The young woman who yells to her friends from an open pickup window is attired for summer season in strapless stretch tube top, slipping down toward bountiful cleavage valley. She tugs it up in front as she races toward the two who have just passed a cigarette between them like a baton on a relay team. Her white chest gleams like burnished treasure as they giggle loudly there in the corner and I glance down to see what costume I have selected to present myself to the world today. I round the corner and walk into Evening descending. Reprinted by permission of Joe Paddock and the publisher.
Peace Lilies I collect them now, it seems. Like sea-shells or old thimbles. Two for my sweet brothers. Odd how little they require of me. Unlike the ones they were sent in memory of. No sudden shrilling of the phone. No harried midnight flights. Only a little water now and then. Scant food and light. Even when they thirst, they summon me with nothing more than a soft, indifferent furl- ing of their leaves. Every parent gets questions like the one at the center of this poem. Love is the elephant and we are the blind mice unable to understand the whole. Instead I shake my head. Go ask your mother.
She laughs and says, I did. Mom told me to come and ask you. Poem reprinted from Rattle, Vol. Atomic energy was then in its infancy. Jehanne Dubrow, who lives and teaches in Maryland, is much younger than I, and she grew up under the fearsome cloud of what atomic energy was to become. We were uneasy in our skins, sixth grade, a year for blowing up, for learning that nothing contains that heat which comes from growing, the way our parents seemed at once both tall as cooling towers and crushed beneath the pressure of small things— family dinners, the evening news, the dead voice of the dial tone.
Even the ground was ticking. The parts that grew grew poison. Whatever we ate became a stone. Whatever we said was love became plutonium, became a spark of panic in the buried world. Poem reprinted from West Branch, No. I am I am a daughter and a sister. I wonder when I will die. I hear the warm weather coming. I see stars in the day.
I want to learn my whole ballet dance. I am a daughter and a sister. I pretend to be a teacher at home. I feel like I am a teacher. I touch hands that are growing. I worry that I will never change. I cry when something or someone dies. I understand that teachers work hard for students. I dream about me not moving while trying really hard to run. I try to become a good friend. I hope that there is no more dying or killing. Window Washer One hand slops suds on, one hustles them down like a blind. Brusque noon glare, filtered thus, loosens and glows. For five or six minutes he owns the place, dismal coffee bar, and us, its huddled underemployed.
A blade, black line against the topmost glass, begins, slices off the outer lather, flings it away, works inward, corrals the frothy middle, and carves, with quick cuts, the stuff down, not looking for anything, beneath or inside. Homes to the last, cleans its edges, grooms it for the end, then shaves it off and flings it away. Which is splendid, and merciless. And all in the wrist. Then, he looks at us. We makers of filth, we splashers and spitters. We sitters and watchers. Who like to see him work. Who love it when he leaves and gives it back: Judith Harris lives in Washington, D.
End of Market Day At five, the market is closing. Burdock roots, parsley, and rutabagas are poured back into the trucks. The antique dealer breaks down his tables. Light dappled, in winter parkas shoppers hunt for bargains: Poem reprinted from The Southern Review, Vol. John, who lives in California, gives us a snapshot of workers protecting an orchard. John, whose most recent book of poetry is The Face: A Novella in Verse, Harper Collins, John and the publishers.
Poem reprinted from Shinemaster, Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, , by permission of Michael McFee and the publisher. Here Jane Varley, who lives in Ohio, offers us a touching last moment with a dear friend. Packing the Car for Our Western Camping Trip What we will remember—we tried to take the dog, packed around him, making a cozy spot at the back of the Subaru, blocking out the sun, resisting the obvious— he was too old, he would not make it.
And when he died in Minnesota, we smelled and smelled his paws, arthritic and untouchable these last many years, took those marvelous paws up into our faces. They smelled of dark clay and sweet flower bloom decay. Here Peter Everwine, a California poet, tells us about the seeds that stick to us, in all their beauty and variety. Back from the Fields Until nightfall my son ran in the fields, looking for God knows what.
Odd birds on the wing. Something to fill an empty spot. Maybe a luminous angel or a country girl with a secret dark. He came back empty-handed, or so I thought. Now I find them: Selected and New Poems, Univ. Ellery Akers is a California poet who here brings all of us under a banner with one simple word on it.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: Here she takes us with her on a ninety-foot dive into colorful mid-Pacific waters. Red sea fans pulse. The leopard shark lounges on a smooth ramp of sand, skin jeweled with small hangers-on. Pyramid fish point the way to the surface. Ninety feet down, blue ribbon eels cough, their mouths neon cautions. Soft corals unfurl rainbow polyps, thousands of mouths held open to night. Christmas tree worms snap back, flat spirals tight, living petroglyphs against the night.
