A Birthday Poem (With Zombies)

Butterfly on Lilacs

So here it is, June 3rd and along comes the birthday of Allen Ginsberg. I love the poem 'Howl' for how dense the language is, and how long the poem sustains this. In honor of Allen Ginsberg's birthday, I present an excerpt from 'Foul', a riff on the old classic. With 88% more zombies.

Foul

by Constance Brewer

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by starving, naked zombies, it was hysterical how they dragged themselves through suburban streets before dawn looking for a brain fix,

empty-headed corpses yearning for a tasty connection of white and gray wrapped in dura matter,

whose lipids and neurons and glial cells are but fodder in the supernatural darkness of the soul of rotting flesh floating across the top of open-sore craniums

who attack mindless in waves the haven and see other Romerian zombies staggering on shambling, putrid limbs,

who pass on recruiting at universities with discolored eyes not wanting to hallucinate Sartre and Camus from feasting on the flesh of philosophy majors,

who were reanimated from the academies for crazy - pushing obscene odes to the density of the skull,

who cower in infected rooms in long underwear, saving their medullas in wastebaskets and listening politely to the Terror through the wall,

who got decomposed in their tender graves returning through reanimation with a desire for middle-class flesh from New York,

who ate cerebellum like candy or drank cerebrospinal fluid in death, or purgatoried their tissues night after night

with bad hygiene, with infection, with waking nightmares, rotting teeth and rotten nails,

incomprehensible screaming of shuddering crowds at the light-in-the-mind staggering past cases of Bartles & James, illuminated by the motionless soldiers in riot gear

Payless shoes on detached feet, shuffle through cemetery dawns, wine-drunk survivors fleeing over the rooftops hiding behind storefronts joyriding with cricket bats ignoring neon blinking traffic lights, as they roar over walking corpses and smash the apocalyptical plague upside the head . . .

(. . . Original Poem- Howl by Allen Ginsberg)

New Poets Of The American West

Coming in July - I have a poem in this anthology. Here, read all about it: (I would be the "and many more!"...)


New Poets of the American West

an anthology of poets
from eleven Western states

Edited by Lowell Jaeger


Kim Addonizio • Sandra Alcosser • Sherman Alexie • Jimmy Santiago Baca •Ellen Bass • Jim Barnes • Marvin Bell • James Bertolino • Sherwin Bitsui • Judy Blunt • Christopher Buckley • Henry Carlile • Maxine Chernoff • Marilyn Chin • Katharine Coles • Mary Crow • Matthew Dickman • Gary Gildner • Raphael Jesús Gonzáles • Dana Gioia • Samuel Green • Mark Halperin • Sam Hamill • Joy Harjo • Jim Harrison • Jane Hirshfield • Garrett Hongo • Christopher Howell • Linda Hussa • Lawson Fasao Inada • Mark Irwin • Lowell Jaeger • Ilya Kaminsky • Melissa Kwasny • Lance Larson • Dorianne Laux • David Lee • Philip Levine • Adrian C. Louis • Clarence Major • Ron McFarland • Sandra McPherson • Jane Miller • Dixie Partridge • Simon Ortiz • Carol Muske-Dukes • Robert Pack • Greg Pape • Lucia Perillo • David Ray • Lois Red Elk • David Romtvedt • Alberto Rios • Pattiann Rogers • William Pitt Root • Wendy Rose • Vern Rutsala • Kay Ryan • Reg Saner • Leslie Marmon Silko • Maurya Simon • Floyd Skloot • Gary Soto • Kim Stafford • David St. John • Primus St. John • Luci Tapahonzo • Rawdon Tomlinson • Bill Tremblay • David Wagoner • Robert Wrigley • Al Young • and many more!


