poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Ellen Bass

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GATE C 22
– Ellen Bass

At gate C 22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after

the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like satin ribbons tying up a gift. And kissing.

Like she’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
she kept saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning

of a calm day at Big Sur, the way it gathers
and swells, taking each rock slowly
in its mouth, sucking it under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—

the passengers waiting for the delayed flight to San Jose,
the stewardesses, the pilots, the aproned woman icing
Cinnabons, the guy selling sunglasses. We couldn’t
look away. We could taste the kisses, crushed

in our mouths like the liquid centers of chocolate cordials.
But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still

opened from giving birth, like your mother
must have looked at you,
no matter what happened after—
if she beat you, or left you, or you’re lonely now—

you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off and someone gazing at you
like you were the first sunrise seen from the earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,

each of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse,
little gold hoop earrings, glasses,
all of us, tilting our heads up.

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For more information about Ellen Bass, please click here: http://www.ellenbass.com/index.php
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Poem of the Week, by Li-Young Lee

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Nativity
– Li-Young Lee

In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.

How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?

Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,

this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,

just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,

each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.


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For more information on Li-Young Lee, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/li-young-lee
—
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Poem of the Week, by Paul Farley

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The Power
– Paul Farley

Forget all of that end-of-the-pier
palm-reading stuff. Picture a seaside town
in your head. Start from its salt-wrack-rotten smells
and raise the lid of the world to change the light,
then go as far as you want: the ornament
of a promenade, the brilliant greys of gulls,
the weak grip of a crane in the arcades
you’ve built, ballrooms to come alive at night,
then a million-starling roost, an opulent
crumbling like cake icing …
Now, bring it down
in the kind of fire that flows along ceilings,
that knows the spectral blues; that always starts
in donut fryers or boardwalk kindling
in the dead hour before dawn, that leaves pilings
marooned by mindless tides, that sends a plume
of black smoke high enough to stain the halls
of clouds. Now look around your tiny room
and tell me that you haven’t got the power.

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For more information on Paul Farley, please click here: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=27
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Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe

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What the Living Do
– Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably
fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes
have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we
spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight
pours through.

The open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and
I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street,
the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying
along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my
wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called
that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to
pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss – we want more and more and
then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the
window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing
so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m
speechless:
I am living, I remember you.

—
For more information on Marie Howe, please click here: http://www.mariehowe.com/
—
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Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

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Father’s Voice
– William Stafford

“No need to get home early;
the car can see in the dark.”
He wanted me to be rich
the only way we could,
easy with what we had.

And always that was his gift,
given for me ever since,
easy gift, a wind
that keeps on blowing for flowers
or birds wherever I look.

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
that move in the sun and have
close, reliable friends
in the earth, in the air, in the rock.


—
For more information on William Stafford, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-e-stafford
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Poem of the Week, by Jennifer Michael Hecht

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Lady Look-Alike Lazarized
– Jennifer Michael Hecht

It was many, many years ago
in this house, with this tree
that a woman lived, whom I don’t know
in a photo you can see. She baked bread
and ate with two fat men
and her picture looks much like me.

I was a child and she was a child
then neither again would be
she in nineteen-thirteen
me near two-zero, one-three.
And we loved with a love that was more
than a love, at the heads of our centuries.
Let me see less than she’ll see
because I know more than she
and, even from here, it near-blinded me.

And with virtue and reason, long ago,
In this picture that looks like me,
A bug blew out of a cough one night,
chilling the woman who looks like me;
So her muscled kinsman came
and took her away from our tree
to bake no more bread for fat men
and escape the brutality.
Yes, a wind blew out of a cloud
one night chilling and killing
who looks like me.

Microbes, heartache, and wars
do not give way to reason nor pause
at the soaring wrought-iron gate
of Brooklyn, nor at the doors of state.
She was here and some time later died,
well before I arrived here or anywhere.

But our love, she for fat men, I for my
small and tall friends, is stronger by far
than the love of those younger or richer
than we, and who could be wiser than we?
And neither the redbreasts in heaven above,
Nor the dolphins down under the sea,
Can ever quite sever my sight from the sight
Of the woman who looks like me.

For the moon rarely beams without bringing
dark dreams to the woman who looks like me;
And the stars never rise but I feel my tight eyes
on a dark dream that looks like me; And so,
all nighttime, I lie down by the side of my
searching self and my self that hides. With a
photo from nineteen-hundred, one and three,
of a woman who looks a lot like me.


—
For more information on Jennifer Michael Hecht, please click here: http://www.jennifermichaelhecht.com/

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Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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The Best Moment of the Night
– Tony Hoagland

You had a moment with the dog,
down near the base of the butcher-block table
just as the party was getting started.

Just as the guests were bringing in
their potluck salads and vegetarian lasagna,
setting them down on the buffet,

you had an unforeseeable exchange of warmth
with this scruffy, bug-eyed creature
who let you scratch his ears.

He lives down there, among the high heels
and the cowboy boots, below the human roar
rising to its boil up above. Like his, your evening

is just beginning –but you
are lonelier than him. You think
that if you disappeared tonight,

you would not be missed for years;
yet here, the licking of the hands and face;
and here, the baring of the vulnerable belly.

You are still panting, and alive, and seeking love;
yet no one who knows you
knows, somehow,

about your wet, black nose,
or that you can wag your tail.


—
For more information on Tony Hoagland, please click here: http://www.tonyhoagland.com/
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Poem of the Week, by Anna Journey

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Diagnosis: Birds in the Blood
– Anna Journey

The hummingbird’s nervous embroidery
through beach fog by our back

patio’s potato vine
reminds me of my mother’s southern

drawl from the kitchen: She’s flying,
flying like bird! I’ve heard that

as a child I involuntarily flapped my hands
at my side during moments

of intense concentration. I’d flutter
over a drawing, a doll, a blond hamster

in a shoebox maze. There are ways
to keep from breaking

apart. My guardians. My avian
blood. I believed

birds bubbled inside me—my own
diagnosis—though the doctors called it

something else: a harmless
twitch. A body’s

crossed wires. The lost
birds of my childhood

nerves have never
returned. But when you held

my elbow as we walked the four
blocks to the boardwalk,

we saw the brief
dazzle of a black-

chinned hummingbird—the first
I’d ever seen. It sheened

and tried to sip
from my sizzled wrists’

vanilla perfume. I knew
a single one

from the magic
flock had finally found me.

—
For more about Anna Journey, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Journey
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Poem of the Week, by Philip Levine

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You Can Have It
– Philip Levine

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds,
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.


—
For more information on Philip Levine, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/philip-levine
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