Reprinted by permission of Peggy Shumaker and the publisher. And lots of parents, thinking their children have moved on, discover one day that those children are back. Taylor, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, writes of that. The company caved, the boss went broke, The job and the love affair, all up in smoke. The anguish of loneliness comes as a shock— O heart in the doldrums, O heart in hock. And so they return with their piles of possessions, Their terrified cats and their mournful expressions, Reclaiming the bedrooms they had in their teens, Clean towels, warm comforter, glass figurines.
The children are back.
Full text of "Crossword Lists & Crossword Solver Stibbs Anne"
Taylor and the publisher. The Aunts I like it when they get together and talk in voices that sound like apple trees and grape vines, and some of them wear hats and go to Arizona in the winter, and they all like to play cards. Poem reprinted by permission of Joyce Sutphen and the publisher.
She lives in Duluth and has a keen eye for what goes on around her. Mysterious Neighbors Country people rise early as their distant lights testify. Each house has a personal source, like a bank account, a stone vault. A walk for the mail elevates the heart rate. Last November I saw a woman down the road walk out to her mailbox dressed in blaze orange cap to boot, a cautious soul. Our neighbor across the road sits in his kitchen with his rifle handy and the window open. You never know when. Once he shot a trophy with his barrel resting on the sill. Hard work never hurt a man until suddenly he was another broken tool.
His silhouette against the dawn droops as though drought-stricken, each step deliberate, down the driveway to his black mailbox, prying it open. Reprinted from New Ohio Review, No. I like this poem by year-old Lois Beebe Hayna of Colorado for the way it captures restrained speech. The speaker spends most of her words in describing a season, but behind the changes of spring another significant change is suggested.
No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody to ask questions. Except for the one big question we went on asking ourselves. That spring myriads of birds stopped over briefly. Flocks appeared overnight—birds brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks or crossed bills, birds small and enormous, all of them pausing to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings, and disappear.
Each flock seemed surer than we of a destination. Poem reprinted from The Greensboro Review, No. A cherry tree is all about giving. Remaking a Neglected Orchard It was a good idea, cutting away the vines and ivy, trimming back the chest-high thicket lazy years had let grow there.
The great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso said that, in his subjects, he kept the joy of discovery, the pleasure of the unexpected. In this poem celebrating Picasso, Tim Nolan, an attorney in Minneapolis, says the world will disclose such pleasures to us, too, if only we pay close attention. Picasso How can we believe he did it— every day—for all those years?
We remember how the musicians gathered for him—and the prostitutes arranged themselves the way he wanted— and even the helmeted monkeys with their little toy car cerebella— posed—and the fish on the plate— remained after he ate the fish— Bones —What do we do with this life? Joy —from the lead— to the oil—to the stretch of bright canvas—stretched—to the end of it all.
In this poem, Frannie Lindsay, a Massachusetts poet, remembers a similar experience. The poem first appeared in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. For My Wife Cutting My Hair You move around me expertly like the good, round Italian barber I went to in Florence, years before we met, his scissors a razor he sharpened on a belt. But at first when you were learning, I feared for my neck, saw my ears like sliced fruit on the newspapered floor. Taking us back in time, you cleverly clipped my head in a flat-top. The years in between were styles no one had ever seen, or should see again: In the chair, almost asleep, I hear the bright scissors dancing.
Hear you hum, full-breasted as Aida, carefully trimming the white from my temples, so no one, not even I, will know. She rolled out bread dough, put catsup on it, and baked it. My grandfather is rolling meatballs in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy by coming to America.
Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce. Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean, sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after cops delivered him home just hours before. The waitresses are helping themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer, playing the numbers with Moon Mullin and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. With anchovies, large, 50 cents.
A whole dinner is 60 cents before 6 pm. How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix, would stand outside all the way down Warren Street, waiting for this new taste treat, young guys in uniform, lined up and laughing, learning Italian, before being shipped out to fight the last great war. Reprinted by permission of Grace Cavalieri and the publisher.
Alan Broughton of Vermont, we sense a kind of friendship without dependency between our species and another. Great Blue Heron I drive past him each day in the swamp where he stands on one leg, hunched as if dreaming of his own form the surface reflects. Often I nearly forget to turn left, buy fish and wine, be home in time to cook and chill. Reprinted by permission of T. Alan Broughton and the publisher.
