Author: tgifreytag

Yellow Light

One arm hooked around the frayed strap
of a tar-black patent-leather purse,
the other cradling something for dinner:
fresh bunches of spinach from a J-Town yaoya,
side of split Spanish mackerel from Alviso’s,
maybe a loaf of Langendorf; she steps
off the hissing bus at Olympic and Fig,
begins the three-block climb up the hill,
passing gangs of schoolboys playing war,
Japs against Japs, Chicanas chalking sidewalks
with the holy double-yoked crosses of hopscotch,
and the Korean grocer’s wife out for a stroll
around this neighborhood of Hawaiian apartments
just starting to steam with cooking
and the anger of young couples coming home
from work, yelling at kids, flicking on
TV sets for the Wednesday Night Fights.

If it were May, hydrangeas and jacaranda
flowers in the streetside trees would be
blooming through the smog of late spring.
Wisteria in Masuda’s front yard would be
shaking out the long tresses of its purples hair.
Maybe mosquitoes, moths, a few orange butterflies
settling on the lattice of monkey flowers
tangled in chain-link fences by the trash.

But this is October, and Los Angeles
seethes like a billboard under twilight.

From used-car lots and the movie houses uptown,
long silver sticks of light probe the sky.
From the Miracle Mile, whole freeways away,
a brilliant fluorescence breaks out
and makes war with the dim squares
of yellow kitchen light winking on
in all the side streets of the Barrio.

She climbs up the two flights of flagstone
stairs to 201-B, the spikes of her high heels
clicking like kitchen knives on a cutting board,
props the groceries against the door,
fishes through memo pads, a compact,
empty packs of chewing gum, and finds her keys.

The moon then, cruising from behind
a screen of eucalyptus across the street,
covers everything, everything in sight,
in a heavy light like yellow onions.

***

Hello Friends,

“Yellow Light” is the first poem of Garrett Kaoru Hongo‘s first collection of poems, Yellow Light (not a bad start, eh?). The book was published in 1982. Hongo grew up on the Big Island of Hawai’i, crossing over to the mainland to attend college in Southern California. Like many poets, he makes his living as a professor of Creative Writing — currently at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. You can always learn more about National Poetry Month or sign up for a more official-like poem-a-day list at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Best,
Ellen

monster

We can be so sensual,
and I know you were waiting for a signal.
I move closer and closer,
until I feel like a bookstore.

Also at some point I woke,
and my love had been plucked
like a guitar string
and I was just shaking.

Now I see you’re a volcano
to whom I cannot say no.
Would you believe I’m the monster
trapped in your radiator?

***

Hello friends,

Today’s poem was written by Rose Polenzani and self-published in an untitled chapbook in the late nineties.

As a reminder, you can always learn more about National Poetry Month or sign up for a more official-like poem-a-day list at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Best,
Ellen

what i think when i ride the train

maybe my father
made these couplers.
his hands were hard
and black and swollen,
the knuckles like lugs
or bolts in a rich man’s box.
he broke a bone each year
as if on schedule.
when i read about a wreck,
how the cars buckle
together or hang from the track
in a chain, but never separate,
i think; see,
there’s my father,
he was a chipper,
he made the best damn couplers
in the whole white world.

***

Hi friends,

Today’s poem comes from Lucille Clifton‘s Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000.

As you have probably inferred from the poem, a “coupler” — also called a “coupling” — is the mechanism that holds two railway cars together. One meaning of “knuckle” is the round nob-like piece of a coupler. The role of a “chipper” in a steel mill focuses on seems and joints — hammering, cutting, chipping, splitting, filing, fine-tuning angles; “chipper” is also slang for an occasional narcotics user.

Since you are reading this poem in isolation from Clifton’s larger body of work, I would also consider myself remiss if I left you thinking that she had a wonderful, perfect relationship with her father and always viewed him in a nostalgic, idealized light. Many of Clifton’s other poems explore a more complex and painful relationship with her father, who, among other things, sexually abused her as a child.

Does that biographical information change how you read this poem, in particular the description of her father’s hands? Should biographical information change how one reads a poem?

