The Week Before College Graduation

She’s right—
it’s not apathy that flattens my brain
like one of her Frisbees
as it wings through each day,
rebounding from someone else’s hand,
flying on someone else’s throw.
It’s not apathy that has curdled
my craving for sweet knowledge
so that my stomach lurches when I sit down
to parse a Spanish verb,
to examine the starched silt of Victorian England
and write one more paper
to add to the ream I’ve written
in exchange for just one, in calligraphy.
This thing that has stolen sleep from me,
that pins open my eyes to stare at nothing,
that freezes my purpose, my motivation
into a blunt cube of mute apprehension—
no, it’s not apathy.
It’s impossible to not care. No.

Someone has their fingers tangled in my hair,
pulling back my head to stare at the stars.
Something has planted my feet in the mud
and held out my arms to catch all the rain.
Some force of being, some impulse for justice
has interrupted my continuum as it did for Joshua,
has stopped my sun over Gibeon, and is screaming,
“Too many times have your epochs gone unnoticed.
Too many times has your life undergone metamorphosis
in a slow and single moment that you
were traveling too fast to see.
No more will you be carefree,
no more will you skip around your life’s transformation.
Stand, lift up your head,
and watch your being supernova into newness.
Stand, look down at your earth
and watch the quake strip your life of what has been.
Stand. This time, you will watch your butterfly struggle
from faded cocoon to fresh quickening.
The old has gone, the new is coming.

4.27.06
crystal l.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

Selecting a Reader

Selecting a Reader
by Ted Kooser

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

Famous

A friend just brought to my attention the fact that I've been "published" on the Academy of American Poets web site. Well okay, not really. It's just a response to a project they're doing for National Poetry Month, in which people send in lines of poems that are very dear to them and explain why. Click here and look under April 8 to see my entry. This is the poem my lines come from:

Famous
by Naomi Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and is not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

One Art

My life is plummeting into the abyss of the past faster than I can shake a stick at. I thought I had just posted on this thing, and nay, I find out that it has been four whole days.

Right after Easter, I have my final project in English Senior Seminar due, and I'd like to expand on my theory that this is one of, if not the best time to write and appreciate poetry. I don't know if I can pull it off, but I'll certainly have fun trying, which is what counts when I'm finishing up 19 credit hours, a part-time job, and relationships with dear, dear people I won't see again for a long time.

I think we've come to a great place in poetry--we appreciate multiplicity in form and genre, we've brought about the happy marriage of realism and romanticism, and we rely just enough on sound and rhythm to create lovely poetry, but not so much that we lose readability in the attempt to design a perfect metric scheme. Granted, some of this newer, extremely experimental stuff, as well as the voyeuristic, sexual-politics-ridden refuse I could leave behind without qualm, but fortunately, that kind of poetry seems to be in the minority.

I just convinced our school library to purchase a wealth of new poetry anthologies and collections. Anything to make that sad, but cozy little building more relevant.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Thursday Night

Thursday Night

Tell me who I am so I can be that person.
You've handed me the second fiddle--
just tell me what tune we're playing.
My sidekick suit fits;
I'd just rather not have to gasp
to keep up with you.
Tell me I am the ice in your glass
or the birds on your telephone pole.
I don't mind being unnecessary,
but it would be nice to be expected.

3.31.06
crystal l.

April is National Poetry Month!

Spring is like a perhaps hand
by e.e. cummings

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

A Selection of African-American Poetry

The Negro Speaks of Riversby Langston Hughes

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
    flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
    went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
    bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Sympathy
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
  When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
  When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats its wing
  Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
  And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting--
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
  When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
  But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--
I know why the caged bird sings!

The Bean Eaters
by Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
         is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
         tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Love Poem with Toast

Sometimes poems come at the perfect time.

Love Poem with Toast
by Miller Williams

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

Poetry

Poetry
by Don Paterson

In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps
one spark of the planet's early fires
trapped forever in its net of ice,
it's not love's later heat that poetry holds,
but the atom of the love that drew it forth
from the silence: so if the bright coal of his love
begins to smoulder, the poet hears his voice
suddenly forced, like a bar-room singer's -- boastful
with his own huge feeling, or drowned by violins;
but if it yields a steadier light, he knows
the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound
like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene.

Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water
sings of nothing, not your name, not mine.

Mad World

If you can find the Gary Jules version of this song, do. I believe it's on the Donnie Darko soundtrack.

Mad World

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very
Mad world, mad world

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher, tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me

And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very
Mad world, mad world
Enlarging your world
Mad world

Happy Valentine's Day

Poetry on a postcard.

God Says Yes To Me

A poem that will never cease to throw me off or make me think.

God Says Yes To Me
by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

(from Poetry 180, arranged by Billy Collins)

Post Secret

This week's batch of Post Secret entries are better than most. The concept still intrigues me, even though the site's gone a little down the tubes regarding cleanliness and propriety. When the secrets people post actually make sense, when they point to a common human condition--that's when I think they are most poignant. They are the things everyone thinks and no one says.

Moderation Is Not a Negation...

There are days I wish I could shout this poem at the majority of the world. But most of them wouldn't get it. (Editorial note: Thanks, Jason. I figured there was some html tag for formatting, but I was too lazy to look it up. Thanks for the assistance.)
Moderation Is Not a Negation of Intensity, But Helps Avoid Monotonyby John Tagliabue

Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself
           together
for some clear "meaning"--some momentary summary?
           no one
can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day;
           the ordinary
blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the
           health sometimes,
only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long
           long tumultuous stretches;
look what that intensity did to poor great Van Gogh!;
           linger, lunge,
scrounge and be stupid, that doesn't take much centering
           of one's forces;
as wise Whitman said "lounge and invite the soul."  Get
           enough sleep;
and not only because (as Cocteau said) "poetry is the
           literature of sleep";
be a dumb bell for a few minutes at least; we don't want
           Sunday church bells
           ringing constantly.

Invitation to the Voyage

Johannes Vermeer, Allegory of Painting (The Painter In His Studio), 1666

This afternoon I'm working on a brief analysis of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, one of the most famous French poets, for my World Literature class. The only background I know of him is the two and a half page introduction to just a few of his poems in my anthology, but he and his art are intriguing nonetheless. They say Baudelaire wrote poetry to shock, and so it seems, because even in the 21st century it still does. In his poem "The Carcass," he observes to his female companion that for all her beauty, she will one day end up as the maggot-ridden, half-eaten animal they find on their afternoon stroll, and then she will be hard pressed to "explain to the worms / Who cherish your body so fine, / That I am the keeper for corpses of love / Of the form, and the essence divine!" Encouraging stuff.

I'll post something a bit more palatable of his here. "The Voyage," according to my Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, is a description of "the opposite of inertia, an active search for goals always out of reach." The "Invitation" summons the reader to "an exotic land of peace, beauty, and sensuous harmony. The voyage is imaginary, of course, implying two forms of escape from reality: an escape out of real time into a primeval accord of the senses, and an escape into another artistic vision--the glowing interiors painted by such Dutch masters as Jan Vermeer."

Invitation to the Voyage
by Charles Baudelaire
translated by Richard Wilbur

My child, my sister, dream
How sweet all things would seem
Were we in that kind land to live together,
And there love slow and long,
There love and die among
Those scenes that image you, that sumptuous weather.
Drowned suns that glimmer there
Through cloud-disheveled air
Move me with such a mystery as appears
Within those other skies
Of your treacherous eyes
When I behold them shining through their tears.

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

Furniture that wears
The lustre of the years
Softly would glow within our glowing chamber,
Flowers of rarest bloom
Proffering their perfume
Mixed with the vague fragrances of amber;
Gold ceilings would there be,
Mirrors deep as the sea,
The walls all in an Eastern splendor hung--
Nothing but should address
The soul's loneliness,
Speaking her sweet and secret native tongue.

There, there is nothing but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

See, sheltered from the swells
There in the still canals
Those drowsy ships that dream of sailing forth;
It is to satisfy
Your least desire, they ply
Hither through all the waters of the earth.
The sun at close of day
Clothes the fields of hay,
Then the canals, at last the town entire
In hyacinth and gold:
Slowly the land is rolled
Sleepward under a sea of gentle fire.