Here Molly Fisk, a California poet, gives us one of those many moons that you and I may have failed to observe. A late-quarter moon hangs in the air above the ridge like a broken plate and shines on us all, on the new deputy almost asleep in his four-by-four, lulled by the crackling song of the dispatcher, on the bartender, slowly wiping a glass and racking it, one eye checking the game.
This poet lives in Lexington, Virginia. I go astray in old routines, I dare myself to reconstruct the rules of old invented games—that one of throwing snowballs at the roof, to watch them shrink as they rolled down, spinning to their pits, to see the force that made them briefly a thing so neatly undone. I bowed to his dense little will. But planned to miss. As I packed and flung each one to its unpacking, he hunted down the humble bits and crumbs of every impact, as they ran from him along the icy slope, and gathered and carried them back to me at the top. Eating them as he came.
Even the heavily bearded bear in accounting has a little otter-like boyfriend. A gaggle of models comes shrieking into the bar to further punctuate why I sometimes hate living in this city. They glitter, a shiny gang of scissors. They are shoes that fool absolutely no one. Everyone wore their special holiday party outfits. First printed in Rattle, Vol. The mysteries from the public library, due in two weeks. The half-eaten square of lasagna in the fridge. The half-burned wreckage of her last cigarette, and one red swallow of wine in a lipsticked glass beside her chair.
Finally, a blue Bic on a couple of downs and acrosses left blank in the Sunday crossword, which actually had the audacity to look a little smug at having, for once, won. Reprinted by permission of George Bilgere and the publisher. Developing the Land For six nights now the cries have sounded in the pasture: Five years ago you saw two spotted fawns rise for the first time from brome where brick mailboxes will stand; only three years past came great horned owls who raised two squeaking, downy owlets that perished in the traffic, skimming too low across the road behind some swift, more fortunate cottontail.
It was on an August afternoon that you drove in, curling down our long gravel drive past pasture and creek, that you saw, flickering at the edge of your sight, three mounted Indians, motionless in the paused breeze, who vanished when you turned your head. We have felt the presence on this land of others, of some who paused here, some who passed, who have left in the thick clay shards and splinters of themselves that we dig up, turn up with spade and tine when we garden or bury our animals; their voices whisper on moonless nights in the back pasture hollow where the horses snort and nicker, wary with alarm.
Behrendt from his most recent book of poetry, History, Mid-List Press, Reprinted by permission of Stephen C. Behrendt and the publisher. Girl Riding a Horse in a Field of Sunflowers Sitting perfectly upright, contented and pensive, she holds in one hand, loosely, the reins of summer: When she stops to rest, summer rests. When she decides to leave, there goes summer over the hill. San Francisco Bay Press, Reprinted by permission of David Allan Evans and the publisher. Veil In this low place between mountains fog settles with the dark of evening.
Every year it takes some of those we love—a car full of teenagers on the way home from a dance, or a father on his way to the paper mill, nightshift the only opening. Each morning, up on the ridge, the sun lifts this veil, sees what night has accomplished. The water on our window— screens disappears slowly, gradually, like grief. Reprinted by permission of Todd Davis and the publisher. Poem first appeared in Albatross, No. Here is just one example. How many of us have marveled at how well our parents have succeeded at a long marriage? The Exam It is mid-October.
The trees are in their autumnal glory red, yellow-green, orange outside the classroom where students take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if identifying lines from Blake or Keats was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words they never saw before. I am wondering who could have fashioned the test that would have predicted this success?
Who could have known? Poem reprinted by permission of Joyce Sutphen. A Ghost Abandons the Haunted You ignore the way light filters through my cells, the way I have of fading out—still there is a constant tug, a stretching, what is left of me is coming loose. Reprinted by permission of Katie Cappello and the publisher. Having a dog is like having a dictator. In this poem by Mark Smith-Soto, who teaches in North Carolina, his dog Chico is very much like my dogs, demanding human company on whatever mission they choose to pursue.
Tagged works
Night Watch Chico whines, no reason why. Just now walked, dinner gobbled, head and ears well scratched. And yet he whines, looking up at me as if confused at my just sitting here, typing away, while darkness is stalking the back yard. His whines are refugees from a brain where time and loss have small dominion, but where the tyranny of now is absolute. I get up and throw open the kitchen door, and he disappears down the cement steps, barking deeper and darker than I remember. I follow to find him perfectly still in the empty yard— the two of us in the twilight, standing guard. Poem reprinted from Poetry East, Nos.
