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

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 

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

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

50.

The black scribble of naked tree branches on the slate of winter sky is a very pleasing visual poem.

day 16.

Pippin Poem

Practically speaking, the 

Pippins were superfluous.

Pears were the point of my errand. But

petite and tart,

puckered and gnarled, the 

Pippins seduced me at the market. I

picked up four. At home, I

posed them on the windowsill, their tubby sides

propped together while I 

prepared their

pastry nest. Floured the dough,

patted it into shape,

pressed it into a shallow green bowl.

Picking the apples from the sill, I

pared them, one by one, their little jackets

peeling in a heap. I tucked them in and

pricked the crust, resigned myself to

patience while they

perfumed the kitchen. When the pie emerged,

plump and bubbling, I

polished it off.

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.

national poetry month, day 29.

I've often seen the first stanza of this poem quoted as a sort of life lesson about honesty and confronting your feelings. The full poem, however, is a lot more shivery and complicated than that. From Songs of Innocence and Of Experience. (This one's in Experience. Plainly.)

A Poison Tree
by William Blake

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

national poetry month, day 28.

Shana found this beautiful disturbance for me on The Nervous Breakdown.

Sideshow

by Lauren Wheeler

For a nickel, you can take a picture of me

standing just so in front of a wooden board

with a heart painted on it.

For a dime, you can take a picture with me,

you squatting behind and peeking through

like I'm one of those cardboard cutouts

of an "Indian Chief" or a unicorn or some other

supposedly mythical creature.

When you offer a quarter, we move to the tent,

dim-lit and dusty, where I sit on the low

quilt-covered pot and pat the space beside me.

You are nervous. "Will it hurt you?"

I shake my head. "It never hurts. Not anymore."

Then I take your hand and guide up towards

the hole in my chest. You tremble for a second

as you reach through me, wiggle your fingers

around behind my back, disbelieving.

"Where is your heart?" you ask.

"How do you live without your heart?"

I take your hand again, kiss it.

"It's amazing the things you can learn 

to live without."

national poetry month, day 27.

This is a song, but it's my blog and I'll sing if I want to. For Leslie, because I love and miss her. Ain't nobody that can sing this song like Billy Bragg, with backing vocals by Natalie Merchant.

Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key
by Woody Guthrie

I lived in a place called Okfuskee
And I had a little girl in a holler tree
I said, little girl, it's plain to see,
There ain't nobody that can sing like me

She said it's hard for me to see
How one little boy got so ugly
Yes, my little girly, that might be
But there ain't nobody that can sing like me

Ain't nobody that can sing like me
Way over yonder in the minor key
Way over yonder in the minor key
There ain't nobody that can sing like me

We walked down by the Buckeye Creek
To see the frog eat the goggle eye bee
To hear that west wind whistle to the east
There ain't nobody that can sing like me

Oh my little girly will you let me see
Way over yonder where the wind blows free
Nobody can see in our holler tree
And there ain't nobody that can sing like me

Her mama cut a switch from a cherry tree
And it on the she and me
It stung lots worse than a hive of bees
But there ain't nobody that can sing like me

Now I have walked a long long ways
And I still look back to my tanglewood days
I've led lots of girls since then to stray
Saying, ain't nobody that can sing like me.

national poetry month, day 26.

I prefer Sherman Alexie's fiction to his poetry, but am always struck dumb by this four part cycle.

Indian Boy Love Song (#1)

Everyone I have lost
in the closing of a door
the click of the lock

is not forgotten, they
do not die but remain
within the soft edges
of the earth, the ash

of house fires and cancer
in sin and forgiveness
huddled under old blankets

dreaming their way into
my hands, my heart
closing tight like fists.

Indian Boy Love Song (#2)

I never spoke
the language
of the old women

visiting my mother
in winters so cold
they could freeze
the tongue whole.

I never held my head
to their thin chests
believing in the heart.

Indian women, forgive me.
I grew up distant
and always afraid.

Indian Boy Love Song (#3)

I remember when I told
my cousin
she was more beautiful

than any white girl
I had ever seen.
She kissed me then
with both lips, a tongue

that tasted clean and un-
clean at the same time
like the river which divides

the heart of my heart, all
the beautiful white girls on one side,
my beautiful cousin on the other.

Indian Boy Love Song (#4)

I remember when my father would leave,
drinking,
for weeks. My mother would tell me

the dream he needed
most
was the dream that frightened him
more

than any stranger ever could.
I
would wait by my window, dreaming

bottles
familiar in my hands, not my father's, always
empty.