Parang pag-ibig.

Failing and Flying

Jack Gilbert


Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

"Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven. (c) Alfred A. Knopf, 2005 . Reprinted without permission, The Writers Almanac.

Ngyar.

Woman's (G)lib

When he slows it

down, drives deep

I feel

Every ridge
More
And more
Than that catalog

of notches--his, mine,
Another's in another time--

The girl falls
In love again
And again.

Because it's another year. New. Again.

Guinea Pig

Julie Cadwallader-Staub


As if your cancer weren't enough,
the guinea pig is dying.
The kids brought him to me
wrapped in a bath towel
‘Do something, Mom.
Save his life.'

I'm a good mom.
I took time from work,
drove him to the vet,
paid $77.00 for his antibiotics.

Now, after the kids rush off to school,
you and I sit on the bed.
I hold the guinea pig, since he bites.
You fill the syringe.
We administer the foul smelling medicine,
hoping the little fellow will live.

admitting to each other:
if he doesn't,
it'll be good practice.


"Guinea Pig" by Julie Cadwallader-Staub. Reprinted without permission from The Writers Almanac.

***

Looking at Pictures to Be Put Away

Gary Snyder

Who was this girl
In her white night gown
Clutching a pair of jeans

On a foggy redwood deck.
She looks up at me tender,
Calm, surprised,

What will we remember
Bodied thick with food and lovers
After twenty years.


"Looking at Pictures to Be Put Away" by Gary Snyder, from The Back Country. (c) New Directions, 1957. Reprinted without permission from The Writers Almanac.

***

One Night

Jeremy Voigt


The car crossed two lanes of traffic
and a grass median before plowing
head-on into me, killing my wife,
unborn child, and myself. Before
I died I touched the shoulder
of a policeman, felt the sure strength
of his muscles, heard the only word
he spoke, "Jesus," and I smiled
because I stopped believing in him
long ago. He mistook my smile
for something positive and not listless
irony, and I tried to correct him,
but my throat stopped. Red lights.
Blue lights. Star's gases. I walked home.
My wife wandered off into a river
to give birth. I began calling my friends:
"We are all dead," I said into the phone.
I let them cry or exalt in turn, taking
note. I didn't know it would be this
simple. I slipped into a midnight robe,
poked holes in a black sheet, tore
into a loaf of bread. Wandered off
yeast-heavy neither rising nor falling.


"One Night" by Jeremy Voigt, from Neither Rising nor Falling. (c) Finishing line Press, 2009. Reprinted without permission from The Writers Almanac.

Haay.

December
Gary Johnson


A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here--and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.


"December" by Gary Johnson. Used without permission from The Writers Almanac.

Blood and more blood

The Thumb
Peter Schneider


In a nanosecond David lost his thumb,
the one his mother painted
with pine pitch when he was four
to keep him from forever sucking it.
Unable to distinguish human flesh
the McCormick silo filler
sliced it off--
nail, bone, knuckle--
and blew it skyward
an ounce of humanity
in a thousand tons of silage.

Taken by surprise
David suppressed the truth.
Before the rush of blood
he held up the stump
saw the clean cut
grey bone marrow visible
and thrust it in his mouth
where the memory
of childhood security lay.
Then he swore,
tears rushing to his eyes, and ran
holding the stump with his good hand
blood oozing between his fingers.

Joe, a huge bulk of a man
and a constant neighbor,
jumped from his wagon
caught David like a child
held him to his chest
not intimidated by blood
or the tears of a grown man.



"The Thumb" by Peter Schneider, from Line Fence. (c) Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2006. Reposted from The Writers Almanac.

***

Because November is the weird boy of months.

How Many Nights
Galway Kinnell

How many nights
have I lain in terror,
O Creator Spirit, maker of night and day,

only to walk out
the next morning over the frozen world,
hearing under the creaking snow
faint, peaceful breaths...
snake,
bear, earthworm, ant...

and above me
a wild crow crying 'yaw, yaw, yaw'
from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life.


