[1888–1965, Born in Britain, migrated to America]
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
Source: Eliot, TS 1943, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets, Harcourt (US).
21 Oct 2013
Blind Date. Bees – Philip Salom
[1950–current, Australian]
When he mentions the Right Names
she begins to think of bees.
When his Conquests get an airing
she feels like being elsewhere.
By the time he gets around to the First Million
her head is a swarm.
Shocked he thinks her face is Distressed
but closer, it is a complete intensity.
And then the queen streaks into the sky
and her face takes flight, is gone.
A few last workers trailing off
where once had been her arms.
Her clothes collapse, empty as his mouth
about to say: ‘Honey?’
Source: Salom, P 1993, Feeding the ghost, Penguin Books, London.
When he mentions the Right Names
she begins to think of bees.
When his Conquests get an airing
she feels like being elsewhere.
By the time he gets around to the First Million
her head is a swarm.
Shocked he thinks her face is Distressed
but closer, it is a complete intensity.
And then the queen streaks into the sky
and her face takes flight, is gone.
A few last workers trailing off
where once had been her arms.
Her clothes collapse, empty as his mouth
about to say: ‘Honey?’
Source: Salom, P 1993, Feeding the ghost, Penguin Books, London.
Having Stood On the Ledge – Lynn Hard
[1938–current, born America, migrated to Australia in 1977]
Having stood on the ledge
and watched the crowd gather:
a country fair painting
of sprayed acrylics:
an anticipation
of splatter,
I know the indifference to height,
that the ledge
is an improvement
on the hotel room with its special channel
which endlessly rolls the time,
the weather,
and the wind direction by,
and I know the indifference to the street,
just another cord in the net.
Having taken the step
and felt my intestines
uncoiled by gravity
I have dropped
like a fluttering x,
a dark cross of St Andrew,
watching the crowd
make a place for me.
The awnings flash by:
blurs of test patterns,
lodgers gouached by the tube
do not look up
from loving Lucy,
they go past like credits
scrolling up.
I drop,
my clothes make an annoying buffet
and worse,
the street gets no nearer.
Source: Hard, L 1993, Dancing on the Drainboard, Angus & Robertson, Australia, pp. 65–66.
Having stood on the ledge
and watched the crowd gather:
a country fair painting
of sprayed acrylics:
an anticipation
of splatter,
I know the indifference to height,
that the ledge
is an improvement
on the hotel room with its special channel
which endlessly rolls the time,
the weather,
and the wind direction by,
and I know the indifference to the street,
just another cord in the net.
Having taken the step
and felt my intestines
uncoiled by gravity
I have dropped
like a fluttering x,
a dark cross of St Andrew,
watching the crowd
make a place for me.
The awnings flash by:
blurs of test patterns,
lodgers gouached by the tube
do not look up
from loving Lucy,
they go past like credits
scrolling up.
I drop,
my clothes make an annoying buffet
and worse,
the street gets no nearer.
Source: Hard, L 1993, Dancing on the Drainboard, Angus & Robertson, Australia, pp. 65–66.
2 Sept 2013
Making a Fist – Naomi Shihab Nye
[1952-current, American]
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
—Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
Source: Nye, NS 1988, 'Making a Fist', Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry, University of Utah Press.
Retrieved 2 September 2013, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241028
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
—Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
Source: Nye, NS 1988, 'Making a Fist', Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry, University of Utah Press.
Retrieved 2 September 2013, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241028
Night Watch – Mark Smith-Soto
[American]
Chico whines, no reason why. Just now walked,
dinner gobbled, head and ears well scratched.
And yet he whines, looking up at me as if confused
at my just sitting here, typing away, while darkness
is stalking the back yard. How can I be so blind,
he wants to know, how sad, how tragic, how I
won’t listen before it is too late. His whines are
refugees from a brain where time and loss have
small dominion, but where the tyranny of now
is absolute. I get up and throw open the kitchen door,
and he disappears down the cement steps, barking
deeper and darker than I remember. I follow
to find him perfectly still in the empty yard—
the two of us in the twilight, standing guard.
