weekly poem...

An Exercise in Love

for Jackson Allen

My friend wears my scarf at his waist
I give him moonstones
He gives me shell & seaweeds
He comes from a distant city & I meet him
We will plant eggplants & celery together
He weaves me cloth


Many have brought the gifts
I use for his pleasure
silk, & green hills
& heron the color of dawn


My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind
He backlights my dreams
He has built altars beside my bed
I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember
his name, or my own.

Diane di Prima

weekly poem...

This week is less poetry in form, but the imagery is beautiful to me. I really like the writing I've found by Melanie Braverman. I like it a lot.

No longer if we'll get cancer but when

No longer if we’ll get cancer but when, the doctor said. Now questions accrete around the irritant like pearl: Not when but how? Not how but whom? And then why. And then why not. I take a can of ashes to the beach and empty them into the wind. Outside the trash man collects bottles like a miser rattling his jewels, tossing them onto the growing heap.

-Melanie Braverman

weekly poem...

Poem (Internal Scene)

To make beauty out of pain, it damns the eyes—
No, dams the eyes. See how they overflow?
No damns them, damns them, and so they cry.
What shape can I swallow to make me whole?
Baby’s bird-shaped block, blue-painted wood
That fits in the bird-hole of the painted wood box?
The skeleton leaf? The skeleton key? Loud
Knock when the shape won’t unlock any locks.
I hear it through the static in the baby’s room
When the monitor clicks on and off, sound
Of sea-ice cracking against the jagged sea-rocks,
Laughing gull in the gale. What is it dives down
Past sight, down there dark with the other blocks?
It can’t be seen, only heard. A kind of curse,
This kind curse. Forgive me. Blessing that hurts.

-Dan Beachy-Quick

weekly poem...

Changes

The leaves are beginning to change.
They flutter slightly in the breeze, a haze of
yellow-tinged green,
growing brighter every day in the fading light of summer.
I study the colors of the sky;
the grass;
the plants in the garden.
Everything seems sharpened in the suddenly crisp air,
touched by the lengthening shadows
of autumn’s fall.

-Georgie K. Buttons

weekly poem...

Fool's Errand

Alone, like a feather in the air,
An occasional sadness the weather knows
Comes to earth as a bend in the road.

The winter is at its most instructive
As other sadnesses fall
Across the democracy of objects.

Those that aren't shy
Introduce themselves—
Fool's Errand, Clowns of Anguish—

The Equitation of Beautiful Young Girls
Is an exemplary sadness,
As is The Whale's Parasol.

I want to part company
With linear extent,
Congenital heartbreak,

Where the raven goes and snow comes from.
I want distance washed clean,
Unencumbered by facts;

The red cactus flower
To slip into my shirt at dusk
And be the heart's boat.

I want Clowns of Anguish to raise the sail,
And a white handkerchief
Waving from shore.

-James Galvin

weekly poem...

Curtain Up

Every time I’m with you is like
preparing to go onstage.
Knees begin to shake;
heart begins to drum;
stomach full of frantic,
fluttering butterflies.

Anticipation.
Exhilaration.

Sometimes, even dread.

Take a deep, steadying breath
and clasp my hands tightly
behind my back.
Try to keep them from reaching up
to my hair, or in some cases,
yours.

The music starts,
the lights flare bright.
Curtains open onto
figures in vibrant colors,
busy going about their
memorized lives,

oblivious to me and you.

And you, oblivious,
to me.

Georgie K. Buttons

weekly poem...

Dear Friend

Y.

I become each day more reckless,
too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat,
the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here,
not one, and I’m bored with the stillness

of the yellow field outside my window. And you,
who cannot keep still, who can never
look back, where will you go next?
How will I find you?

Can you feel the world pull
apart, the seams loosen?
What, tell me, will keep it whole,

if not you? if not me?
Send a postcard, picture, tell me
how you’ve been.

Blas Falconer

weekly poem...

Dear Friend

X.

Your bags were packed
and left at the door, the vase you
filled with shells, wrapped in tissue,
your books boxed. I have the whelk

you found on shore, the small conch,
intact—the point, the fine grooves—
and keep it in a box with a picture of you
at the beach: your hair slicked back,

head cocked at an angle.
Behind you, the green jacket
you told me to throw away. Strewn

over a chair, its arms dangle
above the floor—a hole in the pocket,
the elbows thin from years of use.

