18 Aug 2015

Mementos, 1 -- WD Snodgrass

Sorting out letters and piles of my old
    Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards   
That meant something once, I happened to find
    Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,   
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard
             Who has turned up a severed hand.

Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand
    Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender,
In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies
    That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned   
Us all. Well, our needs were different, then,
             And our ideals came easy.

Then through the war and those two long years
    Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks   
Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried
    This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,   
Prove it had been, that it might come back.
             That was before we got married.

—Before we drained out one another’s force   
    With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret
And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce
    And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,   
I put back your picture. Someday, in due course,
             I will find that it’s still there.


Source: Snodgrass, WD 1987, 'Mementos, 1' from Selected Poems, 1957-1987, Soho Press, New York. Retrieved 18 August 2015, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171518.

Late Night Ode -- JD McClatchy

HORACE IV. i

It’s over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,
   Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,
The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,
   The sour taste of each day’s first lie,

And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling
   A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,
Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark
   Along a body like my own, but blameless.

What good’s my cut-glass conversation now,
   Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad?
You get from life what you can shake from it?
   For me, it’s g and t’s all day and CNN.

Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level
   At eighty grand, who pouts about overtime,
Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,
   And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.

There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer
   Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.
His answering machine always has room for one more
   Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.

Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears
   Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why now?
I long ago gave up pretending to believe
   Anyone’s memory will give as good as it gets.

So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream
   Almost every night of holding you again,
Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,
   Through the bruised unbalanced waves?


Source: McClatchy, JD, 1998, ‘Late Night Ode’ from Ten Commandments, Alfred A. Knopf.  Retrieved 18 August 2015, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/236602