poetry

Poem of the Week, by Michelle Boisseau

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Collect Call
– Michelle Boisseau

Whatever he means, my brother means no harm.
It’s 6 a.m. in his time zone. Was he awake
all night dreaming these children? a girl
my daughter’s age named Music,
and 12-year-old twin sons
born six months apart:
Seth Gábriel and Seth Gäbriel, named
for an archangel of double messages
whose secret translations my brother keeps.

And he meant no harm years ago
when he scooped up a toddler at the zoo
and ran with her as far as Monkey Island
before the crowd pried away the child he fought
to save from them. While he was strapped
onto the stretcher and lifted, a cracker on a plate,
he watched me watch him speed away,
climb the stairs that wind through a hole
in the clouds and close around him like an eye.

“Oh, I have lots of children,”
he suddenly remembers, “lots and lots,
but I never get to see them.”
Perhaps each tooth he lost was sown
into a child that sprang up like a god
with a fanciful name. I hunch the phone
against my shoulder, try not to set him off:
“And how do you manage to support them all?”
“I give them lots of ideas.”

Upstairs I hear doors slamming, the kids
awake, running, laughing, a game
of can’t-catch-me. The winner chooses
the place at the table; the other pours the milk.
Perhaps he means the wind loved him.
Or that the blond aspen behind the Seven-Eleven
wept grateful in his arms.

Or maybe he does have real children,
sometime a woman slowly undressed
a small nervous man and gave him
a bit of evidence he wasn’t denied
every fruit in the garden—children,
jobs, houses, beds—our easy windfall.

—
For more information on Michelle Boisseau, please click here: http://www.michelleboisseau.com/bio.html

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Poem of the Week, by Max Garland

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Sciurus Carolinesis
– Max Garland      

It’s hopeless how she loves this life.
The gray squirrel digs a small moon’s
worth of craters in the yard.
Some she fills, some leaves open.
I’ve seen her work a walnut, still green,
round and round, shaving the surface
down to the meat. It moves in her claws
like a planet, or a bead
bigger and quicker than worry.
By love, I mean she uses the day
down to the last morsel of light—digs, barks,
insults the crow, wields
and lashes her tail like a glorified whip.
There’s a charge in her, wild volts.
A livid motion, leaping from red pine
to hackberry, the single forepaw catching first,
swinging under, then over, then onto
the branch. She’s a circus
when she takes to the power lines,
racing the live wire above the lowly
addresses. She’s a spiral of serious sleep
in the high hollow of the pin oak.
By love, I mean filling herself
with small right intentions. By life,
I mean she looks at you from the railings.
A kind of dare is in her, her tail curled
like a bass clef, or mutant fern.
You won’t catch her. She’s scrolling
from scent to sound to slightest motion.
However the light moves
might be ruin, or rich enough to rob.
The way she ransacks, hoards, loses,
lashes, bluffs the crouched cat,
the unleashed dog, her death,
a dozen times a day, is what I mean
by hopeless how she loves this life.

—
For more information about Max Garland, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Garland
—
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Poem of the Week, by Sydney Lea

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To a Young Father
– Sydney Lea

This riverbend must have always been lovely.
Take the one-lane iron bridge shortcut across
the town’s west end and look downstream
to where the water backs up by the falls.
Boys once fished there with butterball bait
because the creamery churned by hydro
and the trout were so rich, says my ancient neighbor,
they tasted like heaven, but better. Try to
stop on the bridge if no one’s coming
to see the back of the furniture mill

in upside-down detail on the river,
assuming the day is clear and still.
I’ve lived here and driven this road forever.
Strange therefore that I’ve never taken
the same advice I’m offering you.
I’ve lived here, but I’ve too often been racing
to get to work or else back home
to my wife and our younger school-age children,
the fifth and last of whom will be headed
away to college starting this autumn.

I hope I paid enough attention
to her and the others, in spite of the lawn,
the plowing, the bills, the urgent concerns
of career and upkeep. Soon she’ll be gone.
Try to stop on the bridge in fall:
that is, when hardwood trees by the river
drop carmine and amber onto the surface;
or in spring, when the foliage has gotten no bigger
than any newborn infant’s ear
such that the light from sky to stream

makes the world, as I’ve said—or at least this corner—
complete, in fact double. I’d never have dreamed
a household entirely empty of children.
It’ll be the first time in some decades,
which may mean depression, and if so indifference
to the river’s reflections, to leaves and shades,
but more likely—like you, if you shrug off my counsel
or even take it—it’ll be through tears
that I witness each of these things, so lovely.
They must have been lovely all these years.

