Poet of the Day: Deborah Ager (1971 - Present) ** All I can say is, "WOW".

The Lake

by Deborah Ager

The yard half a yard,
half a lake blue as a corpse.
The lake will tell things you long to hear:
get away from here.
Three o'clock. Dry leaves rat-tat like maracas.

Whisky-colored grass
breaks at every step and trees
are slowly realizing they are nude.
How long will you stay?
For the lake asks questions you want to hear, too.

Months have passed since, well,
everything. Since buildings stood
black against sky, rain hissed from sidewalks
and curled around you.
O, how those avenues once seemed menacing!

I know what you miss
sings this lake. Car horns groaning
in rush hour. Sweet coffee. Wind
pounding like hammers. Warmth of a lover.
Crickets humming love songs to the street.

Poet of the Day: Andrew Crumey (1961 - Present) **He's Scottish but looks a bit like Clark Kent/Superman.

Music, In A Foreign Language

by Andrew Crumey

In a cafe, once more I heard
Your voice - those sparse and frugal notes.
Do they not say that you spoke your native Greek
With an English accent?

Briefest of visions: eyes meet across the cafe;
A man of about my age - eyelids heavy,
Perhaps from recent pleasures.
I begin the most innocent of conversations.

Again I see that image;
Ancient delight of flesh
Against guiltless flesh.
Sweeter still, in its remembering.

Most innocent of conversations: once more, I am mistaken.
He leaves; the moment lost - and to forego
The squalor of this place, I read again your lines; those sparse and frugal notes.
In a taverna, you found beauty, long ago.

And when you draw, with your slim, swift pen
The image of that memory - time's patient hostage;
Then how can I forget him, that boy whom you could not forget,
Or that music, in a foreign language?

Poet of the Day: Carolyn Forche (1950 - Present) **This is an EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT poem.

The Testimony Of Light

by Carolyn Forche

Our life is a fire dampened, or a fire shut up in stone.
--Jacob Boehme, De Incarnatione Verbi

Outside everything visible and invisible a blazing maple.
Daybreak: a seam at the curve of the world. The trousered legs of the women
shimmered.
They held their arms in front of them like ghosts.

The coal bones of the house clinked in a kimono of smoke.
An attention hovered over the dream where the world had been.

For if Hiroshima in the morning, after the bomb has fallen,
is like a dream, one must ask whose dream it is. {1}

Must understand how not to speak would carry it with us.
With bones put into rice bowls.
While the baby crawled over its dead mother seeking milk.

Muga-muchu {2}: without self, without center. Thrown up in the sky by a wind.

The way back is lost, the one obsession.
The worst is over.
The worst is yet to come.



1--...is the question asked by Peter Schwenger in Letter Bomb.
Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word.
2--...is from Robert Jay Lifton's Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima.

Poet of the Day: Naomi Shihab Nye (1952 - Present) **I like this persons poetry so much, I'm giving you two of her poems to contemplate.

Half-And-Half

by Naomi Shihab Nye

You can't be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can't love
anyone else. Says he.

At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,
he's sweeping. The rubbed stones
feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
across faces of date-stuffed mamool.

This morning we lit the slim white candles
which bend over at the waist by noon.
For once the priests weren't fighting
in the church for the best spots to stand.
As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.

A woman opens a window—here and here and here—
placing a vase of blue flowers
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making a soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out.
------------------------------------------------

Hidden


If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.

If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.

No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.

Poet of the Day: Anastasia Clark (1959 - Present) ** This is for anyone who is in, has been, or hopes to be in love.

Jigsaw Puzzles and You

by Anastasia Clark

There were long hyphens in our day-
When no one spoke; no one exhaled

As we contemplated the broken puzzles-
The broken tiles all over the floor

Some might have called us mad-
Insane- in this ceramic nightmare

Of yoga knees and bloody feet-
Empty bottles scattered on a garden mat

And still we persevered-
With our buckets of glue and fingers of paste

Figuring how to fit ourselves into this chaos-
Of porcelain folly and jaded beliefs

This irksome chaos of so-called matrimony-
This well-earned puzzle that some call LOVE.

Poet of the Day: Gerry Mattia (? - ?) **All the working smoos out there can relate to this poem.

Yuppie Dragons And Paper Mountains

by Gerry Mattia

Climb mountains!
Slay Dragons!
That's what I did
When I was a kid
Now it's too much
All this grownup stuff
Amalgamations
Corporations
Business-like murder
under the guise of merger
Micro-second chattel battles
waged on computer panels
Flash before my eyes
In a plate glass high-rise

Now all my mountains are made of paper, and
all my dragons wear ties

Poet of the Day: John Betjeman (1906 - 1984) **One for Christmas

Christmas

by John Betjeman

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
'The church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,
Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze,
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'.

