Category: April 2011

The Poem Said
By Franz Wright

The poem said never love anything
Not even you?
I asked
and it answered

especially me

If you must, love

not living
with hope

or not living

taste this
and remember

not yet being—

Especially me

I am just you

If you must, like
and coldly admire my cold stars
shit for brains
love what I stand for

not me

the leopard the beautiful
death
who puts on his spotted robe when he goes
to his chosen,
the

what was the not now the what will be

Like suddenly using a dead friend’s expression

Make yourself useful
while there is time

while there is still light and time

---

Hello Friends,

Well, we’re running short on both light and time for National Poetry Month 2011. But the good news is, the poems are still there, all around you, all the time, if you look for them.

My hope is that a poem or two has spoken to you over the past month. Maybe you even got to ask a poem or two a question.

I thank you for humoring me in this April ritual. And if a particular poem or two from the past 30 days did stick with you, and you feel inspired to dive deeper, here are some places to start. You can also now find all of this month’s poem-a-days (and April 2010, April 2009, April 2008, and April 2007) migrated here to meetmein811.blogspot.com.

Cheers,
Ellen

Hello Friends —
I’m going to subject you to a longer poem today, cuz it’s just so darn gorgeous. So I’ll mostly avoid making this email any longer with explanations, except to point out this poem contains 12 hyphens, or 13 if you include the title…as well as several additional instances of compound adjectives that could be hypenated but aren’t.

---

WOOFER (WHEN I CONSIDER THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN)

When I consider the much discussed dilemma
of the African-American, I think not of the diasporic
middle passing, unchained, juke, jock, and jiving
sons and daughters of what sleek dashikied poets
and tether fisted Nationalists commonly call Mother
Africa, but of an ex-girlfriend who was the child
of a black-skinned Ghanaian beauty and Jewish-
American, globetrotting ethnomusicologist.
I forgot all my father’s warnings about meeting women
at bus stops (which is the way he met my mother)
when I met her waiting for the rush hour bus in October
because I have always been a sucker for deep blue denim
and Afros and because she spoke so slowly
when she asked the time. I wrote my phone number
in the back of the book of poems I had and said
something like “You can return it when I see you again”
which has to be one of my top two or three best
pickup lines ever. If you have ever gotten lucky
on a first date you can guess what followed: her smile
twizzling above a tight black v-neck sweater, chatter
on my velvet couch and then the two of us wearing nothing
but shoes. When I think of African-American rituals
of love, I think not of young, made-up unwed mothers
who seek warmth in the arms of any brother
with arms because they never knew their fathers
(though that could describe my mother), but of that girl
and me in the basement of her father’s four story Victorian
making love among the fresh blood and axe
and chicken feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughter
executed by a 3-D witchdoctor houseguest (his face
was starred by tribal markings) and her ruddy American
poppa while drums drummed upstairs from his hi-fi woofers
because that’s the closest I’ve ever come to anything
remotely ritualistic or African, for that matter.
We were quiet enough to hear their chatter
between the drums and the scraping of their chairs
at the table above us and the footsteps of anyone
approaching the basement door and it made
our business sweeter, though I’ll admit I wondered
if I’d be cursed for making love under her father’s nose
or if the witchdoctor would sense us and then cast a spell.
I have been cursed, broken hearted, stunned, frightened
and bewildered, but when I consider the African-American
I think not of the tek nines of my generation deployed
by madness or that we were assigned some lousy fate
when God prescribed job titles at the beginning of Time
or that we were too dumb to run the other way
when we saw the wide white sails of the ships
since given the absurd history of the world, everyone
is a descendant of slaves (which makes me wonder
if outrunning your captors is not the real meaning of Race?).
I think of the girl’s bark colored, bi-continental nipples
when I consider the African-American.
I think of a string of people connected one to another
and including the two of us there in the basement
linked by a hyphen filled with blood;
linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.

---

By Terrance Hayes from Wind in a Box (2006)

Death is a beautiful car parked only
to be stolen on a street lined with trees
whose branches are like the intestines
   of an emerald.

You hotwire death, get in, and drive away
like a flag made from a thousand burning
   funeral parlors.

You have stolen death because you’re bored.
There’s nothing good playing at the movies
   in San Francisco.

You joyride around for a while listening
to the radio, and then abandon death, walk
away, and leave death for the police
   to find.

---

Disclaimer: The curator of this poem-a-day list shall not be held liable for any carjackings or other illicit actions arising from the reading of this or any other (untitled) poem from Richard Brautigan’s The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968).

Brautigan dedicates this poem “For Emmett” — Brautigan’s close friend had recently entered into a rehab facility, and one interpretation of this poem is that it is about leaving an addiction behind. There is a particular street lined with trees out at Pt. Reyes (one of my favorite places on earth, and where Emmett’s rehab facility was located) that I always picture when I picture “the intestines of an emerald” — that facility is gone, but the trees are still there:

[Photo by David Ramage]

“Death is a beautiful car parked only” by Richard Brautigan was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 11, 2007.

Hello Friends —
Sometime between December 31, 2010 and January 1, 2011, more than 5,000 redwing blackbirds died in mid-air and fell to the ground in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas. Widespread speculation over the birds’ unknown cause of death, combined with their time of death, inspired such insightful news headlines as “Aflockalypse Now” — as well as today’s poem from Nickole Brown. Brown also invokes the sounds of names, the shapes of letters, and the nearly universal Southern experience of being stuck behind a logging truck.
Cheers,
Ellen

---

Black bird, red wing

So this is where the last year
of the Mayan calendar begins—
5,000 birds falling on Beebe,
Arkansas, a state that could smooth
out with the sway of the plains
but instead sputters the silence
of the first syllable like a pothole
that hits before you’re off the
on ramp—say it—
ar-
    -can-saw—
ending with that blade
of rusted teeth to chew
through the last of what’s left
of those woods, a fast-driving
diesel flatbed of felled trees
and all of us in a tight spot
between that chugging machine
and the concrete barrier
as we hope the straight back
of our consonants will
hold, even if they are quiescent
monsters, reticent prayers,
because we can’t help it, we lean
towards letters that do not bend,
try our exhausted weight
on the middle of that state,
that silent K—the shape of a man
trying to hold up the ceiling,
trying not to think
of its falling
as the sky’s.