Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Click the title of the poem to listen.

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Adrienne Rich

To a Frustrated Poet

I think this may be the only poem R.J. Ellmann has ever written, but when you've done this well first shot out of the box, why mess with it? Delight.

Click the title of the poem to listen.

To a Frustrated Poet

This is to say
I know
You wish you were in the woods,
Living the poet life,
Not here at a formica topped table
In a meeting about perceived inequalities in the benefits and
     allowances offered to employees of this college,
And I too wish you were in the woods,
Because it's no fun having a frustrated poet
In the Dept. of Human Resources, believe me.
In the poems of yours that I've read, you seem ever intelligent
     and decent and patient in a way 
Not evident to us in this office,
And so, knowing how poets can make a feast out of trouble,
Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair,
I give you this check representing two weeks' wages
And ask you to clean out your desk today
And go home
And write a poem
With a real frog in it
And plums from the refrigerator,
So sweet and so cold.

R.J. Ellmann

The Goose

Click the title of the poem to listen.

The Goose

Do you want to know why I am alive today?
I will tell you.
Early on, during the food-shortage,
Some of us were miraculously presented
Each with a goose that laid a golden egg.
Myself, I killed the cackling thing and I ate it.
Alas, many and many of the other recipients
Died of gold-dust poisoning.

Muriel Spark

Dawn Revisited

Click the title of the poem to listen.

Dawn Revisited

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits --
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on, 
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.

Rita Dove

Three More Days

Mike Watts is a poet and spoken word performer from Hull, Yorkshire. This poem is taken from his book Day and Night in the Damaged Goods Factory. Phil mined this gem of a lament, and he's guest reading today.

Click the title of the poem to listen.

Three More Days

Alone for three weeks

In a bed that has

Crippled me,

Whose sheets have tormented

To the edge of 

Insanity

And tonight,

As bleak northern bursts

Pelt rain at my window,

Wanting nothing more

Than to feel

The warm plump

Of breasts

Soft at my back.

I am here

And she is 250 miles south

Of hands

That would peel

Her like fruit

If she were beside me now.

Heavy as I am,

Sleep touches briefly

And the need 

To piss

Is about to break it

Completely.

There is too much space.

I want

An entanglement of legs,

An arm locked

Around my chest,

I want to close my eyes

Until the point

Of an elbow

Digs a rib

And wakes me.

by Mike Watts

In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden

A lucky find for me on the Poetry Foundation app, this. It was love at first confusion. I like a good thicket of words, and a love letter to thickets, to home, to love letters? With internal rhymes? Yes, please.

Click the title of the poem to listen.

In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden

Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart

Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and

Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves

That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and

Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down   

I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence

And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that

They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense

In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear

She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without

It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when

You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of   

A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets

So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds

With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter

About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on   

The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp

I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry

If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire

So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them

To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you

by Matthea Harvey, from Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form

Red Fox

Many thanks to Kirsten for teaching me how to pronounce the French bit in this sharp-toothed beauty. Sauve qui peut means "save which can" or "save who can."

Red Fox

The red fox crosses the ice
intent on none of my business.
It's winter and slim pickings.

I stand in the bushy cemetery,
pretending to watch birds,
but really watching the fox
who could care less.
She pauses on the sheer glare
of the pond. She knows I'm there,
sniffs me in the wind at her shoulder.
If I had a gun or a dog
or a raw heart, she'd smell it.
She didn't get this smart for nothing.

She's a lean vixen: I can see
the ribs, the sly
trickster's eyes, filled with longing
and desperation, the skinny
feet, adept at lies.

Why encourage the notion
of virtuous poverty?

It's only an excuse 
for zero charity.
Hunger corrupts, and absolute hunger
corrupts absolutely,
or almost. Of course there are mothers,
squeezing their breasts
dry, pawning their bodies,
shedding teeth for their children,
or that's our fond belief.
But remember - Hansel
and Gretel were dumped in the forest
because their parents were starving,
Sauve qui peut. To survive
we'd all turn thief

and rascal, or so says the fox,
with her coat of an elegant scoundrel,
her white knife of a smile,
who knows just where she's going:

to steal something
that doesn't belong to her -
some chicken, or one more chance,
or other life.

by Margaret Atwood from Morning in the Burned House

Induction

Phil has been following and contributing to my National Poetry Month project since the first year I did it. He lives in Hull, Yorkshire, which is a city with a great history of gritty, mouthy, sharply brilliant poets. When he discovers something new that he likes, I file it away to share during April. They've been some of my favorite posts over the last few years, and I particularly love this one. Russ Litten is a local Hull poet, and he teaches a creative writing class in a prison (read a little more about that on his website). Phil is guest reading today.

Click the title of the poem to listen.