***
Driving Nails
Gary L. Lark

I learned to walk stud walls
setting rafters when I was six.
I straightened nails for my father
to re-drive, piecing a home together
after work or on weekends.

We were called Okies by some
when we moved to the valley,
putting up our tar-papered shack.
Two years later a house was rising
to face them across the pasture.

The only plans were sketched
on a six inch pad, but all the corners
were true. The septic tank hole
was dug with pick and shovel.
Lumber carted home from the mill.

The only time help came
was when we poured the foundation.
Guys from the mill rode springing planks
to deliver tons of wet concrete by wheelbarrow,
tamped down with shovel handles.

My father beveled the molding,
drilled and set each piece of hardwood flooring,
not a nail would show. I crawled insulation
into tight places above the ceiling
and helped with rolled roofing.

Nobody mentioned our low rank
when my mother joined the garden club.


"How Many Nights" by Galway Kinnell, from Three Books. (c) Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
"Driving Nails" by Gary Lark, from Getting By. (c) Logan House, 2009.
Both reposted from The Writer's Almanac, without permission.

Reflection is not always a mirroring.

Harvest
Louise Gluck


It's autumn in the market--
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They're beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth--

Inside, they're gone. Black, moldy--
you can't take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.

Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.

Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.

At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.

The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground's so hard the farmers think
it isn't worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?

And then the frost comes; there's no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.



"Harvest" by Louise Gluck from A Village Life. (c) Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009. From The writer's Almanac.

In The Night Orchard

In The Night Orchard
R. T. Smith


I know, because Paul has told me
a hundred times, that the deer
gliding tonight through tangleweed
and trashwood, then bounding across
Mount Atlas Road, are after his pears.

And who could blame them?
On the threshold of autumn, the Asian
imports, more amazing than any Seckle
or indigenous apple, start to ripen.
Then a passing crow will peck one open.

That's when the whitetails who bed
and gather beyond Matson's pasture
will catch the scent and begin to stir.
It's a dry time, and they go slowly mad
for sweetness. No fence can stop them.

The farmers like Paul will admit
it starts in hunger, but how suddenly
need goes to frenzy and sheer plunder.
When the blush-gold windfalls are gone
and the low boughs are stripped

of anything resembling bounty, bucks
will rise on their hind legs and clamber
up the trunks. Last week Cecil Emore
found one strangled in a fork,
his twisted antlers tangled as if

some hunter had hung him there
to cure. We all remember what it's like,
this driven season, this delirium
for something not yet given a name,
but the world turns us practical, tames

us to yearn for milder pleasures.
For Augustine, it was actual pears
that brought him out of the shadows
and over a wall, for Eve, the secret
inside what we now say was an apple.

Others have given up safety for less,
and I wonder, catching an eight-point
buck outlined on the ridge amid spruce,
if it's this moonstruck nature that renders
the ruminants beautiful, or if we stalk

them out of envy, not for the grace
of their gliding, but for the unadorned
instinct that draws them after dark
into trespass and the need to ruin
the sweetest thing they've ever known.


"In The Night Orchard" by R. T. Smith, from Brightwood. (c) Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

Moving Day

Moving Day
Ron Koertge


While sitting home one night, I hear burglars fiddling
with the lock. This is what I've been waiting for!

I run around to the back and open the door, invite
them in, and pour some drinks. I tell them to relax,
and I help them off with shoes and masks.

In a little while we are fast friends, and after a dozen
toasts to J. Edgar Hoover, they begin to carry things out.
I point to the hidden silver, hold the door as they
wrestle with the bed, and generally make myself useful.

When they get the truck loaded and come back inside
for one last brandy, I get the drop on them. Using Spike's
gun, I shoot them both and imprint Blackie's
prints on the handle.

Then I get in the van and drive away,
a happy man.


"Moving Day" by Ron Koertge, from Making Love to Roget's Wife: Poems New and Selected. (c) University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

Straightpins

Straightpins
Jo McDougall


Growing up in a small town,
we didn't notice
the background figures of our lives,
gray men, gnarled women,
dropping from us silently
like straightpins to a dressmaker's floor.
The old did not die
but simply vanished
like discs of snow on our tongues.
We knew nothing then of nothingness
or pain or loss--
our days filled with open fields,
football,
turtles and cows.