—
For more information on Sydney Lea, please click here: http://sydneylea.net/
—
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Poem of the Week, by Jeanne Murray Walker

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If Found, Drop In Any Mail Box. Owner Will Pay Postage
– Jeanne Murray Walker

I’m grading papers in the motel room,
the teacher in me watching as my students
fumble with their keys in the lock of the world.

I crack down on the one who misspells
the minuet amount of imagination a person needs
to live well. And I give a C to the one I suspect

of telling me whatever I want: that summer is a newspaper
printed with no alphabet but pleasure. But I confess,
I feel a twinge for the one who postures,

as if he can’t imagine anyone loving him for himself.
And I admit, I cheat on the good side to help the one
who writes that he and his girl are one cell,

sliced apart by the scalpel of her parents.
When I get to the one who says
that he’s a lonely space ship flying between stars,

I put my red pen down. I could go under the knife
with him, I think, knowing that I won’t.
But let’s say this. It surprises me to find out I love them.

I’d like to tell someone, the woman in the next room, maybe,
like to spread this sweetness, to bring about some
minor good. Can I offer you this pale translation

of my students’ essays? Nothing special.
The sound of their keys turning in the lock of the world.
I drop it as I close the door, in case you need it.

—
For more information on Jeanne Murray Walker, please click here: http://www.jeannemurraywalker.com/poems.php

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Poem of the Week, by Phebe Hanson

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Somewhere I’ll Find You
– Phebe Hanson

So we moved from my small town in western Minnesota
to St. Paul where I had to go to Murray High, a school
with more people than in the entire town of Sacred Heart,

and I had to walk two and a half miles every day because
there were no school buses, but it turned out to be not so
bad after all because I met a boy in confirmation class who

let me ride on the handlebars of his bike on the way home from
school and one Sunday my dad even let this boy pick me up
to go for a walk in Como Park, since after all the paths were

safe, filled with many families swarming with children, and
even though my dad knew the devil went about the city like a
roaring lion seeking whom he might devour, he let me go

with this boy because after all he was a Luther Leaguer and
we had sung together sitting side by side in church, “Yield not to
temptation, for yielding is sin / each vict’ry will help you,

some other to win / fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue /
look only to Jesus, He’ll carry you through,” but as soon as we
left my house this boy said he was going to take me some other

place I’d like very much and it was going to be a surprise so
off we went on the streetcar and new to the city I had no idea where
we were going until we got off and were standing in front of a

movie marquee and I said, “I can’t go in. You know my father
doesn’t let me go to movies. It’s a sin,” but he gently guided me
with his seductive hands, saying “Just come into the lobby to talk.”

There below the sign “Somewhere I’ll Find You,” starring Clark Gable
and Lana Turner in a “torrid tale of love between two people caught
in the chaos of war,” he persuaded me at least to go inside and sit

down and watch part of the movie and if I didn’t like it, we could get
right back on the streetcar and go to Como Park, so I decided since
I already was in this lobby den of iniquity surrounded by posters of

Jezebel movie queens and devilish leading men, I was doomed anyway,
so I might as well go into the darkness with him and even let him put
his arm around me and hold my hand and that’s the way it’s been ever since.


—
For more information on Phebe Hanson, please click here: http://www.rusoffagency.com/authors/hanson_p/phebe_hanson.htm
—
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Poem of the Week, by John Hodgen

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My Mother Swimming
– John Hodgen

Chest-deep, my brothers and I, the waters of Comet Pond leaping at our little hearts
as we held on for dear life, shrivel-fingered, blue, to the cement boat dock,
as far as we dared go, the self-declared demarcation of our drowning,
our father back on the blanket, lonely as Liechtenstein, his shirt still on, always,
the polioed hunch of his back like a boat overturned on a beach,
my mother swimming alone before us, back and forth, smoothly, shining,
this one time and never again. Soon she would come in to us, gleaming,
pack up the blanket, the basket, sit like silence next to my father all the way home,
their heads and shoulders looming before us, the Scylla and Charybdis
we knew even then we would have to get past to make our way in the world.

