure, the Frank Capra films are the most famous, and they're great. I've declared that I can only watch "It's a Wonderful Life" every other year because it so thoroughly breaks me. My system can't take it more often than that.


But "Vertigo" and "Rope" and "The Philadelphia Story" and "Rear Window" and the classic Westerns still blow me away. He's seen as an Everyman, but he had a real dark side that was all the more effective BECAUSE he was such a stand-in for the audience. You identify so closely with him that when he takes these dark turns you don't have any choice but - sick at heart - to follow him down the long hallway to hell.


So could somebody please explain this?

Jimmy Stewart

The Aberdares!

The North Pole's rather chilly,
Those who've been there all will tell.
There's lots of snow and lots of ice
And lots of wind as well.


An iceberg's really never warm
And takes a while to melt.
A snowball's not the hottest thing
That I have ever felt.


Siberia is never mild,
And never very nice.
They send a lot of people there,
And put them all on ice.


But then there's a place in Africa
That puts them all to shame.
They say Jack Frost was born here,
The Aberdare's its name.


They've never known the temperature,
Thermometers just fail,
For when exposed, the mercury
Just sinks below the scale.


It never ever snows here,
The snow it wouldn't dare,
Snow and ice aren't dummies,
It's cold in Aberdare!


As I lie here gasping in my tent,
The chill just numbs my spine.
Then suddenly a vision comes
That takes me back in time.


There's California sunshine,
And I can breathe again,
A putting green - a fairway -
Relaxing in my den.


Then just as fast the vision leaves
No more sunshine, no more golf.
No need to wipe my tears away,
I simply break them off.


A frigid mist is moving in,
I've put on all my clothes.
There's not enough - the chill seeps in -
Is this the end? Who knows?


So gather your statistics,
Let all the facts be told.
Oh! Aberdare, you're beautiful,
Bu, Aberdare, you're cold.




It's not the worst poem ever written - there are some funny lines like breaking the tears off and snow being too smart to fall. But still, doing Robert Service knockoffs? I sort of wish he'd tried to write more during his heyday. The verse stylings would probably be just as mediocre but the subject matter would have been way more interesting. As an interesting side note, he won a Grammy for the audio version of the book this poem comes from, "Jimmy Stewart and His Poems."


So I've got to say, Reagan-era Stewart (or should that be Carson-era?) is kinda disappointing. Maybe that's just too much darkness for one person to shoulder. Relax, write poems about your pets and your kids and trips you've taken, be a kind, grandfatherly presence. Not a bad way to ride out your sunset years.


I just can't help wishing more of these luminaries went down swinging instead of in rocking chairs.

From This Side

I'll be in my twenties for another three weeks or so and from this side of things I can't wait to be rid of the burden of youth. Sure, middle-aged people laugh and say, "Oh, you young people always think you're so old." But thirty is pretty much the cut off point: any illusions you might have about being just a kid get increasingly hard to justify. And kids, well - they know you stop being a kid when you have to insist you still are one.

I know little about this poet, and for the moment I like it that way. I tend to get turned off by orthographic sleight-of-hand: unusual punctuation or capitalization. I figure the magician who can do his confident act without top hat or beautiful assistant is the real performer. But I like the cut of this guy's jib, and an interesting jib it is.

Happy Birthday

Frank Bidart

Thirty-three, goodbye -
the awe I feel


is not that you won't come again, or why -


or even that after
a time, we think of those who are dead


with a sweetness that cannot be explained -


but that I've read the trading-cards:
RALPH TEMPLE CYCLIST CHAMPION TRICK RIDER


WILLIE HARRADON CYCLIST
THE YOUTHFUL PHENOMENON


F.F. IVES CYCLIST
100 MILES 6 H. 25 MIN. 30 SEC.


- as the fragile metal of their
wheels stopped turning, as they


took on wives, children, accomplishments, all those
predilections which also insisted on ending,


they could not tell themselves from what they had done.


Terrible to dress in the clothes
of a period that must end.


They didn't plan it that way -
they didn't plan it that way.

Its Tear Is Steam

Another area in which my poetry knowledge is pretty limited is non-English/non-Russian poetry. I'm starting to rectify that - here's something I'd never read before today.

Eye of Time

Paul Celan, trans. Herman Salinger

This is the eye of time:
it squints cross-eyed
under a seven-colored brow.
Its lid is fire-washed,
its tear is steam.


The blind star flies at it
and melts away against the hotter lashes:
world waxes warm 
and the dead
bud out and blossom




The imagery is allegorical with almost an undercurrent of science fiction. There's myth and physics jumbled up and I don't quite know what to make of it. I think this is one of those poems where, at just three sentences long, it's still going to stick with me for a long time.


Usually that's how it is with me and poems. I don't go around quoting lines at people or declaiming verse like a town crier; I'm not Poetry Man. But every now and again some phrase or natural phenomena will give off an echo of something I half-remember. And when I cast around for what was echoed, it's often a poem.