New Poets of the American West is a panoramic (and revealing) view of the West through the eyes of more than 250 poets and 450 poems, including poems in English, Spanish, Navajo, Salish, Assiniboin, and Dakota languages. Collected here are poems about horse racing, mining, trash collecting, nuclear testing, firefighting, border crossings, buffalo hunting, surfing, logging, and sifting flour. In these pages you will visit flea markets, military bases, internment camps, reservations, funerals, weddings, rodeos, nursing homes, national parks, backyard barbecues, prisons, forests, meadows, rivers, and mountain tops. In your “mind’s eye,” you will meet a simple-minded girl who gets run over by a bull, two mothers watching a bear menacingly nosing toward unsuspecting children, and children who “have yet to be toilet trained out of their souls.” You will learn to “reach into the sacred womb, / grasp a placid hoof / and coax life toward this certain moment.” You’ll teach poetry to third graders, converse with hitchhikers, lament for an incarcerated brother “trying to fill the holes in his soul / with Camel cigarettes / and crude tattoos.” You will sit at the kitchen table where perhaps the world will end “while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.” In the short time each of us has in this world, here’s your chance to experience life widely and to reflect on your experiences deeply. Lowell Jaeger, Editor In New Poets of the American West, we hear from Native Americans and first-generation immigrants, from ranchlanders and megaopolites, from poet-teachers and street-poets, and more. In fact, the West is so big, and home to such diversity that the deeper one reads in this anthology, the more voices and world views one encounters, the more textures of thought, emotion, and language one discovers, the less we may find ourselves able to speak of a single, stable something called the American West. Rather, we may find ourselves living in (or reading into) not one West, but many.


Brady Harrison, Professor
University of Montana

New Poets of the American West
is available for purchase
at amazon.com or by contacting:
fvccbookstore.com
or call 406-756-3814 (9:00 - 5:00 M-F)

For more information, please contact Lowell Jaeger at
406-756-3907 or ljaeger@fvcc.edu
ISBN: 978-0-9795185-4-6
7 x 10 - 550 pp
$24

April Poem A Day Challenge Day 30

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, write a letting go poem. The poem could be about letting go of a relationship; it could be about letting go of anger; it could be about letting go of a tree branch; or it could even be about, yes, letting go of this April challenge. There are so many things we can let go.

A good prompt to end the month on. It's loose enough to interpret many ways. My poem is more or less about letting go of the past. It was more complicated than it sounds, because it needed a preface of sorts built into the poem, so that the actually letting go would have more impact, and so the reader could understand just what was lost and what was gained by the action.

The difficulty is in letting the poem tell the story without attempting to direct it too much, which sounds weird, but I've learned not to apply a heavy hand, or else the poem rebels. Rebellious poems turn into horses with hard mouths, they don't listen, they toss their heads a great deal and generally make any journey less than pleasant. So I bridle my poems with a hackamore, giving up some control for the comfort of the ridden. The poem has the illusion of being free, while I retain some directional ability.

A roundabout way of saying don't overwork it, but at the same time, give it some guidelines. Here are three 'letting go' (or not being able to let go) poems to round out the month.



This Was Once a Love Poem
by Jane Hirshfield

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.



Lot's Wife
by Anna Akhmatova

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.



Going Home
by Wislawa Szymborska

He came home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
Pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He's nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists just as he did inside his mother's womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he'll give a lecture
on homeostasis in metagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.


,

April Poem A Day Challenge Day 29

My least favorite of phrases coupled with my least favorite of prompts, the title phrase poem. Talk about an uphill battle. "And suddenly, I lost interest…" is the only phrase that came immediately to mind. But I was determined not to accept defeat so close to the end of the month.

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, I want you to take the phrase "And Suddenly (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Some examples: "And suddenly we were lost," "And suddenly over," "And suddenly banana," "And suddenly sudden," "And suddenly the poem I was writing turned into a killer robot," etc.

"And suddenly" feels gimmicky, which is probably why I had a hard time with it. Also, the word suddenly, in poetry, represents a failure to communicate urgency properly to me. It feels sloppy.

Okay, initial kicking and screaming over, I venture forth into actually writing a poem.