But for now, for just this moment, she glowed. She showed us,
moving like language along the water, like handwriting on the horizon,
that even in the oceans of darkness that would come,
the long rivers of abandoned office buildings on a Sunday afternoon,
the silent crow’s-nest shadows of all the true angels of death,
the first step we would take from the train, alighting into the darkness
of our hometown, our mother and father no longer there to meet us,
their shadows long gone, run off and drowned somewhere –
There will be these moments, she said, smiling, as she turned on her back,
floating, moments like diamonds in our hands, candles on the waves,
that we could make our way to them, hold them one by one,
the gold buttons of the opera singer as he changes music into light,
the smile on the face of your lover as she closes the door and turns to you,
the twilight that gathers all afternoon in the nave of the cathedral,
the silver beads of water on the head of the baby being baptized,
the breath she takes in like a dream and lets go.

—
For more information on John Hodgen, please click here: http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2010/09/john-hodgen.html
—
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Poem of the Week, by Thomas Lux

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From The Neighborhood of Make-Believe
– Thomas Lux

It is elsewhere, elsewhere, the neighborhood you seek.
The neighborhood you long for,
where the gentle trolley –ding, ding– passes
through, where the adults are kind
and, better, sane,
that neighborhood is gone, no, never
existed, though it should have
and had a chance once
in the hearts of women, men (farmers dreamed
this place, and teachers, book writers, oh thousands
of workers, mothers prayed for it, hunchbacks,
nurses, blind men, maybe most of all soldiers,
even a few generals, millions
through the millennia…), some of whom,
despite anvils on their chests,
despite taking blow after blow across shoulders and necks,
despite derision and scorn,
some of whom still, still
stand up everyday against ditches swollen with blood,
against ignorance, still dreaming,
full-fledged adults, still fighting,
trying to build a door to that place,
trying to pry open the ugly,
bullet-pocked, and swollen gate
to the other side,
the neighborhood of make-believe.


—
For more information on Thomas Lux, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/thomas-lux
—
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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Shoulders
– Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.


—
For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.
—
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Poem of the Week, by Philip Booth

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First Lesson
– Philip Booth

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

 

For more information on Philip Booth, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Margaret Mackinnon

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The Invented Child
– Margaret Mackinnon
(I spring from the pages into your arms.)

Someone who once knew him said
Walt Whitman sang before breakfast
behind his bedroom door—
broken arias, bits of patriotic tunes,
the way my child sings this morning
in early spring, the way
the raucous mockingbirds fill the warming air
with their own borrowed songs.
The world is once again its hopeful green.
Bold forsythia bursts its spindly stalks.
The young trees again flicker on the slopes,
and when he ended his days on dusty
Mickle Street, Whitman must have remembered
mornings like this—
Nights, no longer really sleeping, confined
to the paralytic chair, say he remembered
that earlier, softer air, the light on the water
in that clearing he had called Timber Creek,
the idea of it—
Say he thought again of those days
when he was still fat & red & tanned,
when he’d strip off his clothes
and roll his great flesh in the pond’s black marl.

In the close, bug-ridden room in Camden,
he spoke, sometimes, of a grandson,
fine boy, a Southern child who sometimes wrote,
once stopped by—
No one ever saw him.
An old poet. His invented child.
Though why shouldn’t a man
who’d always lived in words create something
to endure his sore, soiled world?
There is at Timber Creek, Whitman wrote about the trees
their rough bark, the massive limbs and trunks
as if they were the bodies of those he’d loved.
Some people believe the souls of unborn children
rest in trees. Say he saw them, then,
caught their soft breath
sweet as the spice bush, lush as the early crocus.
In the long, hard work of his imagination,
say he watched their disembodied hearts
sway among the new leaves,
watched the eager light shine on another fine morning
until the sky lifted above him
like exultant, fresh desire—
and the children descended,
and then the crowns of the trees were all on fire.

 

– For more information on Margaret Mackinnon, please click here: http://imagejournal.org/page/artist-of-the-month/margaret-mackinnon

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