Author: tgifreytag

Why is the Color of Snow?

Let’s ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn’t?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It’s true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that’s occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won’t stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don’t we melt it?
Aren’t we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question–

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasure safe forever,

what world is made, that made us that we keep
making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming.

---

By Brenda Shaughnessy from Human Dark with Sugar (2008)

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem comes from Elizabeth Alexander‘s 1990 collection The Venus Hottentot — and from a long lineage of poems that incorporate quotes, scraps, excerpts from other works.

The Dirt-Eaters

tra
dition
wanes
I read
from North
ern South:
D.C.

Never ate
dirt
but I lay
on Great-
grandma’s
grave
when I
was small.

“Most cultures
have passed
through
a phase
of earth-
eating
most pre
valent today
among
rural
Southern
black
women.”

Geo
phagy:
the practice
of eating
earthy matter
esp. clay
or chalk.

(Shoe-
boxed dirt
shipped North
to kin)

The gos
sips said
that my great-
grand
ma got real
pale when she
was preg
nant:

“Musta ate
chalk,
Musta ate
starch, cuz
why else
did her
babies
look
so white?”

The Ex
pert: “In ano
ther gener
ation I
sus
pect it will dis
appear al
together.”

Miss Fannie Glass
of Creuger, Miss.:
“I wish
I had
some dirt
right now.”

Her smile
famili
ar as the
smell
of
dirt.

The Crossroads

This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
All day the cars blow past and disappear.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
Look at the sparkling dust, the oily smear.
Look at the highway marker, still askew.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.

---

Hello Friends —

A trigger, one most people might not notice, sparks a particular sequence of your neurons firing. Do you have a trigger like that, one that brings the same sharp memory back over and over? It could be an intersection. It could be a day of the year. It could be a word.

The poet Joshua Mehigan is so strict to form in this piece — every line exactly 10 syllables; every line end-stopped in a whole, perfect rhyme; no dashes, no italics, no indentation — you don’t have to count syllables to hear the plain rigidness; it’s like he’s just white-knuckled clinging to basic structure, to have something regular and certain to hang onto. For me, it’s how tightly you can feel Mehigan clinging — that conversational but stalted, redundant tone — that enable him to convey the common characteristic of traumas that still come back to us over and over: a sense of something amorphous unexplained or unresolved — you’ve got many sharp little details, and yet still somehow they don’t add up. That’s why it’s still following you around, still getting triggered, precisely because there is something about it you still don’t have words for. I’d argue this is a poem about not having words — about that feeling of knowing there is something that you have not named, but also still not having the name for it.

In the meantime, you do have these words, these eight lines, you can hear going round in your head every time that trigger goes off. Stalted, redundant, simple, jagged — it might not sound like the most flattering description for a poem, but for me that’s exactly what makes this little piece drop-dead gorgeous.

“Crossroads” appeared in Poetry magazine (Feb. 2010).

Cheers,
Ellen

CHECKING OUT

I turn off the Xerox machine and the fax and the other fax
and the PC tower and the fluorescents,
put the check register in the desk, lock the desk,
and take the elevator eleven floors down
to the narrow front of East 21st Street.

When I come out, the space between the buildings
is so thin it’s an upside-down skyscraper of sky,
narrower at the street. There will be no sky at all
for the next two hours of trains back to Brooklyn.
Someone once told me I should come to New York, so I did.

Two trains and three stations later—and a walk
past a housing project like a cliff made of bricks—
I am back in my windowless basement room
with the tile floor, staring at the square grate
in the middle, wondering what the drain was for.

I eat the same sandwich I eat every night.
A car alarm punctuates the seconds of the dark,
as if to say how few hours of single-malt sleep
stand between me and tomorrow’s trains.
Someone once told me I should come to New York,

so I did. Tomorrow I will try to buy food
for a different kind of sandwich and it will not go well—
I will see the word California on a bag of mandarin oranges
and start crying in the narrow aisles of the supermarket—
and a man with a cart full of cat food will ask me to move, please,

he is trying to get to the checkout. Where I come from,
I want to tell him, they make the grocery stores
big enough for someone to cry in the produce section
and someone else to move around them.
And when you get to the parking lot

you put your oranges in a car, not a backpack,
and you drive the car home, and you park the car
in a driveway above ground, never under,
and you eat the whole bag of mandarin oranges
at a kitchen table bigger than Brooklyn.

---

Hello Friends —

Alright, it’s Dara Weinberg‘s birthday. And she has her first poem in print in fancypants academic literary journal thing (you can find “Checking Out” on pages 7-8 of The Hopkins Review winter 2011 issue). So if you enjoy today’s selection, hop over to www.daraweinberg.com and leave a comment on her blog.

It’s National Poetry Month all month! If a poem a day just isn’t enough, you can always find more at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

Go Cardinal,
Ellen

love is a deep and a dark and a lonely
and you take it deep take it dark
and take it with a lonely winding
and when the winding gets too lonely
then may come the windflowers
and the breath of wind over many flowers
winding its way out of many lonely flowers
waiting in rainleaf whispers
waiting in dry stalks of noon
wanting in a music of windbreaths
so you can take love as it comes keening
as it comes with a voice and a face
and you make a talk of it
talking to yourself a talk worth keeping
and you put it away for a keen keeping
and you find it to be a hoarding
and you give it away and yet it stays hoarded

like a book read over and over again
like one book being a long row of books
like leaves of windflowers bending low
and bending to be never broken

---

Hello Friends —

“Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely” from Carl Sandburg‘s 1953 collection Honey and Salt begs to be read out loud. Here’s a little experiment for you: read this poem out loud to yourself. Then find someone else and ask them to read it out loud. Notice if the two of you made the same choices about where to put punctuation, or when to ‘wind’ and when to ‘wind.’

It’s National Poetry Month all month! If a poem a day just isn’t enough, you can always find more at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

Cheers,
Ellen