poetry

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Djanikian

Posted on by alisonmcghee

First Winter in America
– Gregory Djanikian

I walked out into the January blizzard,
my breath froze into small clouds,
and ice was hanging from the trees.

The dunes were dreamy animals;
I heard shovels striking music.

White eyelashes, white mittens,
I thought I could become
whatever I touched.

A year before, in another language,
I held the desert in my hand,
I tasted the iridescent sea.

Now I stayed quiet, afraid
I would never see it again, the sky
shattered into a million pieces
and falling around me.

I watched my mother inside
walking back and forth in her heavy coat,
and my sister rubbing her hands
to make some kind of spark.

I could imagine furnaces rumbling
all over America, heat rising
through the vents, parching the air.

And I stayed where I was,
someplace I had no name for,
not for the snow or my standing still
and watching it fall

beautiful wreckage
deepening
with hardly a sound.


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For more information about Gregory Djanikian, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gregory-djanikian
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Poem of the Week, by Julia Koets

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Paper Birds
– Julia Koets

Moths must tire of sleeping near the ceiling.
All that waiting for their wings to match
color that changes where wall folds to eave.

This afternoon I found her at the table, asleep
amongst paper, delicate as dreams, elaborate
birds made of folding, made for our ceiling.

I try unfolding one, tail and beak of pleats,
green and yellow flowers on a patch
of wing. No cuts or glue to hold to evening,

to have them flying from fishing line. Geese,
swans, a hummingbird. Window unlatched,
and wind wakes their sleeping from the ceiling.

Song of paper rustling; song of crease
and bend; song of watching
color that changes where wall folds to eave.

We fall asleep like this, a counting sheep,
a listening for paper birds, a grasping
for sounds that sleep near the ceiling,
in colors that change where wall folds to eave.


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For more information on Julia Koets, please click here: http://www.versedaily.org/2012/aboutjuliakoets.shtml
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Poem of the Week, by Rick Barot

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Brown Refrigerator
– Rick Barot

You don’t have to understand it
but you will carry it anyway.
A couple whose baby died,
when they had to move
to another state, took the baby
from the years-long ground
and brought her with them.
They did this again a second
time, their memory always
tied to its embodiment,
new burials for an old grief.
In a short film I once saw,
ants lifted away the silver
and gold confetti from a party,
making a trail of suns
and moons on the floor.
The filmmaker must have put
something sweet on the circles,
like a painter dabbing
little points of white paint
to give highlights to an eyeball.
Some of the recipes that
a friend keeps making
go so far back in her family
the recipes are like snapshots
of villages and forests,
mountains and falling snow.
Apples and trout rise up
into the night’s constellations,
a dark without yellow stars.
What I remember of childhood
sometimes comes down
to the brown refrigerator
in our house. Its chrome
handle was always angry
with static, so that now when
I reach for the doorknob
or the gas pump, the sharp
charge on my fingers is
childhood calling its child back.


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For more information about Rick Barot, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rick-barot
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Poem of the Week, by Emily Rechnitz

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Wedding
– Emily Rechnitz

I stumbled in high heels
across the wood chips
of the Christmas-tree farm
to take my place with the other guests
under coarse pine boughs.

In a coned damsel cap
the bride glimmered
through the woods, materialized
at the altar microphone.

In the barbecue line
his mother whispered on my neck,
“I thought you would be the one!”

I watched the bride and groom
shake hands, stared at his profile
til it buzzed, remembering
2 a.m. behind the high school
when we rocked on a blanket
rubbing jeans into jeans
until the moon jumped and I fell
off the hill slowly, a diamond in glycerine.

I remember walking down a road to meet him,
how the air tingled, in love
with how I looked in my underwear,
dancing in front of his mirror.


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I could not find any recent information on Emily Rechnitz and her poetry – anyone out there in the know, please update me.
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Poem of the Week, by Laura Kasischke

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Bike Ride with Older Boys

     – Laura Kasischke

The one I didn’t go on.

I was thirteen,
and they were older.
I’d met them at the public pool. I must

have given them my number. I’m sure

I’d given them my number,
knowing the girl I was. . .

It was summer. My afternoons
were made of time and vinyl.
My mother worked,
but I had a bike. They wanted

to go for a ride.
Just me and them. I said
okay fine, I’d
meet them at the Stop-n-Go
at four o’clock.
And then I didn’t show.