Best,
Ellen

Correction Note: The initial poem-a-day email for April 2, 2008 contained by far my most embarrassing error in Poem-a-Day history. It incorrectly stated this poem could be found in a collection “published in 2000, the year of her death.” Lucille Clifton is still alive. I am so very sorry and so very embarrassed. I don’t know what else to say at the moment. How does one apologize for mistaking someone for dead?

THE SHOES OF WANDERING

1.

Squatting at the rack
in the Store of the Salvation
Army, putting on, one after one,
these shoes strangers have died from, I discover
the eldershoes of my feet,
that take my feet
as their first feet, clinging
down to the least knuckle and corn.

And I walk out now,
in dead shoes, in the new light,
on the steppingstones
of someone else’s wandering,
a twinge
in this foot or that saying
turn or stay or take
forty-three giant steps
backwards, frightened
I may already have lost
the way: the first step, the Crone
who scried the crystal said, shall be
to lose the way.

***

Hi Friends,

Today’s poem opens section III of The Book of Nightmares (1971) by Galway Kinnell.

As a reminder, you can make my life easier, and keep poem-a-day out of junk folders, by joining this Yahoo! Group list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/poemaday_tgifreytag

After a few more days of poems, I’ll only be sending poem-a-day to the group email list.

You can always learn more about National Poetry Month and sign up for a more official-like poem-a-day list at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Best,
Ellen

Dear Friends,

April is National Poetry Month!

I had a great time last April sending out my own eclectic poem-a-day email series and reading each of your responses to the different poems. To collectively answer the overwhelming number of inquiries about whether I’ll be doing the series again this year: YES!

Please sign up for this Yahoo! Group if you wish to receive my poem-a-day series for April 2008: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/poemaday_tgifreytag/

As a reminder, you can always learn more about National Poetry Month and sign up for a more official-like poem-a-day list at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

You can also view the archives of Ellen’s April 2007 poem-a-day series at meetmein811.blogspot.com.

Love,
Ellen

The Wish

Remember that time you made the wish?

I make a lot of wishes.

The time I lied to you
about the butterfly. I always wondered
what you wished for.

What do you think I wished?

I don’t know. That I’d come back,
that we’d somehow be together in the end.

I wished for what I always wish for.
I wished for another poem.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Louise Glück from her collection Meadowlands (1996).

If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list, you’re a little bit late: Today is the last day of April, and the last Poem-a-Day for 2007. Thirty days. Thirty poets. Thirty poems.

Thank you for humoring me in this celebration of National Poetry Month. Remember that you may peruse all of the month’s poem-a-days on my blog at meetmein811.blogspot.com.

If a particular poem or two from this month has really stuck with you, and you’re feeling inspired to dive into a whole book of poetry, here are some places to start.

You can still learn more about National Poetry Month, and about poetry events in your geographic region all year round, at www.poets.org.

Thank you again for partaking in my own little celebration of National Poety Month.
I hope to run into you in 811…

Ellen

Poet Louise Glück was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 12, 2008.

WHAT THE ANGELS LEFT

At first, the scissors seemed perfectly harmless.
They lay on the kitchen table in the blue light.

Then I began to notice them all over the house,
at night in the pantry, or filling up bowls in the cellar

where there should have been apples. They appeared under rugs,
lumpy places where one would usually settle before the fire,

or suddenly shining in the sink at the bottom of soupy water.
Once, I found a pair in the garden, stuck in turned dirt

among the new bulbs, and one night, under my pillow,
I felt something like a cool long tooth and pulled them out

to lie next to me in the dark. Soon after that I began
to collect them, filling boxes, old shopping bags,

every suitcase I owned. I grew slightly uncomfortable
when company came. What if someone noticed them

when looking for forks or replacing dried dishes? I longed
to throw them out, but how could I get rid of something

that felt oddly like grace? It occurred to me finally
that I was meant to use them, and I resisted a growing compulsion

to cut my hair, although, in moments of great distraction,
I thought it was my eyes they wanted, or my soft belly

-exhausted, in winter, I laid them out on the lawn.
The snow fell quite as usual, without any apparent hesitation

or discomfort. In spring, as I expected, they were gone.
In their place, a slight metallic smell, and the dear muddy earth.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Marie Howe, from her 1987 collection The Good Thief.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

“What The Angels Left” by Marie Howe was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 14, 2009.