"And Suddenly Episcopalian"
"And Suddenly The Chicken Crossed The Road"
"And Suddenly Pancakes"
"And Suddenly Priscilla Remembered A Previous Engagement"
"And Suddenly Time Lurched Sidewards"

Yes, I overachieved and wrote several very short, pretty silly poems that are mostly title. That's one way of pushing yourself past a prompt you don't like. Refuse to take it seriously. For the record, "And Suddenly Pancakes" was a direct quote from the Muse. I imagine it was meant to be a blistering rebuttal on the current state of proper nutrition for Muses in general and one in specific, but instead the poem turned left and hid itself under a waterfall of maple syrup. Or it was just a reminder to eat at IHOP next time I'm in Casper. . .



Lost in the Forest
by Amy Gerstler

I’d given up hope. Hadn’t eaten in three
days. Resigned to being wolf meat ...
when, unbelievably, I found myself in
a clearing. Two goats with bells
round their necks stared at me:
their pupils like coin slots
in piggy banks. I could have gotten
the truth out of those two,
if goats spoke. I saw leeks
and radishes planted in rows;
wash billowing on a clothesline ...
and the innocuous-looking cottage
in the woods with its lapping tongue
of a welcome mat slurped me in.

In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex
is barely discernible pours a glass
of fraudulent milk. I’m so hungry
my hand shakes. But what is this liquid?
“Drink up, sweetheart,” she says,
and as I wipe the white mustache
off with the back of my hand:
“Atta girl.” Have I stumbled
into the clutches of St. Somebody?
Who can tell. “You’ll find I prevail here
in my own little kingdom,” she says as
she leads me upstairs—her bony grip
on my arm a proclamation of ownership,
as though I've always been hers.




Gretel
by Ron Koertge

said she didn't know anything about ovens
so the witch crawled in to show her
and Bam! went the big door.

The she strolled out to the shed where
her brother was fattening, knocked down
a wall and lifted him high in the air.

Not long after the adventure in the forest
Gretal married so she could live happily.
Her husband was soft as Hansel. Her
husband liked to eat. He like to see
her in the oven with the pies and cakes.

Ever after was the size of a kitchen.
Gretel remembered when times were better.
She laughed out loud when the witch
popped like a weenie.

"Gretel! Stop fooling around and fix
my dinner."

"There's something wrong with this oven,"
she says, her eyes bright as treasure.
"Can you come here a minute?"




Writing in the Afterlife
by Billy Collins

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.


.

April Poem A Day Challenge Day 28

I feel like one of those prisoners keeping a secret diary.

"Day 28. I was forced to contemplate the end of the line today. My captor claims I will be released in two days, but time has ceased to have the meaning it once had. I see an endless array of poetic feet marching before me, kicking me to produce more and more. The Guard Muse seems sympathetic, tossing me crumbs when no one is looking. I notched another day in the wall of my cell and buckled down to producing what the Warden demanded. doG only knows what hideous prompt awaits to torture me tomorrow. . . "

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, write an end of the line poem. Maybe the narrator of your poem is at the end of his or her line. Other possible lines that have an end: assembly lines, phone lines, power lines, rail lines, graph lines, dotted lines, waiting lines, lines of poetry, etc.

My poem today kind of dovetailed off of yesterday's hopeless prompt, it was a poem of despair that refused to take itself seriously, mocking me at every turn. The dangers of attempting to shoehorn your poem into something pre-envisioned. I forced it to a conclusion, then wrote another about what waits out West when the train tracks run out in the middle of nowhere. Then I wrote a little piece that needs a lot more work on 'lines' as in genealogical lines. So I may get three poems from this, or I may get none. Or I may mash all three poems together into one giant FrankenPoem. I have the power.

A few end of the line poems.



Medusa
by Louise Bogan

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.




The day my mother died
by Marge Piercy

I seldom have premonitions of death.
That day opened like any
ordinary can of tomatoes.

The alarm drilled into my ear.
The cats stirred and one leapt off.
The scent of coffee slipped into my head

like a lover into my arms and I sighed,
drew the curtains and examined
the face of the day.

I remember no dreams of loss.
No dark angel rustled ominous wings
or whispered gravely.

I was caught by surprise
like the trout that takes the fly
and I gasped in the fatal air.