Source: Smith-Soto, M 2009, 'Night Watch', Poetry East, no. 64 & 65, Spring.
Retrieved 2 September 2013, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240366
Chico whines, no reason why. Just now walked,
dinner gobbled, head and ears well scratched.
And yet he whines, looking up at me as if confused
at my just sitting here, typing away, while darkness
is stalking the back yard. How can I be so blind,
he wants to know, how sad, how tragic, how I
won’t listen before it is too late. His whines are
refugees from a brain where time and loss have
small dominion, but where the tyranny of now
is absolute. I get up and throw open the kitchen door,
and he disappears down the cement steps, barking
deeper and darker than I remember. I follow
to find him perfectly still in the empty yard—
the two of us in the twilight, standing guard.
Source: Smith-Soto, M 2009, 'Night Watch', Poetry East, no. 64 & 65, Spring.
Retrieved 2 September 2013, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240366
Unmediated experience – Bob Hicok
[1960–current, American]
She does this thing. Our seventeen-
year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog.
Our mostly dead dog, statistically
speaking. When I crouch.
When I put my mouth to her ear
and shout her name. She walks away.
Walks toward the nothing of speech.
She even trots down the drive, ears up,
as if my voice is coming home.
It’s like watching a child
believe in Christmas, right
before you burn the tree down.
Every time I do it, I think, this time
she’ll turn to me. This time
she’ll put voice to face. This time,
I’ll be absolved of decay.
Which is like being a child
who believes in Christmas
as the tree burns, as the drapes catch,
as Santa lights a smoke
with his blowtorch and asks, want one?
Source: This poem originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Poetry magazine.
She does this thing. Our seventeen-
year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog.
Our mostly dead dog, statistically
speaking. When I crouch.
When I put my mouth to her ear
and shout her name. She walks away.
Walks toward the nothing of speech.
She even trots down the drive, ears up,
as if my voice is coming home.
It’s like watching a child
believe in Christmas, right
before you burn the tree down.
Every time I do it, I think, this time
she’ll turn to me. This time
she’ll put voice to face. This time,
I’ll be absolved of decay.
Which is like being a child
who believes in Christmas
as the tree burns, as the drapes catch,
as Santa lights a smoke
with his blowtorch and asks, want one?
Source: This poem originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Poetry magazine.
If Feeling Isn't In It – John Brehm
[1955-current, American]
Dogs will also lick your face if you let them.
Their bodies will shiver with happiness.
A simple walk in the park is just about
the height of contentment for them, followed
by a bowl of food, a bowl of water,
a place to curl up and sleep. Someone
to scratch them where they can't reach
and smooth their foreheads and talk to them.
Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen
and other bringers of bad news and will
bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell
fear and also love with perfect accuracy.
There is no use pretending with them.
Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy
or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed
or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it.
They make no secret of themselves.
You can even tell what they're dreaming about
by the way their legs jerk and try to run
on the slippery ground of sleep.
Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance.
They don't try to impress you with how serious
or sensitive they are. They just feel everything
full blast. Everything is off the charts
with them. More than once I've seen a dog
waiting for its owner outside a café
practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,
what if she doesn't come back this time?
What will I do? Who will take care of me?
I loved her so much and now she's gone
and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people
who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.”
And when she does come, what a flurry
of commotion, what a chorus of yelping
and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!
It's almost unbearable, this sudden
fullness after such total loss, to see
the world made whole again by a hand
on the shoulder and a voice like no other.
Source: This poem originally appeared in the August 1999 issue of Poetry magazine.
Retrieved 2 September 2013, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/29842#poem
You can take it away, as far as I'm concerned—I'd rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I'm not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . .
Howard Moss
Dogs will also lick your face if you let them.
Their bodies will shiver with happiness.
A simple walk in the park is just about
the height of contentment for them, followed
by a bowl of food, a bowl of water,
a place to curl up and sleep. Someone
to scratch them where they can't reach
and smooth their foreheads and talk to them.
Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen
and other bringers of bad news and will
bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell
fear and also love with perfect accuracy.
There is no use pretending with them.
Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy
or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed
or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it.
They make no secret of themselves.
