May 2013
5 posts
9 tags
Moving day
When it’s time, the hotels of Ardmore no longer interesting in their facades, the small bags of peanuts you used to buy suddenly twice as big, as if someone far away, looking
out a window at a barge, had thought your appetite was asking to be doubled, and the little girl you showed how to affix playing cards to her spokes has gone off
to college, that school where anthrax arrived in a...
8 tags
When Big Joan Sets Up
Imagine having enough left to break a bottle over it. Listen how pretty, listen
for glass in nothing nearby shattering, just morning birds that do not wake whoever
is not sleeping. Come here Little Birdie, come here. No matter how great the gains
so many complaints hang— The grass full of worms, and still all that squawking,
like a couple talking and talking about never talking. The...
9 tags
Attempted Banquet
Lugging of shellfish in coolers, boiling, and bouillabaissing—summer luncheon we had tried to give, canceling twice when the parasite had come back to my gut, then trying again, recurrent hope of serving up the creatures of the shallow deep. We joked about putting it off, but underneath the joking, grim and hidden, he wanted to leave me, and he was working toward it and against it,...
8 tags
The Binding
We love them more than life, these children who are born to us.
How did Mary endure it? It was more than she bargained for, the white lily light, the passive acceptance of the sacred seed. For the daughter of the well at dusk, it was a moment of vanity. He had taken notice.
He was like the stranger who rides into town who in his worldliness sees the gullible girl and sweeps her off her feet. He...
8 tags
Twenty Thousand Songs
Twenty thousand songs he lived in like a self. Most ~ three minutes long—a duration—a form derived from the piano-roll. And as the sparrow sings. Twenty thousand songs gone digital (machine-ghosts), a collection excerpted from the economy of bodies except for the three minutes becoming, blaring now in my ear—as the sparrow sings—and as I cross the bridge of day: the young,...
April 2013
9 posts
8 tags
Beneath all the hoof prints:
I’ve known little of science but understood the heart beats like a caged god. I’ve been too something my whole damn life. I’ve buried chandeliers, turned domestic work into love. I’ve traced an elegy to its teeth. It looked like pushing in reverse. I’ve been having a hard time separating the kindness of strangers from the motives of friends. I’ve torn the...
8 tags
Easter Morning
On Easter morning all over America the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.
We’re not supposed to have “peasants” but there are tens of millions of them frying potatoes on Easter morning, cheap and delicious with catsup.
If Jesus were here this morning he might be eating fried potatoes with my friend who has a ‘51 Dodge and a ‘72 Pontiac.
When his...
8 tags
Piscatory Diner
I’m squeezed behind Formica and chrome, sitting in a diner booth waiting for my steak and eggs, spitting tobacco into an empty Coke can,
and scratching some words on a paper napkin, just hoping to hook a rhythm on a stale bait while
outside in the millbrick midnight, the canals of the Merrimack run red in the blood glow of brake lights.
Casting my lines across these city veins where carp...
7 tags
Rough Draft of a Poem About Heartbeats
Hers first. The beat of it. Something original, like a washing machine or a car tire with two big nails in it. Describe the tire. It has to be black.
Describe changing the tire with your father and talk about his heartbeat, which will involve the radio bump in his chest where the defibrillator is.
Pretend your father’s heart is made of pennies. Mention that the wires are copper—it...
9 tags
Love Letter to Justin Timberlake
When I think of you it is always of a small, locked room. A principal’s dark, full lips pressed together in a smirk. A glare from his fat, gold herringbone chain burning tears in my eyes, my face red as yours in direct sunlight. And even as my voice shut down that day, I knew ditching to buy *NSYNC’s CD was worth more than Prescriptive Speech class. What I heard: four voices harmonized...
8 tags
After All These Years You Know They Were Wrong...
It’s Palm Springs and you’ve slipped away from a day of swimming and drinking to lie for a minute with your eyes closed in the other room while the air-conditioner moan-groans outside the window—your body chilled from sunburn and untouched for months. Startled from near sleep you hear a crash of laughter, man-laughter, the slapping of bare backs, hands smacking the skin of men drying by...
7 tags
Aunt Eloe Schools the Scarecrow
As the crow flies, you say? Come now you god of the crossroads, I’m talking ravens here. Corvids are corvids, yes, but like a dog
compared to a wolf you can’t call a crow a raven and have the word “nevermore” mean the same thing. Now, two facts: ravens mate
for life, but this raven, let’s call him Caw the raven husband, he lived with the wolf wife Howl. You...
9 tags
Useless Landscape
A lone cloudburst hijacked the Doppler radar screen, a bandit hung from the gallows, in rehearsal for the broke-necked man, damn him, tucked under millet in the potter’s plot. Welcome to disaster’s alkaline kiss, its little clearing edged with twigs, and posted against trespass. Though finite, its fence is endless.
Lugs of prune plums already half-dehydrated. Lugged toward shelf...
8 tags
The Beauty of Busted Fruit
When we were children, we traced our knees, shins, and elbows for the slightest hint of wound, searched them for any sad red-blue scab marking us both victim and survivor.
