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Poem-a-Day, April 28: the smell of scissors

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.

Poem-a-Day, April 27: some distant trembling warmth

FROM THE ADULT DRIVE-IN

The hill, no the body unbroken
By the strip mall’s lights arced
Harp of her pelvic bone a mouth

Falling upon it like corn cut down
In a field I was forbidden
To walk through. There are so many

Kinds of darkness: her arms tied
To the bed, the shadow they cast
On the sheets whose brightness

Illuminates the hushed cars lying below.
Dark mouth surrounding the root
Or pressing against an opening:

A dog furrowing into the mole’s home
Following some distant trembling warmth.

• ♦ •

Having walked here through the darkening pines
The woman finds her lover in the abandoned
House, some hunter’s cabin, feathers everywhere.

She’s been running, has been pursued, a jealous
Husband who wants her. Is she afraid? Who cares.
We want the fucking to start. The field is so full

Of hunger that when she bends over the cars
Seem to move forward without being turned on.
Two women moving inside each other.

He’s coming for them sure as raccoons in grain
Pails. Their pale skin washes the screen
So we’re almost snow-blind. They can’t see us

Or him for that matter, huge in the doorframe.
He’s beginning to unbuckle his pants.

• ♦ •

O dark barns who will move me now?
I am undone by the flickering screen
By all those girls thrown against the coal black

Night. We, all of us, go back to the field
Scene of a back that went on forever,
The closed eyes, the want that entered us

As we drove by and tried not to look.
How will I ever learn to tell the truth
After the places my hands have been?

It is darker here than other towns, leaves
Burn clear through December. After that
We light beasts of the field to keep ourselves

Warm. Everyone has weathered each other’s want,
Familiar as the feed store’s smell of grain.

• ♦ •

Familiar as the feed store’s smell of grain
This figure seen from the road where the trees
Break apart. A woman straddling the pasture,

Arms white as birches that surround the body
Of cars idling beneath her. I cannot
Tell her voice from the leaves, just watch her mouth

Move, bare as plucked birds in a hunter’s
Hands. It’s a short walk to the fairgrounds.
I want to take her there, to the palace

Of the bandstand and have it out, music
Of tailbone, tensed hamstring, unrelenting
Chord of her neck pulled back till our eyes

Fill like a screen awash in headlights
As the hushed crowd pushes into the night.

• ♦ •

Like snow, feathers, thrush in the virgin’s mouth
It appeared, white against the dark sky. How
Did he know we wanted it, that we’d come

In all weather? A drive-in of skin flicks
For farmers, machinists, salesmen who lived
For small towns like ours. So much empty

Land and the mills shut down, our lives like barns
With both doors blown open: you could see straight
Through. O life before the freeway rose, dark

Turnpike passing thin as a shiv through
The backside of town. Nobody looking
For anyone to come home, truckers in

Back, some kids out for a ride, all of us
Expectant as deer in open season.

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. The above version of this sonnet sequence appeared in the journal Ninth Letter. A different (more recent) version of this poem also appears in Calvocoressi’s collection The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (2005) — but I’m sending you the older version because I like it better (possibly just because I fell in love with it first), and it’s my poem-a-day list so I get to choose. 😉 I would also like to note that I started writing this email before midnight and have at least some meek argument that I did not spoil my perfect record of having not missed a day all month.

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 Gabrielle Calvocoressi was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2010.

Poem-a-Day, April 26: alone too, too alone

28
Snow Line

It was wet & white & swift and where I am
we don’t know. It was dark and then
it isn’t.
I wish the barker would come. There seems to be to eat
nothing. I am unusually tired.
I’m alone too.

If only the strange one with so few legs would come,
I’d say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.
Where are his notes I loved?
There may be horribles; it’s hard to tell.
The barker nips me but somehow I feel
he too is on my side.

I’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all
run, even that would be better. I am hungry.
The sun is not hot.
It’s not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn’t.

*

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by John Berryman (1914-1972) from his masterwork The Dream Songs (1969).

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

Dream Song #28 “Snow Line” by John Berryman was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 26, 2009.