You were gone suddenly as a sound
fading in the coil of the ear
no trace, no print, no ash

just the emptiness of stilled air.
My hunger feeds on itself.
My hands are stretched out

to grasp and find only their
own weight bearing them down
toward the dark cold earth.



Stars
by Marjorie Pickthall

Now in the West the slender moon lies low,
And now Orion glimmers through the trees,
Clearing the earth with even pace and slow,
And now the stately-moving Pleiades,
In that soft infinite darkness overhead
Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread.

And all the lonelier stars that have their place,
Calm lamps within the distant southern sky,
And planet-dust upon the edge of space,
Look down upon the fretful world, and I
Look up to outer vastness unafraid
And see the stars which sang when earth was made.



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April Poem A Day Challenge Day 27

Poetic Asides: Wow! After today, we'll be a mere three days from the end of this challenge. Today is a two for Tuesday prompt, so you've got two options:
1. Write a hopeful poem.
2. Write a hopeless poem.

Hey, it's opposites day again, where the prompts are diametrically opposed to one another. At least in theory. I see hopeful and hopeless not as flip sides of a coin, but angles to each other. The change from hopeful to hopeless can hinge on margins as thin as Prozac.

I meant to write one of each poem, but the poem had other ideas. It is a hopeful poem with undertones of hopelessness. Kind of like one of those puppies you kick that keeps coming back to be petted, tail wagging. Hey, I've never been able to properly channel Sylvia Plath.

Somehow my poem came out titled "Hopefulless". That's not where it will stay (I don't think) But we'll see. Three hopeful/hopeless poems to take in, two by my unchanneled Sylvia and one by Kim Addonizio, who I'm starting to like more and more.


Denouement
by Sylvia Plath

The telegram says you have gone away
And left our bankrupt circus on its town;
There is nothing more for me to say.

The maestro gives the singing birds their pay
And they buy tickets for the tropic zone;
The telegram says you have gone away.

The clever wolly dogs have had their day
They shoot the dice for one remaining bone;
There is nothing more for me to say.

The lion and the tigers turn to clay
And Jumbo sadly trumpets into stone;
The telegram says you have gone away.

The morbid cobra's wits have run astray;
He rents his poisons out by telegram;
There is nothing more for me to say.

The colored tenst all topple in the bay;
The magic sawdust writes: address unknown.
The telegram says you have gone away;
There is nothing more for me to say.




What Do Women Want?
by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.



Insomniac
by Sylvia Plath

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole ---
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue ---
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.


,

April Poem A Day Challenge Day 26

An out of left field prompt. I admit when I first read it, I despaired of finding anything to write about. The Muse chortled.

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, write a "more than 5 times" poem. Of course, I'll let you decide what that means. Maybe you'll write a poem about something the narrator does more times than preferable; maybe you'll write a deja vu poem; or maybe you'll just write the same line and/or stanza more than 5 times. I just know that multiple poets recently said the "More than 5 times" subject line would make a great prompt, so I'm listening to the group. Have at it!

I wasn't sure how literally to take this prompt, and toyed with a repetition poem like Robert did. Interestingly, the minute I started writing the poem, it dictated how it wanted to be formed.

Five stanzas of five lines each for the technical, the subject matter is a bit more subtle. Although the poem's title is "Things I Never Told You" there isn't any reference to those things until the end. The majority of the poem is taken up with the things I did tell the anonymous 'you', roughly… five things if you dig through all the posturing and deflection.

As always, I wrote the poem, went back through it a few times to make sure it says what I want it to say, and then saved it for later editing. It's funny how later on when I pull it out and look, I'll find things I didn't realize I put in there, meanings, Freudian slips, all kinds of interesting word play. Some will stay, others will get toned down or built up.

Three poems by poets you may not know. Find the theme...




What the Angels Left
by Marie Howe

At first, the scissors seemed perfectly harmless.
They lay on the kitchen table in the blue light.

