Archive for the 'Poetry' Category

Thursday Short Poem: Simmonds’ “The Woman who…”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 8, 2008
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

The cultural references are heavily English, but the sentiments are nigh-on universal. Kathryn Simmonds describes more than one woman whom I know.

The Woman who Worries Herself to Death

She wasn’t robbed or raped or made a scapegoat of,
she didn’t take ill-fated flights on shaky planes and

no one splashed her house in paint. Kids with hoods
and sovereign rings and hates left her alone. That twinge

she sometimes felt was just a twinge. Her fillings didn’t
leak. At office dos she danced and no one laughed.

Her children didn’t have disorders, fail exams,
take smack. Her husband didn’t love his secretary

or get the sack. But, if you saw her fidgeting
towards the dawn, her breathing playing tricks,

a thousand what ifs snaking in a queue, you’d feel for her,
you’d wish she had something to pin her torment to.

Thursday Short Poem: a section from Newman’s “Coitus Interruptus”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 1, 2008
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

This is the first time I’ve ever put up a poem on Thursday by someone who is a friend on Facebook. Richard Jeffrey Newman’s collection The Silence of Men has been on my shelf for a while, and it’s to my discredit that I’ve taken so long to plug it and to put up one of his offerings as a Thursday Short Poem. Newman writes in a style that recalls Sharon Olds, particularly in his reflections on the body, sex, and death — but his worldview is of the deep masculine. Both tender and unsentimental, he’s produced an interesting and memorable collection. I recommend picking up a copy.

One of my favorite pieces is a long one, “Coitus Interruptus”. I’m putting up the opening section here. We’ve been talking a lot about white privilege in the feminist blogosphere lately; re-reading this poem earlier this week, I saw something here I hadn’t seen before, something about the ways in which racist reality both impinges upon — and leaves untouched — white existence.

From Coitus Interruptus

Naked at the window, my wife calls me
as if someone is dying, and someone
almost is, pinned to the concrete face down
beneath the fists and feet and knees of three

policemen. I’m still hard from before she
jumped out of bed to answer the question
I was willing not to ask when the siren
stopped on our block, but now I’m here and I see

the man is Black, and how can I not
bear witness? They’ve cuffed him
but the uniforms continue to crowd our street,
and the blue and whites keep coming

as if called to war, as if the lives
in all these darkened homes
were truly at stake, and that’s the thing —
who can tell from up here — maybe

we’re watching our salvation
without knowing it. Above our heads,
a voice calls out “Fucking pigs!”
but the ones who didn’t drag the man

into a waiting car and drive off
refuse the bait. They talk quietly
gathered beneath the streetlamp
in the pale circle of light

the man was beaten in, and then
a word we cannot hear is given
and the cops wave each other back
to their vehicles, the sparkle and flash

of their driving off
throwing onto the wall of our room
a shadow of the embrace
my wife and I have been clinging to.

Thank God for those who willing to answer the questions that I too am often willing not to ask.

Thursday Short Poem: Kenyon’s “Otherwise”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2008
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

Few poets wrote as eloquently about the approach of death as Jane Kenyon; I’ve had one of hers up before; I posted it during the period when my father was in hospice care, and we were walking with him towards death.

In my women’s history class on Tuesday, I gave a ringing lecture on birth control and the importance of bodily autonomy. But in the end, if we’re lucky to live long, we lose that precious mastery of our own flesh. As strong as we are now, it will, in the end, always be otherwise.

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Thursday Short Poem: Lux’s “The Milkman and His Son”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 10, 2008
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

Sometimes, one line or one image in an otherwise unremarkable poem grabs you and stays with you for a long time. It is so for me with Thomas Lux’s offering — the final lines resonate, and I wish, though I know I am not, that I was the sort of man of whom such things were said.

The Milkman and His Son

For a year he’d collect
the milk bottles—those cracked,
chipped, or with the label’s blue
scene of a farm

fading. In winter
they’d load the boxes on a sled
and drag them to the dump

which was lovely then: a white sheet
drawn up, like a joke, over
the face of a sleeper.
As they lob the bottles in

the son begs a trick
and the milkman obliges: tossing
one bottle in a high arc
he shatters it in mid-air

with another. One thousand
astonished splints of glass
falling . . . Again
and again, and damned
if that milkman,

that easy slinger
on the dump’s edge (as the drifted
junk tips its hats

of snow) damned if he didn’t
hit almost half! Not bad.
Along with gentleness,

and the sane bewilderment
of understanding nothing cruel,
it was a thing he did best.

