Poem of the Week, by Kim Addonizio

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IMG_3122I never paid much attention to tattoos until my children and their friends, and then my own friends, started getting them. For me, it’s been a natural progression from disinterest + a tinge of sadness (that beautiful skin, forever altered) to mild interest + resignation (that beautiful skin, forever altered) to deep interest (what’s the story behind that tattoo? + admiration (it’s an art form, with the body as medium) = these days, tattoos are among the first things I notice when out wandering the streets and beach. This poem, by one of my favorite poets, makes me think about them in a different way, in an everything-we-can’t-see-but-know-is-there kind of way. All the unknown stories walking around out there.

 

First Poem for You
     – Kim Addonizio

I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

 

For more information on Kim Addonizio, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Marge Piercy

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Look at us, walking around in the world with only skin to cover up the muscles attached to tendon attached to bone that we’re all made of, invisible blood flowing through all of us all the time. Don’t our bodies seem so insubstantial for all the experiences we go through, all the conversations we have, all the music and tears and talk and laughter that pours out of us? So much of what makes up the heart of us is invisible. People from my past, for good and for not, flitted through my mind when I read this poem.

William Road

The visible and the in-
     – Marge Piercy

Some people move through your life
like the perfume of peonies, heavy
and sensual and lingering.
Some people move through your life
like the sweet musky scent of cosmos
so delicate if you sniff twice, it’s gone.
Some people occupy your life
like moving men who cart off
couches, pianos and break dishes.
Some people touch you so lightly you
are not sure it happened. Others leave
you flat with footprints on your chest.
Some are like those fall warblers
you can’t tell from each other even
though you search Petersen’s.
Some come down hard on you like
a striking falcon and the scars remain
and you are forever wary of the sky.
We all are waiting rooms at bus
stations where hundreds have passed
through unnoticed and others
have almost burned us down
and others have left us clean and new
and others have just moved in.

 

For more information on Marge Piercy, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Todd Boss

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My friend Erica and I are both the if-your-fingers-are-busy-then-your-concentration-is-more-focused types. We like to sit next to each other in meetings because we can then present a united front of seamstressery, which is a word I just made up. Erica, an artist specializing in handmade paper creations (her work is stunning), calmly plies her needle while I either knit or quilt. In this way, we can pay close attention to what’s being said. Slow, rhythmic projects that take time and care, like quilting or gardening or cooking or long hikes, both keep me sane and bring ideas floating into my head. When I read this poem by Todd Boss it brought me right back to elementary school, those fat pencils and thick paper with the wide lines. Wooden desks. The whispery sound of pencil on paper. The tangibility of the physical world.

Shack hammock (1)

The World Is in Pencil

– Todd Boss

—not pen. It’s got
that same silken
dust about it, doesn’t it,
that same sense of
having been roughed
onto paper even
as it was planned.
It had to be a labor
of love. It must’ve
taken its author some
time, some shove.
I’ll bet it felt good
in the hand—the o
of the ocean, and
the and and the and
of the land.

 

For more information on Todd Boss, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Mary Karr

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Scrolling through a few hundred poems this morning, no poetry goal in mind, I found this one by Mary Karr. It flung me back into memories of my long-ago cat Clemens, who appeared in my life one night when we were eating salmon. He hurled himself up from the ground and clung to the screen window of our first-floor apartment, yowling. We took him in and he never lIMG_1181eft. Clem was born to the streets and it was not possible to keep him inside all the time. He was a street cat, a warrior, scourge of the feline neighborhood. One day I returned home to find him lying on the front lawn, near death, one eye gouged half-out, deep wounds in his tail and sides that took him weeks both in the hospital and at home to recover from. He loved running water and sometimes I let the kitchen faucet trickle just to watch him crouch in the sink, batting at it. His nickname was shui mao, which translates as water cat. He loved tall boxes just barely big enough to contain him, from which he would stare out, sure that no one could see him. When he was nine he developed diabetes. It was twice-daily insulin shots from then on, none of which slowed him down much. He died at 17, having finally become an old, slow cat. Clem was magnificent. I still miss him.

For a Dying Tomcat Who’s Relinquished His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature
     – Mary Karr

I remember the long orange carp you once scooped
from the neighbor’s pond, bounding beyond
her swung broom, across summer lawns

to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks
for that. I’m not one to whom offerings
often get made. You let me feel

how Christ might when I kneel,
weeping in the dark
over the usual maladies: love and its lack.

Only in tears do I speak
directly to him and with such
conviction. And only once you grew frail

did you finally slacken into me,
dozing against my ribs like a child.
You gave up the predatory flinch

that snapped the necks of so many
birds and slow-moving rodents.
Now your once powerful jaw

is malformed by black malignancies.
It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way
I pray for: Lord, before my own death,

let me learn from this animal’s deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.

 

For more information on Mary Karr, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Jim Daniels

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IMG_4028Those boots over there were sitting amongst the rundown running shoes and loafers and wingtips on a display rack of men’s shoes at Experienced Goods in Brattleboro, Vermont a few years ago. They were $8. It was clear that they were at least an inch too long for me, but because they were narrow I tried them on anyway and they fit as if someone had poured liquid leather around my feet and ankles and it magically turned into boots. I took them to an old-school cobbler to be resoled.

“Can you tell me what brand these are?” I said. “Because I need to buy only this brand for the rest of my life.”

He smiled.

“You can’t buy this brand,” the cobbler said. “There is no brand. These boots are probably thirty years old. They were handmade in Italy.”