Then I began to notice them all over the house,
at night in the pantry, or filling up bowls in the cellar

where there should have been apples. They appeared under rugs,
lumpy places where one would usually settle before the fire,

or suddenly shining in the sink at the bottom of soupy water.
Once, I found a pair in the garden, stuck in turned dirt

among the new bulbs, and one night, under my pillow,
I felt something like a cool long tooth and pulled them out

to lie next to me in the dark. Soon after that I began
to collect them, filling boxes, old shopping bags,

every suitcase I owned. I grew slightly uncomfortable
when company came. What if someone noticed them

when looking for forks or replacing dried dishes? I longed
to throw them out, but how could I get rid of something

that felt oddly like grace? It occurred to me finally
that I was meant to use them, and I resisted a growing compulsion

to cut my hair, although in moments of great distraction,
I thought it was my eyes they wanted, or my soft belly

—exhausted, in winter, I laid them out on the lawn.
The snow fell quite as usual, without any apparent hesitation

or discomfort. In spring, as expected, they were gone.
In their place, a slight metallic smell, and the dear muddy earth.


The Kitchen Shears Speak
by Christianne Balk

This division must end.
Again I'm forced to amputate
the chicken's limb; slit the joint,
clip the heart, snip wing from back,

strip fat from flesh, separate
everything from itself. I'm used,
thrown down by unknown hands,
by cowards who can't bear to do

the constant severing. Open and close!
Open and close. I work and never tell.
Though mostly made of mouth, I have no voice,
no legs. My arms are bent, immobile

pinions gripped by strangers. I fear
the grudge things must hold.
I slice rose from bush, skin from muscle,
head from carrot, root from lettuce,

tail from fish. I break the bone.
What if they join against me,
uncouple me, throw away one-half,
or hide my slashed eye? Or worse,

what if I never die? What I fear
most is being caught, then rusted rigid,
punished like a prehistoric
bird, fossilized, and changed

into a winged lizard, trapped while clawing
air, stuck in stone with open beak.



The Cabbage
by Ruth Stone


You have rented an apartment.
You come to this enclosure with physical relief,
your heavy body climbing the stairs in the dark,
the hall bulb burned out, the landlord
of Greek extraction and possibly a fatalist.
In the apartment leaning against one wall,
your daughter's painting of a large frilled cabbage
against a dark sky with pinpoints of stars.
The eager vegetable, opening itself
as if to eat the air, or speak in cabbage
language of the meanings within meanings;
while the points of stars hide their massive
violence in the dark upper half of the painting.
You can live with this.


.

April Poem A Day Challenge Day 24

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, write an evening poem. My initial thought is that this poem would somehow involve the night, but upon further reflection, I guess it could be about evening things up or something.

Evening is a broad enough topic to encompass a whole bunch of things. I did the usual pondering on weirder topics, but came back to nature. Wyoming evenings offer up spectacular sunsets, honking geese, chattering redwings, pesky killdeer, and if you're far enough out from town, owls, coyote, and the occasional wolf song.

If that wasn't enough, the view provides plenty of poetry fodder. As we slide towards night, the stars pop out, planets, the moon when it's around can hang large in the sky. To the west the remnants of the sun cling to the peaks of the Big Horn Mountains, to the east, dark deep enough to hurt. On a clear night, out away from the regular world, you can see the Milky Way-millions and millions of stars swathed in a line.

So I did a nature poem, of sorts. I tried to leave Orion out of it, but it wasn't to be. And then there was another poem, about sinking into the sea in the evening, watching as the light above changed colors and vanished.

A nice change of pace from the usual. Here are three 'evening' poems for you to ponder – Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, and William Stafford.


Rolling In At Twilight
by Gary Snyder

Rolling in at twilight – Newport Oregon –
cool of september ocean air, I
saw Phil Whalen with a load of groceries
walking through a dirt lot full
of logging trucks, cats
and skidders

looking at the ground.

I yelld as the bus wheeld by
but he kept looking down.
ten minutes later with my books and pack
knockt at his door

"Thought you might be on that bus"
he said, and
showed me all the food.




The Journey
by Mary Oliver


One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.



Traveling through the Dark
by William Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.


