Poems – Page 20 – Poetry Out Loud

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am 
asked to drink from my water bottle.

                    This water bottle? That's right. 

                    Open it and drink from it.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am 
asked to take off my shoes.

                   Take off my shoes? 

                   Yes. Both Please.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am 
asked if I have a fever.

                   A fever? Really? 

                   Yes. Really.

My grandmother is in a nursing home. It’s not bad. It doesn’t smell like pee.
It doesn’t smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the
hall past the common room and the nurses’ station, old person after old
person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls.
It’s like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are
what is wanted, your company. In third-world countries I have felt
overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel
young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for
our country, it’s been a martyr for the American dream, it’s been neutralized,
co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it
takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a
channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant
dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplor-
able, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant
falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to
darken. It meant me. I felt sad.

There are many people who come back
After the doctor has smoothed the sheet
Around their body
And left the room to make his call.

They die but they live.

They are called the dead who lived through their deaths,
And among my people
They are considered wise and honest.

They float out of their bodies
And light on the ceiling like a moth,
Watching the efforts of everyone around them.

The voices and the images of the living
Fade away.

A roar sucks them under
The wheels of a darkness without pain.
Off in the distance
There is someone
Like a signalman swinging a lantern.

The light grows, a white flower.
It becomes very intense, like music.

They see the faces of those they loved,
The truly dead who speak kindly.

They see their father sitting in a field.
The harvest is over and his cane chair is mended.
There is a towel around his neck,
The odor of bay rum.
Then they see their mother
Standing behind him with a pair of shears.
The wind is blowing.
She is cutting his hair.

The dead have told these stories
To the living.

Copyright Credit: Frank Stanford, “The Light the Dead See” from The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford. Copyright © 1979 by Frank Stanford. Copyright © 1991 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas. Used with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press.

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and 
    clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and 
    the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and 
    Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. 
    Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and 
    wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work 
    and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to 
    remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons 
    of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me 
    for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: 
    “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of 
    derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

The cat has the chance to make the sunlight
Beautiful, to stop it and turn it immediately
Into black fur and motion, to take it
As shifting branch and brown feather
Into the back of the brain forever.

The cardinal has flown the sun in red
Through the oak forest to the lawn.
The finch has caught it in yellow
And taken it among the thorns. By the spider
It has been bound tightly and tied
In an eight-stringed knot.

The sun has been intercepted in its one
Basic state and changed to a million varieties
Of green stick and tassel. It has been broken
Into pieces by glass rings, by mist
Over the river. Its heat
Has been given the board fence for body,
The desert rock for fact. On winter hills
It has been laid down in white like a martyr.

This afternoon we could spread gold scarves
Clear across the field and say in truth,
“Sun you are silk.”

Imagine the sun totally isolated,
Its brightness shot in continuous streaks straight out
Into the black, never arrested,
Never once being made light.

Someone should take note
Of how the earth has saved the sun from oblivion.

Copyright Credit: Patinann Rogers, “The Significance of Location” from Firekeeper, Selected Poems, Revised and Expanded Edition. Copyright © 2005 by Pattiann Rogers. Used with the permission of Milkweed Editions.

How confident I am it is there. Don’t I bring it,
As if it were enclosed in a fine leather case,
To particular places solely for its own sake?
Haven’t I set it down before the variegated canyon
And the undeviating bald salt dome?
Don’t I feed it on ivory calcium and ruffled
Shell bellies, shore boulders, on the sight
Of the petrel motionless over the sea, its splayed
Feet hanging? Don’t I make sure it apprehends
The invisibly fine spray more than once?

I have seen that it takes in every detail
I can manage concerning the garden wall and its borders.
I have listed for it the comings and goings
Of one hundred species of insects explicitly described.
I have named the chartreuse stripe
And the fimbriated antenna, the bulbed thorax
And the multiple eye. I have sketched
The brilliant wings of the trumpet vine and invented
New vocabularies describing the interchanges between rocks
And their crevices, between the holly lip
And its concept of itself.

And if not for its sake, why would I go
Out into the night alone and stare deliberately
Straight up into 15 billion years ago and more?

I have cherished it. I have named it.
By my own solicitations
I have proof of its presence.

Copyright Credit: Patinann Rogers, “On the Existence of the Soul” from Firekeeper, Selected Poems, Revised and Expanded Edition. Copyright © 2005 by Pattiann Rogers. Used with the permission of Milkweed Editions.

The subtlest strain a great musician weaves,
Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony
To music in his soul. May it not be
Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves
That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves
Unheard in the transition. Thus do we
Yearn to translate the wondrous majesty
Of some rare mood, when the rapt soul receives
A vision exquisite. Yet who can match
The sunset’s iridescent hues? Who sing
The skylark’s ecstasy so seraph-fine?
We struggle vainly, still we fain would catch
Such rifts amid life’s shadows, for they bring
Glimpses ineffable of things divine.