One day we noticed
Death has a musty breath,
that some we loved
died dreadfully,
that dying
sometimes takes time.
Now, standing in a supermarket line
or easing out of a parking lot,
we realize
we've become the hazy backgrounds
of younger lives.
How long has it been,
we ask no one in particular,
since we've seen a turtle
or a cow?



"Straightpins" by Jo McDougall, from Satisfied with Havoc. (c) Autumn House Press, 2004.

Occupation

Occupation
Eliza Griswold


The prostitutes in Kabul tap their feet
beneath their faded burqas in the heat.

For bread or fifteen cents, they'll take a man to bed--
their husbands dead, their seven kids unfed--

and thanks to occupation, rents have risen twentyfold,
their chickens, pots and carpets have been sold.

Two years ago, the Talibs favored boys and left the girls alone.
A woman then was worth her weight in stone.


"Occupation" by Eliza Griswold, from Wideawake Field. (c) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Re-hash. Ho hum.

So this is how it's done, I watch her
aaaaaaaaaaIf the wounds dry up, the words die with them.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa--Stephen King, The Body

She sleeps with her mouth open,
and I would watch her
like she has something to say
I wait for it

But she never does, she's not one to talk now
in her sleep or awake

I have tried to decipher
these silences like overcast skies
or her bright talk once--
the sudden movement of clouds
to let the sun through, or thunder

Her moods not like the weather:
thunderstorms made her happy
or at least I think so
watching her

Pressed against the windows now
mouth again open
again silent

So this is how it's done, I watch her
The fog of her breath on the glass
appear, disappear in rhythm
like catch and release--
a heart at goodbye.


#
A re-hash of one part of a three-part poem I wrote last year. Kept the title and the epigraph(?), despite retaining only one-third of the original. The other two were blah, and needed work.

And I need sleep.

A Letter Home

These paper walls

Someone had told me, was because Japan was prone

To earthquakes, and people had to deal

With shattering, the fall.

And how apt, I think now

These white sheets, the raised fibers

Like scars, the learned lessons.

The green of the tatami like leaves on the floor,

Except always fresh.

The whisper of sliding doors—

You remember. We couldn’t sleep once, Mang Jun going crazy, yelling at his TV. I knelt at the window to peek through the curtains but all I could see was a shifting blue light.

Our leaving like a sigh leaving

Our tired bodies before sleep.

Sometimes I dream about who lives now

In our old house. Here, spring to autumn

Everything is a-falling—

Sometimes I dream of how that light would flicker on his face, becoming green, yellow, blue. He is quiet then, in my dream, but the light shifts his expressions: pain, loneliness, the sigh, the anger.

Dead flowers, dead leaves.

Or how it could be empty

Light and shadow walking through its walls

All the silences between.

Those walls! I suddenly remember

The white-wash, the concrete cold and silent.

Those walls our country understands;

Sturdy like anything

That carries weight.

Weight without gravity

aaa1
There is no weight without gravity.
But matter and weight have come
To mean the same things:

What keeps our feet on the ground, what pulls
At clouds to return to sea, why we fear
The fall.

We have assigned them, too
To other things: meaning
and burden.

Weight no longer belongs to the body.

aaa2
My mother's weight keeps her pinned
To this hospital bed, chained
By our fears, by all she has to fight.

She is her body now more than ever.
The pressure of her hand in mine
A collection of mere molecules--

Matter acted upon by gravity.
And I waver at the edge of You and
This is not you, I tell her.

The weight of our worry pulls the water from her eyes.

aaa3
I do not fear the words dead, weight.
The part of my mother I wait to waken
Weighs nothing and means all.

Because it is finished.