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April Poem A Day Challenge Day 23

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, write an exhausted poem. The poem can be a first person account of your own exhaustion, or it can describe the exhaustion of someone (or something) else. Heck, I guess it even could be about exhaust, huh?

This was a bit of a different prompt. I ran through the ideas about physical exhaustion and didn't come up with a whole lot I wanted to work with. Mental exhaustion and the accompanying hallucinations and psychosis? Excellent! Nothing like a poem about imaginary people, freaky music and weird smells to make the Muse rub his hands with glee.

Too bad my poem didn't actually turn out like that. Well, not as much as the Muse would have liked it to. It was more about burnout and the slow, almost unnoticed descent into exhaustion that can accompany mental fatigue. You know, the sneaky, insidious doubts that force their way into your mind, eat your lunch, put their feet up on your mental coffee table, and refuse to surrender the remote.

Here are a few poems kinda sorta related to the topic. Wilfred Owen, Amy Lowell, and Anne Sexton - an odd trio for sure, but I think they would all have sat around the table with a shot and a beer and had a good discussion on exhaustion.



Mental Cases
by Wilfred Owen

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, -- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

-- These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
-- Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
-- Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.




Fatigue
by Amy Lowell

Stupefy my heart to every day's monotony,
Seal up my eyes, I would not look so far,
Chasten my steps to peaceful regularity,
Bow down my head lest I behold a star.
Fill my days with work, a thousand calm necessities
Leaving no moment to consecrate to hope,
Girdle my thoughts within the dull circumferences
Of facts which form the actual in one short hour's scope.

Give me dreamless sleep, and loose night's power over me,
Shut my ears to sounds only tumultuous then,
Bid Fancy slumber, and steal away its potency,
Or Nature wakes and strives to live again.

Let each day pass, well ordered in its usefulness,
Unlit by sunshine, unscarred by storm;
Dower me with strength and curb all foolish eagerness --
The law exacts obedience. Instruct, I will conform.




The Starry Night
by Anne Sexton

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.
- Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother


The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.


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April Poem A Day Challenge Day 22

I should have seen it coming. I try to avoid thinking about whatever media induced "Day" is coming up, with all its accompanying hype and hoopla. The day when specific groups try and browbeat me into believing and acting the way they do, for "the children", "the country", or 'the planet". (no pressure) Refuse to hop on the bandwagon carrying your 90 pound recyclable tuba and receive prompt accusations of Not Caring about the earth. I prefer to spread my actions out over 365 days instead of just one, and what I reuse and my weekly purchasing choices are my own business, thank you. Okay, rant over.

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, write an Earth poem. You can decide what an Earth poem is. Maybe it's a poem about the planet; maybe it's actually the lowercase earth (a gardening or burial poem?); maybe it's just a poem that happens on (or to) Earth; maybe it's even written in the voice of extraterrestrials (that might be fun). No matter how you decide to roll with it, have a very poetic Earth Day!

I actually took this prompt and ran with it (okay, ran away at first). I just didn't take it in the direction that was probably expected. Earth to me meant ground, and ground meant grounded, as unable to fly. So my poem became "Grounded", and the quest for flight by someone who is fascinated by flying things, but kind of afraid of heights.

I wrote the poem in a sort of stream of consciousness process, so it appeared as more of a prose poem. I broke it into lines, which luckily for me, seem to occur at regular intervals. The stanza breaks are a bit trickier, and I will probably leave those for later revisions. Another good thing is that I already know the basic principles of flight, so I didn't have to go research them, break my flow, they slid naturally into my poem.

The tricky part will be deciding which of the two themes that emerged is the right one for the poem. One has a more psychological, or self-analytical bent to it. The danger in choosing that path is perhaps bending the poem to the theme, even if it doesn't entirely fit. I will probably try and retain both themes, one overt, the other underlying, and try to weave them together so they compliment each other rather than compete. This is where I shelve the poem until after this month is over, to let it breathe before I try that balancing act, because the poem, reduced, reused, recycled is usually better than the poem, fresh plucked. Something like that.

A few poems to ponder. My earth poem, courtesy of Ruth Stone, A commentary on Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a poem by Constance Urdang for traveling about on Earth Day. Or so I see it.