We have been playing for hours, and now we need to stop, and she does not want to. She is counting on me to lower the boom that is her heavy body, and settle her down. I rub her ribcage, I arrange the blankets around her hips. Downstairs are lethal phonecalls I have to answer. Friends dying, I need to call. My daughter may be weeping all my tears, I only know that even this young and lying on her side, her head uplifted like a cupped tulip, sometimes she needs to cry.
Burke, who lives in N. Nocturne A man can give up so much, can limit himself to handwritten correspondence, to foods made of whole grains, to heat from a woodstove, logs hewn by his own hand and stacked neatly like corpses by the backdoor. He can play nocturnes by heart. They will not make the beloved appear. He can learn the names of all the birds in the valley.
Not one will be enticed to learn his. Burke and reprinted from Lake Effect, Vol. Burke and the publisher. Love Story The kitchen door opens onto dirt and the second half of the country all the way to the Pacific. Rusted prairie trains out of the tall weeds elbow the last century aside, rumble from every direction towards Chicago. My great-grandfather, who would be years old today, put on his one tall hat and took the big trip to Omaha for my great-grandma with the family ring on his vest and winter wheat lying wait in seed.
He gave her all the miles he had and she gave him the future I walk around in every day. The mountains were too far west to count so they doubled back over the land and century and the real weather kept coming from them. Poem reprinted from the Nimrod International Journal, Vol. I love to sit outside and be very still until some little creature appears and begins to go about its business, and here is another poet, Robert Gibb, of Pennsylvania, doing just the same thing. Reprinted by permission of the author and Autumn House Press.
I was the earliest pinch of civilization, the one who laced him into shoe leather when he stumbled into walking upright. Through a pane of glass that shivers when the wind kicks up I watch my son walk away. He trips; my hand flies out; I yank it back. Most of us spend our time thinking about other people, and scarcely any time thinking about other creatures. I recently co-edited an anthology of poems about birds, and we looked through lots of books and magazines, but here is a fine poem we missed, by Tara Bray, who lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Once I climbed the roll of hay to watch the heron in the pond. He waded a few steps out, then back, thrusting his beak under water, pulling it up empty, but only once. How is it for him, day after day, his brittle legs rising from warm green scum, his graceful neck curled, damp in the bright heat?
Every day, the same roads, the sky, the dust, the barn caving into itself, the tin roof twisted and scattered in the yard. Again, the bank covered with oxeye daisy that turns to spiderwort, to chicory, and at last to goldenrod. Each year, the birds— thick in the air and darting in wild numbers— grow quiet, the grasses thin, the light leaves earlier each day.
The heron stood stone-still on my spot when I returned. And then, his wings burst open, lifting the steel- blue rhythm of his body into flight. I touched the warm hay. Hoping for a trace of his wild smell, I cupped my hands over my face: It is a painful experience but it underlines life. Here Carl Little, who lives in Maine, returns to a place like that. The Clearing The sunbox lies in pieces, its strips of aluminum foil flaking away to the wind, tanning platform broken up for kindling.
In The Chair: A Crinkled Mind Novella
All has been cleared, thick cat briar raked into piles and set ablaze, invincible ailanthus stacked for dump. Five Years Later My brother was on his way to a dental appointment when the second plane hit four stories below the office where he worked. Maybe, shamed by his luck, he keeps quiet, afraid someone might guess how good he feels, breathing. No one cares about my old humiliations but they go on dragging through my sleep like a string of empty tin cans rattling behind an abandoned car.
First printed in the Northwest Review , Vol. One September Afternoon Home from town the two of them sit looking over what they have bought spread out on the kitchen table like gifts to themselves. She holds a card of buttons against the new dress material and asks if they match. The hay is dry enough to rake, but he watches her empty the grocery bag. He reads the label on a grape jelly glass and tries on the new straw hat again. Poem reprinted from Paddlefish, No. Over the years I have read many poems about fireflies, but of all of them hers seems to offer the most and dearest peace.
Fireflies In the dry summer field at nightfall, fireflies rise like sparks. Imagine the presence of ghosts flickering, the ghosts of young friends, your father nearest in the distance. This time they carry no sorrow, no remorse, their presence is so light. Childhood comes to you, memories of your street in lamplight, holding those last moments before bed, capturing lightning-bugs, with a blossom of the hand letting them go. Lightness returns, an airy motion over the ground you remember from Ring Around the Rosie. If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies again, not part of your stories, as unaware of you as sleep, being beautiful and quiet all around you.
Reprinted by permission of Marilyn Kallet. Rhyming has a way of brightening a poem, and a depressing subject can become quite a bit lighter with well-chosen rhymes. Are there readers among you who have felt like this? And let me swim in cover-ups. One reaches for the pleasures of the mind and heart to counteract the loss of quicker knowledge.
