Category: April 2015

On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries

Connecticut College, 1968

Your book surprised me on the bookstore shelf —
swans gliding on a blueblack lake;
no blurbs by the big boys on back;
no sassy, big-haired picture
to complicate the achievement;
no mentors musing
over how they had discovered
you had it in you
before you even knew
you had it in you.
The swans posed on a placid lake,
your name blurred underwater
sinking to the bottom.

I had begun to haunt
the poetry shelf at the college store —
thin books crowded in by texts,
reference tomes and a spread
of magazines for persistent teens
on how to get their boys,
Chaucer-Milton-Shakespeare-Yeats.
Your name was not familiar,
I took down the book and read.

Page after page, your poems
were stirring my own poems —
words rose, breaking the surface,
shattering an old silence.
I leaned closer to the print
until I could almost feel
the blue waters drawn
into the tip of my pen.
I bore down on the page,
the lake flowed out again,
the swans, the darkening sky.
For a moment I lost my doubts,
my girl’s voice, my coming late
into this foreign alphabet.
I read and wrote as I read.

I wanted to own this moment.
My breath came quickly, thinking it over —
I had no money, no one was looking.
The swans posed on the cover,
their question-mark necks arced
over the dark waters.
I was asking them what to do . . .

The words they swam over answered.
I held the book closed before me
as if it were something else,
a mirror reflecting back
someone I was becoming.
The swans dipped their alphabet necks
in the blueblack ink of the lake.
I touched their blank, downy sides, musing,
and I put the book back.

 

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem is from Julia Alvarez‘s 1995 collection The Other Side / El Otro Lado. Alvarez was also featured for poem-a-day April 28, 2012 and poem-a-day April 10, 2010.

Have you ever come across a book that called to you so strongly you still remember it, even though you left it behind on the shelf? I’d love to hear about it.

I hope you’re enjoying National Poetry Month!

— Ellen

On Gardens

When I read about the garden
designed to bloom only white flowers,
I think about the Spanish friar who saw one
of my grandmothers, two hundred years
removed, and fucked her. If you look
at the word colony far enough, you see it
traveling back to the Latin
of inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words

that would have meant something
to the friar, walking among the village girls
as though in a field of flowers, knowing
that fucking was one way of having
a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow
falling, which means that every
angry thought is as short-lived as a match.
The night is its own white garden:

snow on the fence, snow on the tree
stump, snow on the azalea bushes,
their leaves hanging down like green
bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair
to see qualities of injustices in the aesthetics
of a garden, but somewhere between
what the eye sees and what the mind thinks
is the world, landscapes mangled

into sentences, one color read into rage.
When the neighbors complained
the roots of our cypress were buckling
their lot, my landlord cut the treet down.
I didn’t know a living thing three stories high
could be so silent, until it was gone.
Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light
in the windows, as though every sheet

of glass was having a migraine.
When I think about that grandmother
whose name I don’t even know, I think of
what it would mean to make a garden
that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas
of deepest purple, tulips like ravens.
Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks
poised on clean gravel. When the snow stops,

I walk to see the quiet that has colonized
everything. The main street is asleep, except
for the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship.
There are sheet cakes of snow on top
of cars. In front of houses, each lawn
is as clean as paper, except where the first cat
or raccoon has walked across, each track
like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.

— Rick Barot, Poetry magazine (May 2013)

Ballad of Orange and Grape

After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you’ve read your reading
after you’ve written your say —
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth
century.

Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack —
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who’d like to break your back.
But here’s a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose
and pink, too.

Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog man leans —
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on
walking.

I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked orange
orange in the one marked grape,
the grape drink in the machine marked orange
and orange drink in the grape.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, one each
machine.

I ask him : How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? —
How can they write and believe what they’re writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into orange
and orange into the one marked grape —?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write and
we hear and we say and we do?)

He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black     women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don’t do.

On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into orange
and orange into the one marked grape,
pouring orange into grape and grape into orange forever.

For a recording of Muriel Rukeyser reading “Ballad of Orange and Grape” as well as a discussion of the poem, check out this PoemTalk podcast #78: How can they write and believe?

Hi Friends,
I saw over 300 wild dolphins today, which is totally magical and poetic. So we’re featuring a dolphin poem-a-day —

 

Dolphins at Seven Weeks

Inward lush unpetaling purpose in pink blooms of sleep, and I no longer needed to be separate. I was living there then, at the edge of the sea. And my friends came to visit, trying for a baby, not sure how to read me on that island of dozy sunlight. And there it was: familiarity edged with fear, the way we’d feed each other sandwiches and wonder if we should have wanted something other. We walked the folded cliffs over conifer fronds and mud runneling rocks slick with dropped fruit and rotting camellias to pause at the first ridge. We looked through high pines at the blue moving tides, then his finger caught a snag in the water and another and we saw — glinting fins wheeling the sheen, thousands playing in pods coming closer like the souls slippering into our bodies, attached to matter as flippers angle into a ferrying strand. We too are a species, I realized. We too could know that as joy.

“Dolphins at Seven Weeks” by Rachel Jamison Webster appeared in the March 2013 issue of Poetry magazine.

Rain fell on one man,
he ran into his house.

But the swan spread its wings and said,
“Pour more on me of that power
I was fashioned from.”

Hello Friends,

Today’s ruba’i or Persian quatrain was translated by Coleman Barks for a collection of Rūmī’s most spring-ful works entitled Birdsong (MAYPOP Athens Georgia 1993).

I hear Doria Roberts “Caught in the Rain” when I read this poem; hear Leda; hear a middle school science teacher explaining what percentages of our bodies are made of water, what percentages of the earth waters cover…

— Ellen

Hello Friends,

Happy Friday, and I hope you’re enjoying National Poetry Month!

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a poem with just one “hidden” meaning the reader was meant to “unlock.” But I do know one poem you can read with a key — from the Scottish poet Robin Robertson, first printed in a January 2000 issue of The New Yorker.

A very happy birthday to Dara today, who showed me the locks and keys of Kraków this past fall —

Enjoy,
Ellen

 

Wedding the Locksmith’s Daughter

The slow-grained slide to embed the blade
of the key is a sheathing,
a gliding on graphite, pushing inside
to find the ribs of the lock.

Sunk home, the true key slots to its matrix;
geared, tight-fitting, they turn
together, shooting the spring-lock,
throwing the bolt. Dactyls, iambics—

the clinch of words—the hidden couplings
in the cased machine. A chime of sound
on sound: the way the sung note snibs on meaning

and holds. The lines engage and marry now,
their bells are keeping time;
the church doors close and open underground.

Moonlight Night: Carmel

Tonight the waves march
In long ranks
Cutting the darkness
With their silver shanks,
Cutting the darkness
And kissing the moon
And beating the land’s
Edge into a swoon.

Hello Friends,

It gives me shivers to think Langston Hughes once stood exactly where I’ve stood, looking out over the same magic landscape that is the beach after dark in Carmel, California. Today’s poem-a-day is from the 1959 edition of his Selected Poems — though several of his poems were first published in the Carmel Pine Cone.

Do you have a poem like that — one that makes you shiver with recognition of a path you walked or shoes you wore?

— Ellen