Thursday Short Poem: Rich’s “From a Survivor”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 3, 2008
in Poetry
. 3 Comments

I’m approaching, in a few months, my tenth “birthday” in recovery. Of course, I’ve been around 12-Step Programs since 1987, but have been clean from drugs and alcohol since July 1, 1998. And as I approach this milestone, I find myself thinking about those whom I knew and loved who didn’t make it. I don’t dwell a lot on former lovers, for so many reasons (chiefly the desire to focus so strongly on she who is my now-and-future). But there are some people whose skin I knew intimately and with whom I shared a private world who aren’t here anymore. It’s too painful to write about, but this poem captures some of what I feel when I think about them.

From a Survivor

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next

Thursday Short Poem: Sexton’s “The Rowing Endeth”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 20, 2008
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

This was the second poem I ever put up here on the blog, back when I started doing Thursday Short Poems in July ‘04, at the suggestion of Annika. If I could have the collected works of but three poets on a desert island, I’d pick Auden, Jeffers, and Anne Sexton. She means as much to me today as she did when I first discovered her in my adolescence, and this poem is just the thing as I head through Holy Week as an unchurched, but still passionate, lover of the God of surprises and the perfect hand.

the rowing endeth

I’m mooring my rowboat
at the dock of the island called God.
This dock is made in the shape of a fish
and there are many boat moored
at many different docks.
“It’s okay,” I say to myself,
with blisters that broke and healed
and broke and healed–
saving themselves over and over.
And salt sticking to my face and arms like
a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca.
I empty myself from my wooden boat
and onto the flesh of The Island.

“On with it!” he says and thus
we squat on the rocks by the sea and play–can it
be true–a game of poker.
He calls me.
I win because I hold a royal straight flush.
He wins because He holds five aces.
A wild card had been announced
but I had not heard it
being in such a state of awe
when He took out the cards and dealt.
As he plunks down His five aces
and I sit grinning at my royal flush,
He starts to laugh,
the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth
and into mine,
and such laughter that He doubles right over me
laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs.
Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs
the sea laughs. The Island laughs.
The Absurd laughs.

Dearest dealer,
I with my royal straight flush,
love you so for your wild card,
that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha
and lucky love.

Thursday Short Poem: Brackenbury’s “6:25″

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 13, 2008
in Poetry
. 2 Comments

Alison Brackenbury’s short poem is the very thing for this first week of daylight savings time. It’s been awfully dark the past few mornings, and I was up a bit before the time she chooses as her title. Then again, I’ve only once in my adult life been in England in December; the lateness of the dawn was unbelievably dispiriting.

6:25

My day begins with darkness
Since I get up too soon.
Hung vast above the garage end
A brilliant moon
Ignores the morning radio,
White sea without an ebb
Freezes the lithe ash twigs
A glittered web.

The light is metal, deep and pure.
It is what Plato’s cave
Ached for, truth, the throb of power
His shadows gave.

It borrows from the animals
Snow of the owl’s wing
Flash of the badger’s white cheek, wet
From tunnelling.

Gleams slide from gutter, shed and slate,
The radio plays on.
I burn my toast. The east turns blue.
The moon has gone.

Thursday Short Poem: Hutton’s “On the Vanishing…”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 6, 2008
in Poetry
. 2 Comments

This Susan Hutton poem bears reading out loud, preferably more than once. It’s especially good for those of us who call ourselves historians to ponder.

On the Vanishing of Large Creatures

I don’t think the Mayflower’s passengers boarded
with any inkling they would be revered.
We imagine their journey with clean sails and blue sky,
and the galley was probably filthy.
Meriwether Lewis finally reached the Pacific
after writing those dutiful descriptions of routes
and rivers and new species, and just carved his name
in a tree. Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel,
eventually finished and went home.
But that fervor must be somewhere.
As when the music finishes and floats off into the air.
As when Stevens walked to work writing poems in his head,
and when he got there let that private part of his mind keep going,
Van Gogh kept painting himself in the asylum
because he was the only model he had.
Oh, the spring river moves around the ice
and the floes chime out their ruin,
taking with them the shape of the winter banks
and the stones sloping down toward the bed.
In bed the body’s glorious grasp of its anatomy
will move off with its pleasure, and the shape of the bones,
the muscles and tendons must all be relearned.
No one remembers when it happened,
but we were anchored to the earth in the time it took
to draw water, hand over hand, up from the well.
The stone wall stood unassisted all those years,
and the oceans were once filled with giant creatures
the fishermen stripped from the sea.