One feels old urgencies unwind, although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer, in case I might attract another geezer. Poem reprinted from Rattle , Vol. Here he beautifully captures a quiet moment of reflection. Rain Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. And thinking of my father and of good companions gone into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain and the soft lapping of water, and did not know whether it was grief or joy or something other that surged against my heart and held me listening there so long and late.
Reprinted from Ploughshares, Vol. Rehab We wear harnesses like crossing guards. In a pouch over the heart, over stent and bypass, a black box with leads pressed onto metal nipples. Angels of telemetry with vials of nitro watch over us. We beam to their monitors now a barn dance, now a moonwalk. They cuff us and pump and we keep on so tomorrow will live off today. By now only the dead know more about gravity than we do. Poem reprinted from The Hudson Review, Vol.
My Hometown Oh, Homer! You kept your town at two stories, as flat as the surrounding prairie. You taught the Iliad and Odyssey in honor of your namesake poet. Your spirit outlasted the bleached fields of the Depression, and Bravely swam against the raging Omaha Creek floods.
On warm, wet spring Saturday nights, You provided dark places for your young To launch your next generation In pickups, unlighted. Poem reprinted by permission of Donal Heffernan. In summer heat you would find her in the hayfield— cutting, raking, baling, stacking. In between she kept the books, cooked, cleaned laundered, fed bum lambs. Garden rows straight, canned jars of food lined cellar walls.
I asked him how he would manage. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey. I thought that today you might like to have us offer you a poem full of blessings. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. I like to paint and draw, and I own enough art supplies to start my own store. And for every hobby there are lots of supplies that seem essential.
In this poem we get a whole tackle box full of equipment from Michael Sowder, who lives and fishes in Utah. Reprinted by permission of Michael Sowder. Yard Work My leaf blower lifted the blackbird— wings still spread, weightless, floating on the loud, electric wind almost as if it were alive. Three or four times it flew, but fell again, sideslipped down like a kite with no string, so I gave up.
I had work to do, and when the dust I raised had settled in that other world under the rose bushes, the ants came back to finish theirs. POET LAUREATE, Barnyard chickens, which are little more than reptiles with feathers, can be counted on to kill those among them who are malformed or diseased, but we humans, advanced animals that we think we are, are far more likely to just turn away from people who bear the scars of misfortune. Cramped, shoved hard, I, too, passed up the seat, the place, and fought on Through to the next car, and the next, but now I wonder why the fire that could have killed him Spared him, burns scarred over; if a life Is what he calls this space through which he moves, Dark space we dared not enter, and what fire Burns in him when he sees us move away.
We are sometimes amazed by how well the visually impaired navigate the world, but like the rest of us, they have found a way to do what interests them. Here Jan Mordenski of Michigan describes her mother, absorbed in crocheting.
- Freche Mädchen - frecher Advent: Ein Horoskop für Vanessa (Folge 3) (German Edition)?
- Search Results.
- Glinda | books tagged Glinda | LibraryThing?
Crochet Even after darkness closed her eyes my mother could crochet. Her hands would walk the rows of wool turning, bending, to a woolen music. The dye lots were registered in memory: There need not be anything sensational or unusual or peculiar about that moment, but somehow, by directing my attention to it, our attention to it, the poet bathes it in the light of the remarkable. Here is a poem like this by Carolyn Miller, who lives in San Francisco. The World as It is No ladders, no descending angels, no voice out of the whirlwind, no rending of the veil, or chariot in the sky—only water rising and falling in breathing springs and seeping up through limestone, aquifers filling and flowing over, russet stands of prairie grass and dark pupils of black-eyed Susans.
Only the fixed and wandering stars: Orion rising sideways, Jupiter traversing the southwest like a great firefly, Venus trembling and faceted in the west—and the moon, appearing suddenly over your shoulder, brimming and ovoid, ripe with light, lifting slowly, deliberately, wobbling slightly, while far below, the faithful sea rises up and follows. Reprinted by permission of Carolyn Miller and the publisher. Touch this word now, that one. These are the words from immortality. No one stands between us now except Death: I enter it entirely writing this.
I have to tell you I am not alone.
Shopping Cart
We like to watch you read. Poem reprinted from Pleiades, Vol. The one chore she spared us: Or did she guard her place at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss of the magnolia, the school traffic humming. Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon, delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news. Poem reprinted from Tar River Poetry, Vol. Here is a poem like that by Rachel Contreni Flynn, who lives in Illinois. The Yellow Bowl If light pours like water into the kitchen where I sway with my tired children, if the rug beneath us is woven with tough flowers, and the yellow bowl on the table rests with the sweet heft of fruit, the sun-warmed plums, if my body curves over the babies, and if I am singing, then loneliness has lost its shape, and this quiet is only quiet.
