Posts tagged poetry

The Loneliest Job in the World

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?, 

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
the be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.

—Tony Hoagland 

Grab Somebody Sexy Tell ‘Em, “Hey!” Arguments for one-night stands, in order: 1. Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress”. “Had we but world enough, and time,This coyness, lady, were no crime…” 2. Nathaniel West’s, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell” “And now, finally, we come to the Time-argument. Do not confuse what I shall say under this head with the theories so much in vogue among the metaphysicians and physicists, those weavers of the wind. My ‘Time’ is that of the poets. In a little while, love, you will be dead; that is my burden. In a little while, we all will be dead. Golden lads and chimney-sweeps, all dead. And when dying, will you be able to say, I turn down an empty glass, having drunk to the full, lived to the full? Is it not madness to deny life? Hurry! Hurry! for all is soon over. Blown, O rose! in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon. Do you realize the tune the clock is playing? The seconds, how they fly! All is soon over! All is soon over! Let us snatch, while yet we may, in this brief span, whose briefness merely gilds the bubble so soon destroyed, some few delights. Have you thought of the grave? O love! have you thought of the grave and of the change that shall come over your fair body? Your most beautiful bride—though now she be pleasant and sweet to the nose—will be damnably mouldy a hundred years hence. O how small a part of time they share, that are so wonderous sweet and fair. Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend before we too into the dust descend. Into the dust, Mary! Thy sweet plenty, in the dust. I tremble, I burn for thy sweet embrace. Be not miserly with thy white flesh. Give your gracious body, for such a short time lent you. Give, for in tile giving you shall receive and still have what you give. Only time can rob you of your flesh, I cannot. And time will rob you—it will, it will! And those who husbanded the golden grain, and those who flung it to the wind like rain…” 3. Ne-Yo’s “Let’s Do It Tonight” “…give me everything tonight for all we know we might not get tomorrowlets do it tonighti will love love you tonightgive me everything tonightfor all we know we might not get tomorrowlets do it tonight…” And people say we’re evolving.
Grab Somebody Sexy Tell ‘Em, “Hey!”


Arguments for one-night stands, in order:

1. Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress”.

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime…”

2. Nathaniel West’s, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell”

“And now, finally, we come to the Time-argument. Do not confuse what I shall say under this head with the theories so much in vogue among the metaphysicians and physicists, those weavers of the wind. My ‘Time’ is that of the poets. In a little while, love, you will be dead; that is my burden. In a little while, we all will be dead. Golden lads and chimney-sweeps, all dead. And when dying, will you be able to say, I turn down an empty glass, having drunk to the full, lived to the full? Is it not madness to deny life? Hurry! Hurry! for all is soon over. Blown, O rose! in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon. Do you realize the tune the clock is playing? The seconds, how they fly! All is soon over! All is soon over! Let us snatch, while yet we may, in this brief span, whose briefness merely gilds the bubble so soon destroyed, some few delights. Have you thought of the grave? O love! have you thought of the grave and of the change that shall come over your fair body? Your most beautiful bride—though now she be pleasant and sweet to the nose—will be damnably mouldy a hundred years hence. O how small a part of time they share, that are so wonderous sweet and fair. Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend before we too into the dust descend. Into the dust, Mary! Thy sweet plenty, in the dust. I tremble, I burn for thy sweet embrace. Be not miserly with thy white flesh. Give your gracious body, for such a short time lent you. Give, for in tile giving you shall receive and still have what you give. Only time can rob you of your flesh, I cannot. And time will rob you—it will, it will! And those who husbanded the golden grain, and those who flung it to the wind like rain…”

3. Ne-Yo’s “Let’s Do It Tonight”

“…give me everything tonight 
for all we know we might not get tomorrow
lets do it tonight
i will love love you tonight
give me everything tonight
for all we know we might not get tomorrow
lets do it tonight…”

And people say we’re evolving.

Windmills

Great white arms,
churning through the air,
turning toward the wind;
heliotropes facing the sun.

At night
they blink a low red warning
light, and in the calm
the drone of their motion
hums down into my valley
where they keep watch.

When I hear this sound
I think of pop-culture music
reviews and some DJ some-
where calling the sound
“sweet” with no connection
to the rain-soaked ground
beneath my feet, or the memories
that haunt me. 

