Category: Blogspot

Posts migrated from meetmein811.blogspot.com

A Perfect Mess


Hello Friends!

Welcome to National Poetry Month! It's hard to believe it was ten years ago today that I started my own poem-a-day list to celebrate these 30 days with 30 poems by 30 poets. And ten years later, I still can't wait to do it all over again.

No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! So feel free to invite friends and family to join you in this little poetry month celebration. Just send me an email, or sign up through the blog meetmein811.org — where you can also find an archive of the past ten years of poem-a-days.

I didn't plan out this year's poetry month as much as I sometimes do, so in some sense the best I can hope for is a "perfect mess" — which is what today's poem by Mary Karr is about. Karr finds the poetry in everyday items like umbrellas and pianos to paint a beautiful portrait of not just New York City but our collective humanity.

Enjoy.
Ellen

A Perfect Mess

I read somewhere
that if pedestrians didn't break traffic laws to cross
Time Square whenever and by whatever means possible,
          the whole city
would stop, it would stop.
Cars would back up to Rhode Island,
an epic gridlock not even a cat
could thread through. It's not law but the sprawl
of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved
the unprecedented gall
of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand
up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.
They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical
as any day laborers. They knew what was coming,
the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black
as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant
it burst. A downpour like a fire hose.
For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled,
paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato.
And it was my pleasure to witness a not
insignificant miracle: in one instant every black
umbrella in Hell's Kitchen opened on cue, everyone
still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera,
the sails of some vast armada.
And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress
to accompany the piano movers.
each holding what might have once been
lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next
the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled
under the corner awning,
in line for an open call—stork-limbed, ankles
zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette
around. The city feeds on beauty, starves
for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight,
to my deserted block with its famously high
subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure
longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon
opened its mouth to drink from on high...

■

Mary Karr's "A Perfect Mess" appeared in Poetry Magazine, December 2012.

So much of any year is flammable

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

■

Today’s poem is by the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. For another take on “things I didn’t do,” see W.S. Merwin’s “Something I’ve not done.”

Culture and the Universe

Hello Friends,
The poetry of Simon J. Ortiz is rooted in the oral traditions of the Acoma Pueblo Indians — so you may want to read today’s poem out loud. “Culture and the Universe” can be found in Ortiz’s 2002 collection Out There Somewhere.
Enjoy.
— Ellen

Culture and the Universe

Two nights ago
in the canyon darkness,
only the half-moon and stars,
only mere men.
Prayer, faith, love,
existence.

We are measured

by vastness beyond ourselves.
Dark is light.
Stone is rising.

I don’t know
if humankind understands
culture: the act
of being human
is not easy knowledge.

With painted wooden sticks
and feathers, we journey
into the canyon toward stone,
a massive presence
in midwinter.

We stop.

Lean into me.
The universe

sings in quiet meditation.

We are wordless:

I am in you.

Without knowing why
culture needs our knowledge,
we are one self in the canyon.

And the stone wall

I lean upon spins me
wordless and silent
to the reach of stars
and to the heavens within.

It’s not humankind after all
nor is it culture
that limits us.
It is the vastness
we do not enter.
It is the stars
we do not let own us.

■

Miley Cyrus or Manatee?

Hello Friends,
Today I am sharing my favorite poem to encompass both celebrity culture and Sirenia. The poet responsible is James Reidel.
Enjoy.
— Ellen

Miley Cyrus or Manatee?

What is flat and nothing but skin,
What lolls in a shallow world,
What is watched for its surface,
Between long episodes of water the color of a dead screen’s sea-green glass,
What has but a few hairs in the snapshot?
A bit of muzzle,
No more than a pug’s worth for a rented red kayak,
For this sailor swallowed by enormous wax lips,
What is gray and aporial,
Once mistaken for half girl,
Half monster,
Disappointingly naked and slipping under the hull.

— Lido Beach, Fla., November 2013

■

Heart to Heart

Hello Friends,
Sometimes we describe a thing best by saying what it is not. Today’s poem by Rita Dove is one of those cases.
Enjoy.
— Ellen

Heart to Heart

It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.

It doesn’t have
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want—
but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.

■

but a little moment

Hello Friends, and Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare! In honor of the Bard, today’s poem-a-day is Sonnet 15. Read this and then tell me “engraft” isn’t the best word you’ve heard all day. — Ellen

When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and check’d even by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

■

angel of the ordinary house

Hello Friends,
To honor Earth Day today, I have for you a poem by Dorianne Laux that is both gross and gorgeous — and that’s exactly the point of it. (Just maybe don’t read it over lunch.)
Enjoy.
Ellen

Life is Beautiful

          and remote, and useful,
if only to itself. Take the fly, angel
of the ordinary house, laying its bright
eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out
delicately along a crust of buttered toast.
Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest
dump where other flies have gathered, singing
over stained newsprint and reeking
fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate
ballet above the clashing pirouettes
of heavy machinery. They hum with life.
While inside rumpled sacks pure white
maggots writhe and spiral from a rip,
a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips
a living froth onto the buried earth.
The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch,
rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon
their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded
dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges,
a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh.
And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening,
husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening
and shifting within, wings curled and wet,
the open air pungent and ready to receive them
in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts,
a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost
children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents
soundly sleep along the windowsill, content,
wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass.
Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless
waste we make when we create—our streets teem
with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming
over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is
a purpose, maybe there are too many of us
to see it, though we can, from a distance,
hear the dull thrum of generation’s industry,
feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing
the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing
like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder.
Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.

■

pocket poems!

Hello Friends,

It’s one of my favorite days of the year — Poem in Your Pocket Day! Today is the perfect day to stand on a street corner and pass out poems to passers-by. They will mostly think you’re trying to sell them something at first, but you’ll find many are quite delighted to realize you’re giving them a poem. I’ve made a PDF of some pocket-sized poems for you to download and print, so you too can pass out poems to your friends, neighbors, co-workers, or on your nearest street corner.

Also, for the first-time ever on Poem in Your Pocket Day: I have something special for you this year, which is a poem actually about a pocket!

Enjoy.
Ellen

poem I wrote sitting across the table from you

if I had two nickels to rub together
I would rub them together

like a kid rubs sticks together
until friction made combustion

and they burned
a hole in my pocket

into which I would put my hand
and then my arm

and eventually my whole self—
I would fold myself

into the hole in my pocket and disappear
into the pocket of myself, or at least my pants

but before I did
like some ancient star

I’d grab your hand

■

— Kevin Varrone