poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by David Bottoms

Posted on by alisonmcghee

In a U-Haul North of Damascus
– David Bottoms

1

Lord, what are the sins
I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks,
the workless days, the scotch bottles thrown across the fence
and into the woods, the cruelty of silence,
the cruelty of lies, the jealousy,
the indifference?

What are these on the scale of sin
or failure
that they should follow me through the streets of Columbus,
the moon-streaked fields between Benevolence
and Cuthbert where dwarfed cotton sparkles like pearls
on the shoulders of the road. What are these
that they should find me half-lost,
sick and sleepless
behind the wheel of this U-Haul truck parked in a field
on Georgia 45
a few miles north of Damascus,
some makeshift rest stop for eighteen wheelers
where the long white arms of oaks slap across trailers
and headlights glare all night through a wall of pines?

2

What was I thinking, Lord?
That for once I’d be in the driver’s seat, a firm grip
on direction?

So the jon boat muscled up the ramp,
the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked Harley
chained for so long to the back fence,
the scarred desk, the bookcases and books,
the mattress and box springs,
a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair
of three-way speakers, everything mine
I intended to keep. Everything else abandon.

But on the road from one state
to another, what is left behind nags back through the distance,
a last word rising to a scream, a salad bowl
shattering against a kitchen cabinet, china barbs
spiking my heel, blood trailed across the cream linoleum
like the bedsheet that morning long ago
just before I watched the future miscarried.

Jesus, could the irony be
that suffering forms a stronger bond than love?

3

Now the sun
streaks the windshield with yellow and orange, heavy beads
of light drawing highways in the dew-cover.
I roll down the window and breathe the pine-air,
the after-scent of rain, and the far-off smell
of asphalt and diesel fumes.

But mostly pine and rain
as though the world really could be clean again.

Somewhere behind me,
miles behind me on a two-lane that streaks across
west Georgia, light is falling
through the windows of my half-empty house.
Lord, why am I thinking about this? And why should I care
so long after everything has fallen
to pain that the woman sleeping there should be sleeping alone?
Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded
before he can see? Lord, is it possible to fall
toward grace? Could I be moved
to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved?


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For more information on David Bottoms, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/david-bottoms
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Poem of the Week, by Mark Leidner

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Things to Call Water
– Mark Leidner

friend of the cup
void soda
idiot’s vodka
fool’s oil
pipe sap
tap wine
faucet gumbo
boiler’s tool
baby of snow
steam’s mom
hot dog blood
“Cannonball!” shrapnel
diver’s excuse
island ender
navy gravy
torpedo media
The Artist Formerly Known as Ice
Dances with Eels
Señor Osmosis
drowner’s woe
world launderer
arsonist’s boycott
Cousteau’s milieu
hydrophobe’s gutcheck
“intern at the cistern”
tempest gristle
Odyssey sauce
hemisphere paint
the ghost in the sauna
the condensed mists of time
zodiac milk
casino preserves
stork’s anklets
periscope’s necktie
rowboat wingspan
catfish litterbox
starfish cathedral
turbulence skein
stream bacon
river luggage
crystal chowder
geyser sperm
fin wind
mer-air
loose frost
dank fire
blue flower

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For more information on Mark Leidner, please click here: http://thermosmag.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/a-conversation-with-mark-leidner/
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Poem of the Week, by Billy Collins

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Memento Mori
– Billy Collins

There is no need for me to keep a skull on my desk,
to stand with one foot up on the ruins of Rome,
or wear a locket with the sliver of a saint’s bone.

It is enough to realize that every common object
in this sunny little room will outlive me–
the carpet, radio, bookstand and rocker.

Not one of these things will attend my burial,
not even this dented goosenecked lamp
with its steady benediction of light,

though I could put worse things in my mind
than the image of it waddling across the cemetery
like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord,
the small circle of mourners parting to make room.

 

For more information on Billy Collins, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/billy-collins

Poem of the Week, by Virginia R. Terris

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The Uninvited
– Virginia R. Terris

As the heads of state feast with one another, the tables in the
gilded hall loaded with caviar, venison, exotic fruits and veg-
etables and gallons of champagne, there’s a tapping on the
windows. A child’s face, then another, presses against the
panes, the eyes in them black as the night the children stand
in, their mouths open as if they were howling with the wind.

“Who are they?” ask the guests uneasily. “Where did they
come from?”

“Keep them out!” yells the host. “Get Security! Where’s
Security?”

But the children are so thin, they slip under the doors,
around the edges of the windows. Noiselessly. In great
numbers. They move forward to the tables. Their fingers
grip the edges of the tables. Their eyes gaze upwards into the
enormous openings and closings of official mouths.

For more information on Virginia R. Terris (who died last year), please click here: http://www.virginiarterris.zoomshare.com/0.html
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Poem of the Week, by Wendell Berry

Posted on by alisonmcghee

There is No Going Back
– Wendell Berry

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

For more information on Wendell Berry, please click here: http://www.wendellberrybooks.com/

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Poem of the Week, by Moya Cannon

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Viola D’Amore
– Moya Cannon

Sometimes, love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill
and, like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.


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For more information on Moya Cannon, please click here: http://www.californiapoetics.org/interviews/3818/an-interview-with-moya-cannon
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Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Dark Charms
– Dorianne Laux

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

 

For more information on Dorianne Laux, please click here: http://doriannelaux.com/

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Poem of the Week, by Maureen Micus Crisick

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Suppose
– Maureen Micus Crisick

the ghetto stars pinned to cloth
could lift from history
like angels soaring to the sky.
The air which holds cinders
of Buddhist robes, burned hair
of ones who doused themselves, set fire,
suppose the plume of smoke
becomes clear and white.

What did I say?
I said: what if Sarajevo is not burning
and no city is burning
and in the market square
no human head is impaled on a stick
or mute limbs strewn on the streets,
and no fingers exist without hands.

Suppose grenades side with sunlight.
Bullets in boxes become
chocolate wrapped in gold foil,
and in Guatemala, the men come back
from their disappearance,
and in the morning, wake in their own beds
because love is the white moon
and light moves in us like blood.

Yes
there will be holes left in clothes
but not from ripped stars,
only from wear,
to let the darkness out.


—
I found Maureen Micus Crisick’s poem in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Companion-Pleasures-Writing-Poetry/dp/0393316548/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358000383&sr=1-1&keywords=Maureen+Micus+Crisick
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Poem of the Week, by Alden Nowlan

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Great Things Have Happened
– Alden Nowlan

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.


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For more information on Alden Nowlan, please click here: http://www.poemhunter.com/alden-nowlan/biography/
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Poem of the Week, by Yehuda Amichai (tr. by Chana Bloch)

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A Quiet Joy
– Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch)

I’m standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.
I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what’s possible.
I remember you waving your hand
as if wiping mist from the windowpane,
and your face, as if enlarged
from an old blurred photo.
Once I committed a terrible wrong
to myself and others.
But the world is beautifully made for doing good
and for resting, like a park bench.
And late in life I discovered
a quiet joy
like a serious disease that’s discovered too late:
just a little time left now for quiet joy.

—
For more information on Yehuda Amichai, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/yehuda-amichai

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