21 posts tagged “poetry”
Memoriam
In lawn chairs under stars. On the dock
at midnight, anchored by winter clothes,
we lean back to read the sky. Your face white
in the womb light, the lake's electric skin.
Driving home from Lewiston, full and blue, the moon
over one shoulder of highway. There,
or in your kitchen at midnight, sitting anywhere
in the seeping dark, we bury them again and
again under the same luminous thumbprint.
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.
There stones are salt and mark where we look back.
Your mother's hand at the end of an empty sleeve,
scratching at your palm, drawing blood.
Your aunt in a Jewish graveyard in Poland,
her face a permanent fist of pain.
Your first friend, Saul, who died faster than
you could say forgive me.
When I was nine and crying from a dream
you said words that hid my fear.
Above us the family slept on,
mouths open, hands scrolled.
Twenty years later your tears burn the back of my throat.
Memory has a hand in the grave up to the wrist.
Earth crumbles from your fist under the sky's black sieve.
We are orphaned, one by one.
On the beach at Superior, you found me
where I'd been for hours, cut by the lake's sharp rim.
You stopped a dozen feet from me.
What passed in the quiet said:
I have nothing to give you.
At dusk, birch forest is a shore of bones.
I've pulled stones from the earth's black pockets,
felt the weight of their weariness - worn,
exhausted from their sleep in the earth.
I've written on my skin with their black sweat.
The lake's slight movement is stilled by fading light.
Soon the stars' tiny mouths, the moon's blue mouth.
I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry,
some words to make me less afraid, to say
you gave me this.
Memory insists with its sea voice,
muttering from its bone cave.
Memory wraps us
like the shell wraps the sea.
Nothing to carry,
some stones to fill our pockets,
to give weight to what we have.
Anne Michaels
Please visit www.harlotssauce.com, a really wonderful magazine, with a poem of mine and my first published photo! The magazine's main theme this month is life, god and the universe. I believe in God, or an "invisible friend." I have often struggled with this faith, forged in childhood. I need my God like I need a safety blanket. I carry God around with my everywhere. In my poem, I am exploring how I feel about God. Many good poems and articles in this issue of Harlot's Sauce, so please read and comment. I plan to do so.
Soft Spots
They're worse than weak links
in chains, which we can blame
on blacksmiths' fire, and chinks
in armor, made by rain
of arrows. Soft spots,
those parts of us that bruise,
prove we're fruit that rots
as hourglasses ooze.
But I've a spot spot for,
a phrase we tend to whisper,
is what we say before
we name our guilty pleasure--
the damper pedal that pounds
sonatas into mush
the critic Ezra Pound
would call, with a shudder, slush.
Jason Guriel
To view more of Michael's poetry and essays, please visit http://mkitchin.vox.com/
Silly Sisters
Winter has smoky hair, shy of black
Michael Kitchin
a dream of making love
you cry at me sharply like a peacock
stripped of plumage your fecund greens,
your violent blues your crazy eyes
all gone from you
we have never I am dreaming
moonlight spills so many pearls
from hidden oysters
Lucy Simpson
Seattle, 1/14/2009
The Myrmidons Journey to Troy
Worship warship!
Worshipful the vessel!
Give unto him the bright red
poppies of opium
to brighten his vesicles
His mother Thetis down below
riding the rudder
How now mother?
How goes it?
Hera straddles the prow
in her vermilion cape
in her longing to be most
desired
of only one god
one husband
No means to sound the depths
no necessity
but they will be sounded for
thousands years hence
Only Patroclus may know
second sight
but keeps it hidden
even from his lover
When the ship is settled in the water
at night
he looks out at the blackness
and counts the dead
L. Simpson, Seattle, 5/3/2008
The Fatal Shore
The horseshoe crab in frail armor-plate,
broken open as if by a javelin throw,
lay in the sand like a cracked jam-jar,
the son of some Trojan.
Achilles, too, arrived in medias res
at his mortal scene.
The booming foghorn, the groaning buoy,
tide by tide by tide
kept their mockeries to themselves.
Was there no end to them?
Lost Renaissance studies with a sepia cast,
the dunes receded in perspective.
Fog lounged in the marsh shallows.
A soda-colored dawn again and again
rubbed salt into the clapboards,
collapsing upon a radiant wild-eyed dailiness.
Dullness, too, was my god.
Tangled knobs of seaweed
drifted up the beach on the curt tide,
like Myrmidons out of work.
William Logan
Mermaids
Oil on canvas, 1942
Lisel Mueller
Who is that man in black, walking
away from us into the distance?
The painter, they say, took a long time
finding his vision of the world.
The mermaids, if that is what they are
under their full-length skirts,
sit facing each other
all down the street, more of an alley,
in front of their gray row houses.
They all look the same, like a fair-haired
order of nuns, or like prostitutes
with chaste, identical faces.
How calm they are, with their vacant
eyes,
their hands in laps that betray nothing.
Only one has scales on her dusky dress.
It is 1942; it is Europe,
and nothing fits. the one familiar figure
is the man in black approaching the sea,
and he is small and walking away from
us.
Lisel Mueller
Dear Friends and Neighbors,
Please visit http://www.harlotssauce.com/ to view my most recent publication. Thanks Patricia and fellow editors. I have enjoyed reading the entire magazine.
I am currently taking classes in nursing at night and studying during the day, so this cuts down drastically on the time I have for writing. I will try to post something weekly and read blogs too. I will be a less frequent Vox presence, but will drop in when I am able.
Lucy in her cups of wine on a Saturday night, wishing you all sweet dreams and if you reside in the lower hemisphere, sweet awakenings.
Friends, Neighbors, Country Men, Country Women and People in Foreign Lands, Lend Me Your Electronic Ears!
The book is almost complete. I am not using my own photography, since I find it technically lacking and too "light-filled" for the dark surreal tone of the fairytale poems. Good news, is I have been quietly working with an artist on the farther shore of my nation, Katherine Anderson. Her photographic art is richly layered and reminiscent of Rene Magritte, the painter and Man Ray, the photographer. Her work is often witty, sometimes sad, but never dull.
Here is an example of one of Katherine's thought-provoking, surreal works paired with a poem for the book. Please let us know what you think. We are both hard at work pairing poems with art. The title of the book is Into These Woods. Stay tuned for updates and thanks for encouraging me on the road.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/klsanderson/2444668446/in/set-72157594191446671/
Great Aunt Wicked
every family claims one, in their lore, in their book of books
a spinster aunt, a crazy derelict crone in a decrepit brownstone
with screeching paint and a hundred cats or more
creaking the floorboards cut from ancient forest.
piles of newspapers are her informative courtesans
the royal jewels are chicken bones and her nectar is golden gut-rot
Jim Beam, whatever.
she can’t stand a pretty girl, an Alice, if you please
fresh as morning, fresh as daisies, a button sort of girl
a reflection of herself self sixty years ago
it is back to her whiskey as if it were mama milk
from an ice teat, a solace, a darkness, a falling and falling
past emptiness into Oz again, green again
green as a grass blade, singing with crickets
and the creatures that crawl up from the earth's guts
say “howdy do.”
Lucy Simpson
Seattle
12/2008
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