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Poet of the Day: Erin Belieu (1965 - Present)

Legend of the Albino Farm

by Erin Belieu

Omaha, Nebraska They do not sleep nights
but stand between

rows of glowing corn and
cabbages grown on acres past

the edge of the city.
Surrendered flags,

their nightgowns furl and
unfurl around their legs.

Only women could be this
white. Like mules,

they are sterile
and it appears that

their mouths are always
open. Because they are thin

as weeds, the albinos
look hungry. If you drive out

to the farm, tree branches will
point the way. No map will show

where, no phone is listed.
It will seem that the moon, plump

above their shoulders, is constant,
orange as harvest all year

long. We say, when a mother
gives birth to an albino girl,

she feigns sleep after
labor while an Asian

man steals in, spirits
the pale baby away.

Poet of the Day: Jennifer Reeser (1968 - Present) * I like.

Leaning Over Eros

by Jennifer Reeser

She recognizes him at last as Other,
not Self. I see her in my mind, hot wax
about to plummet from the lifted candle.
Should closeness be so vulnerable to fact?

The wrinkles in her gown – a troubling grayness
amid chaste white – I see as always moved
by some upended breeze against their terrace;
his face I see as turned, not wholly proved,

his faith in her confirmed in that he sleeps.
She scorches one long finger on the flame.
It all takes place unerringly and fluid
as Psyche’s first defeat of Cupid’s aim.

And you are...somewhere. Never mind my grief.
It springs from sources better left unseen,
when in this life, I scour my own gray wrinkles
between our nights. But they will not come clean.

Poet of the Day: Kelli Russell Agodon (1969 - Present) * This is worth a repost. Enjoy and think.

Snapshot of a Lump

by Kelli Russell Agodon

I imagine Nice and topless beaches,
women smoking and reading novels in the sun.
I pretend I am comfortable undressing
in front of men who go home to their wives,
in front of women who have seen
twenty pairs of breasts today,
in front of silent ghosts who walked
through these same doors before me,
who hoped doctors would find it soon enough,
that surgery, pills and chemo could save them.

Today, they target my lump
with a small round sticker, a metal capsule
embedded beneath clear plastic.
I am asked to wash off my deodorant,
wrap a lead apron around my waist,
pose for the nurse, for the white walls-
one arm resting on the mammogram machine,
that "come hither" look in my eyes.
This is my first time being photographed topless.
I tell the nurse, Will I be the centerfold
or just another playmate?

My breast is pressed flat - a torpedo,
a pyramid, a triangle, a rocket on this altar;
this can't be good for anyone.

Finally, the nurse, winded
from fumbling, smiles,
says, "Don't breathe or move."
A flash and my breast is free,
but only for a moment.

In the waiting room, I sit between magazines,
an article on Venice,
health charts, people in white.
I pretend I am comfortable watching
other women escorted off to a side room,
where results are given with condolences.

I imagine leaving here
with negative results and returned lives.
I imagine future trips to France,
to novels I will write and days spent
beneath a blue and white sun umbrella,
waves washing against the shore like promises.

Poet of the Day: Hayden Carruth (1921 - Present)

Saturday At The Border

by Hayden Carruth

"Form follows function follows form . . . , etc."

--Dr. J. Anthony Wadlington

Here I am writing my first villanelle
At seventy-two, and feeling old and tired--
"Hey, Pops, why dontcha give us the old death knell?"--

And writing it what's more on the rim of hell
In blazing Arizona when all I desired
Was north and solitude and not a villanelle,

Working from memory and not remembering well
How many stanzas and in what order, wired
On Mexican coffee, seeing the death knell

Of sun's salvos upon these hills that yell
Bloody murder silently to the much admired
Dead-blue sky. One wonders if a villanelle

Can do the job. Granted, old men now must tell
Our young world how these bigots and these retired
Bankers of Arizona are ringing the death knell

For everyone, how ideologies compel
Children to violence. Artifice acquired
For its own sake is war. Frail villanelle,

Have you this power? And must Igo and sell
Myself? "Wow," they say, and "cool"--this hired
Old poetry guy with his spaced-out death knell.

Ah, far from home and God knows not much fired
By thoughts of when he thought he was inspired,
He writes by writing what he must. Death knell
Is what he's found in his first villanelle.