All this before we knew that some wounds can’t heal, before we knew the jagged scars of Great-Grandmother’s amputated legs, the way a rock can split a man’s head open to its red syrup, like a watermelon, the...
March 2013
11 posts
8 tags
Leisure, Hannah, Does Not Suit You (2)
—After Catullus
My house disgusted me, so I slept in a tent. My tent disgusted me, so I slept in the grass. The grass disgusted me, so I slept in my body, which I strung like a hammock from two ropes. My body disgusted me, so I carved myself out of it.
My use of knives disgusted me because it was an act of violence. My weakness disgusted me because “Hannah” means...
8 tags
Love Poem w/Strat
My baby’s got a solid-body guitar, rocks it hard like dinosaurs eating cars, plays it dirty like worlds exploding, like Stevie Ray’s battered strat, Badlands sticker on the back, he’s got a fever for the steamroller, like Hendrix on Voodoo Child, like Jeff Beck avalanching notes into air/ my baby’s a gunslinger, plays his guitar rock-hard— he likes it old-style, he...
5 tags
Anonymous asked: what is the meaning of relavance and technique of a poem?
8 tags
What We Take With Us
I make them memorize soliloquies, some lines to keep, should they be taken prisoner, like John McCain, in some foreign jail, no words to read, no paper to write, just the wild ranting of Hamlet, Macbeth, to take them through the darkest nights. I urge them to know Emily, Wordsworth, Whitman, some Keats, seal the music in their souls.
High schoolers smirk at me. I smile, for I know of prisons...
7 tags
Anonymous asked: in the poem mad girls love song are the images literal or abstract?
5 tags
Anonymous asked: Hi - I liked your "take" on Rilke's "I am much too alone...". Given your collective love of poetry and evangelizing about it, I recently came across a blog: - illsandthrillsoflove on Blogspot - you might want to check out. Very interesting range of selections and commentary.
8 tags
The Invisible Man (continued)
I am no better than my brother, but I smile, because when I walk through the streets —the only one who does not exist— life flows around me like rivers, I am the only one who is invisible, no mysterious shadows, no gloom and darkness, everyone speaks to me, everyone wants to tell me things, to talk about their relatives, their misery and their joy, everyone passes by, and everyone...
7 tags
Turbulence
There’ll be turbulence. You’ll drop your book to hold your water bottle steady. Your mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall may who ne’er hung there let him watch the movie. The plane’s supposed to shudder, shoulder on like this. It’s built to do that. You’re designed to tremble too. Else break Higher you climb, trouble in mind...
9 tags
The Local Human Being
Often now, this body she wore…this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing, nothing at all. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
I chanced a map on how to find your soft-spotted heart between the pitter-patter of bodies when misbehaving. Past the theater where you sat stricken before kissing a brace-faced eighth grader. That girl you speak of, had she a nicely defined clavicle?...
7 tags
Fear of Happiness
Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had: As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight, Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through, Though someone always said I’d be all right— Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad (The nothing rising underfoot). Then later The high-dive at the pool,...
7 tags
We Are All the Animals
If I was an arsonist I would burn my clothes & your clothes & pin all my hopes on your chest partly because you resemble Newport Kentucky the way I remember it was when I was six years old partly because my pants don’t fit right & I wanna jellyfish our legs wanna be your sperm whale I have the idea you get the idea & it’s 1:52 pm in October would it be ok...
February 2013
7 posts
10 tags
The Secret of Soil
The secret of smoke is that it will fill any space with walls, no matter how delicate: lung cell, soapy bubbly blown from a bright red ring.
The secret of soil is that it is alive— a step in the forest means you are carried on the back of a thousand bugs. The secret
I give you is on page forty-two of my old encyclopedia set. I cut out all the pictures of minerals and gemstones. I could not...
9 tags
Why God Invented the Cold
To give the people a break from repositioning their lawn chairs. To give us a glimpse of life without bugs. Without weeping welts, the odd fever, and yellow smears on our shoes.
To confuse the boys. To force them to ask, “Why do teenage girls smoke outside in January until their nipples get stiff? Why do they stand around with their coats undone and life
smacked onto their cheeks? ...
10 tags
Journal of Catherine Terry
5 December 1920
Robert Davis’s father and two brothers are dead and Nathan Stokes is missing. When they told Mrs. Davis, she slid down on herself like melting wax on a candle then shook off the women who rushed to hold her. She turned—even the air around her seemed bruised—walked through the crowd to the wall of fallen rock blocking the drift mouth and pressed her ear against...
10 tags
Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem
My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think
praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this is exactly what’s happening,
it’s what they write...
7 tags
Poem
And if it snowed and snow covered the drive he took a spade and tossed it to one side. And always tucked his daughter up at night. And slippered her the one time that she lied.
And every week he tipped up half his wage. And what he didn’t spend each week he saved. And praised his wife for every meal she made. And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.
And for his mum he hired a...
7 tags
After Love
Afterward, the compromise. Bodies resume their boundaries.
