poetry

Poem of the Week, by Barbara Crooker

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In the Middle
– Barbara Crooker

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between,
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

—
For more information on Barbara Crooker, please click here: http://www.barbaracrooker.com/
—
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Poem of the Week, by Leigh Hunt

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Jenny Kissed Me
– Leigh Hunt

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in;
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.

—
For more information on Leigh Hunt, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/leigh-hunt
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Poem of the Week, by Wesley McNair

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Waving Goodbye
– Wesley McNair

Why, when we say goodbye
at the end of an evening, do we deny
we are saying it at all, as in We’ll
be seeing you, or I’ll call, or Stop in,
somebody’s always at home? Meanwhile, our friends,
telling us the same things, go on disappearing
beyond the porch light into the space
which except for a moment here or there
is always between us, no matter what we do.
Waving goodbye, of course, is what happens
when the space gets too large
for words – a gesture so innocent
and lonely, it could make a person weep
for days. Think of the hundreds of unknown
voyagers in the old, fluttering newsreel
patting and stroking the growing distance
between their nameless ship and the port
they are leaving, as if to promise I’ll always
remember, and just as urgently, Always
remember me. It is loneliness, too,
that makes the neighbor down the road lift
two fingers up from his steering wheel as he passes
day after day on his way to work in the hello
that turns into goodbye? What can our own raised
fingers to for him, locked in his masculine
purposes and speeding away inside the glass?
How can our waving wipe away the reflex
so deep in the woman next door to smile
and wave on her way into her house with the mail,
we’ll never know if she is happy
or sad or lost? It can’t. Yet in that moment
before she and all the others and we ourselves
turn back to our disparate lives, how
extraordinary it is that we make this small flag
with our hands to show the closeness we wish for
in spite of what pulls us apart again
and again: the porch light snapping off,
the car picking its way down the road through the dark.

—

For more information on Wesley McNair, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/wesley-mcnair

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Poem of the Week, by Thomas Alan Orr

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Soybeans
– Thomas Alan OrrThe October air was warm and musky, blowing
Over brown fields, heavy with the fragrance
Of freshly combined beans, the breath of harvest.

He was pulling a truckload onto the scales
At the elevator near the rail siding north of town
When a big Cadillac drove up. A man stepped out,
Wearing a three-piece suit and a gold pinky ring.
The man said he had just invested a hundred grand
In soybeans and wanted to see what they looked like.

The farmer stared at the man and was quiet, reaching
For  the tobacco in the rear pocket of his jeans,
Where he wore his only ring, a threadbare circle rubbed
By working cans of dip and long hours on the backside
Of a hundred acre run. He scooped up a handful
Of small white beans, the pearls of the prairie, saying:

Soybeans look like a foot of water on the field in April
When you’re ready to plant and can’t get in;
Like three kids at the kitchen tables
Eating macaroni and cheese five nights in a row;
Or like a broken part on the combine when
Your credit with the implement dealer is nearly tapped.

Soybeans look like prayers bouncing off the ceiling
When prices on the Chicago grain market start to drop;
Or like your old man’s tears when you tell him
How much the land might bring for subdivisions.
Soybeans look like the first good night of sleep in weeks
When you unload at the elevator and the kids get Christmas.

He spat a little juice on the tire of the Cadillac,
Laughing despite himself and saying to the man:
Now maybe you can tell me what a hundred grand looks like.”

—

—

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Poem of the Week, by Carl Sandburg

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River Roads
– Carl Sandburg

Let the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.
They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere.
Let ’em hawk their caw and caw.

Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump.
He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years
And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to his head.
Let his red head drum and drum.

Let the dark pools hold the birds in a looking-glass.
And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the blur of many wings, old
swimmers from old places.

Let the redwing streak a line of vermillion on the green wood lines.
And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of a woman’s
shawl on lazy shoulders.

–For more information on Carl Sandburg, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/carl-sandburg
—

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Poem of the Week, by Coleman Barks

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Hummingbird Sleep
– Coleman Barks

A hummingbird sleeps among the wonders.
Close to dark, he settles on a roosting limb
and lowers his body temperature
to within a few degrees of the air’s own.

As the bird descends into torpor,
he assumes his heroic sleep posture,
head back, tilted beak pointing to the sky,
angling steep, Quixotic, Crimean.

This noctivation, the ornithologist word for it,
is very like what bears do through the winter.
Hummingbirds live the deep drop every night.
You can yell in his face and shake the branch.

