April 2007

Poem-a-Day, April 21: Remember Sarah Stout

Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout

Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout
Would not take the garbage out.
She’d wash the dishes and scrub the pans
Cook the yams and spice the hams,
And though her parents would scream and shout,
She simply would not take the garbage out.
And so it piled up to the ceiling:
Coffee grounds, potato peelings,
Brown bananas and rotten peas,
Chunks of sour cottage cheese.
It filled the can, it covered the floor,
It cracked the windows and blocked the door,
With bacon rinds and chicken bones,
Drippy ends of ice cream cones,
Prune pits, peach pits, orange peels,
Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal,
Pizza crusts and withered greens,
Soggy beans, and tangerines,
Crusts of black-burned buttered toast,
Grisly bits of beefy roast.
The garbage rolled on down the halls,
It raised the roof, it broke the walls,
I mean, greasy napkins, cookie crumbs,
Blobs of gooey bubble gum,
Cellophane from old bologna,
Rubbery, blubbery macaroni,
Peanut butter, caked and dry,
Curdled milk, and crusts of pie,
Rotting melons, dried-up mustard,
Eggshells mixed with lemon custard,
Cold French fries and rancid meat,
Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat.
At last the garbage reached so high
That finally it touched the sky,
And none of her friends would come to play,
And all of her neighbors moved away;
And finally, Sarah Cynthia Stout
Said, “Okay, I’ll take the garbage out!”
But then, of course it was too late,
The garbage reached across the state,
From New York to the Golden Gate;
And there in the garbage she did hate
Poor Sarah met an awful fate
That I cannot right now relate
Because the hour is much too late
But children, remember Sarah Stout,
And always take the garbage out.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is from Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974) by Shel Silverstein(1932-1999, also author of The Giving Tree). Kinda makes you want to start composting, doesn’t it?

Today is Earth Day and the perfect excuse to ditch your incandescent bulbs once and for all, bring your own bags to the grocery store, start that compost, or finally get around to whatever it is that you in particular have been putting off. If doing it “for the earth” is a little too abstract to truly motivate you, try doing it for Shel.

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

Poems by Shel Silverstein were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 30, 2009 and Poem-a-Day April 18, 2011.
Poems in honor of Earth Day were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 22, 2008; Poem-a-Day April 22, 2009; Poem-a-Day April 22, 2010; and Poem-a-Day April 22, 2011.

Poem-a-Day, April 20: shorter than haiku

DOWNHILL

I don’t have a home
and I live there
all the time.

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Julia Vinograd, from Berkeley Street Cannibals: Selected Poems, 1969-1976.

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

Poems by Julia Vinograd were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 12, 2009 and Poem-a-Day April 25, 2011.
Poems shorter than haiku were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 5, 2008; Poem-a-Day April 14, 2008; and Poem-a-Day April 2, 2009.

Poem-a-Day, April 19: the tender machines of fact

Captivity Narrative

He is running across the ice
fast enough so that it doesn’t know it should
be breaking. At some point
you will breathe again. This could be
a movie, will be the movie you play
when you tell the story somewhere,
sometime, else: this boy in the avocado
windbreaker, the sky the white
of pills. In one of the captivity narratives
you have read, the Indians took a woman
on an ice floe big as a room.
You don’t know anything yet.
You are on this side still. The ice
is scarred like the moon.

If the eyes were brown, you should
have known this. You thought green.
If there is money in his pockets,
you should know this. Think of licking
the hands clean. You can ask with some
pleasure, Why do you smell like gym?
You want the paradigm of love
you think of all day
to become the tender machines of fact.
Something is like a spigot, another like a toaster.
His thumb flicks on the lighter,
hinges stop things from falling apart.
The planes keep going over cities, intricate below
as the insides of watches.

The streets of your city
are white. But he writes you about the muezzin
calling the heat’s changes—
heavier, then less. The blue
concentrated day, curved: he wears his headphones
walking in the gold market.
In other words he writes the insect-like script
for lemon and electric,
each a bladed, calligraphic secrecy.
Here, the plastic stapled over your windows keeps
the cold out. In one dream that you wake from,
the bug skitters
into your ear, rapid with fright, eating itself
to the other side.

Still, you are no more certain
for every image you have. His figure
up ahead, the tree stripped, each
warped into something you need.
The chair is peeling outside under a waterlogged
sky. The child is asked,
Why is your face so dirty? You are no more happy
for having seen them:
a girl rubbing her nose on the boy’s
cheek, beyond them the streets in the bus window
passing, moving. It is an industry, love.
The tree’s fingers brightening
into your notice one day, the child holding
a coin in his mouth.