But what would my memories
have to do with the drone,
or the DJ, or the rain-soaked
ground, other than this is where
they form, as the world shimmers
through air I cannot see,
and gears turn in ways
I do not understand, and I
am filled with a warmth,
like a drone in a hive
filled purpose, shivering
while the world glistens.

Description

A bird with a cry like a cell phone says something
to a bird which sounds like a manual typewriter.

Out of sight in the woods, the creek trickles
its ongoing sentence; from treble to baritone,

from dependent clause to interrogative.

The trees rustle over the house: they are excited
to be entering the poem

in late afternoon, when the clouds are creamy and massive,
as if to illustrate contentment.

And maybe a wind will pluck off the last dead leaves;
and a cold rain will splash

dainty white petals from the crab apple tree
down to the ground,

the pink and the brown mingled there,
like two different messages scribbled over each other.

In all of this a place must be
reserved for human suffering:

the sick and unloved, the chemically confused;
the ones who believe desperately in insight;
the ones addicted to change.

How our thoughts clawed and pummeled the walls.
How we tried but could not find our way out.

In the wake of our effort, how we rested.
How description was the sign of our acceptance.

—Tony Hoagland 

This is the glimpse of the god you were never supposed to get. 
Like the fox slipping into the thicket. 
Like the thief in the night outside the window. The cool 
gray dorsal fin in the distance. Invisible 
mountain briefly visible through the mist 
formed of love and guilt.

- Laura Kasischke

Poetry is not a form of entertainment, and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but our anthropological, genetic goal, our linguistic, evolutionary beacon.
Joseph Brodsky

Spent

Suffer as in allow.

List as in want.

Listless as in transcending
desire, or not rising
to greet it.

To list
is to lean,
dangerously,
to one side.

Have you forgotten?

Spent
as in exhausted. 

- Rae Armantrout

…that there can be no end
to roads & tracks in our singing, that the asphalt & rail,
more than everything we know, are the knowing itself,
which is inescapably within us. That the plot is footfall
& click-clack unfolding, as it always must, one steely step
at a time. And that Prometheus’s brother, of whom
almost nothing is sung, was named Hindsight,
the one who had not the gift of predicting the story


but the gift of making sense of the story once the story was done.

Kathleen Graber, Another Poem About Trains


My Puppets

I wake up morning snug in my bed-puppet.
Not the liveliest in my repertoire,
but wait, it gets better: next is my pants-puppet,
bandy-legged, hyperactive, true
to life, puppeting lifelike down the hall
onto my waiting elevator-puppet—

a marionette—the down, down to my bus-
puppet, puppeting all those nodding heads,
those drowsy fingers on their so-called smart phones,
and wait till you get to see my office-puppet,
a tour de force of digitalization
that makes the city flap its arms in panic.

So this must be my poem-puppet, yes?
Don’t be naive. The poem is my hand.
Can’t you feel it here inside you, friend?
It enters where it can, and reaches up,
way behind your eyes. So realistic,
how your mouth moves like that as you read.

- Jeff Dolven 

Resolution

My metaphor 
     is becoming

& in my transience 
I’ve gone viral.

*

Sit loose,
    my friends:
we’re ancient
beings, all
of us set in amber
weaving through
the conversations
spiraling above
us, ghosts like gnats
that hollow the air
around the buzz
& light, casting
our shadows
on all the un-
suspecting below,
the sigh of death
unnoticed &
rightly so.

*

     When I say “And?”
     & you reply “No.” 
I see the rough stone
of your likening
already beginning
to become a fade,
the winds pausing
before then giving
their chase to me. 


A petal
          falls to the floor
& I forget to breath.

- Edward Montgomery

This beating heart
won’t stop;
ancillary madness—

a caged animal
determined
to gallup. 

…I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.

Matthew Zapruder

If I had to describe these days, this is how I would put it.   

How about you?

Inside Voice

My inside voice
swallows.

It moves in
sine waves—
I think in math,
my metaphor,
transparent &
ghostlike
sashaying across
the spreading grass:
a field
that hides
the rushes—
knurls of feather
& kick;
colored earth,
flecked stone,
flexed against
instinct, perhaps
as numbers do,
ancient & unbending,
waiting
for me to speak
their name. 

My inside voice
shudders, 

cries calumny!
& then shrinks
back to energy,
to the hushed
moment
when I felt
the world shift,
brace,
then recover,
waiting
for the word
to be spoken
by another. 

*        *        *

You want a story?

Ache for me &
            then speak.