Tom Clark

Sounding Chinese at Inspiration Point

Nice spring day off big white cloud

At Inspiration Point escaping time wars

Poet takes book & wine bottle up into Mist Mountains

Since only available agenda is rhyming with silence

Seeking window of opportunity on a wall

I disguise what I have to say by sounding Chinese

Such as stars are now darker and farther away

They take deeper drinks because space is

Drying out afraid to think own thoughts

Administered citizen achieving condition of robot

In public mind things not so good these days

Nor in wrong run will it matter to Tu Fu

Andrew Zawacki

 

[Begins in interruption...]

Begins in interruption:

an ambulance bell at the center

of sleep, the room tilts

sideways, furniture slides,

an octet of amber blue

verres à liqueur, one with a cut

at the lip, clatters as a quaalude

light in tatters mattes the

curtains ormolu:

                              I miss you

is what I want to say

like a rocket

stocked from the Reagan

years, its radar gone haywire,

wiring fried but

live inside a bunker of some

private Soviet

Union you & I —

Elizabeth Bishop

Filling Station 

Oh, but it is dirty!

—this little filling station,

oil-soaked, oil-permeated

to a disturbing, over-all

black translucency.

Be careful with that match!

 

Father wears a dirty,

oil-soaked monkey suit

that cuts him under the arms,

and several quick and saucy

and greasy sons assist him

(it’s a family filling station),

all quite thoroughly dirty.

 

Do they live in the station?

It has a cement porch

behind the pumps, and on it

a set of crushed and grease-

impregnated wickerwork;

on the wicker sofa

a dirty dog, quite comfy.

 

Some comic books provide

the only note of color—

of certain color. They lie

upon a big dim doily

draping a taboret

(part of the set), beside

a big hirsute begonia.

 

Why the extraneous plant?

Why the taboret?

Why, oh why, the doily?

(Embroidered in daisy stitch

with marguerites, I think,

and heavy with gray crochet.)

 

Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

esso—so—so—so

to high-strung automobiles.

Somebody loves us all.

 

Kenneth. Koch

 You Were Wearing

 

You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.

In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.

Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me, "Do most boys think that most girls are bad?"

I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip.

"No," I said, "it's girls who think that boys are bad." Then we read Snowbound together.

And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes.

 

Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes comb in her hair.

We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville.

As well as with illustrations from his book Moby Dick and from his novella, Benito Cereno.

Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: "How about a drink, everyone?"

I said, "Let's go outside a while." Then we went onto the porch and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing.

You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.

In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

Robert Duncan

Poetry, a Natural Thing

 

Neither our vices nor our virtues   

further the poem. “They came up   

      and died 

just like they do every year 

      on the rocks.” 

 

      The poem 

feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, 

      to breed    itself, 

a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. 

 

This beauty is an inner persistence 

      toward the source 

striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,   

      a call we heard and answer 

in the lateness of the world 

      primordial bellowings 

from which the youngest world might spring, 

 

salmon not in the well where the   

      hazelnut falls 

but at the falls battling, inarticulate,   

      blindly making it. 

 

This is one picture apt for the mind. 

 

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, 

where last year’s extravagant antlers   

      lie on the ground. 

The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears   

      new antler-buds, 

      the same, 

 

“a little heavy, a little contrived”, 

 

his only beauty to be   

      all moose.

Mark Strand

Madrid, 2013

Fiction

I think of innocent lives

Of people in novels who know they’ll die

But not that the novel will end. How different they are

From us. Here, the moon stares dumbly down,

Through scattered clouds, onto the sleeping town,

And the wind rounds up fallen leaves,

And somebody—namely me—deep in his chair,

Riffles the pages left, knowing there’s not 

Much time for the man and woman in the rented room,

For the red light over the door, for the iris

Tossing its shadow against the wall; not much time

For the soldiers under the trees that line

The river, for the wounded being hauled away

To the cities of the interior where they will stay;

The war that raged for years will come to a close,

And so will everything else, except for a presence

Hard to define, a trace, like the scent of grass

After a night of rain or the remains of a voice

That lets us know without spelling it out

Not to despair; if the end is come, it too will pass.

 

A. R. Ammons

Loss

When the sun 

falls behind the sumac 

thicket the 

wild 

yellow daisies 

in diffuse evening shade 

lose their 

rigorous attention 

and 

half-wild with loss 

turn 

any way the wind does 

and lift their 

petals up 

to float 

off their stems 

and go  

Carl Phillips

 

  

Unbridled

  

To look at them, you might not think the two men, having spoken briefly 

                and now moving away from each other, as different goals 

                require, have much history, if any, 

between them. That, for a time that seems longer ago now than in fact 

                it’s been, they used to enter each other’s bodies so often, so routinely, 

                yet without routine ever seeming the right way of putting it, 

that even they lost count—back then, 

                who counted? It’s not as if they’ve forgotten, or at least 

                the one hasn’t, looking long enough back at the other 

to admire how outwardly unchanged he seems: still muscled, even if 

                each muscle most brings to mind (why, though) 

                an oracle done hiding at last, all the mystery made 

quantifiable, that it might more easily that way—like love, like the impulse 

                toward love—be disassembled. The other man doesn’t look back 

                at all, or think to, more immediately distracted 

by the dog he had half forgotten at the end of a leash he’d forgotten 

                entirely, though here it is, in his hand, 

                and the dog at the end of it. What kind of dog? The kind whose 

digging beneath the low-lying branches of a bush thick with flowers 

                shakes the flowers loose, they make of the dog’s 

                furious back a fury of petals that the dog takes no notice of, 

though the man has noticed. 

                How the petals lie patternless where they’ve fallen. 

                How there’s a breeze, bit of storm in it. How as if in response 

the dog lifts its dirt-blackened face from the hole it’s digging, 

                then continues digging. Then the man is crying. No, it looks like crying. 

                Now what good at this point do you really think that’s likely to do 

either of us, he says, to the dog. 

  

Adrienne Rich

 

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

 

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

 

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

 

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.