Leather boots, steel toe boots especially, are one of the few things left in the world that can’t be rushed. They can’t be stonewashed or bleached or chemically altered in order to save time, because what boots need to fit right is exactly that: time. This poem reminds me of that fact.

Work Boots: Still Life
     – Jim Daniels

Next to the screen door
work boots dry in the sun.
Salt lines map the leather
and laces droop
like the arms of a new-hire
waiting to punch out.
The shoe hangs open like the sigh
of someone too tired to speak
a mouth that can almost breathe.
A tear in the leather reveals
a shiny steel toe
a glimpse of the promise of safety
the promise of steel and the years to come.

For more information on Jim Daniels, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Leah Falk

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See that bird below? I’ve been watching him sing his heart out for hours now, here at the Austin, TX airport, where we have both taken up residence, me for the better part of 24 hours and him for who knows how long. A combination of overbooked flights, rebooked flights, unbooked flights and the chaos of the SXSW music festival have given me the opportunity to get to know this airport well, although probably not as well as this bird. I wander from one end of the terminal to another, listening to live music, eating pretzel bits offered up by the Auntie Anne’s server, talking to the Earl Campbell Sports Bar waiter who recognized me this morning from dinner last night, and listening to the bird. He might not be singing so much as wailing, and who can blame him? He made me think of this beautiful poem by Leah Falk. A torn page in the book of animals.

IMG_3996.JPG

 

Noah, to His Dove

– Leah Falk

 

With your wings of paper, fly, my bird, and find

a man who stands in water. In this land,

even far from shore, the brows of waves might break

against a sandy table, glass moon lit

to guide them toward last call, their salty end.

 

To the man who holds that trembling room

together with his feet—who holds his heart

against erosion—give your gentle body,

 

its crisp folds, its fragile case, its ink

as sweet as liquor. If he reads you over

and again, build us a house upon his rocky breast,

 

gather clay and willow. Until then, when I come

to your torn page in the book of animals,

my own heart stills and digs a trench that fills with rain.

 

 

For more information on Leah Falk, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Alden Nowlan

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IMG_0382When I was a kid, the school bus I rode back and forth to school was a horror show of cruelty perpetrated by bullies who were aided and abetted by the bus driver. Every four years I pretend to be British (a six-week election campaign! silence until September!) but it’s not working. Being bullied, watching others be bullied, staying silent about the crime of bullying, watching the as-yet-unbullied align themselves nervously behind the bullies with the goal of not being bullied themselves are all part of the same putrid bully swamp. A poem about someone rejecting the surround-sound meanness, even covertly, even though he’s scared, can act as partial antidote to the poison. Poem of the week, by Alden Nowlan.

Flossie at School
     – Alden Nowlan

Five laths in a cotton dress
was christened Flossie
and learned how to cry,
her eyes like wet daisies
behind thick glasses.

She was six grades ahead of me
and wore bangs; the big boys
called her “The Martian,”
they snowballed her home,
splashed her with their bicycles,
left horse dung in her coat pockets.

She jerked when anyone spoke to her,
and when I was ten
I caught up with her one day
on the way home from school,
and said, Flossie I really like you
but don’t let the other kids know I told you,
they’d pick on me, but I do like you,
I really do, but don’t tell anybody.
And afterwards I was ashamed
for crying when she cried.

 

For more about Alden Nowlan, click here.

Poem of the Week, by Nancy Willard

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Pete in first snow, 2011Snow in the city is beautiful for about a day, sometimes two days if it’s a blizzard and no plows or cars can get through the streets. The minute the plows go through, that beauty degenerates into muddy ice, brown clumps flung up on curbs, nearly impassable single-file streets where cars take turns one by one. Snow in upstate New York, where I grew up, is beautiful for months (and months and months) on end, because there’s nothing to interfere with it. White and blue and green and pink, all the colors of snow in the shifting light, turn every field and wood into calm. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to the rumble of snowplows sweeping down Route 274, their orange revolving light circling the walls of my room. Someone out there is taking care of us, is what the memory of that sound still feels like to me.

 

The Snow Arrives After Long Silence
– by Nancy Willard

The snow arrives after long silence
from its high home where nothing leaves
tracks or stains or keeps time.
The sky it fell from, pale as oatmeal,
bears up like sheep before shearing.

The cat at my window watches
amazed. So many feathers and no bird!
All day the snow sets its table
with clean linen, putting its house
in order. The hungry deer walk

on the risen loaves of snow.
You can follow the broken hearts
their hooves punch in its crust.
Night after night the big plows rumble
and bale it like dirty laundry

and haul it to the Hudson.
Now I scan the sky for snow,
and the cool cheek it offers me,
and its body, thinned into petals,
and the still caves where it sleeps.

 

For more information on Nancy Willard, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by ee cummings

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Abel Pann, breathing life into AdamWhen I was a kid I used to read ee cummings’ poems not so much for the words but for the way he put them down on the page, all shoved up against each other, parentheses around some, weird punctuation, missing spaces, and the complete lack of upper case letters, down to the way he spelled his own name. Why why why why does he do it that way, I used to wonder. The strangeness and unconventionality was so fascinating. He was a Famous Person so I knew that all these choices must be intentional, but why why why?

If at first I didn’t care about the poems themselves, now I love them. Mr. Cummings is one of my most beloved poets, in fact. A small white used paperback copy of his 50 Poems that I found at a garage sale sits on a shelf in the living room; this poem felt right for today.

in spite of everything
– e.e. cummings

in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

– before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.

 

For more about ee cummings, please click here.