Hugo, Roethke, & Wright

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 6


"Hardly a ghost left to talk with." Richard Hugo
 "What’s madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?" Theodore Roethke
 "I have wasted my life." James Wright

The silence is impossible,
always a rush of noise:
a train, leaf-rustle, thump
of heart, or house whisper.
Nothing stops the procession:
so much memory to alleviate
some choose liquid, pen, or pills.


Then there is the giving in:
dancing with the heavy bear,
is it time or is it spirit?
What was it the Greek said
about the river, always?
Never doubt the soaring chicken-
hawk nor the blessed ground.


For me its pictures, a line of
tinted bottles, foreground,
a haze that might be ghost-
flesh dancing just behind.
What is the strange reflection
in the glass? It could not be me,
not without a hand to chin, a tug.


Is it a waste to lay the day,
to look, to wake, to see?
Isn't it madness to doubt
your own devastation, all
the while courting the edge?
What the blood begs is not
silence, is it? Merely fluctuation.


When the three drunk ghosts visit,
never together, they speak, each
in a lonely room. One of cancer
stealing the cells, seven at a time.
Another swears sobriety: I'm dancing.
I've been dancing all this time.
The last one just sings: Kapowsin,


Kapowsin, sunfish, perch, & trout.
They are nothing if not gentlemen
ready for one last night at the fights
that will never come. Of course,
ghosts don't really wear flesh,
nor scuttle their way into pictures,
& best: they have no need of shaking hands.

Don't Fix It

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 5

The ocean is the waves,
No matter which direction.
So I'll leave gravity to that.

The moon is the shine,
Even on its dark side.
So I'll leave time & season to that.

The wind is what moves,
& the sounds they make.
So I'll leave storm to that.

Nothing was broken today,
There is nothing a poem can fix.
I'll leave tomorrow for that.

Maple on Fire

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 4

"And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

Dylan Thomas, "The Force that though the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"

Each year, when the maples catch fire,
I am tempted to stop the car & spend
the day staring, warming my eyes,
gathering the strength to survive
another November's lapse & loss.
There is a subtle rise in the blood,
a tiny blush, a push to slow down,
to crave rest & to look for what's
not all lost: an old charm still hiding,
a souvenir of youth that first came alive
one Autumn watching a maple catch fire.

Sort of Like New

"Twins" 11/3/2011

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 3 

Holocene: adjective, Geology: of, relating to, or denoting the present epoch

The Holocene epoch has lasted from about 10,000 years ago to the present day. It covers the period since the ice retreated after the last glaciation and is sometimes regarded as just another interglacial period.

[from the late 19th century: coined in French from HOLO 'whole' + kainos 'new']

Oxford Dictionaries Online

Sometimes old is sort of like new:
hand me down boots,  LPs,
unscratched, the humming sound
of an old song almost forgotten,
a new song conjuring a time
when every one was older
than you & everything full
of the gravity of discovery.

Then there are books whose pages
untouched in years are still crisp,
corners unbent, spine strong.
then something slides into view:
a handwritten note, or the stub
of a plane ticket, the feather of a bird
long done soaring, whatever it is
it has nested there waiting to be found:
beyond old or new.

Finally there are the trees, often ignored,
occasionally climbed, more often cursed
for the clean-up, & each winter iced,
a clue that we are merely between ice-ages,
like the sign on our road that reminds us
that these hills were once & will be glaciers.

I've never been one to get hung up on age:
old was often new to me & as I've aged
it's mattered less & less. Watching small
turn large, praying daily for health, happiness,
& growth, knowing that day stacks on to day,
that winter follows fall, and spring never comes
too soon.

What is time to a tree, to a wall of ice cutting
through a valley or charting a river's course?
What is time to me? What am I to a child
who is everything to me?






[Note: I wrote the poem while listening to the Bon Iver  album Bon Iver. I did not watch the video until afterwards. A very serendipitous find.]

Getting it Right

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 2

The saddest are those not right in their lives

who are acting to make things right for others:
they act only from the self –
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom.

William Stafford, “The Little Ways that Encourage Good Fortune” (1977)

I couldn’t have written this last night,
not that what I learned today makes the difference,
it’s just that timing is always a part of getting it right.

This morning there was nothing wrong with waking,

even the clouds covering familiar friends did not detract

from the lucky feeling of being awake as the west was breaking.

On the side of the road, a small fox crouched under harsh headlight,

though moving too fast I swear I could see his dark eyes dilating,

when he decided running wasn’t worth the risk, I knew what I would write it.

It’s not that everything was right today, or any day,

but nothing overwhelmed the sense that the direction was clear:

sometimes wisdom is staying quiet, sometimes it’s having something to say.

St. Charles, The Machinist

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 1: I am attempting the November poem-a-day challenge again this year. 
Please feel free to comment or ignore. These will not be great poems.


All Saints' Day, 2011

“Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.” (William Carlos Williams Introduction to The Wedge, 1944)

tool and die maker, 

writer of tolerances,
martyr of a silent cause,
surrounded by endless noise,
saint in side-shields & glasses,
sideburns of shifting lengths,
shirtsleeves, buttonhole stretch.

our patron in polyester, leather,
plastic, steel, zinc, chromium,
aluminum, thyroid, tumor, trachea,
larynx, cartilage, tissue & blood.

what shall we do with the icons:
slide rule, tape measure, earplugs,
pocketprotector, pocketknife, caliper,
micrometer, lathe, mill, collet & drill?

******

I remember walking in the building,
the hum of hard work,
men in plastic hats, work gloves, tools
names on doors,
names on shirts,
names of men,
names of ghosts.

Machine sounds from below
grinding, spinning, ripping,
the pounding of metal on metal,
the thin reverb of clinking sheets,
the smell of oil, hydraulic fluid & sweat,
a coppery film on the tongue,
& the smile of a job well done.

