Category: Blogspot

Falling: The Code

1.
Through the night
the apples
outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn.
I can’t see, but hear
the stem-snap, the plummet
through leaves, then
the final thump against the ground.

Sometimes two
at once, or one
right after another.
During long moments of silence
I wait
and wonder about the bruised bodies,
the terror of diving through air, and
think I’ll go tomorrow
to find the newly fallen, but they
all look alike lying there
dewsoaked, disappearing before me.

2.
I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of apples dropping in

the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,
which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know

the meaning of what I hear, each dull
thud of unseen apple-

body, the earth
falling to earth

once and forever, over
and over.

---

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is from Li-Young Lee‘s first collection, Rose (1986). I love Lee’s attention to pauses, to the spaces between things in this poem, building toward that stanza break between “apple-” and “body.” What passes in that moment, in that white space, is a solidification of the apples’ transformation in this poem to more-than-apples: Lee uses “bodies” earlier in the poem, but it is not until this moment — this pause, this use of white space — that the apples become undeniably tied to human mortality, myth, knowledge, code (from the title) in the moral and religious sense. Re-reading the earlier “bodies” reference in this light makes “the bruised bodies, the terror of diving through air,” all the more terrifying — their “final thump” and “disappearing,” earth to earth and dust to dust.

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.

— Ellen

Poet Li-Young Lee was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 28, 2008.

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