Reprinted from his most recent book of poems, Father, Wind Publications, , by permission of Jeff Daniel Marion and the publisher. Wendy Videlock lives in western Colorado, where a person can stop to study what an owl has left behind without being run over by a taxi. The Owl Beneath her nest, a shrew's head, a finch's beak and the bones of a quail attest the owl devours the hour, and disregards the rest. Reprinted from Poetry, January , by permission of Wendy Videlock and the publisher.
Music lessons, well, maybe 80 out of every of us had them, once, and a few of us went on to play our chosen instruments all our lives. But the rest of us? Music Is Time Music is time, said the violin master. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.
She clapped her hands together as the boy moved the bow across the strings. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, the violin master shouted, louder and more shrill so that her voice traveled through the house like a metronome, guiding him, commanding him to translate the beat, to trust his own internal rhythm. Good boy, she said. See how hard you have to be on yourself? How will your violin know who you are unless you make it speak? Knopf, , by permission of Jill Bialosky and the publisher.
But at the edges of floods are the dead, too. The Coffins Two days into the flood they appear, moored against a roof eave or bobbing caught in the crowns of drowned trees. What have they discovered and come back to account? Or is this the beginning of the marvelous voyage and they plan never to return?
All over this country, marriage counselors and therapists are right now speaking to couples about unspoken things. In this poem, Andrea Hollander Budy, an Arkansas poet, shows us one of those couples, suffering from things done and undone. Betrayal They decide finally not to speak of it, the one blemish in their otherwise blameless marriage.
It happened as these things do, before the permanence was set, before the children grew complicated, before the quench of loving one another became all each of them wanted from this life. Years later the bite of not knowing and not wanting to know still pierces the doer as much as the one to whom it was done: Poem reprinted from Shenandoah, Vol. These days are brim full of bad news about our economy—businesses closing, people losing their houses, their jobs.
Bankruptcy Hearing They have us corralled in the basement of the courthouse. One desk and a row of folding chairs— just like first grade, our desks facing Teacher in neat little rows. No creditors have come to claim us today. This guy from the graveyard shift stares at his steel-toed boots, nervous hands in his lap. None of us look each other in the eye. We steal quick looks— how did you get here. We examine the pipes that hang from the ceiling, the scratched tiles on the floor, the red glow of the exit sign at the end of the hall so like our other failed escapes: Here is a lovely snapshot of her father, whom I cherished among my good friends.
Until the green-haloed tree rose up and sang hello, I had forgotten. He planted it twelve years ago, when he was seventy-three, so that in September he could stroll down with the sound of the crickets rising and falling around him, and stand, naked to the waist, slightly bent, sucking juice from a ripe pear. Baker lives in Granville, Ohio, and teaches at Denison University. He is also the poetry editor for the distinguished Kenyon Review. These are the true lovers, this dog, this man, and when the dog stops to pee, the old guy hurries him back, then hurls the ball farther away.
To call for, and it comes. Poem reprinted from Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. Often when I dig some change out of my jeans pocket to pay somebody for something, the pennies and nickels are accompanied by a big gob of blue lint. A long time to be picking lint from pockets. Imagine entering my classroom in a jacket made from lint. Who would believe it? On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest This one got tired of lugging his fortress wherever he went, was done with duck and cover at every explosion through rustling leaves of fox and dog and skunk.
Said au revoir to the ritual of pulling himself together. I imagine him waiting for the cover of darkness to let down his hinged drawbridge. He wanted, after so many protracted years of caution, to dance naked and nimble as a flame under the moon— even if dancing just once was all that the teeth of the forest would allow.
Reprinted from Poetry East, Nos. How often does one happen according to the dreams that preceded it? In this poem, Wesley McNair, a poet from Maine, describes a first night of marriage in a tawdry place. For My Wife How were we to know, leaving your two kids behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap hotels in New York City to draw customers like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby? Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door with a cut on one side the exact shape of the toilet bowl that was in its way when I closed it.
I opened and shut the door, admiring the fit and despairing of it. Yet in that room we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay our love down, and in this way began our unwise and persistent and lucky life together.