Thursday Short Poem: Bottum’s “Undivided Heart”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 28, 2008
in Poetry
. 2 Comments

I have a large reservoir of affection for Joseph Bottum, a poet, essayist, and editor of First Things. I can think of only a handful of writers whose prose and verse dazzles me more; despite his reactionary politics, Bottum scribbles with such tender and generous power that he often moves me to tears. I have read just about everything he’s written that’s in print. I have mused before on my blog-crushes; my feelings for J. Bottum extend well beyond that threshold into the realm of heart-palpitating, sweaty-palmed devotion. His wife and children need not fear; no stalker I.

He has some published poetry; formal and elegant, this is my favorite of his.

The Undivided Heart
(Lines Written on My Daughter Faith’s
Second Birthday)

Why should the aspens shrink from death?
In the clearing after fire,
they sift the sunlight through their leaves:
a ripple shield, a spray of shade
for tender shoots of tower pine
in whose grown shadow aspen dies.

Yesterday I caught my daughter
pushing gently at the mirror,
reaching for her self and other,
learning now that at the heart
of things there is divide. Christ,

it was from this I’d hoped to save her,
shelter her until I died
content beneath her tower shade.

In Faith’s green age I climbed the hill
behind the cabin, through the pines,
to sit alone in the fire glade.

The aspens flashed like mirrored panes,
and in the breeze the rippled leaves
whispered there of light and dark,
death and love and sacrifice,
the undivided heart that springs
to fill the broken heart of things.

Thursday Short Poem: Murray’s “Eucalypts in Exile”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 21, 2008
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

This appears in the March issue of First Things. Les Murray writes about a tree we Californians know all too well, and of which I have never been fond. Our ranch road is lined by eucalyptus, a non-native tree with an extraordinary ability to adapt, to conquer, and to crowd out native species. It’s a splendid tribute to these stout invaders, and as anyone who has watched what they can do to other plants knows, they are indeed “merciless in a gang.”

Eucalypts in Exile

They’ve had so many jobs:
boiling African porridge. Being printed on.
Paving Paris, flying in her revolutions.
Supporting a stork’s nest in Spain.

Their suits are neater abroad,
of denser drape, unnibbled:
they’ve left their parasites at home.

They flower out of bullets
and, without any taproot,
draw water from way deep.
When they blow over
they reveal the black sun of that trick.
Standing round among shed limbs
and loose slabbings of bark
is homeland stuff
but fire is ingrained.
They explode the mansions of Malibu
because to be eucalypts
they have to shower sometime in Hell.
Their humans, meeting them abroad,
often grab and sniff their hands.
Loveable singly or unmarshalled
they are merciless in a gang.

Thursday Short Poem: Berry’s “Country of Marriage”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 14, 2008
in Poetry
. 2 Comments

I put this poem up in September 2005, just days before my wife and I were wed. I put it up again on this Valentine’s Day, as it remains one of my very favorite poems written about this challenging, glorious, blessed state in which we find ourselves.

The Country of Marriage

I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth’s empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

III.

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

IV.

How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.

V.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are–
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen tine and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

VI.

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

VII.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy–and this poem,
no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.

It’s very fine.  And I love this bit:

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.

Thursday Short Poem: Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 3, 2008
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

As we head towards Epiphany, here’s one of the most famous poems about the origin of that feast. It’s a troubled poem from a troubled, wise, conflicted believer. The final line seems so bleak, it’s important to remember the central one a few beats above: And I would do it again.

The Journey of the Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Thursday Short Poem: an excerpt from Auden’s “For the Time Being”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 27, 2007
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

Christmas, for most of us in the Western World, ends almost immediately after the 25th of December. The “twelve days” live on only in song. Advent 2007, for the vast majority of Americans and Europeans, was a forgotten season. After all, few if any of us restricted our singing of Christmas carols by, say, the day after Thanksgiving.

