Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Jet
– Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

—

​For more information on Tony Hoagland, please click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/books/05book.html?_r=0​

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Shelley Whitaker

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The Fox Den
–  Shelley Whitaker

As a kid on Spring evenings
while junebugs hooked their legs
into every drop of water and lassos
of grey moths sliced the air,
I would sit mid-driveway
waiting for a family of fox pups
to emerge from their hole in the earth
beside our house. Every May evening
they were born from red straw beds
of those woods; sharp-eyed, black-chinned
creatures burning behind the trees
like apparitions of the sunset.

I would always rise too quickly,
plastic zippers buzzing, shoelace
slapping concrete, scaring them
underground again. It knocked
the heart out of me to send something
back into blackness, to think a necklace
of sun-hungry dogs was snaking its way
back towards the center of the world,
all because I shuddered, all because
I thought I heard the wind call
my name, and rushed to meet it.



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For more information on Shelley Whitaker, please click here: http://www.versedaily.org/2014/aboutshelleywhitaker.shtml


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Poem of the Week, by Gregory Djanikian

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Something Else
– Gregory Djanikian

There’s the lush grass again,
the white pines green and mysterious.
And the barn, too, in the distance,
fading red, the color of longing.

The afternoon light is gilding the hillside,
the clouds are moving together,
huge, incipient thoughts,

and you’re swooning with desire
wanting the beautiful to lie down with you,
gold-leaf your fingertips and tongue,
green you with fragrance

though you don’t know exactly
what you’re after, whether it’s beauty itself
or whatever lives inside it,
elusive, entire,
peripheral to your wanting—

shadow of wings
you catch obliquely
along the woods’ edge,

river that you hear
without listening.

* * *

For more information on Gregory Djanikian, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gregory-djanikian

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Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

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Station
– Sharon Olds

Coming in off the dock after writing,
I approached the house,
and saw your long grandee face
in the light of a lamp with a parchment shade
the color of flame.

An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered
eyes found me on the lawn. You looked
as the lord looks down from a narrow window
and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no
hint of shyness you examined me,
the wife who runs out on the dock to write
as soon as one child is in bed,
leaving the other to you.

Your long
mouth, flexible as an archer’s bow,
did not curve. We spent a long moment
in the truth of our situation, the poems
heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.

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For more information on Sharon Olds, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sharon-olds
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Poem of the Week, by Pablo Neruda

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Love Sonnet LXXXIX
– Pablo Neruda

When I die, I wish your hands upon my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass once more their cool touch over me:
to sense the softness that changed my fate.

I want you to live while I, asleep, await you.
I want your ears to go on hearing the wind.
I want you to smell the sea’s aroma we loved so together,
and to go on walking the sands we walked.

I want what I love to go on living.
And you, whom I loved and sung above all else,
for all that, flourish again, my flower,

to reach for everything my love demands of you,
so that my shadow is passed through your hair,
so that all can know the reason for my song.

(Translation: Terence Clarke)


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For more information on Pablo Neruda, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/pablo-neruda


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Poem of the Week, by Galway Kinnell

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St. Francis and the Sow
– Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

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For more information on Galway Kinnell, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/galway-kinnell

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Poem of the Week, by Marianne Kunkel

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Homeschooled
– Marianne Kunkel

The Nazis? Learned of them in comic books.
Titanic? Heard of it when I mistook
the film for a rom-com on a cruise ship—
glued to my friend’s TV as she skinny-dipped
with a lawn boy, I wondered what the hell
else my parents wouldn’t tell. Six-by-eight cells,
she later said, scrunching her dripping hair,
inside a jail called Gitmo. Then upstairs
in her dad’s office, she skimmed her fingernail
across a world map: Hiroshima, Trail
of Tears, Darfur. No password locking it,
a laptop on the desk showed us portraits
of Katrina—backpacked men wading in streets,
told too late of disaster. Dead last, like me.



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For more information on Marianne Kunkel, please click here: http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/?q=blog/around-office-marianne-kunkel

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Poem of the Week, by Joshua Mehigan

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How Strange, How Sweet
– Joshua Mehigan

This was a butcher. This, a Chinese laundry.
This was a Schrafft’s with 10-cent custard ice creams.
Off toward the park, that was the new St. Saviour.
Then, for five blocks, not much but chain-link fences.
These foolish things, here today, gone today,
yesterday, forty years ago, tomorrow.
Deloreses and Normas not quite gone,
with slippers on, and heads like white carnations,
little, and brittle, and mum, why did the fine
September weather call you out today?
To dangerously bend and touch a cat.
To lean beside your final door and smile.
To go a block and get a thing you need.
What are you hiding, ladies? What do you know?

Micks were from here to there. Down there, the Mob.
And, way down there, the mob the bill let in.
Far west were Puerto Ricans. Farther west,
in Newark, Maplewood, or Pennsylvania,
one canceled choice away, why, there’s nostalgia,
lipstick, and curls, and gum, and pearls on Sunday.
So here’s a platinum arc from someone’s neck chain,
bass through a tinted window, loudest laughter,
the colored fellow with the amber eyes
who doesn’t need to stand just where he is.
Here sits the son of 1941,
a pendulous pink arm across a chair back;
his sister, she of 1943,
her hair the shade of an orangutan.
Food stamps and welfare, Medicaid and Medicare.
Kilroy was here. Here was where to get out of.

Last come the new inevitable whites.
See how the gracious evening sunshine lights
their balconied high-rise’s apricot
contemporary stucco-style finish.
Smell the pink-orange powder as some punk
sandblasts Uneeda Biscuit off the wall.
Flinch at the miter saw and nail gun,
at three-inch nails that yelp as men dismantle
a rooftop pigeon loft. Those special birds
will not fly home to the implicit neighbor,
or fall like tiny Esther Williamses
in glad succession from a wire, to climb
and circle in the white December sky.
Far up, from blocks away, the pale birds seemed,
when they all turned at once, to disappear.
Across the street, the normal pigeons eat.



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For more information on Joshua Mehigan, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/joshua-mehigan

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Poem of the Week, by Wallace Stevens

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The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


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For more information on Wallace Stevens, please click here:


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Poem of the Week, by Nathaniel Perry

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In Bloom, Where the Meadow Rises
– Nathaniel Perry

Do you remember when the sky burned down
its wick of light as an April cold came on
the evening of your fifth day in the world?
Of course you don’t, you couldn’t even hold
your head up yet, much less begin to think
to hold one evening’s ash inside, like a drink
held up to the sun, trapping and clutching the light.
But I wonder sometimes if within the slighter
corners of your mind you’ve held a hint of it,
the light I saw beyond the trees which split
the view from our rented front porch, while you
slept, swaddled as if in song, through
the louder sleep of your mother beside you. Rache,
if you can find that evening, which is stationed
in my chest, inside you now, I swear it will
get you somewhere, across a field so filled
with snow the sky and ground are one, across
a field so bleached with drought the giant cross
of shadows from the pines is friction enough
to set the day on fire. You’ll come, rough
in your heart, to the edges of those fields and be lifted
just a fraction of an inch by the gift
of the sky’s old light in you. It will remind
you to invite yourself, the whole of your mind,
the whole history of your self along across
the grass. If you see yourself you can’t be lost;
though I may lose sight of you against the sky,
or in the vetch, in bloom, where the meadow rises.

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For more information on Nathaniel Perry, please click here: http://www.kenyonreview.org/conversation/nathaniel-perry/
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