New and Selected Poems, Godine, Poem reprinted from Five Points, Vol. What might my late parents have thought, I wonder, to know that there would one day be an occupation known as Tooth Painter? Tooth Painter He was tall, lean, serious about his profession, said it disturbed him to see mismatched teeth. Squinting, he asked me to turn toward the light as he held an unglazed crown by my upper incisors. With a small brush he applied yellow, gray, pink, violet and green from a palette of glazes, then fired it at sixteen hundred degrees.
We went outside to check the final color, and he was pleased. Today the dentist put it in my mouth, and no one could ever guess my secret: A gallery opens when I smile. Even the forgery gleams. In this poem, Ann Struthers looks into the mystery of instinctive behavior. Not Knowing Why Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings, lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger.
What danger on this island in the middle of Marble Lake? They wheel over the lake, the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes. In autumn something urges them toward Texas marshes. They follow their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles creeping along geometric roads, going toward small boxes, toward lives as narrow or as wide as the pond, as glistening or as gray as the sky.
They do not know why. They fly, they fly. Poem reprinted from the Coe Review, Vol. That was the news. I love this poem by Nancyrose Houston of Seattle for the way it plays with the character of those letters from home that many of us have received. The Letter From Home The dogs barked, the dogs scratched, the dogs got wet, the dogs shook, the dogs circled, the dogs slept, the dogs ate, the dogs barked; the rain fell down, the leaves fell down, the eggs fell down and cracked on the floor; the dust settled, the wood floors were scratched, the cabinets sat without doors, the trim without paint, the stuff piled up; I loaded the dishwasher, I unloaded the dishwasher, I raked the leaves, I did the laundry, I took out the garbage, I took out the recycling, I took out the yard waste.
There was a bed, it was soft, there was a blanket, it was warm, there were dreams, they were good. The corn grew, the eggplant grew, the tomatoes grew, the lettuce grew, the strawberries grew, the blackberries grew; the tea kettle screamed, the computer keys clicked, the radio roared, the TV spoke. My mother cooked, the apple tree bloomed, the lilac bloomed, the mimosa bloomed, I bloomed. Reprinted from Wake Up In Brightness: I have been reading her work in literary magazines for at least thirty years.
The Other Fathers would be coming back from some war, sending back stuffed birds or handkerchiefs in navy blue with Love painted on it. Some sent telegrams for birthdays, the pastel letters like jewels. The magazines were full of fathers who were doing what had to be done, were serving, were brave. My father sat in the grey chair, war after war, hardly said a word. I wished he had gone away with the others so maybe he would be coming back to us American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine.
Poem reprinted from Natural Bridge, No. We do not accept unsolicited manuscript. Here is a nine-word poem by Joette Giorgis, who lives in Pennsylvania, that is based upon noticing and then thinking about something so ordinary that it might otherwise be overlooked. Even the separate words are flat and commonplace. But so much feeling comes through! Untitled children grown— dust accumulates on half the kitchen table American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation www. One of the wonderful things about small children is the way in which they cause us to explain the world.
Here Christine Stewart-Nunez, who lives and teaches in South Dakota, tries to teach her son a new word only to hear it come back transformed. Convergence Through the bedroom window a February sunrise, fog suspended between pines. Intricate crystals— hoarfrost lace on a cherry tree. My son calls out, awake. We sway, blanket-wrapped, his head nuzzling my neck. Hoarfrost, tree—I point, shaping each word. His hand reaches to the wallpaper lion.
Eyes widening, he opens his mouth and roars. Here is a lovely poem by Tim Nolan, an attorney in Minneapolis. At the Choral Concert The high school kids are so beautiful in their lavender blouses and crisp white shirts. They open their mouths to sing with that far-off stare they had looking out from the crib. First printed in Ploughshares , Winter In this poem, Ben Vogt of Nebraska describes a color snapshot of a Christmas dinner, the family, impatient to tuck in, arrayed along the laden table.
I especially like the description of the turkey. Turkey tanned to a cowboy boot luster, potatoes mashed and mounded in a bowl whose lip is lined with blue flowers linked by grey vines faded from washing. Each pair of eyes admonished by Aunt Photographer. Reprinted by permission of Benjamin Vogt. Here is a poem by Trish Crapo, of Leyden, Massachusetts, that captures a moment of that innocence.
Back Then Out in the yard, my sister and I tore thread from century plants to braid into bracelets, ate chalky green bananas, threw coconuts onto the sidewalk to crack their hard, hairy skulls. The world had begun to happen, but not time. We would live forever, sunburnt and pricker-stuck, our promises written in blood.
Not yet would men or illness distinguish us, our thoughts cleave us in two. If she squeezed sour calamondins into a potion, I drank it. When I jumped from the fig tree, she jumped. Poor Patriarch The rooster pushes his head high among the hens, trying to be what he feels he must be, here in the confines of domesticity. Before the tall legs of my presence, he bristles and shakes his ruby comb.