You can even tell what they're dreaming about
by the way their legs jerk and try to run
on the slippery ground of sleep.
Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance.
They don't try to impress you with how serious
or sensitive they are. They just feel everything
full blast. Everything is off the charts
with them. More than once I've seen a dog
waiting for its owner outside a café
practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,
what if she doesn't come back this time?
What will I do? Who will take care of me?
I loved her so much and now she's gone
and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people
who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.”
And when she does come, what a flurry
of commotion, what a chorus of yelping
and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!
It's almost unbearable, this sudden
fullness after such total loss, to see
the world made whole again by a hand
on the shoulder and a voice like no other.
Source: This poem originally appeared in the August 1999 issue of Poetry magazine.
Retrieved 2 September 2013, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/29842#poem
Self-Employed – David Ignatow
[1914–1997, American]
For Harvey Shapiro
I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
I am searching for a lost coin.
You’re fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I’m letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another chance to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,
depressed and about to leave,
and wave myself back in wearily,
for who else could I get in my place
to do the job in dark, airless conditions?
Source: Ignatow, D 1993, 'Self-Employed', Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994, Wesleyan University Press.
For Harvey Shapiro
I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
I am searching for a lost coin.
You’re fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I’m letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another chance to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,
depressed and about to leave,
and wave myself back in wearily,
for who else could I get in my place
to do the job in dark, airless conditions?
Source: Ignatow, D 1993, 'Self-Employed', Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994, Wesleyan University Press.
Self-Inquiry Before the Job Interview – Gary Soto
[1952–current, American]
Did you sneeze?
Yes, I rid myself of the imposter inside me.
Did you iron your shirt?
Yes, I used the steam of mother's hate.
Did you wash your hands?
Yes, I learned my hygiene from a raccoon.
I prayed on my knees, and my knees answered with pain.
I gargled. I polished my shoes until I saw who I was.
I inflated my résumé by employing my middle name.
I walked to my interview, early,
The sun like a ring on an electric stove.
I patted my hair when I entered the wind of a revolving door.
The guard said, For a guy like you, it's the 19th floor.
The economy was up. Flags whipped in every city plaza
In America. This I saw for myself as I rode the elevator,
Empty because everyone had a job but me.
Did you clean your ears?
Yes, I heard my fate in the drinking fountain's idiotic drivel.
Did you slice a banana into your daily mush?
I added a pinch of salt, two raisins to sweeten my breath.
Did you remember your pen?
I remembered my fingers when the elevator opened.
I shook hands that dripped like a dirty sea.
I found a chair and desk. My name tag said my name.
Through the glass ceiling, I saw the heavy rumps of CEOs.
Outside my window, the sun was a burning stove,
All of us pushing papers
To keep it going.
Source: This poem originally appeared in the July 2001 issue of Poetry magazine.
Retrieved 2 September 2013, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/30461#poem
Did you sneeze?
Yes, I rid myself of the imposter inside me.
Did you iron your shirt?
Yes, I used the steam of mother's hate.
Did you wash your hands?
Yes, I learned my hygiene from a raccoon.
I prayed on my knees, and my knees answered with pain.
I gargled. I polished my shoes until I saw who I was.
I inflated my résumé by employing my middle name.
I walked to my interview, early,
The sun like a ring on an electric stove.
I patted my hair when I entered the wind of a revolving door.
The guard said, For a guy like you, it's the 19th floor.
The economy was up. Flags whipped in every city plaza
In America. This I saw for myself as I rode the elevator,
Empty because everyone had a job but me.
Did you clean your ears?
Yes, I heard my fate in the drinking fountain's idiotic drivel.
Did you slice a banana into your daily mush?
I added a pinch of salt, two raisins to sweeten my breath.
Did you remember your pen?
I remembered my fingers when the elevator opened.
I shook hands that dripped like a dirty sea.
I found a chair and desk. My name tag said my name.
Through the glass ceiling, I saw the heavy rumps of CEOs.
Outside my window, the sun was a burning stove,
All of us pushing papers
To keep it going.
Source: This poem originally appeared in the July 2001 issue of Poetry magazine.