In the Next Galaxy
by Ruth Stone

Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not
have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.



Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.



The Luggage
by Constance Urdang

Travel is a vanishing act
Only to those who are left behind.
What the traveler knows
Is that he accompanies himself,
Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked,
Stolen, or lost, or mistaken.
So one took, past outposts of empire,
“Calmly as if in the British Museum,”
Not only her Victorian skirts,
Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith
In the civilizing mission of women,
Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor;
Another, friend of witch-doctors,
Living on native chop,
Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes,
Heralded her astonishing arrival
Under shivering stars
By calling, “It’s only me!” A third,
Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate
That a woman could travel as easily as a man,
Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears
And only once permitted a tribal chieftain
To stroke her long, golden hair.



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April Poem A Day Challenge Day 21

Yikes! Another fill in the blank prompt.

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, take the phrase "According to (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Example titles might be: "According to Bob," "According to these instructions," "According to the government," "According to the sun," etc.

Didn't get a whole lot of inspiration from this one. The Muse rolled his eyes and vanished in a puff of chocolate-scented powder. So, lacking other ideas, I wrote, "According To Me", which seemed very appropriate, including the line - I'm not everything I'm cracked up to be – which I think was Muse inspired, because doG forbid I get the least bit cocky, or the Muse will put me in my place.

So the poem became a cynical rant about how the part of me that has a mighty high opinion of itself is constantly being sniped at by the part of me that loathes and despises such arrogance. Nothing like some good old internal conflict to keep the blood... er, poetic juices flowing.

Here are three poems that fall into my "According To Me" file. Marge Piercy, who is an old favorite of mine, and Young Smith, a recent discovery. Smith only appears to have one poetry book out, but from what I've read of his work in poetry reviews, it's enough to make me want to go forth and buy his book, something that doesn't happen too often.


Dislocation
by Marge Piercy


It happens in an instant.
My grandma used to say
someone is walking on your grave.

It's that moment when your life
is suddenly strange to you
as someone else's coat

you have slipped on at a party
by accident, and it is far
too big or too tight for you.

Your life feels awkward, ill
fitting. You remember why you
came into this kitchen, but you

feel you don't belong here.
It scares you in a remote
numb way. You fear that you—

whatever you means, this mind,
this entity stuck into a name
like mercury dropped into water—

have lost the ability to enter your
self, a key that no longer works.
Perhaps you will be locked

out here forever peering in
at your body, if that self is really
what you are. If you are at all.

"Dislocation" by Marge Piercy from The Crooked Inheritance. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.




She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul
by Young Smith

The shape of her soul is a square.
She knows this to be the case
because she often feels its corners
pressing sharp against the bone
just under her shoulder blades
and across the wings of her hips.
At one time, when she was younger,
she had hoped that it might be a cube,
but the years have worked to dispel
this illusion of space, so that now
she understands: it is a simple plane,
a shape with surface, but no volume—
a window without a building, an eye
without a mind.
---------------Of course, this square
does not appear on x-rays, and often,
weeks may pass when she forgets
that it exists. When she does think
to consider its purpose in her life,
she can say only that it aches with
a single mystery, for whose answer
she has long ago given up the search—
since its question is a word whose name
can never quite be asked. This yearning,
she has concluded, is the only function
of the square, repeated again and again
in each of its four matching angles,
until, with time, she is persuaded
anew that what it frames has no
interest in ever making her happy.




Beneath the Waves
by Young Smith


On the streetcar one evening, I met a fat little man
with a face full of warts where his beard should have been.
He was interested in the mysteries of deep ocean vents,

where, he said, there are life forms found nowhere else
on the planet. Great clusters of tube worms, for example,
waving in the dark, many of them over six feet in length!

You could find pale spider crabs there and giant white clams,
carpets of starfish, clouds of blind shrimp. Until recently,
he said, before the lamps of the submarines found their way

at last to those fields of chimneys, not a single photon of light
had ever brushed the black trenches where they lay.
The little man showed me photographs in a large book

on the subject, and as I studied his pictures, I came to see how,
as he put it, alone in bed late at night, one might find a peculiar
comfort in this landscape with no use for eyes.