Little man, I want to say the hens know who they are. I want to ease his mistaken burden, want him to crow with the plain ecstasy of morning light as it finds its winter way above the woods. Poor outnumbered fellow, how did he come to believe that on his plumed shoulders lay the safety of an entire flock? I run my hand down the rippled brindle of his back, urge him to relax, drink in the female pleasures that surround him, of egg laying, of settling warm-breasted in the nest of this brief and feathered time.
Reprinted by permission of Susie Patlove and the publisher. Night Flight I am doing laps at night, alone In the indoor pool. Outside It is snowing, but I am warm And weightless, suspended and out Of time like a fly in amber. Though it is late, even At that height, I know her light Is on, her window a square Of gold as she reads mysteries Above the Atlantic. If she looks down by moonlight, Under a clear sky, she will see Black water. She will see me Swimming distantly, moving far From shore, suspended with her In flight through the wide gulf As we swim toward land together.
Reprinted by permission of George Bilgere. Lots of contemporary poems are anecdotal, a brief narration of some event, and what can make them rise above anecdote is when they manage to convey significance, often as the poem closes. Here is an example of one like that, by Marie Sheppard Williams, who lives in Minneapolis. Everybody I stood at a bus corner one afternoon, waiting for the 2. An old guy stood waiting too. I stared at him.
He caught my stare, grinned, gap-toothed. Will you sign my coat? Held out a pen. He wore a dirty canvas coat that had signatures all over it, hundreds, maybe thousands. On a little space on a pocket. I am one of everybody. Reprinted from the California Review, Volume 32, no. In this lovely sonnet, Kathy Mangan, of Maryland, contributes to that respected tradition. Unthrottled, wavering in the upper reaches, your trilled summons traveled farther than our few blocks. Reprinted by permission of Kathy Mangan and the publisher. Like Coins, November We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees were tossed like coins against the sky.
Stunned gold and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes: The autumn boughs and blackened branches wore a somber gloss that whispered tails to me, not heads. I read memorial columns in their trunks; their leaves spelled UNUM, cent; and yours, the only head.
Here Philip Memmer of Deansboro, N. Thank you, I smile— then I close the door and never call him again. A Hagiography , Lost Horse Press, Bach in the DC Subway As an experiment, The Washington Post asked a concert violinist— wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a baseball cap— to stand near a trash can at rush hour in the subway and play Bach on a Stradivarius. A thousand people streamed by. Seven of them paused for a minute or so and thirty-two dollars floated into the open violin case.
Here Bruce Guernsey, who divides his time between Illinois and Maine, plays with a common yam. Yam The potato that ate all its carrots, can see in the dark like a mole, its eyes the scars from centuries of shovels, tines. May spelled backwards because it hates the light, pawing its way, paddling along, there in the catacombs.
The desolation she must face was once my concern but like a bobber pulled beneath the surface by an inedible fish she vanished into the life he offered her. It stopped occurring to me she might return. Poem reprinted from Field, No. But somehow she resisted her wanderlust just long enough to make this telling snapshot of her father at work. The Pick I watched him swinging the pick in the sun, breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock, and the rocks into dust, and the dust into earth again.
I must have sat for a very long time on the split rail fence, just watching him. He was turning the backyard into terraces, breaking the hill into two flat plains. I took for granted the power of him, though it frightened me, too. I watched as he swung the pick into the air and brought it down hard and changed the shape of the world, and changed the shape of the world again.
Reprinted from When She Named Fire , ed. God is in the details, as we say. Here David Bottoms, the Poet Laureate of Georgia, tells us a great deal about his father by showing us just one of his hands. Sometimes it leans for an hour on that bony ledge. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Feb 19, Glinda Harrison rated it it was amazing Shelves: This was a great read! Original, well-written,unpredictable and suspenseful. Hard to define from a genre perspective, but very enjoyable.
I read it in one sitting and that is rare for me I am definitely going to check out more of this author's works! Peggy rated it it was amazing Dec 22, Beard rated it liked it Apr 20, Jim Haywood rated it liked it Sep 29, Brett rated it liked it Mar 26, Elizabeth rated it really liked it Feb 14, Charlotte Whitney rated it it was amazing Nov 13, Randy Harmelink marked it as to-read Feb 17, Netanella marked it as to-read Feb 18, Andrew added it Feb 19, Evan marked it as to-read Jul 26, Kasia marked it as to-read Apr 16,