Induction

Every Monday morning I stand up
before twenty or so disinterested faces
slouched around library tables
and tell them
about the possibilities of poetry
and the prospect of escape.

It's a poor joke, and some mornings
it goes down less well
than others.

Like this morning,
one sullen soul flinging rancour
from the back of the room:
What's that for then?

...

Yeah, but what do you get at the end of it?

...

Do you get paid?

...

So what use is that to me?

...

And I said
(quoting Scargill quoting his Dad)
:

"...the quality of your life depends upon
your ability to manipulate words..."
Does it fuck, he
said,
thus proving
both of
our 
points.

by Russ Litten

The Mercy

Today is a bit of a cheat: I'm reblogging something I wrote several years ago when I started posting occasional poems. I've added the spoken work recording, though, so I'm calling it new. 

Click the title of the poem to listen.

When I started this project, I had several pieces in mind to use for the first six weeks or so, but one thing inevitably leads on to another, and I've only used one of the poems I had originally chosen so far. This week is no different; I had planned to use something by Frank O'Hara ("oh god it's wonderful/to get out of bed/and drink too much coffee/and smoke too many cigarettes/and love you so much..."), but in reading him over, there was a poem that mentioned oranges, and that reminded me of this piece by Philip Levine that steals the breath from me each time I read it. I will not be able to keep to my original rules of not repeating a poet; I'm sure Philip Levine will turn up in this space again. However, I'll start at the end; this is, I think, the finest work he's ever done, moving backwards through his own familiar subjects of industry, struggle and rage, and arriving at the birth of his own history in this country.

The Mercy

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island
Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy."
She remembers trying to eat a banana
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman
who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her
with a red bandana and taught her the word,
"orange," saying it patiently over and over.
A long autumn voyage, the days darkening
with the black waters calming as night came on,
then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space
without limit rushing off to the corners
of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish
to find her family in New York, prayers
unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored
by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness
before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat
while smallpox raged among the passengers
and crew until the dead were buried at sea
with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom.
"The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book
I located in a windowless room of the library
on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days
offshore in quarantine before the passengers
disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships
arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune"
registered as Danish, "Umberto IV,"
the list goes on for pages, November gives
way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore.
Italian miners from Piemonte dig
under towns in western Pennsylvania
only to rediscover the same nightmare
they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels
all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.
She learns that mercy is something you can eat
again and again while the juice spills over
your chin, you can wipe it away with the back
of your hands and you can never get enough.

by Philip Levine from The Mercy

2058

2058 is a masterpiece of efficient space. Its nine lines are enormous in imagery, in narrative and emotion. Christy Ducker writes beautifully story-driven dystopian poems, sounding of angles and edges, but tender underneath. 

I'm reading all of the poems I'm posting this month aloud. Click the title of the poem to listen.

2058

You want a boy so tick Male.
The doctor rigs pipettes
beside a window that's been rainy
now for months. You come to
Eyes, tick Blue: no squint. A tremor
rolls in from the coast, again
the building wavers. You check the pen
at Feelings where the column falls
away beyond the table's edge.

by Christy Ducker

Wiglaf

This is the first poem I ever posted on this blog, many years ago. It was borrowed from a friend who has excellent taste in words.

I'm recording all the poems I post this month. Click the title of the poem to listen.

Wiglaf

Wiglaf the foot-warrior sat near the shoulder of the king, wearily sprinkling water on his face to wake him. He succeeded not at all. –Beowulf

It is the saddest part of a sad story:
a young man in an old man’s heavy shirt,
his helmet, arm-rings, all the gold gone dull

and gummed with blood. The gutted dragon lies
there twitching, and cowards–seasoned fighters–
are dragging themselves, shamefaced, from the woods.

Wiglaf’s own eyes saw his master’s body
caught up by waves of flame, saw long teeth tear
the great one’s throat. Through clots of smoke, he

found the weak spot, struck, and found out later
what is worse than dragons. Kings die slowly,
gasping words. Young Wiglaf loved his king

and carried water to him, in his hands.
This story is and isn’t old. My half-brother’s
sixth-month-born, three-pound daughter was alive

an hour last December, and in spring, he’s
saying this, “You haven’t seen her room, yet”
although he knows I have, the crib and stack

of folded blankets, silver brush and comb
his wife lifts up to dust beneath and then
puts back. Fat bears and grinning tigers dance

across the wall. Foot-warrior Wiglaf knew
the king was dead, and still he bathed his face
to wake him, sprinkling water, while the others

watched. We are standing in my brother’s yard,
where a single mimosa, bloom-decked, leans
in careful arabesque. He’s choking, weary,

on his loss, and I see how love, once started,
can become a thing apart from us,
a being all its own, unstoppable,

just watching as we waste our human gestures
on the air, and who can say if it’s
the monster or the hero of our lives?
–by Marisa De Los Santos

(from her book “From the Bones Out” and also published in “The New American Poets” Breadloaf anthology, edited by Michael Collier. Originally published in the Antioch Review)

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

Poetry Foundation (publisher of Poetry Magazine) has a really great app for iPhone and Android. You can search, save things to favorites, or just spin for random selections. That's how I came across this great poem by Mohja Kahf about cultural divides and generational experience.