Adam Aitken (1960 - Present) *Australia

Terra Nullius

for Victoria Dawson


1

The Marlboro billboards seem to green
for an abattoir.
Marlboro man looks older this year, but gets about,
wears his dead heart
open-cut upon his sleeve,
greets custodians at the airstrip.
The young writer’s poems jangle like camping gear,
wearing hand-me-down boots.
Chirpier than a new four-wheel drive
they go bush, where the inland sea begins.
She sits out the heat with a Salman Rushdie
in a cemetery for dead miners.
she combs her Mohawk, walks and talks.
It was women’s business brought here
to the boneyard of men’s business.
Somewhere half way to Arltunga
coping with immense distance
and depressed parents he telephotos mountains
macros a spinifex pigeon cooing in a prickly nest.
Out Geln Helen way they lilo algal waterholes
that dampen everything inside
they never knew was dry.
At Ormiston scree run and climb a dinosaur’s back
with Bob, snake portraitist and charmer
who’d stuffed his knees this way
one or two marriages back.
In saltpan Terra nullius caravans and Nissan huts,
cask wine transfusions from hole-in-the-wall bars.


2

Wake in pre-dawn purple. 256 colours.
Residual embers sink back
to the land of Namatjira’s ghost.
From there go abstract, or swear
a dingo took the leftovers.
Flames brighten and fade, the morning’s surplus
clarity turning frost
into dust filled slipstream.
You could drive backwards, in reverse, – forever –
the road ruled straight and narrow
each sand hill urging
the mind towards a moral thought.
All snake and no tail, no head.
Like a roll-your-own open at both ends.
Learn how and why, say please
for every step taken on a pixilated track
across the land. Endless painting.
Enter anywhere. Drivetime talk of
national style. Cowboy, what void was that?
Marlboro man closes the gates.
like an earnest God, when you leave.

Poet of the Day: Mary Oliver (1935 - Present)

A Meeting

by Mary Oliver

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

Poet of the Day: Denise Duhamel (1961 - Present)

Sex With A Famous Poet

by Denise Duhamel

I had sex with a famous poet last night
and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered
because I was married to someone else,
because I wasn't supposed to have been drinking,
because I was in fancy hotel room
I didn't recognize. I would have told you
right off this was a dream, but recently
a friend told me, write about a dream,
lose a reader and I didn't want to lose you
right away. I wanted you to hear
that I didn't even like the poet in the dream, that he has
four kids, the youngest one my age, and I find him
rather unattractive, that I only met him once,
that is, in real life, and that was in a large group
in which I barely spoke up. He disgusted me
with his disparaging remarks about women.
He even used the word "Jap"
which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.
When we were first dating, I told him
"You were talking in your sleep last night
and I listened, just to make sure you didn't
call out anyone else's name." My future-husband said
that he couldn't be held responsible for his subconscious,
which worried me, which made me think his dreams
were full of blond vixens in rabbit-fur bikinis.
but he said no, he dreamt mostly about boulders
and the ocean and volcanoes, dangerous weather
he witnessed but could do nothing to stop.
And I said, "I dream only of you,"
which was romantic and silly and untrue.
But I never thought I'd dream of another man--
my husband and I hadn't even had a fight,
my head tucked sweetly in his armpit, my arm
around his belly, which lifted up and down
all night, gently like water in a lake.
If I passed that famous poet on the street,
he would walk by, famous in his sunglasses
and blazer with the suede patches at the elbows,
without so much as a glance in my direction.
I know you're probably curious about who the poet is,
so I should tell you the clues I've left aren't
accurate, that I've disguised his identity,
that you shouldn't guess I bet it's him...
because you'll never guess correctly
and even if you do, I won't tell you that you have.
I wouldn't want to embarrass a stranger
who is, after all, probably a nice person,
who was probably just having a bad day when I met him,
who is probably growing a little tired of his fame--
which my husband and I perceive as enormous,
but how much fame can an American poet
really have, let's say, compared to a rock star
or film director of equal talent? Not that much,
and the famous poet knows it, knows that he's not
truly given his due. Knows that many
of these young poets tugging on his sleeve
are only pretending to have read all his books.
But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.
I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?
For instance, he writes a mean iambic.
Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.