When he is five and his father
has not yet lost it, they would climb
to the top floor of the downtown
building and put mail into the chute that fell
all the way down, a straight glass
spine. You see the scrawled North Pole
address, the sepia-colored stamp showing
the Wright Brothers and their plane.
This many years later, just outside
the museum, he says he sees his father, skinny
as a string, dirty Santa beard, garbage clothes.
He would like to kick him
for what he did and didn’t do. He would like to
take him with him.

First they laid a round
of flat stones, then smaller rocks and a layer
of sand. Then twigs,
and bunched, dry grass, and larger pieces
of wood. The fire caught quickly where one
of the men had struck one, out
of his hands. From that long interval
now to the home of particular
rooms, what returned to her came
in a colorless stream, things recalling
only themselves. The curiously solid footing
of the ice, the fire
they made on it. And the snow, the sky coming
down to the ground.

You will have to keep traveling.
This far north the light will not sleep.
So there must be other ways of being
held. Can it be that there is only one bird.
only one: Who made the eyes but I?
One barn and its stricken panes:
Where are my window songs? Backyard pools
are blue as his envelopes,
though the leaves have dropped, shadows
clumped at the bottoms. You’re walking
not knowing you’re walking, just someone
turning in sleep, someone turning
a corner and appearing unannounced
on a storefront’s dozen TVs.

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Rick Barot, from Five Fingers Review Issue 22 (2005), and will probably also be included in his forthcoming sophomore collection Want.

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

Poet Rick Barot was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 7, 2008.

Poem-a-Day, April 18: pious rape

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon — his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple yet not understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950). Poet Trivia: Millay’s Greenwich Village Bohemian friends called her “Vincent.”

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

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 17, 2011.

Poem-a-Day, April 17: The towers are incidental.

Hum

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

Hello Friends —

Today’s is the title poem of Ann Lauterbach‘s 2005 collection Hum.

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

“Hum” by Ann Lauterbach was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 21, 2009.

Poem-a-Day, April 16: Save a day.

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Robert Frost (1874-1963), from a collection called You Come Too that I ordered from my third grade class’s Scholastic catalog. I’m not sure in which of Frost’s books it was originally published (Do any of you know?). Poetry Trivia: Robert Frost was poet laureate from 1958-9 (under Eisenhower), the fist poet to read at a presidential inauguration (for JFK), and won the Pulitzer Prize four times across three decades. He never graduated from college.

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

“Dust of Snow” by Robert Frost was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 28, 2010.
Poet Robert Frost was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 30, 2008.

Poem-a-Day, April 15: slip and sip, fib and rib

Ghazal

Beneath her slip,
the slip of her.

Iron. Lust.
The flint of her.

In dorms and parks, motels
and tents: the din of her.

What I would not have done
for another sip of her.

She swore she’d never love another.
The fib of her.

She kicked off the sheets; I held on,
breathless, through the fit of her.

Good or evil, she was first.
The rib of her.

That she could leave me after all
that I had been to her.

Hands pressed deep
into my mouth. The bit of her.

A lengthy, doe-eyed nuzzle
at the salt lick of her.

Cock sure,
the spit of her.

A week spent curled up on the floor,
gutted, sick for her.

Nights she ground my bones
to dust. The grit of her.

Teeth, nails, my name
whispered low. The grip of her.

*

Hello Friends —

When asked to name a single very favorite poem in the whole wide world, I often answer with today’s poem, “Ghazal” by Emily Moore, which appeared in The Yale Review, vol. 90, no. 1 (January 2002).

To learn more about the ancient Persian poetic form of the ghazal and its various rules and restraints, click here — and, if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, also click here.

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

P.S. Many thanks to Rick Barot for introducing me to this poem (among others).

“Ghazal” by Emily Moore was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 8, 2010.

Poem-a-Day, April 14: dresses wider than doors

House of Worth

To trim the hat made to match the fifth white dress worn
this year, a feather of the mourning dove left this morning on the windowsill.

Dresses meant to be worn
once and once only and then worn
by servants lifting
the hem to hurry down the hall. Face worn,
dress quite new.