There, there is nothing but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

Some Nights I Am Glad

some nights i am glad to be caught up
in this cosmic squall called life
i rest in thankfulness for my place
in this sickly sway of the heavens
for my heart that beats
with the rhythm of the falling stars

it means i am small
it means i matter

i am the dust speck
in this oyster of a universe
and it means that someday i will dwell
in the heart of the great luminous pearl
of redemption

1.25.06
crystal l.

The Abnormal Is Not Courage

I think it is people like my grandparents who have taught me the truth of this poem. They are not headstrong. They do not rush in when a hero is needed to save the day. They are gently saving it, bit by bit, behind the scenes: digging rocks out of the garden, loving their children, cooking a meal, carving and fitting fresh, clean wood.

Danger calls for urgency. Extraordinary circumstances need actions that are un-pondered; they call upon sheer survival instinct. It is courageous to block a speeding bullet for someone, or to march out in war, or to save a person from drowning, but I hold that courage is also steady and perpetual. It sometimes requires great thought and detail. The single mother who cooks dinner every night after work; the boy who musters the nerve to ask his teacher for help; the misunderstood artist who continues to create... these too demonstrate courage.

It is the kind of courage I want. This description fascinates me: Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality. My courage does not consist of those things which I am not, but of the "crescendo" of those things I already am. My courage will not manifest itself in a marvelous act that is completely out of my character; it will be the fruition, "the culmination," of what good I am currently cultivating in my character: love, patience, wisdom, joy. If courage were the abnormal, we would think of it as a miracle visited on the lucky, on the brave, only occasionally. If courage can indeed be cultivated, it must grow out of something that is already in us.

I don't know about you, but that inspires me.

The Abnormal Is Not Courage
by Jack Gilbert

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

(taken from "The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry since 1940," edited by Mark Strand, Signet Classic, copyright 1969)

Wunderkind

This song plays during the credits of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and appears on the soundtrack. Specially written for the film, it functions both as Lucy's theme song and the anthem of someone new to the numinous, entranced with the beyond, with the place where fantasy meets supernatural reality.

I do love this song, but saying much more than that would cheapen it. Suffice it to say that I have my own wardrobe and my own Narnia, places I see shadows of in my head that I believe will one day be fully revealed. Now we see through a glass darkly... It is no shallowness, no frivolous child's fantasy to seek this "deeper wonderment." Perhaps it is for the poets and artists and composers to see more clearly, but I think everyone carries a bit of it in them. That is, if they haven't completely trampled the child, the wunderkind, that lives inside them. May our theological profundity always be tempered with a healthy wonder, a divine curiosity and vision. May Narnia's virgin snow always lie on the other side of the common wardrobe.

Wunderkind
by Alanis Morissette

Oh, perilous place walk backwards toward you
Blink disbelieving eyes chilled to the bone
Most visibly brave, no apprehended bloom
First to take this foot to virgin snow

I am magnet for all kinds of deeper wonderment
I am a wunderkind, ohh oh oh
And I live the envelope pushed far enough to believe this
I am a princess on the way to my throne

Destined to serve, destined to roam

Oh, ominous place spellbound and un-child-proofed
My least favorite shelter bear alone
Compatriots in face, they’d cringe if I told you
Our best back pocket secret, our bond full blown

And I am a magnet for all kinds of deeper wonderment
I am a wunderkind, ohh oh oh
And I am pioneer naïve enough to believe this
I am a princess on the way to my throne

Destined to seek, destined to know

Most beautiful place reborn and blown off roof
My view about-face whether great will be done

And I am a magnet for all kinds of deeper wonderment
I am a wunderkind, ohh oh oh
I am a groundbreaker naïve enough to believe this
I am a princess on the way to my throne

And I am a magnet for all kinds of deeper wonderment
I am a wunderkind, ohh oh oh
I am a Joan of Arc and smart enough to believe this
I am a princess on the way to my throne

Destined to reign, destined to roam
Destined to reign, destined to roam

To be of use

Another selection from Good Poems. These speak for themselves.

To be of use
by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.