Blas Falconer

weekly poem...

choice

You can do great things,
and you can do terrible things.
But only you can decide
which of the two you will choose.

Will you be great?
Will you be terrible?
Will you be terribly great?
Or just great in small ways?

Two paths lay before you.
Time to explore only one.
The left path? Or the right path?
Try to dabble down the middle?

Hazy lines of great and terrible.
Yours the choice to make.
Not you mother’s, not your father’s.
Not friend’s or foe’s. Yours.

Will you be famous for good?
Famous for bad?
Or not famous at all,
Just living as people do?

You can do great things,
and you can do terrible things.
Yours is the choice to make,
be it small, large, or none at all.

Georgie K. Buttons

weekly poem...

Dear Friend

Z.

Running down the stairwell in the garden,
I divide the steps by three, until my
foot catches the edge, wet with rain, and my
frame, flung forward by its own momentum,

leans into the night as if reaching
for something I didn’t know I
wanted. Not the moon. No. Not the sky,
suspended and limitless. Not even

the tulips standing on their stems
(their petals cup the air).
But in the streetlamp’s circle of light, I land

among them, broken.
My body can’t contain
itself, as blood burgeons in my hands.

Blas Falconer

weekly poem...

The Bridge

That there are things that can never be the same about
my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the
sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious
but also lacking in courage,

That from this yard I have been composing a great speech,
that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look
like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child,
that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides,
that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky,

That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows
the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds
and sparrows from the sky,

That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not
the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization,
that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself
beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had,

That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding
on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of
sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind
my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters,
and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke
from the chimney of the trees where I was small,

That in January, I met him in a bar, we went
home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard,
and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed,

That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was
the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars,
fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky,

O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still
these assignments in the night, to remember the texture
of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the
moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills,

That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of
crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen,
the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark,
blue, green, with shards of the Pacific,

That I do not know the dreams from which I have come,
sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the
willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside
the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the
sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house,
mammalian, no bigger than the herd,

That I wrote the history of the war waged between the
Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through
shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been
driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the
ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks,
beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having
grown up near the ocean.

Lisa Jarnot

weekly poem...

The Burning Kite

What a thing it would be, if we all could fly.
But to rise on air does not make you a bird.

I’m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles.
It’s spring, and everyone’s got something to puke.

The things we puke: flights of stairs,
a skyscraper soaring from the gut,

the bills blow by on the April breeze
followed by flurries of razor blades in May.

It’s true, a free life is made of words.
You can crumple it, toss it in the trash,

or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining
a permanent address in the sky.

The postman hands you your flight of birds
persisting in the original shape of wind.

Whether they’re winging toward the scissors’ V
or printed and plastered on every wall

or bound and trussed, bamboo frames wound with wire
or sentenced to death by fire

you are, first
and always, ash.

Broken wire, a hurricane at each end.
Fire trucks scream across the earth.

But this blaze is a thing of the air.
Raise your glass higher, toss it up and away.

Few know this kind of dizzy glee:
an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.

Ouyang Jianghe

weekly poem...

Intelligence

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed
bugs and mikes,
intercepted letters
full of passionate declarations, contradictory
intelligence—
how attached he’d grown
to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging
the influx of intelligence
with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost
like love: he felt
the cool gray eyes of his superiors
trained on him, rebuking him
for swerving, for letting
himself go—such tender obsession
occasioned by the file!
Not quite the professional style
he or the Agency expected…

But such official loyalties
seemed mere protocol to this!—
what was wrong with him,
he wondered, that he construed
the documents to make the subject
seem a hero,
a bastard whose sole patrimony
was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword
left by an unknown father beneath a stone?

And yet his exploits in the tabloids,
the headlines screaming,

SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN!
HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC

were these heroic
different in kind from the rumors,
unverified,
of a rape, a murder?

