The Poetry Marathon

8: Books

Harvard undergrads
used to read books
on the Red Line train.

How many eyes nowadays
scan print and paper?
Virtually none.

*

Luddite,
I’ll still carry
three or four paperbacks
in my tote bag,
the poor man’s Kindle.

*

When I was sixteen,
I hid a copy
of The Colossus
in my jacket pocket
at Steve & Cory’s wedding.

Thirty years have passed
since I bought my first volumes of verse:
Eliot’s Four Quartets,
Rimbaud’s Illuminations,
Heaney’s Field Work.

Eliot because it was cheap,
Rimbaud because it was French,
Heaney because Mr Waldron
said he was good.

The printed page
is bread to me,
life and light,
shelter and sustenance.

*

Sure, I’m as guilty
as the next guy
of checking the iPhone
during a dull commute.

But there are times
at home alone
I’ll pick up a book,
an old favorite,
weathered, seasoned,
and pace from room to room
reading aloud
to the four walls,
to any muse or angel
that might be haunting me.

*

Wystan, Estlin, Theodore, Marianne,
you wouldn’t be the same
as lucent type on a small screen.

You’re most at home
in dead-tree editions!

I lift your pages
and kiss the verses
as the priest
kisses the Gospel.

Records on Repeat

I remember this song

And I know which song will come next

I remember the summer that this album was always on repeat

In the book shop

I would sit long enough to hear it twice

While reading about a house that devours the inhabitants

It was a beautiful thing

It fit the mood of everyone that summer

No matter how many times you heard it

No one ever seemed bored

People would sing along

We would breathe it in

Sink down

And come to that point of zen

That was the theme of that summer

When it was too hot to think

And too humid to survive

And we swam through the air

Like gasping fish on the shore

Here there was oxygen

Here was an oasis

Golden Shovel – I Fellowed Sleep (Destiny Fellows While Angels Sleep) – Hour Eight

It was a faint hallucination of you and a shattered dream self of I

Who destiny fellowed

While our guardian angels closed their eyes to sleep

And woke too late to ask who

Has your soul now kissed?

Mine feared you had tricked me

Yours feared you had tripped too far in

Hauled overboard by the

Lusty siren-song of the brain.

 

Credit: Dylan Thomas – I Fellowed Sleep

scene

she tires of being settled into

settled for

like the banks on which they’ve settled in for fishing expeditions

from which she returns sodden and, the others,

sated

feeling nothing but numbness

even filled to the brim with the catch

for which each cast,

or sometimes dragged, their respective nets

“Seven – Laziness”

 

Seven long hours ago, I saw the sun
sprawling on my lawn, with no real need
to notice it beyond that night was done.
I watched it creeping up with no real speed.
I hadn’t dreamed. No work today. No cause
to roll out of my bed. I’m staying home.
Yet still it crept, according to its laws,
and still I lie here, all ‘not brushed’, uncombed.

Should I go out and see where morning’s gone?
Do I care if all the world is cooler
than I am, in my blankets? Is a yawn
all I need today? Or’s sleep the answer?

Seven hours from now the moon will creep.
But I won’t know it, being fast asleep.

golden shovel – #8

I call upon all of us, the people, WE
to take to heart our shared need to seek
for ourselves, each and every one – not
point to ‘others’ or ‘them’ or  ‘the rest’ –
but
take upon ourselves a goal of transformation.

This can only happen if we
are willing to be accountable, honest; are
able to listen deeply and stop dancing
around the elephant in the room through
blame, hyperbole, making of each
the ‘other’
as if that could possibly solve anything, as
if there weren’t already between us enough closed doorways.

We seek not rest but transformation./We are dancing through each other as doorways.from  ‘Circling’  by Marge Piercy

 

8- Life in Colour

A black crow sits outside my window

The sky is dark and it smells of rain

My black cat brushes against me in the hall

I rub my eyes with my dry hands

And pick up my black socks off the floor

 

I walk to work with my red umbrella

A man on the street sells red apples, I pay

As a red fire truck zooms down the street

I trip over the curb and fall

Red blood drips from my lip where I bit

 

Feeling blue I reach my office

The receptionist in a blue dress smiles sweetly

My desk greets me with blueberries gone bad

Frustration sighs at a miserable day

My blue eyes close for a breath

Rehearsal

At play rehearsal beginning to take myself to another level of time and space requires leather not lace.  Reaching within for a higher shelf to become your character, extends myself. Worrying about the whispering crowd not anymore, being me, creating your story, setting me free

Black Widow

Wherever I may go, for in my mind

I am always leaving to go somewhere, remember

it isn’t you I leave behind,

but myself,

Heiderose, rose of the Heide, the heath,

the name my father chose

against my mother’s wishes.

But what’s in a name? Don’t you see

how exhausted I’ve become by the world’s insistence on labels:

bi-polar, half-breed, addict, refugee, wife, mother, child.

I am all of these and more.

I am the forest Orpheus planted when he returned whetted

and alone from the underworld. I am the Thracian woman

who hacked off his head and hung it singing in a tree.

I am the robin who built a nest out of grass and hair

in its branches. Don’t you see

I never wanted to be born, my birth certificate

a yellowed piece of paper fraying along the folds

and stamped with a swastika, a black spider

spinning a web in my head. I’ve seen it

crawl across the bed, but am afraid to kill it,

to squash it with oppression’s heel.

Don’t you see?

hour 8: korea

“History has failed us, but no matter.” – Min Jin Lee, Pachinko.

To understand the sacrifices of my people, look to our history.
We were royalty and yangban who created language from ashes, but our time of glory has
been beheaded by the island folks who look like us. They have failed
to recognize the humanity coursing through us
and our land. What can we do but
retreat into our families and choose survival over resistance, when no
single child has a grain of rice to eat, what else can matter?