Retrieved 2 September 2013, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/30461#poem
Digging – Seamus Heaney
[13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013, Irish (Northern Ireland)]
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Source: Heaney, S (1966), 'Digging', Death of a Naturalist, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Source: Heaney, S (1966), 'Digging', Death of a Naturalist, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.
23 Aug 2013
Excerpts from ‘Salt’ – Mireille Juchau
“What’s essential about your gentleness is the violence at
its borders.”
“No end in sight. No end insight. No end. Insight.”
Source: Juchau, M
1997, ‘Salt’, in Beth Yahp & Nicholas Jose (eds), Picador New Writing 4, Pan Macmillan: Sydney, p. 103.
The Koala Motel Dream – S.K. Kelen
[1956-current, Australian]
It’s a dog all right the nurse told you
your wife has just given birth to a beautiful
bouncing afghan hound you must decide
either to hand out cigars and carry on
or tell them at the office fuck something
burn down your nice house
starting with the carport so you flew south
for the winter freer than a dream
& on the way picked up a hippy girl
hitching out of Albury if only the
boys at the office then she feeds
you blue hallucinogens on the way
to the Koala Motor Inn at
Wangaratta, Victoria.
Source: Kelen, SK 1991, Atomic Ballet, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney.
Retrieved 26 February 2013 from www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/kelen-s-k/the-koala-motel-dream-0086031 www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/kelen-s-k/ the-koala-motel-dream-0086031
It’s a dog all right the nurse told you
your wife has just given birth to a beautiful
bouncing afghan hound you must decide
either to hand out cigars and carry on
or tell them at the office fuck something
burn down your nice house
starting with the carport so you flew south
for the winter freer than a dream
& on the way picked up a hippy girl
hitching out of Albury if only the
boys at the office then she feeds
you blue hallucinogens on the way
to the Koala Motor Inn at
Wangaratta, Victoria.
Source: Kelen, SK 1991, Atomic Ballet, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney.
Retrieved 26 February 2013 from www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/kelen-s-k/the-koala-motel-dream-0086031 www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/kelen-s-k/ the-koala-motel-dream-0086031
Those Winter Sundays – Robert Hayden
[1913–1980, American]
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Source: Hayden, R 1966, ‘Those Winter Sundays’, in Frederick Glaysher (ed.), Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Source: Hayden, R 1966, ‘Those Winter Sundays’, in Frederick Glaysher (ed.), Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, Liveright Publishing Corporation.
22 Aug 2013
Reflections on 22 August, 1991 – Lynn Hard
[1938–current, born America, migrated to Australia in 1977]
Friends,
names,
die:
the members of the cast
are thinned
old movies
we haven’t seen in years,
disappoint
items
we’ve bought since we can remember
are no longer
stocked
and life
is a steady downpour.
except,
in the USSR
where there’s hardly enough room in squares
to stand,
to affirm
that the unknown is half-full
that the people have a right to their space
even if it’s shared with tanks,
that disillusion must be preceded
by illusion
and that is our most foreign and precious substance.
Source: Hard, L 1993, Dancing on the Drainboard, Angus & Robertson, Australia, p. 4.
Friends,
names,
die:
the members of the cast
are thinned
old movies
we haven’t seen in years,
disappoint
items
we’ve bought since we can remember
are no longer
stocked
and life
is a steady downpour.
except,
in the USSR
where there’s hardly enough room in squares
to stand,
to affirm
that the unknown is half-full
that the people have a right to their space
even if it’s shared with tanks,
that disillusion must be preceded
by illusion
and that is our most foreign and precious substance.
Source: Hard, L 1993, Dancing on the Drainboard, Angus & Robertson, Australia, p. 4.
22 Jul 2013
Grief -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(England, 1806–1861)
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy dead in silence like to death —
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
First published in 1844.
Quiller-Couch, AT (ed), 1919, The Oxford book of English verse, 1250–1900, Oxford: Clarendon.
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy dead in silence like to death —
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
First published in 1844.
Quiller-Couch, AT (ed), 1919, The Oxford book of English verse, 1250–1900, Oxford: Clarendon.
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