Calvocoressi

Poem-A-Day April 25: Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.

Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

■

Hello Friends,

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is one of my favorite poetry professors (from my Stanford days) and one of my favorite poets. In an October 2021 interview about their “Miss you” series of poems, Calvocoressi shares, “When I was younger, when my mom took her life, I didn’t sleep for like four months, because I was so scared her ghost would come. As I’ve gotten older, and particularly I live in an old house now, and the idea of ghosts coming and kind of like, you know, good and generative haunting, is something that really matters to me, and that COVID has in so many ways opened a kind of gate, where it’s just like, oh gosh, there’s just so many, there are so many losses that I wish I could just bring something back.”

If you enjoyed today’s poem, you might also enjoy another of Calvocoressi’s poems featured for Poem-A-Day April 27, 2018 (“The Sun Got All Over Everything”).

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

an appointment with my anguish

Hello Friends,


Gabrielle Calvocoressi was a very special poetry professor of mine, and it is always a treat to have a new poem of hers to share with you. Today's selection is from Rocket Fantastic (September 2017). If you like women in bowties, or bandleaders who represent "a confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure," then this is the poetry collection for you! The poem below is not actually about the bandleader, though; it's about grief.
Enjoy.

Ellen


The Sun Got All Over Everything
Over the boys and girls by the pool,

over the bougainvillea, which got so hot

my palms stayed warm for minutes after.

It made a mess of a day

that was supposed to be the worst

and lured me outside so I forgot her death entirely.

And also the polar bears scrambling

on the ice chips. And also that there was no water

in the Golden State. The pool was full

and the sun poured across the women's bodies

so you had to shade your eyes. Or I did. I had to

put my hand up to see what they were saying.

I know it's no excuse. And I had made a plan

to cry all day
and into the evening. I marked in my book,

which seems like something I'd make up in a poem

except this time I actually did it.

I wrote: Grieve. Because we're all so busy

aren't we? And so broke. I needed to make

an appointment with my anguish, so I could

take my mind off buying groceries

that I really couldn't afford. Anyway.

I didn't mean to go outside except there

the sky was, just ridiculously blue,

taunting me with pigment that I felt

the need to name. And from somewhere

close by a voice I couldn't see because the sun

was like a yolk cracked over it said,
What are you drinking? And I said,

I'm grieving. I'm very busy remembering.

I made an appointment because last year

I forgot and then felt awful. The sun opened

its mouth and made a gong of the canyons.
I poured across the girls and slicked across

their Dior lenses. I put my tongue on it

exactly when I should have been tearing

at my clothes and lighting candles.

I got on top and let it find the tightness

in my back and open where my wings would

be. Somewhere my mother was dying

and someone was skinning a giraffe.

And I let it go. I just let it go.
■

Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2010 and Poem-a-Day April 27, 2007.

Poem-a-Day, April 23: Bottom feeders? Please.

Hi Friends,

Today’s selection comes to you from the only poet I know to be honored with a combination live boxing match and poetry reading — held on January 15, 2010, at the Hartford Club of Hartford, Connecticut, and concluding with a bout between Sammy Vega, a seven-time national amateur champion, and Mike “Machine Gun” Oliver, a reigning New England and Eastern Boxing Association junior featherweight champion. The occasion was a return visit from Connecticut native Gabrielle Calvocoressi, touring with her new boxing-infused poetry collection Apocalyptic Swing — which is a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Awards to be announced tonight. Good luck, Gaby!

You can also hear Garrison Keillor read Gaby’s poem “Jubilee” on The Writer’s Almanac.

Cheers,
Ellen

Jubilee

Come down to the water. Bring your snare drum,
your hubcaps, the trash can lid. Bring every
joyful noise you’ve held at bay so long.
The fish have risen to the surface this early
morning: flounder, shrimp, and every blue crab
this side of Mobile. Bottom feeders? Please.
They shine like your Grandpa Les’ Cadillac,
the one you rode in, slow so all the girls
could see. They called to you like katydids.
And the springs in that car sounded like tubas
as you moved up and down. Make a soulful sound
unto the leather and the wheel, praise the man
who had the good sense to build a front seat
like a bed, who knew you’d never buy a car
that big if you only meant to drive it.

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 27, 2007.

Poem-a-Day, April 27: some distant trembling warmth

FROM THE ADULT DRIVE-IN

The hill, no the body unbroken
By the strip mall’s lights arced
Harp of her pelvic bone a mouth

Falling upon it like corn cut down
In a field I was forbidden
To walk through. There are so many

Kinds of darkness: her arms tied
To the bed, the shadow they cast
On the sheets whose brightness

Illuminates the hushed cars lying below.
Dark mouth surrounding the root
Or pressing against an opening:

A dog furrowing into the mole’s home
Following some distant trembling warmth.

• ♦ •

Having walked here through the darkening pines
The woman finds her lover in the abandoned
House, some hunter’s cabin, feathers everywhere.

She’s been running, has been pursued, a jealous
Husband who wants her. Is she afraid? Who cares.
We want the fucking to start. The field is so full

Of hunger that when she bends over the cars
Seem to move forward without being turned on.
Two women moving inside each other.

He’s coming for them sure as raccoons in grain
Pails. Their pale skin washes the screen
So we’re almost snow-blind. They can’t see us

Or him for that matter, huge in the doorframe.
He’s beginning to unbuckle his pants.

• ♦ •

O dark barns who will move me now?
I am undone by the flickering screen
By all those girls thrown against the coal black

Night. We, all of us, go back to the field
Scene of a back that went on forever,
The closed eyes, the want that entered us

As we drove by and tried not to look.
How will I ever learn to tell the truth
After the places my hands have been?

It is darker here than other towns, leaves
Burn clear through December. After that
We light beasts of the field to keep ourselves

Warm. Everyone has weathered each other’s want,
Familiar as the feed store’s smell of grain.

• ♦ •

Familiar as the feed store’s smell of grain
This figure seen from the road where the trees
Break apart. A woman straddling the pasture,

Arms white as birches that surround the body
Of cars idling beneath her. I cannot
Tell her voice from the leaves, just watch her mouth

Move, bare as plucked birds in a hunter’s
Hands. It’s a short walk to the fairgrounds.
I want to take her there, to the palace

Of the bandstand and have it out, music
Of tailbone, tensed hamstring, unrelenting
Chord of her neck pulled back till our eyes

Fill like a screen awash in headlights
As the hushed crowd pushes into the night.

• ♦ •

Like snow, feathers, thrush in the virgin’s mouth
It appeared, white against the dark sky. How
Did he know we wanted it, that we’d come

In all weather? A drive-in of skin flicks
For farmers, machinists, salesmen who lived
For small towns like ours. So much empty

Land and the mills shut down, our lives like barns
With both doors blown open: you could see straight
Through. O life before the freeway rose, dark

Turnpike passing thin as a shiv through
The backside of town. Nobody looking
For anyone to come home, truckers in

Back, some kids out for a ride, all of us
Expectant as deer in open season.

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. The above version of this sonnet sequence appeared in the journal Ninth Letter. A different (more recent) version of this poem also appears in Calvocoressi’s collection The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (2005) — but I’m sending you the older version because I like it better (possibly just because I fell in love with it first), and it’s my poem-a-day list so I get to choose. 😉 I would also like to note that I started writing this email before midnight and have at least some meek argument that I did not spoil my perfect record of having not missed a day all month.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.

To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2010.