And now, the Great Day having passed, fewer still are ready to embrace the tradition that Christmastide still has ten days to run. In that somewhat melancholy spirit comes this famed excerpt from W.H. Auden’s greatest long poem, For the Time Being. Continue reading ‘Thursday Short Poem: an excerpt from Auden’s “For the Time Being”’

Thursday Short Poem: Milne’s “King John’s Christmas”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 13, 2007
in Holidays and Poetry
. 3 Comments

The traditional pre-Christmas poem is always this AA Milne classic. I’ll be on a short holiday hiatus from December 19-26, and the Thursday Short Poem will return December 27.

King John’s Christmas


King John was not a good man –
He had his little ways.
And sometimes no one spoke to him
For days and days and days.
And men who came across him,
When walking in the town,
Gave him a supercilious stare,
Or passed with noses in the air –
And bad King John stood dumbly there,
Blushing beneath his crown.

King John was not a good man,
And no good friends had he.
He stayed in every afternoon…
But no one came to tea.
And, round about December,
The cards upon his shelf
Which wished him lots of Christmas cheer,
And fortune in the coming year,
Were never from his near and dear,
But only from himself.

King John was not a good man,
Yet had his hopes and fears.
They’d given him no present now
For years and years and years.
But every year at Christmas,
While minstrels stood about,
Collecting tribute from the young
For all the songs they might have sung,
He stole away upstairs and hung
A hopeful stocking out.

King John was not a good man,
He lived his live aloof;
Alone he thought a message out
While climbing up the roof.
He wrote it down and propped it
Against the chimney stack:
“TO ALL AND SUNDRY - NEAR AND FAR -
F. Christmas in particular.”
And signed it not “Johannes R.”
But very humbly, “Jack.”

“I want some crackers,
And I want some candy;
I think a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I don’t mind oranges,
I do like nuts!
And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife
That really cuts.
And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”

King John was not a good man –
He wrote this message out,
And gat him to this room again,
Descending by the spout.
And all that night he lay there,
A prey to hopes and fears.
“I think that’s him a-coming now!”
(Anxiety bedewed his brow.)
“He’ll bring one present, anyhow –
The first I had for years.”

“Forget about the crackers,
And forget the candy;
I’m sure a box of chocolates
Would never come in handy;
I don’t like oranges,
I don’t want nuts,
And I HAVE got a pocket-knife
That almost cuts.
But, oh! Father christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”

King John was not a good man,
Next morning when the sun
Rose up to tell a waiting world
That Christmas had begun,
And people seized their stockings,
And opened them with glee,
And crackers, toys and games appeared,
And lips with sticky sweets were smeared,
King John said grimly: “As I feared,
Nothing again for me!”

“I did want crackers,
And I did want candy;
I know a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I do love oranges,
I did want nuts!
I haven’t got a pocket-knife —
Not one that cuts.
And, oh! if Father Christmas, had loved me at all,
He would have brought a big, red,
india-rubber ball!”

King John stood by the window,
And frowned to see below
The happy bands of boys and girls
All playing in the snow.
A while he stood there watching,
And envying them all …
When through the window big and red
There hurtled by his royal head,
And bounced and fell upon the bed,
An india-rubber ball!

And oh Father Christmas,
My blessings on you fall
For bringing him a big, red,
India-rubber ball!

It’s very fine.

Thursday Short Poem: Atwood’s “Heartless”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 6, 2007
in Poetry
. 4 Comments

As anyone who loves her books knows, few writers indeed have the powers of description that Margaret Atwood possesses. Those powers are on display in her poetry as well.

Heartless

Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.
It was either that or the soul.
The hard part is getting the damn thing out.
A kind of twisting motion, like shucking an oyster,
your spine a wrist,
and then, hup! it’s in your mouth.
You turn yourself partially inside out
like a sea anemone coughing a pebble.
There’s a broken plop, the racket
of fish guts into a pail,
and there it is, a huge glistening deep-red clot
of the still-alive past, whole on the plate.
It gets passed around. It’s slippery. It gets dropped,
but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty.
Too sour, says another, making a face.
Each one is an instant gourmet,
and you stand listening to all this
in the corner, like a newly hired waiter,
your diffident, skilful hand on the wound hidden
deep in your shirt and chest,
shyly, heartless.