Poems – Page 2 – Poetry Out Loud

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—
this is one of my favorite things.
I like it so much I sleep all the time.
Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed
deep in the dreams where they appear.
In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,
before the empress with the melting face, under
the towering plane tree, they just show up.
“It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.”
They are diffident and polite.
(Who knew the dead were so polite?)
They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes.
They don’t want to steal my body
and possess the earth and wreak vengeance.
They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides,
why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it.
One of them shyly offers me a pencil.
The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster.
Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music,
the right Reverend Al Green is singing,
“I could never see tomorrow.
I was never told about the sorrow.”

He will surely take it out when you’re alone

And let it dangle between you like a locket on a chain.

Like any world, it will flicker with lights that mean dwellings,

Traffic, a constellation of need. Tiny clouds will drag shadows

Across the plane. He’ll grin watching you squint, deciphering

Rivers, borders, bridges arcing up from rock. He’ll recite

Its history. How one empire swallowed another. How one

Civilization lasted 3,000 years with no word for eternity.

He’ll guide your hand through the layers of atmosphere,

Teach you to tamper with the weather. Swinging it

Gently back and forth, he’ll swear he’s never shown it

To anyone else before.

If you don’t get too close to people you can’t disappoint them,
which would be so much worse
than letting them disappoint you.

To the extent that you gain
a perch that means other people look up to you,
to just that extent you can never
tell them how you feel.

You can warble, or
follow a siren, or a Shenandoah
vireo, into the shade, or take
advice from the lights: be
a child, or be like a child.
You will want for nothing, and you will never be heard.

We’ve never taken anyone
buttoned up and trotting from point A
to point B—subway to office, office to
lunch, fretting over the credit crunch.
Not the ones carefully maneuvering their
watchamacalits alongside broken white lines,
not the Leash-holders who take their Furries
to the park three point five times per day.
If you’re an integer in that kind of
equation, you belong with your Far-bits
on the ground. We’re seven Staryears
past calculus, so it’s the dreamy ones
who want to go somewhere they don’t know
how to get to that interest us, the ones
who will stare all day at a blank piece of paper
or square of canvas, then peer searchingly into
their herbal tea. It’s true that hula hoops
resemble the rings around Firsthome, and that
when you spin, we chime softly, remembering
Oursummer, Ourspring and our twelve Otherseasons.
but that’s not the only reason (Do we like rhyme?
Yes we do. Also your snow, your moss, your tofu—
our sticky hands make it hard for us to put
things down). Don’t fret, dreamy spinning ones
with water falling from your faces.
It’s us you’re waiting for and we’re coming.

Copyright Credit: Matthea Harvey, “Using a Hula Hoop Can Get You Abducted By Aliens” from If the Tabloids are True What Are You? Copyright © by Matthea Harvey. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.

I can remember when I wanted X
more than anything ever—for X fill in
from your own childhood

[balloon, pencil lead, trading card, shoelaces, a bow
or not to have to wear a bow]

and now I am moved to action, when I am moved,
principally by a memory of what to want.

The point is to be, in your own eyes, what you are,

or to keep your own tools, so that you can pretend.

And so it was no surprise,
to me at least, when Cooper, who is two,
collapsed in fortissimo fits when he could not have
a $20, three-foot-long stuffed frog
in the image of Frog from Frog and Toad, since he is Toad.

That morning, needing a nap,
he had thrown, from the third-story balcony
of Miller’s Cafe and Bakery, into the whistling
rapids and shallows
of the Ammonoosuc River, with its arrowheads and caravans of stones,
his Red Sox cap. His hair was shining like
another planet’s second sun,
as he explained, looking up, “I threw my hat in the river.
I would like my hat back now.”

Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes in my head.”
Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize for the sight in my eyes.
—Susan Briante

I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at the Krogers.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This will be our first step in world domination.

Beneath all this I’m carving a cathedral
of salt. I keep

the entrance hidden, no one seems to notice
the hours I’m missing … I’ll

bring you one night, it’s where
I go when I

hang up the phone …

Neither you
nor your soul is waiting for me at

the end of this, I know that, the salt
nearly clear after I

chisel out the pews, the see-through
altar, the opaque

panes of glass that depict the stations of
our cross — Here is the day

we met, here is the day we remember we
met … The air down here

will kill us, some say, some wear paper
masks, some still imagine the air above the green

trees, thick with bees

building solitary nests out of petals. What’s
the name for this? Ineffable? The endless

white will blind you, some say,
but what is there to see we haven’t already

seen? Some say it’s
like poking a stick into a river — you might as well

simply write about the stick.

Or the river.

The days are dog-eared, the edges torn,
ragged—like those pages
I ripped once out of library books,

for their photos
of Vallejo and bootless Robert Johnson.
A fine needs paying now

it’s true, but
not by me.
I am no more guilty

than that thrush is
who sits there stripping moss
off the wet bark of a tree.

A red fleck, like his, glows
at the back of my head—a beauty mark,
left by the brain’s after-jets.

I would not wish for the three brains
Robert required
to double-clutch his guitar

and chase those sounds he had to know
led down
and into a troubled dusky river, always.

Three brains did Johnson no earthly good,
neither his nor Vallejo’s 4 & 1/2
worked right exactly—O bunglers,

O banged-up pans of disaster!
Crying for days, said Cesar, & singing for months.
How can I be so strong some times,

at others weak? I wish to be free,
but free to do what? To leave myself behind?
To switch channels remotely?

Better to sing.
Not like the bird, but as they sang,
Cesar & Robert—

with the shocked & seeded
sweetness of an apple
split open by a meat cleaver.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Copyright Credit: Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1928, © 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Used with the permission of Literary Executor, The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society.