So many of Marie Antoinette’s dresses were worn
to Masquerade last night, the hem of one dress
met the next dress
in waltz-time and the mind, time-worn
flung its doors
between compartments like the locomotive doors

in which Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes goes door
to door to find the truth. The tweed dress worn
to travel; pillbox hat, no veil, two pins; nothing. Margaret Lockwood watches one door
when the train stops and Michael Redgrave, who loves her already, watches the other door.

Remembering the Vanished Lady writing her name in the window-
fog is not a clue. She may have written it herself, the conductor said, and did
indeed suffer a blow to the head outside her hotel door.

The dress was so big,
one’s hand is useless to take glass from table;
the skirt approaches while the hand is yet distanced.

At home, the dresses
are wider than doors
and carried one by one into the room she’ll wear them, white dresses
are slipped over white dresses-
whole seasons worn
in the stead of one all dressed up
because she who has nowhere to go is most free. Dressed
to listen for the returning hunt; dressed
to see three deer stop by the apple tree near the closest window,
and didn’t they come quietly? The window
was open. The wind sought the innermost layer and lifted
the dresses apart.

Lifting
the lid off the box, the Princess of Corinth
saw the gold dress and lifted
it out. She lifted
the dress in the mirror. She shut the door
and lifted
her old dress off. The children lifted
their hands to their eyes. Was there warning?
The room was hot. Was there warning?
The windows
were locked, so when I went to the window
there was nothing to do but bang on the window.

In 1878 hemlines lifted.
The window
would not. The window
sash could be tied to the leg of the dressing-
table and lowered down if the window
would open. The table would drag toward the window
when we climb down the ladder. There are doors
that never open with doors
behind them. On the previous night, she looked from the carriage window
as she passed the Princess’s parlor window.
She saw him inside when the curtain lifted.

“What an admirable artist who makes us weep thus, two evenings in succession,
with the same words gives me the sensation that she is a different woman the
second day from the first.

When the dying Marguerite lets the mirror fall, it breaks. The first evening leaning
on the table, without gathering up the pieces, she looked at it with terror and
spoke to it from faraway, leaving this world.

This evening, kneeling down slowly, she goes right up to it, her outstretched hand
trembling, she collects the pieces.”

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Robyn Schiff, from her 2002 collection Worth.

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

Poem-a-Day, April 13: boca innumerable

El viento en la isla

El viento es un caballo:
óyelo cómo corre
por el mar, por el cielo.

Quiere llevarme: escucha
cómo recorre el mundo
para llevarme lejos.

Escóndeme en tus brazos
por esta noche sola,
mientras la lluvia rompe
contra el mar y la tierra
su boca innumerable.

Escucha cómo el viento
me llama galopando
para llevarme lejos.

Con tu frente en mi frente,
con tu boca en mi boca,
atados nuestros cuerpos
al amor que nos quema,
deja que el viento pase
sin que pueda llevarme.

Deja que el viento corra
Coronado de espurra,
que me llame y me busque
galopando en la sombra,
mientras yo, sumergido
baja tus grandes ojos,
por esta noche sola
descansarmé, amor mío.

*

The Wind in the Island

The wind is a stallion:
hear how he runs
over the ocean, the sky.

He wants to take me: listen
how he roves the world
to take me far away.

Conceal me in your arms
for this night only,
while the rain breaks
against the ocean and the rocks
its innumerable mouth.

Listen how the wind
calls me, galloping
to take me far away.

With your forehead to my forehead,
your mouth to my mouth,
our bodies tied
to love that burns,
let the wind pass over
unable to take me.

Let the wind run
crowned by seaspray,
call and search for me,
galloping in shadow,
while I, submerged
beneath your huge eyes
for this night only,
will rest, my love.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Pablo Neruda, from Los Versos del Capitan (1952). Today is Cathy & I’s sixth anniversary: Muchas gracias para seis años de noches submergido baja tus grandes ojos, amor mío.

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

Poem-a-Day, April 12: mud-luscious & puddle-wonderful

if i have made,my lady,intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes(frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind — if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy — if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

— let the world say, “his most wise music stole
nothing from death” —
you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul

*

Hello Friends —

Of all the famous occurrences of “April” in poetry (see also Chaucer, Eliot), this untitled E.E. Cummings poem is my favorite. Oh, and the jabberwockean words in subject line of this email come from another of cumming’s great seasonal works, “in Just- / spring.”

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

“if i have made,my lady,intricate” by E.E. Cummings was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 13, 2009 and Poem-a-Day April 13, 2011.
Poems by E.E. Cummings were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 13, 2008 and Poem-a-Day April 20, 2010.