I'm recording all the poems I post this month. Click the title of the poem to listen.

My Grandmother Washes her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink
       of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims
She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold
so she can accomplish this august ritual
and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares
Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown
as they notice what my grandmother is doing,
an affront to American porcelain,
a contamination of American Standards
by something foreign and unhygienic
requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray
They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see
a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom

My grandmother, though she speaks no English,
catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,
I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul
with water from the world's ancient irrigation systems
I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus
over painted bowls imported from China
among the best families of Aleppo
And if you Americans knew anything
about civilization and cleanliness,
you'd make wider washbins, anyway
My grandmother knows one culture - the right one,

as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them,
my grandmother might as well have been squatting
in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,
Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn't matter which,
when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.

"You can't do that," one of the women protests,
turning to me, "Tell her she can't do that."
"We wash our feet five times a day,"
my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.
"My feet are cleaner than their sink.
Worried about their sink, are they? I
should worry about my feet!"
My grandmother nudges me, "Go on, tell them."

Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see
at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers,
all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent
in cleanliness, grooming and decorum
Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,
is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse
For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps
that match her purse, I think in case someone
from one of the best families of Aleppo
should run into her - here, in front of the Kenmore display

I smile at the midwestern women
as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them
and shrug at my grandmother as if they
had just apologized through me
No one is fooled, but I

hold the door open for everyone
and we all emerge on the sales floor
and lose ourselves in the great common ground
of housewares on markdown.

by Mohja Kahf from Emails from Scheherazade 

Why I Have a Crush On You, UPS Man

For all the people I know, including me, whose lives revolve around the mail. But especially for Abby.

Click the title of the poem to listen.

Why I Have a Crush On You, UPS Man

you bring me all the things I order
are never in a bad mood
always have a jaunty wave as you drive away
look good in your brown shorts
we have an ideal uncomplicated relationship
you're like a cute boyfriend with great legs
who always brings the perfect present
(why, it's just what I've always wanted!)
and then is considerate enough to go away
oh, UPS Man, let's hop in your clean brown truck and elope!
ditch your job, I'll ditch mine
let's hit the road for Brownsville
and tempt each other
with all the luscious brown foods --
roast beef, dark chocolate,
brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel, molasses cookies
I'll make you my mama's bourbon pecan pie
we'll give all the packages to kind looking strangers
live in a cozy wood cabin
with with a brown dog or two
and a black and brown tabby
I'm serious, UPS Man. Let's do it.
Where do I sign?

by Alice N. Persons, taken from Good Poems, American Places

Love Poem

Happy Sunday to my sweetheart.

Click the title of the poem to hear it.

Love Poem

I live in you, you live in me;
We are two gardens haunted by each other.
Sometimes I cannot find you there,
There is only the swing creaking, that you have just left,
Or your favourite book beside the sundial.

by Douglas Dunn from Terry Street

People Who Eat in Coffee Shops

This one is for Kaitlyn, in honor of all the years we've taken off our lives in diners. I don't regret one minute, and when are we doing it again? I'll just be over here listening to Small Change the next time you're in town.

This year, I've also recorded all the poems I'm posting. Click the title of the poem to listen.

People Who Eat in Coffee Shops

People who eat in coffee shops
are not worried about nutrition.
They order the toasted cheese sandwiches blithely,
followed by chocolate egg creams and plaster of paris
wedges of lemon meringue pie.
They don't have parental, dental, or medical figures hovering
full of warning, or whip out dental floss immediately.
They can live in furnished rooms and whenever they want
go out and eat glazed donuts along with innumerable coffees,
dousing their cigarettes in sloppy saucers.

by Edward Field, taken from Good Poems, American Places

Gutbucket

Jelly Roll is a bluesey, fluid seduction. I'd never heard of Kevin Young, but when I was browsing for poetry at the library, I liked the cover of this book. I read the whole collection through twice in a week and kept browsing after that. It's overdue now, which means I'm doing my civic-minded part to keep the doors open at Multnomah County Library. Pause for a moment to experience a warm glow of admiration, and then enjoy this.

This year, I've also recorded all the poems I'm posting. Click the title of the poem to listen.