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April Poem A Day Challenge Day 20

Poetic Asides: Today is a two for Tuesday prompt. Here are the two options:

1. Write a looking back poem. There are a few ways to tackle this one, I guess. The narrator could be reflecting on the past or literally looking back (like over his or her shoulder).

2. Write a poem that doesn't look back. This poem would be kind of the opposite, I suppose. Narrator who refuses to look back or who is literally looking forward (or I suppose another option even is that the narrator is blind or something).

Two'fer's are definitely interesting, although they are usually opposites. Black-white, Love-AntiLove, Up-down. AKA Tuesday bipolar poems. Since I like to take the prompt and turn it all around, shake it upside down to see what falls out, opposites aren't too unusual for me. Then the question becomes, how to reflect on the past without becoming maudlin or too introspective. If it's a look back at a personal past, how to keep the reader engaged with something they shouldn't really have an interest in.

For some reason the idea of looking back over your shoulder is kind of intriguing. What if your head became stuck that way, and you could only walk forward but look backward? What would that kind of poem look like? How would it be to be a horse wearing blinders, never to see life outside a narrow field of vision? What if every morning you were required to forget the previous day, and carry on as if it never happened – a la Groundhog Day, but with your knowledge and cooperation. Could someone do this? Would it be a Buddhist world filled with living in the present moment? Is it even possible?

These are the thoughts that bounce through my head when thinking on a prompt – well, at least the thoughts I'm willing to put down in black and white. As for writing a poem that doesn't look back I wrote one that never ended, a phoenix poem if you will, about regrets devoured and the failure to break the cycle that keeps my protagonist stuck. Not in mud, but in the shards of previously devoured bones... yeah, some days are like that.

Here are two poems to ponder. What do they say about looking forward—and looking back?



Personal Helicon
by Seamus Heaney

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.



Exposed on the cliffs of the heart
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered birds flies, slowly
circling, around the peak's pure denial. - But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart...



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April Poem A Day Challenge Day 19

Poetic Asides: For today's prompt, write a poem about somebody and be sure to include the person's name in the title of your poem (no reason to hide the person's identity here). Write a poem about Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, your next door neighbor, your child, or the person standing behind you. I guess you could even technically write a poem about yourself (just make sure you include your name in the title).

Now this was a different prompt, and a fun one. I had a harder time narrowing things down than I thought. Who to choose? So many people. I finally settled on doing two poems. The first was on Amelia Earhart (remember the flight fascination thing?), her thoughts (through my interpretation) about flying across the Atlantic Ocean in the night, alone.

The second poem is about my friend, Linda, and the curious circumstances around our initial meeting at the formation of an artist's group. Her first words to me were the opening line to my poem. "You aren't from around here, are you?" If we lived in the Old Wild West, those might have been an invitation to trouble, but since it was the New Modern Mild West, they were an invitation to a long friendship.

I've had a series of poems planned for a while, all of them about people of the past who were influential to me growing up. Not family, but the mythical and larger-than-life people I read about – of who Amelia Earhart was one.

Diane Arbus, Louise Nevelson, Hildegard of Bingen, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Joan of Arc, Deborah Sampson, Mary Casatt, Beatrix Potter, Indira Ghandi, Jane Goodall, Margaret Bourke-White, Grace Hopper. . . to name a few. Hmm, I better get writing. Haven't even touched on ancient women or the men.

In the meantime, keeping with the prompt, here are two different takes on Persephone, by two different poets.


Persephone, Falling
by Rita Dove

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled,
stooped to pull harder—
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished. No one heard her.
No one! She had strayed from the herd.

(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don't answer to strangers. Stick
with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

"Persephone, Falling", from Mother Love by Rita Dove. Copyright © 1995 by Rita Dove.



Persephone the Wanderer
by Louise Glück

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

Persephone's initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape,
or was she drugged, violated against her will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
"home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother's
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

"Persephone the Wanderer" from Averno by Louise Glück. Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück.


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