These legs, for instance, mine. Your arms take you back in.
Spoons of our fingers, lips admit their ownership.
The bedding yawns, a door blows aimlessly ajar
and overhead, a plane singsongs coming down.
Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when
the wolf, the mongering wolf who stands outside the self
lay lightly...
8 tags
Poetry
Its door opens near. It’s a shrine by the road, it’s a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon, it says, “Look around, listen. Feel the air.” It interrupts international telephone lines with a tune. When traffic lines jam, it gets out and dances on the bridge. If great people get distracted by fame they forget this essential kind of breathing and they die inside their...
January 2013
11 posts
7 tags
Lucifer
You can read almost anything about angels, how they bite off the heads first, copulate with tigers, tortured Miles Davis until he stuck a mute in his trumpet to torture them back. The pornographic magazines ported into the redwoods. The sweetened breath of the starving. The prize livestock rolls over on her larval young, the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs of the clockworks. I would...
11 tags
Calamity Jane Informs Wild Bill of His Faults...
I used to think there was no better smell than gun powder searing flesh, but turns out leather smeared with dirt and sweat beats it, and you and me, we smelled a lot of it on each other briaring our way through the territory. I’m sure you would’ve liked to see me strip out of a corset and bloomers, let the ribbon in my hair...
7 tags
If
For Julie
If I could tie a river around my love’s waist like ribbon, make sails out of her blood and pin down death like a squirming bug.
If I could lift and rock each coffin in my arms I would start with hers.
--John Rybicki
Read this poem about five times. Read it silently, read it aloud, read it slowly. Just read it again. Isn’t it the saddest thing...
8 tags
One Today by Richard Blanco
For today’s poem, I want to direct you to The New York Times for the full-text of “One Today” by the 2013 inaugural poet Richard Blanco. Both of us at Structure and Style are proud of our President and thrilled that he was re-elected, but regardless of your political leanings, this poem is beautiful, so read it and give “thanks for a love/ that loves you back.”
-S
10 tags
Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie: she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded...
10 tags
Odi et Amo
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
I hate and I love. Ask, if you wish, why this is so— I can’t say. But I feel it and I am in torment.
—Catullus
I first encountered this poem in Jane Hirshfield’s collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and wanted to post it today because of the emotions it...
6 tags
And It Came To Pass
This june 3 would be different
Time to draw lines
I’ve grown into the family pores and the bronchitis
Even up east I get by saying goddamnit
Who was that masked man I left for dead in the shadow of mt. shadow
Who crumbles there
Not touching anything but satin and dandelions
Not laid his eyes on the likes of you
Because the unconnected life is not worth living
Thorntrees...
11 tags
I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone
I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to truly consecrate the hour. I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough to be to you just object and thing, dark and smart. I want my free will and want it accompanying the path which leads to action; and wants during times that beg questions, where something is up, to be among those in the know, or else be alone.
I...
7 tags
If
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not...
9 tags
That Now Are Wild And Do Not Remember
Where did you go to, when you went away? It is as if you step by step were going Someplace elsewhere into some other range Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking, Knowing nothing of the language of that place To which you went with naked foot at night Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed, Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking. I have been so dislanguaged by what...
10 tags
Adam's Curse
We sat together at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to...
December 2012
9 posts
9 tags
Noël
When snow is shaken From the balsam trees And they’re cut down And brought into our houses When clustered sparks Of many-colored fire Appear at night In ordinary windows We hear and sing The customary carols They bring us ragged miracles And hay and candles And flowering weeds of poetry That are loved all the more Because they are so common But there are carols That carry phrases Of the...
7 tags
Peanut Butter
I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact. If you get right down to it the new unprocessed peanut butter is no damn good & you should buy it in a jar as always in the largest supermarket you know. And I am an enemy of change, as you know. All the things I embrace as new are in fact old things, re-released: swimming, the sensation of being dirty in body...
6 tags
Preludes
I
The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of...
8 tags
Where Go the Boats
Dark brown is the river, Golden is the sand. It flows along for ever, With trees on either hand.
Green leaves a-floating, Castles of the foam, Boats of mine a-boating— Where will all come home?
On goes the river, And out past the mill, Away down the valley, Away down the hill.
Away down the river, A hundred miles or more, Other little children Shall bring my boats...
8 tags
Watchful
A wasp had built a nest outside the backdoor. Every time I went to knock it down, the wasp was working the chambers. I waited two days, finally turned off the water while doing the dishes, picked up a knife, went out and cut the nest free of the doorframe, where it hung by little more than a thread of wood the wasp had chewed to pulp. The wasp was there, flew off, and was back, on the...
7 tags
The Sciences Sing a Lullabye
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you’re tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch by inch America is giving itself to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch....
8 tags
Archibald Higbie
I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you, I was ashamed of you. I despised you As the place of my nativity. And there in Rome, among the artists, Speaking Italian, speaking French, I seemed to myself at times to be free Of every trace of my origin. I seemed to be reaching the heights of art And to breathe the air that the masters breathed, And to see the world with their eyes. But...