It’s easy to see this as a type of prayer:
the precision of measurement,
hallowed be thy name
the dynamics of cast, form & mold,
thy will be done
the purity of pattern, blueprint & ASME code
on Earth as it is…

*****

Let the tabled figures stand in place of miracle,
the assembled goods, long forgotten, demand canonization.

May the patron of makers, of machinists, of poets,
pray for us, our products, & our words.

The Missing Years

"Orbits" 10/11/2011 

I spent my missing years

missing my father,

falling in & out of love,

altering states & reading books.

I travelled:

walked the dirt of sacred spaces,

slept in the desert,

slept on a couch,

slept on floors, in cars, & in hotel rooms,

in old beds & in new beds.

I found & lost a thousand dreams,

made a hundred schemes and let them fall.

They still appear sometimes on my drives:

coyotes crossing a road, the way they walk

a meditation on what they’ll do,

not what they’ve done, but what comes next.

I made poems whose satisfaction next lasts,

thought stories whose ends would never come,

smiled sweetly at the births of nieces and nephews,

frowned at injustices & cried for all things lost.

It was impossible to know how long they’d last

& there were many moments of found inside the lost,

like tiny electric charges jolting me out of sleep.

Then one day, there it was:  

the life I had been waiting for had been there all along.

Yes, I still miss the things I’ve lost:

the years of people, honest prayers, & unfinished stories.

But the things I’ve found, the things we’ve made,

are sure as the stars on an October morning & do not vanish,

not completely, but mark our movement around in orbit:

the circle that is a life that is always being found.

Moving Bodies, Standing Still

a hunter’s moon, full, dips

golden below hanging giant Jupiter,

blue-green & brilliant as a lighthouse-ship,

moored & pilotless,

somehow fixed & yet always moving,

but oh the difference a half a moon’s phase makes:

as these mornings

the third quarter moon wanes slowly

still high in the black sky

over the black roof of our home,

as the speedy sky-king looms large,

still blue, but less green,

charting my course to the west

before I bear south into the cold.

hours later,

halfway down an  ill-maintained hallway,

I pause thinking:

dizzy from the recognition of perpetual motion,

I stand here still,

but we are never still;

nothing stops, speeds, slows:

all’s perspective,

a trick of the body, the bodies, the moving bodies,

standing still.

so much of the day depends upon the spin of the moon in mid-October:

the recognition of change transpired, occurring, & yet still to stir,

how much of the morning world is illuminated by things moving away?

all this in the movement of the moon, so close,& a big blue star, so far.

the eye cannot fathom distance so great as the dishonest light

from even the king of the sky,

nor nearest neighbor, orbiting constant

cutting between all other points of light,

which are not points only apparitions,

these wandering ghosts moving so quickly in their friendless fields never pausing.

let this be the lesson  of the homeward bound:

nothing is constant but spin,

even when it seems like we’re just bodies standing still

we’re careening closer & closer to some

& sliding farther & farther from others

in & out through our continuous & careless sways.

[a very rough cut, not sure about it.]

Bewilderment

It is not fear.

Fear is waiting for

children to outgrow you.

Bewilderment is

watching them grow

into themselves

all the while knowing

& not knowing what

your role is in their process.

Fear destroys, inhibits;

bewilderment creates

opportunity, awakens

ingenuity, buoys up

sinking hope.

Standing in the morning

darkness, full moon

sinking below its

slower neighbor,

blue-green Jupiter,

so far away: what

could bewilder more

than your own smallness

alone with the stars,

knowing your smaller

children sleep just inside

the walls without a clue

what wonder & wickedness

waits for them .

I swear this is not fear.

This is not the hollowness

in the chest & sinking stomach

of self-doubt, the nagging

ache of regret. These tempt

& torture. This is bewilderment:

the dizziness of recognition,

feeling the spin of gravity,

the pull of magnetism,

the tricky grace of not knowing

what world waits for you

& the ones you love.

With this as a driving force,

I will not pray for clarity.

Six Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens

(who is looking at blackbirds)

1.

a once thin man, carrying

a thing:  a parcel of uncertain

particles, though obviously

not a blackbird’s wing,

his footsteps being

much too slow.

2.

a man in a plain grey suit,

with a somber imagination

& a difficult sense of humor:

a stagnant pond that off & on

again reflects an almost silent tree

in a cold month before the muskrat

sleeps, it sneaks into the poem

her sad reflection smiling a bucky-

toothed grin changing everything,

except for the topmost branch

still trembling from its missing blackbird.

3.

a Connecticut Homer visiting Florida

to smell flowers through a broken nose

finds himself infatuated not with the sound

of a blackbird singing, but with the innuendo

and diminuendo of the foam-cloud surf,

& magically all his well-fed monsters vanish

as so many fizzling stars, smoke-ringed fireworks,

a cigarette disappearing  across a low blue bay.

4.

one man crossing twenty bridges

into one village of twenty men

all of whom hate poetry,

especially poetry about metaphor:

blackbirds, fruit trees, uncertainty.

5.

a miserable liar, who speaks of poetry

as if it were a lion asleep in the sun,

waiting to rip itself apart line by line,

phoneme by phoneme, bit, bit, bit.

a man in a lion costume sneaks into

the poem about blackbirds to scare

them away, only to prove that poetry

is a destructive force, at its best only

knowable in the traces left behind.

6.

a dead man, a handsome ghost

in a white nightshirt pretending

to fly, a blackbird in white feathers

drunk, falling into a green-gold sky

over & over, as if death were a dream,

recurring each night in the purple hour

of 10 o’clock, & life started over again:

a yellow ring in the blue-black—

as if every morning is Spring.