Nothing. Gone. Where? What does he dream of?
He dreams he is the great air itself, the substance
he swims in every day, and the rising light
coming back to be his astonishing body.

—

For more information on Coleman Barks, please click here: http://www.colemanbarks.com/

—
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Poem of the Week, by Richard Kenney

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Coda
– Richard Kenney

I tried lacing loss into these lines,
thinking to bind it safely there.

But when much lifetime had raced by I
saw rather

trapped in the scrag noose, too,
joy and daylight.

I bottled also bile in these poems,
thinking to isolate

the toxin. But when much lifetime had raced by I
found it on the mantel.

I thought to lower these poems into a salt dome—
stable, it’s said, for aeons.

And who isn’t one?
Once

I tried to write invisibly,
but all lifetime is a candle.

—

F​or more information on Richard Kenney, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/richard-kenney​

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Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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The Word
– Tony Hoagland

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”
and “broccoli” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.

—

For more information about Tony Hoagland, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/tony-hoagland
—
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Miniature Torta #2: A nimbus-clouded voice

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I walked into the Y this morning and saw an old friend at the other end of the room, next to the window, studying the instructions for a new machine. She lifted her hand and tucked her dark hair behind her ear. She looked young and fit.

Happiness rushed through me at the sight of her, along with the feeling of Wow, how long has it been?

Then I realized that time had done one of its hiccups. The darkhaired woman across the room wasn’t the friend I was thinking about. I haven’t seen that particular friend, even though we live in the same city, in well over a decade. The woman I was looking at could have been her niece, or her much younger cousin.

Sometimes time picks you up and sets you down, momentarily, in another place. Another era. My old friend might not think about me anymore. The last time I saw her I was forging solo into new territory. Maybe it seemed too hard to maintain the friendship; maybe she wished I would stay put, in the place where she had always known me.

But as I stood there, looking at the familiar-looking stranger studying the machine across the room, I was suddenly back in the living room of an apartment I used to rent, back when I was struggling my way into that new life.

This was the last time I saw her. We were both sitting crosslegged on the floor and drinking red wine and she was telling me about something hard in her life. I could hear her voice, which I remember as calm and bell-like, as if all the vowels became somehow rounded and soft when they emerged from her throat into the air.

Her voice had the texture of what I imagine bubbles from a bubble-pipe would feel like if you could touch them without them popping. What a beautiful voice she had, I thought.

She must still have that voice.

I left that room and went down to the weight room and started doing pull-ups, conjuring up people from my past, to see if their voices were still there. My grandmother, yes. As clear as if she were standing right there in the Y.

Do I hear her so clearly because of the six hours of video I took of her and then had transferred to a cd and then into my computer, so that sometimes, when I’m cooking or cleaning, I pull her up on the screen and she keeps me company?

No. At least I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I will remember her voice forever and ever. But I don’t really know.

How about my best friend from childhood? She appears immediately in my mind, the way she would have looked in, say, fifth grade. Blonde hair, bangs, blue-blue eyes. She was a very small person but her voice was low, older than her years.

Was it, though? I try to listen, but I can only see her, standing in the framed-up doorway of her always-in-progress bedroom. Her voice is low and calm. I can hear it, and yet I can’t. The way I hear it is the way you remember a bubble drifting in the air, undulating in that rainbowy way, just before it vanishes. It’s the sense of a voice, but not the voice itself.

Try someone else. My friend Absalom, yes, I can hear his voice whenever I want, maybe because I spend a fair amount of time with him these days. But I distinctly remember driving to the airport to pick him up a few years ago. This would be the first time I had seen him since college, when we were great friends.

Will I even recognize him?, I remember thinking. And I also remember trying to conjure up his voice, there in the car as I drove down the highway to the airport. No. Nothing.

I pulled up to Baggage Claim and there he was, standing by a post, the same but not. Twenty and more years pass; how can someone not change? Then he called out Allie! and we both started laughing, and his voice came washing over me in that moment but also it came welling up from some deep reservoir of memory.

Now I’m picturing people from long ago in my mind and trying to conjure their voices. Some are there, others are lost. But are they really?

I’m thinking of my darkhaired friend’s voice as it was that night, the last time I saw her. Is that conversation –her soft words, filled with sorrow, and my responses– still somewhere in the world? Do the voices of everyone we know, everyone we loved, hang somewhere in the air after they’ve spoken? After they’re gone from the earth?

Does everything that rises converge, somewhere beyond where we can see and hear?

. . . In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me . . .
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.