Letter to a Mother

Let me tell you
I had dreamt of it too
Once my belly rounding with child
The O of surprise, pleasure
I had imagined too
That clutch of protest
Pain, the beginning
The tearing the leaving the gone

I have lost them
The right to the words
You have your father’s eyes
You take after me
And I shall no longer speak for you
You will say these things
I love you to the last
Because

Yours will be the voice
They hear before
And after all else
Your lips to move
The song the story
The kiss to silence.

So give me leave
To tell the first story
Because this is how it has always begun

Once there was a child.

She said it: Why I love poetry

Poetry
by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
aaaaaaall this fiddle.
aaaReading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
aaaaaadiscovers in
aaait after all, a place for the genuine.
aaaaaaHands that can grasp, eyes
aaaaaathat can dilate, hair that can rise
aaaaaaaaaif it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
aaaaaathey are
aaauseful. When they become so derivative as to become
aaaaaaunintelligible,
aaathe same thing may be said for all of us, that we
aaaaaado not admire what
aaaaaawe cannot understand: the bat
aaaaaaaaaholding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
aaaaaawolf under
aaaa tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
aaaaaathat feels a flea, the base-
aaaball fan, the statistician--
aaaaaanor is it valid
aaaaaaaaato discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
aaaaaaa distinction
aaahowever: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
aaaaaaresult is not poetry,
aaanor till the poets among us can be
aaaaaa"literalists of
aaaaaathe imagination"--above
aaaaaaaaainsolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
aaaaaashall we have
aaait. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
aaathe raw material of poetry in
aaaaaaall its rawness and
aaaaaathat which is on the other hand
aaaaaaaaagenuine, you are interested in poetry.

The audacity of hope, indeed.

Prayer

That I would like to believe again.
That I would believe again. And hope
To live in pursuit and protection of that faith.

As seamless as speech moves
From the simple to the poetic, and poems
From the lyric to the declaration,
My thoughts from Your work to my work—
Let me now move.

If mine is to be the unnamed, unheard, unread—
Let it not matter. I believe,
And let that be its own virtue, its own reward.

My life its own story, my poems a life of their own.
This is all I ask, and all
I will give.

When I believed her.

At a Bach Concert
Adrienne Rich, 1951

Coming by evening through the wintry city
We said that art is out of love with life.
Here we approach a love that is not pity.

This antique discipline, tenderly severe,
Renews belief in love yet masters feeling.
Asking of us a grace in what we bear.

Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer--
The vital union of necessity
With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

A too-compassionate art is half an art.
Only such proud restraining purity
Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.

***
Behind the Motel
Adrienne Rich, 2004

A man lies under a car half bare
a child plays bullfight with a torn cloth
hemlocks grieve in wraps of mist
a woman talks on the phone, looks in a mirror
fiddling with the metal pull of a drawer

She has seen her world wiped clean, the cloth
that wiped it disintegrate in mist
or dying breath on the skin of a mirror
She has felt her life close like a drawer
has awoken somewhere else, bare

He feels his skin as if it were mist
as if his face would show in no mirror
He needs some bolts he left in a vanished drawer
crawls out into the hemlocked world with his bare
hands, wipes his wrench on an oil-soaked cloth

stares at the woman talking into a mirror
who has shut the phone into the drawer
while over and over with a torn cloth
at the edge of hemlocks behind the bare
motel a child taunts a horned beast made from mist


*****
Haay.

A moment of silence.

Prayer
by Francisco Arcellana

CLOSE all open things, Lord.
Open all closed things.

All those who have long received, let them give.
All those who have long given, let them receive.
All those too long apart, let them come together.
All those too long together, sunder them.

Let the wise be fools for once, Lord,
And let the fools speak their minds.
Affirm the long-denied, Lord.
Fulfill the unfulfilled.

Music it is.

One can really fool herself into thinking that symbols become the fact. Perhaps it's only the start, but nothing is never better. Not silence but music, someone told me. And the tune that's playing now, is not here to stay. Not lovely yet, but it's there.


Poet congratulates herself on a job well done

And shivers as the last
Syllables vibrate on the roof
Of her mouth

Somebody has yet to wrap
His tongue around her words
Make a present of it

For someone else.



#at