Gutbucket

I want, like
water, you --

something wet
gainst the back

of my throat. Carry
me out

reel me in
I been down

this well too long --

by Kevin Young

Meditation on a Grapefruit

The ritual act of peeling and eating a grapefruit is a meticulous, visceral joy. Through the years it's become a sort of sacrament, especially when shared with specific people, one of whom sent this to me.

This year, I've also recorded all the poems I'm posting. Click the title of the poem to listen.

Meditation on a Grapefruit

To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
                     To come to the
   kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
           To tear the husk
like cotton padding     a cloud of
  oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
                              To ease
each pale pink section out of its
   case
so carefully        without breaking
a single pearly cell
                    To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling       until the
   whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
                   so sweet
                             a discipline
precisely pointless       a devout
involvement of the hands and
   senses
a pause     a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

by Craig Arnold

Aimless Love

I've never been a really big Billy Collins fan. He's very good, but for whatever reason he doesn't give me the fervor. One of my dearest friends really loves him, though, and a few months ago she sent me the 8th stanza of this poem typed onto a piece of muslin. It hangs on my bulletin board. I read the whole poem, and it struck all the chords I usually miss with him. I am prone to falling in brief and aching love with a glimpsed tableau, and this poem captures both the heat and the detachment of that experience so beautifully.

Aimless Love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor's window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door -
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor -
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail

to a pile of leaves in the woods,

I found myself standing at the bathroom sink

gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,

so at home in its pale green soap dish.

I could feel myself falling again

as I felt its turning in my wet hands

and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

by Billy Collins

this is just to say.

It's April 1, which means it's National Poetry Month in the US once again. Which, in turn, means I'm going to try to post a poem a day here throughout the month. I've been doing this for a couple of years now, and to change it up a little bit this year I'm going to record the poems as well as posting them. You'll be able to hear them by clicking on the poem title in the post. 

This is not going to be a perfect effort. In some cases, I've practiced reading the poem before recording it. In others, I just read it. I'm still working out sound editing and which is the best way to record. There may be the occasional background noise. I really wanted to do this, and decided that if I waited until I had it perfect, it wouldn't ever happen. So I'm learning as I go, which is often the best way. I hope you enjoy the results.

Today's poem was a gift to me from my friend Liz. It's not only wonderful, it also fulfills two criteria that I try to hit when curating poetry for April. It's a suitable bit of nonsense for April Fool's Day, and it's a magnificent riff on William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just to Say."

This Is Just to Say

I have integrated
the random variables
that were in
the sample space

and which
you were probably 
saving
for a density function

Forgive me
they were continuous
so normal
and so infinite

by Liz Twarog

national poetry month, day 30.

This seems like a properly stunning note on which to end the month. Thanks go to Shana for this one, as well. My gratitude to everyone who suggested a poem or poet, and who followed this project.

Prologue--And Then She Owns You
by Patricia Smith

This is not morning. There is a nastiness
slowing your shoes, something you shouldn't step in.
It's shattered beads, stomped flowers, vomit--
such stupid beauty,

beauty you can stick a manicured finger
into and through, beauty that doesn't rely
on any sentence the sun chants, it's whiskey
swelter blown scarlet.

Call this something else. Last night it had a name,
a name wedged between an organ's teeth, a name
pumping a virgin unawares, a curse word.
Wail it, regardless,

Weak light, bleakly triumphant, will unveil scabs,
snippets of filth music, cars on collapsed veins.
The whole of gray doubt slithers on solemn skin.
Call her New Orleans.

Each day she wavers, not knowing how long she
can stomach the introduction of needles,
the brash, boozed warbling of bums with neon crowns,
necklaces raining.

She tries on her voice, which sounds like cigarettes,
pubic sweat, brown spittle lining a sax bell
the broken heel on a drag queen's scarlet slings.
Your kind of singing.

Weirdly in love, you rhumba her edges, drink
fuming concoctions, like your lukewarm breakfast
directly from her crust. Go on, admit it.
You are addicted

to her brick hips, the thick swerve she elicits,
the way she kisses you, her lies wide open.
She prefers alleys, crevices, basement floors.
Hell, let her woo you.

This kind of romance dims the worth of soldiers,
bends and breaks the back, sips manna from muscle,
tells you Leave your life. Pack your little suitcase,
flee what is rigid

and duly prescribed. Let her touch that raw space
between cock and calm, the place that scripts such jazz.
Let her pen letters addressed to your asking.
You s-s-stutter.

New Orleans's, p-please. Don't. Blue is the color
stunning your tongue. As least the city pretends
to remember to be listening.
She grins with glint tooth,

wiping your mind blind of the wife, the children,
the numb ritual of job and garden plot.
Gently, she leads you out into the darkness
and makes you drink rain.