I have been given a little gift—
something sweet
and inexpensive, something
I never worked or asked or said
thank you for, most
days not aware
of what I have been given, or what I missed—

because it’s that, too, isn’t it?
I never saw those boys again.
I’m not as dumb
as they think I am

but neither am I wise. Perhaps

it is the best
afternoon of my life. Two
cute and older boys
pedaling beside me—respectful, awed. When we

turn down my street, the other girls see me …

Everything as I imagined it would be.

Or, I am in a vacant field. When I
stand up again, there are bits of glass and gravel
ground into my knees.
I will never love myself again.
Who knew then
that someday I would be

thirty-seven, wiping
crumbs off the kitchen table with a sponge, remembering
them, thinking
of this—

those boys still waiting
outside the Stop-n-Go, smoking
cigarettes, growing older.


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For more information on Laura Kasischke, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/laura-kasischke
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Poem of the Week, by Patrick Cavanaugh

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The Dubliners
– Patrick Kavanagh

On Raglan Road of an autumn day
I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare
That I might one day rue
I saw the danger and I passed
Along the enchanted way
And said let grief be a fallen leaf
At the dawning of the day

On Grafton Street in November
We tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen
The worth of passion’s pledge
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts
And I not making hay
Oh I loved too much and by such by such
Is happiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind
I gave her the secret signs
Known to the artists who have known
The true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint I did not stint
I gave her poems to say
With her own name there
And her own dark hair
Like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet
I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should
A creature made of clay
When the angel woos the clay
He’ll lose his wings at the dawn of day


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For more information on Patrick Kavanagh, please click here: http://www.tcd.ie/English/patrickkavanagh/life.html
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Poem of the Week, by Adelia Prado

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The Mystical Rose
– Adélia Prado (translated from the Brazilian Portuguese by Ellen Doré Watson)

The first time
I became conscious of form,
I said to my mother:
“Dona Armanda has a basket in her kitchen
where she keeps tomatoes and onions”
and began fretting that even lovely things
eventually spoil,
until one day I wrote:
“It was here in this room that my father died,
here that he wound the clock
and rested his elbows
on what he thought was the windowsill
but was the threshold of death.”
I understood that words grouped like that
made it possible to live without
the things they describe,
that my father was returning, indestructible.
It was as if someone had painted a picture
of Dona Armanda’s basket and said:
“Now you can eat the fruit.”
So, there is order in the world!
—where does it come from?
And why does order, which is joy itself,
and bathes in a different light
than the light of day,
make the soul sad?
We must protect the world from time’s corrosion,
cheat time itself.
And so I kept writing: “My father died in this room …
Night, you can come on down,
your blackness can’t erase this memory.”
That was my first poem.


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For more information on Adelia Prado, please click here: http://bombsite.com/articles/2289
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Poem of the Week, by Lisel Mueller

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What the Dog Perhaps Hears
– Lisel Mueller

If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn’t a shudder
too high for us to hear.

What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.


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For more information on Lisel Mueller, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lisel-mueller
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Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Little Things
– Sharon Olds

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night. I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have –
as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.


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

Posted on by alisonmcghee

In Michael Robins’s class minus one
– Bob Hicok

At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River.
It raises its hand.
It asks if metaphor should burn.
He says fire is the basis for all forms of the mouth.
He asks, why did you fill the boy with your going?
I didn’t know a boy had been added to me, the river says.
Would you have given him back if you knew?
I think so, the river says, I have so many boys in me,
I’m worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day.
Have you written a poem for us? he asks the river,
and the river reads its poem,
and the other students tell the river
it sounds like a poem the boy would have written,
that they smell the boy’s cigarettes
in the poem, they feel his teeth
biting the page.
And the river asks, did this boy dream of horses?
because I suddenly dream of horses, I suddenly dream.
They’re in a circle and the river says, I’ve never understood
round things, why would leaving come back
to itself?
And a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it
against the river, and the kiss flows away
but the river wants it back, the river makes sounds
to go after the kiss.
And they all make sounds for the river to carry to the boy.
And the river promises to never surrender the boy’s shape
to the ocean.

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For more information about Bob Hicok, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/bob-hicok
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