—But to have met undisguised the devouring monster!
To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze…

On balance, for such a life,
the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad:
think of the opportunities for evil
a man of such qualities must have had!
How well he knew him—an essential innocence
that followed impulse, blind
to protocol, not noticeably more kind
than he was cruel.
But to stamp Case Closed and cease
gathering intelligence,
to give the hero up, almost, he admitted,
like a lover…:
such limits the hero
unknowingly transgressed!
And the Agency, cold-blooded where
limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?—
more like a second backbone!), committed
to keeping order, could not afford
such sentiments—the Chief of Security
felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence
should lead to this…

He leaned back in his chair and sighed:
a forged genealogy certifying
that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual
assistance pact
to aid in taking back the usurped crown:
he could see them now, the wind
blowing lightly, the two of them sweating
as they climbed the cliff, discussing
the terms, exchanging information,
intelligence—
how would his own face look
staring down across the sea
as he gestured earnestly toward
some island, saying,
“According to our sources,
the tax revenues…”
And then, edging
the hero closer to the cliff, pointing
out the harbor, he’d push.

Tom Sleigh

weekly poem...

One Cow, Two Moos

We used to have a single cow,
We called her Mrs. Rupple.
But she got struck by a lightning bolt,
And now we have a couple.

She's walking sort of funny now,
Oh pity her poor calf.
Old Mrs. Rupple gives no milk,
She gives us half-and-half.

J. Patrick Lewis

weekly poem...

The Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Stephen Spender

weekly poem...

Peace Lilies

I collect them now, it seems. Like
sea-shells or old
thimbles. One for
Father. One for

Mother. Two for my sweet brothers.
Odd how little
they require of
me. Unlike the

ones they were sent in memory
of. No sudden
shrilling of the
phone. No harried

midnight flights. Only a little
water now and
then. Scant food and
light. See how I’ve

brought them all together here in
this shaded space
beyond the stairs.
Even when they

thirst, they summon me with nothing
more than a soft,
indifferent furl-
ing of their leaves.

~Cathy Smith Bowers

weekly poem...

How You Know

How do you know if it’s love? she asks,
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not,
but I know this won’t help. I want to say
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare
or social security, but this won’t help either.
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth,
“when you still want to be with them
the next morning,” would involve too
many follow-up questions. The difficulty
with love, I want to say, is sometimes
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived
or left. Love is the elephant and we
are the blind mice unable to understand
the whole. I want to say love is this
desire to help even when I know I can’t,
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars,
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes,
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things
she has asked about over the years, all
those phenomena whose daily existence
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head.
I don’t even know how to match my socks.
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says,
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.

~Joe Mills

weekly poem...

Interesting Times

Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event.
You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc:
About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon.
Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity.
How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become?

A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily,
And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself.
A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag.
We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting,
Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring.

We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember.
The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop.
To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen
Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us.
And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too.

So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street.
He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke.
Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know.
Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely.
Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.

~Mark Jarman

weekly poem...

I love poetry. Because of this I've decided to look for a new poem to share each week. I'll post it on Sunday nights, and it will stay up on the "Weekly Poem" page for a week.

Waving Goodbye

The world bends us to its purpose.
In the public gardens, we found
a “gazing globe” balanced
on a waist-high pedestal,
a silver ball a foot in circumference,
reflecting sky and ground,
ourselves as we stood above it.
We stared into its depths,
as in a crystal ball,
our faces large and wild,
arms and legs unnaturally small,
as if a spell were on the world,
or, finally, we clearly saw the world
for what it was: too brightly
shining, circular, unadorned.

Trees bent toward us, mere shadows
of themselves, their shadows
more substantial than the trees themselves.
The sky at one o’clock
a milky white, light-filled,
yet without sun or cloud. And beds
of tulips rising from the groundswell,
each one a little mouth.
I knelt beside you on one knee,
caught up in walls of air
I couldn’t touch or see, the outer world
around me wavering, as on a hot summer day.

We looked out to the future. Our future
selves. You stood dead center
in the globe and raised your hand to stop
the scene, your palm enlarging
until it dwarfed the tallest trees.
Then waving goodbye, we walked,
as a joke, backward and away,
farther and farther away—
the globe still gazing on us—
leaving ourselves behind
to live forever in that silver room,
to watch and spy on lovers like ourselves.

~Elizabeth Spires