Poem-a-Day, April 25: Hold one bead

Object Tension

Sorry, but in the Mahler I hear approach and retreat
further out even than language. I had to think of the music
entering the cone of a hibiscus at its widest moment,
knowing the flower’s movement from most present to most gone
takes one day only, briefest resolution, like a heard note
or notes in any combination, however long. Brief, however deep,
like the buoyant silence after an applause.
In Donatello’s figure of the aged Magdalene, the raised hands
are caught, held apart just so, one coming to the other
in the gesture for prayer, not touching, held there arguing
look, the soul is sensate, look how true things feel
when they’re held.
Oh my God,
is grief more true than love? My father had a problem
with his hands, growths on the tendons drew his fingers into fists,
in years. God bless
the women passing needles to their girls, and hooks, any word
or flower can be embroidered with the x, anything
can last, sweet home sweet
home. I saw the face of a beaded evening bag,
minutest iridescent beads in rose and deeper rose,
and black. Someone stopped at the fringe,
the most decorative part of the decorative thing. She left
the threaded needle in. What grief
was it, as those hours spent readying the rare occasion stopped,
the bag not done but not undone? One bead
is a beautiful thing. We won’t all die at once. Hold one bead
in your hand and keep from thinking of the next one if you can.

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Kathleen Peirce in her 1991 collection Mercy.

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. Thanks to Kate Gapinski (wherever you are) for introducing me to this poem.

Poem-a-Day, April 24: does your house have lions?

what does a liver know of peace
or spleen. kidneys. ribs. be still my soul.
how does a city broker its disease
within the confines of a borough, where control
limps tepid-like carrying a parasol
of hurts, hurting, hurted, hurtful croons
stranded in measured arenas without pulpits or spittoons.

came the summer of nineteen sixty
harlem luxuriating in Malcolm’s voice
became Big Red beautiful became a city
of magnificent Black Birds steel eyes moist
as he insinuated his words of sweet choice
while politicians complained about this racist
this alchemist. this strategist. this purist.

came the rallies sponsored by new york core
came Malcolm with speeches spilling exact and compact
became a traveling man who revived the poor
who answered with slow echoes became cataract
and fiesta became future and flashback
filling the selves with an old outrage
piercing the cold corners with a new carriage.

then i began an awakening a flowering inside
the living dead became a wanderer of air
barking at the stars became a bride
bridegroom of change timeless black with hair
moist with kinks and morning dare
then i began to think me alive with form and history
then i made my former life an accessory.

how to erect respect in a country of men
where dollars pump their veins?
how to return from exhile from swollen
tongues crisscrossing my frail domain?
how to learn to love me amid all the pain?
how to look into his eyes and be reborn
without blood and phlegm and thorn?

sister tell me about this cough i cough
all of my skin cradled in this cough
my body ancient as this white cough, i cough
all day and night i’m haunted by this cough,
a snake rattles in my throat this cough, i cough
a scream embalms my chest with cough
sister an echo surrounds my lungs with this cough, i cough.

*

Hello Friends —

Sonia Sanchez returns poetry to its oral and dramatic roots in Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), a book-length dialogue between sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestor voices. The excerpts above are both in the voice of the brother, who is dying of AIDS.

Sanchez succeeds in invoking a contemporary spoken word sensibility of language and applying it to a poetic form at least as old as Chaucer, the Rhyme Royal: Does Your House Have Lions? is written entirely in seven line stanzas with an a-b-a-b-b-c-c rhyme scheme.

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 23: Since it’s his birthday…

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Hello Friends —

Happy Bard Day! April 23 is celebrated as the supposed birthday of William Shakespeare. The Bard was born in 1564 and also supposedly died on the exact same day 52 years later, April 23, 1616. The monologue above is from Act V, scene 5 of Macbeth, when Macbeth learns of Lady Macbeth’s death. As with “Jabberwocky,” I strongly encourage you to read today’s selection out loud to someone else, at least once a year.

Ever wonder how Shakespeare was able to stay in perfect iambic pentameter so much of the time? Well, it certainly didn’t hurt that he made up many of the words he used — often taking a known word and twisting it into a new part of speech; noun into verb, verb into adjective, etc. — so that they just happen to fit perfectly into his syllabic structure. Here’s a fun list of words that have their earliest usage credited to Shakespeare in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Further reading: Of the dozens of literary works deriving their titles from this ironically immortal Macbeth passage, two particularly worth reading are “Out, Out —” by Robert Frost; and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (but not unless you’ve read something else by Faulkner first — As I Lay Dying is a good place to start if you’re a Faulkner virgin — otherwise, you’ll never get past the first sentence of The Sound and the Fury).

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

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” by William Shakespeare was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2009.
Poems by William Shakespeare were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2008 and Poem-a-Day April 23, 2011.

Poem-a-Day, April 22: 100% cotton

The Shirt

The shirt touches his neck
and smoothes over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Jane Kenyon from her 1978 collection From Room to Room. For a different take, also see “Shirt” by Robert Pinsky.

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

“The Shirt” by Jane Kenyon was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 7, 2009.

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.

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.