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Agosto 29, 2011
Heart Condition
I don't want to hurt a man, but I like to hear one beg.
Two people touch twice a month in ten hotels, and
We call it long distance. He holds down one coast.
I wander the other like any African American, Africa
With its condition and America with its condition
And black folk born in this nation content to carry
Half of each. I shoulder my share. My man flies
To touch me. Sky on our side. Sky above his world
I wish to write. Which is where I go wrong. Words
Are a sense of sound. I get smart. My mother shakes
Her head. My grandmother sighs: He ain't got no
Sense. My grandmother is dead. She lives with me.
I hear my mother shake her head over the phone.
Somebody cut the cord. We have a long distance
Relationship. I lost half of her to a stroke. God
Gives to each a body. God gives every body its pains.
When pain mounts in my body, I try thinking of my
White forefathers who hurt their black bastards quite
Legally. I hate to say it, but one pain can ease another.
Doctors rather I take pills. My man wants me to see
A doctor. What are you when you leave your man
Wanting? What am I now that I think so fondly
Of airplanes? What's my name, whose is it, while we
Make love. My lover leaves me with words I wish
To write. Flies from one side of a nation to the outside
Of our world. I don't want the world. I only want
African sense of American sound. Him. Touching.
This body. Aware of its pains. Greetings, Earthlings.
My name is Slow And Stumbling. I come from planet
Trouble. I am here to leave you uncomfortable.
by Jericho Brown
Posted by sarita at 2:24 PM
Night Drafts
Polite, intent, no fooling this time, because blasphemy
Doesn't follow Him, but the other way around. How
The silence of churches at bedtime can brighten a day,
A soul's day. How Barbie and Ken dolls from memory
Can lighten a day, even as the bad boats from upriver
Go down river, since that's what they do, move at the speed
We speak of with sublime direction. Don't listen too closely
To the thwack of halyards, don't point in the direction
Of home, when you figure out where that is. The true
Voice that is calling is guttural, lifted from graffiti
Off the walls or snippets of news that nip at your heels
As you rip bread and bless the pigeons. Gosh, onions
Or rhubarb should come to mind at a time like this,
But like the rest of us non-believers you're guilty,
Except for the sanctum of late night radio which winds
Around you like a childhood scarf, the one that was burned
Or snatched away by an older sister. Everything is happy
couched in sadness, or the other way around. The smell
Of pavement after summer rain means something
Significant though you're not sure what. These holding
Patterns we find ourselves in are guaranteed to leave us
Feeling outside of our kitchen quarrel. You never get over
The kitchen quarrel you weren't a part of but settled in,
Like an ice house on a frozen lake. No matter. The radio
Says everything melts by degrees, even you, if you care,
So the ordinary life you lead is ordinary, maybe less,
Maybe more if you light candles, or classy cigarettes
For that matter. Maybe you would like to be Russian,
Maybe the Canadian boat person on the St. Lawrence River,
Maybe just the whoosh of the air as it passed through
The tunnel after the rush-hour subway. You're human, you know,
Like the rest of us, you're stuck with that. Own up to it.
by Tony Sanders
Posted by sarita at 2:22 PM
the illusion that this was what was...
Frank had the illusion that though the universe of one of his poems seemed so close to what seemed his own universe at the second of writing it that he wasn't sure how they differed even though the paraphernalia often differed, after he had written it its universe was never exactly his universe, and so, soon, it disgusted him a little, the mirror was dirty and cracked.
Secretly he was glad it was dirty and cracked, because after he had made a big order, a book, only when he had come to despise it a little, only after he had at last given up the illusion that this was what was, only then could he write more.
- Frank Bidart
(writing about himself) in his prose poem Borges and I
Posted by sarita at 11:37 AM
Agosto 15, 2011
Our Valley
We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.
You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.
You have to remember this isn’t your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.
Philip Levine
Posted by sarita at 1:16 PM
On the Beach at Night Alone
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
by Walt Whitman
Posted by sarita at 1:08 PM