How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.
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Today’s poem is from Matt Haig‘s 2015 memoir Reasons To Stay Alive. Thank you to Miguel for sharing this one with me.
Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.
What you can’t know
Is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching
On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.
You won’t be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.
Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.
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Cornelius Eady’s eulogy for Nina Simone, who passed away in 2003, can be found in his 2008 collection Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems.
Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence.
Why aren’t I your wife?
You swerved around a turtle sunning itself.
I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass.
We were late for dinner.
One twentieth of a mile an hour, I said. Claws in tar. You turned the car around.
Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace,
crushed roman dome, the surprise of red blood.
I couldn’t help crying, couldn’t keep anything from harm.
I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt.
The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know.
Driving the road next winter, you remembered that place in the road. Your turtle.
During hibernation, a turtle’s heart beats once for every ten minutes.
It cannot voluntarily open its eyes.
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— Gretchen Marquette, from the March 2016 issue of Poetry magazine
Days you are sick, we get dressed slow,
find our hats, and ride the train.
We pass a junkyard and the bay,
then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel.
You lose your hat. I find it. The train
sighs open at Burlingame,
past dark tons of scrap and water.
I carry you down the black steps.
Burlingame is the size of joy:
a race past bakeries, gold rings
in open black cases. I don’t care
who sees my crooked smile
or what erases it, past the bakery,
when you tire. We ride the blades again
beside the crooked bay. You smile.
I hold you like a hole holds light.
We wear our hats and ride the knives.
They cannot fix you. They try and try.
Tunnel! Into the dark open we go.
Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.
■
Hello Friends,
Today’s poem by Maria Hummel is an example of a pantoum, a poetic form of Malaysian origin in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza. As in this example, the last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.
I hope you’re enjoying poetry month!
— Ellen
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home
to real life. Showers, eats supper, plays video games.
Twelve hours later he comes back, high-fives, takes over the drone
from other pilots, who watch Homeland, do dishes, hope they don’t
dream in all screens, bad kills, all slo-mo freeze-frame.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home.
A small room, a pilot’s chair, the mic and headphones
crowd his mind, take him somewhere else. Another day
another dollar: hover and shift, twelve hours over strangers’ homes.
Stop by the store, its Muzak, pick up the Cheerios,
get to the gym if you’re lucky. Get back to your babies, play
Barbies, play blocks. Twelve hours later, come back. Take over the drone.
Smell of burned coffee in the lounge, the shifting kill zone.
Last-minute abort mission, and the major who forgets your name.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home.
It’s done in our names, but we don’t have to know. Our own
lives, shifts, hours, bounced off screens all day.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home;
fresh from twelve hours off, another comes in, takes over our drone.
■
Hello Friends,
Today’s poem by Jill McDonough is the best example of a villanelle I’ve seen in years. The villanelle’s repetitive nature perfectly suits the subject matter of a drone pilot’s routine; and the restraint of such strict form, the understatement of it, perfectly captures the gravity of “It’s done in our names, but we don’t have to know.” You can read more about villanelles here.
I hope you’re enjoying poetry month!
— Ellen
Hello Friends,
More than any other poem this month, if I could just believe in this one poem by Jack Gilbert, I think I would be better off. Maybe you would be too.
— Ellen
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
■
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
■
— Howard Nemerov, Sentences (1980)
See also Emily Dickinson’s “They shut me up in Prose – “.
Hello Friends,
Today’s poem about the distance between words and what they mean appeared in the May 2013 issue of Poetry magazine and is also included in Rick Barot’s award-winninig 2016 collection Chord.
You can listen to the poet read his poem here.
Enjoy.
Ellen
I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets
under the trees, catching the rain
of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness
of the one covering the bad roof
of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color
inside the winter’s weeks. Another one
took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.
Another flew off the back of a truck,
black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.
I have seen the ones under bridges,
the forms they make of sleep. I could go on
this way until the end of the page, even though
what I have in my mind isn’t the thing
itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing
as a shelter for what is beneath it.
There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over
a wave. You cannot put a tarp
over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken
oil well miles under the ocean.
There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind
that sits in a corner and shreds receipts
and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,
whose only recourse is language
so approximate it hardly means what it means:
He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember
her name. He is old. He is ashamed.
■
Little snail,
Dreaming you go.
Weather and rose
Is all you know.
Weather and rose
Is all you see,
Drinking
The dewdrop’s
Mystery.
■
— Langston Hughes
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in the rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
■
Hello Friends,
It is extremely difficult to write a poem this deceiving simple! Today’s sonnet by Robert Frost is an example of terza rima — written in iambic pentameter and following an interlocking ABA BCB CDC DAD AA rhyme scheme. Much like Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Acquainted with the Night” is typically interpreted to have both literal and metaphorical layers of meaning.
Enjoy.
Ellen
Poems by Robert Frost were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 26, 2012, Poem-a-Day April 28, 2010, Poem-a-Day April 30, 2008, and Poem-a-Day April 16, 2007.