Poet of the Day: Luisa Villani (1964 - Present)

Watching The Mayan Women

by Luisa Villani

I hang the window inside out
like a shirt drying in a breeze
and the arms that are missing come to me
Yes, it's a song, one I don't quite comprehend
although I do understand the laundry.
White ash and rain water, a method
my aunt taught me, but I'll never know
how she learned it in Brooklyn. Her mind
has gone to seed, blown by a stroke,
and that dandelion puff called memory
has flown far from her eyes. Some things remain.
Procedures. Methods. If you burn
a fire all day, feeding it snapped
branches and newspapers--
the faces pressed against the print
fading into flames-you end up
with a barrel of white ash. If
you take that same barrel and fill it
with rain, let it sit for a day,
you will have water
that can bring brightness to anything.
If you take that water,
and in it soak your husband's shirts,
he'll pause at dawn when he puts one on,
its softness like a haunting afterthought.
And if he works all day in the selva,
he'll divine his way home
in shirtsleeves aglow with torchlight.

Poet of the Day: Morten Sondergaard (1964 - Present) **Denmark

NIGHT BLOG

23/9
The night is here again.
Someone has let me into the control tower and thrown the keys
away. Words request permission to land. Come in.
I believe in the conspiracies of the words behind the back
of the syntax.
You just have to keep going.
Full throttle. Hope it goes okay. Even though we’ve nowhere
to go. Write like the evening light that rips open chasms
in all the colours. A spectrum from violet to phosphorescent green.
A light falls on the words inscribed here. I walk
up into the mountains with an invisible dog and write a poem.

24/9
The floors say: Hello, feet.
We go by names: counterpoint, breaking point, melting point.
Time runs its programme, it goes by, it passes, it stands
still:
The body tips forward in its figure One, for everything is
sloping, everything
comes down to blind faith in floors, faith in you,
I walk back, step
by step, I sit on the toilet in my grandmother’s bathroom, a ground of brown,
yellow and blue rectangular tiles, tiles, a way of
falling into a brown study, studying brown and yellow and blue oblongs of tile
and there in the toilet in my thoughts cut the tiles free and lay them out again
on the floor, in new patterns,
far more satisfying patterns, in the beginning was the pattern,
the brown and yellow and blue sensation on the soles of the feet,
random formulations, run-up to figuration, here and there hints
of a flower with petals, a face, a cockroach, a knife
or a screwdriver would do it,
prise them loose, the tiles, but it can’t be done, these feet
must
accept all sorts of floors, all negotiable surfaces.
We search for places. The floor is a starting point.
The place is the walker’s
fixed abode. A sense of place. This place: We.
We let the air out of this place, as if from a beach toy,
and take it with us.

25/9
Ready? Each word is another word.
Each tongue another tongue. From now on face is ‘snow’.
One is friends with one’s toes. A sentence to get hold of.
Hold up. Giddy-up.
My white horses. As a child I played the mouth organ
and regularly rode off into the sunset.
I set. Sorry: I said, I’m Lucky Luke. The palefaces of words
turn among the birch trunks.
Face ought to be face.
Step by step.
So and so many steps. Shanks’s pony.

15/5
My vanity is veritably enormous. Postcard from
Pound: Rid yourself of it, pull it down. I take a walk along
the pedestrian street, ciao. A walk can begin and end anywhere
at all. There is fire on the mountain. Luckily. Poets on
exercise bikes supply the language with electricity. Keep it
going, as they say.
Poetry is so eco-friendly. High-voltage sentences keep whole cities
up and running. I roam at random around the town. Go all
over
I must wean myself of this weird habit of counting
steps.
I truly cannot tell which foot took
the first, but
I remember my playpen was exactly 3 steps long,
there I paced under a
stripy jaguar sun, back and forth, it is 27 steps from the kitchen
over to my desk,
it is 513 to the post office
and 6989 to the football ground down by the motorway, I begin
to go out in the sun, like a babbling fool
suddenly realizing
that life is not one long descent towards death, but a series of
complicated steps
in unforeseen directions,
it is 3124 steps up to the artichokes in the olive grove,
423 steps
down to the bar. It could be 1 step to the moment
of concurrence that occurs
when the poem is written and I am allowed
to be in the world, one on one,
there it is, looking so utterly
convincing with artichokes and Glenn Gould, ossicles
and dogs and chili and
you. I walk up
to the olive grove to see to the artichokes,
portrait
of the artist as vegetable, the artichokes, we cook them,
we pluck off
their petals,
we work our way in to the delicious heart, that’s what we’re after.
Find your patch
of chaos and tend it, get it to flourish with stray shoots
sprouting
from every branch,
25367 steps in one direction, 25367 in another,
like when
as children we
counted our steps on the way to school
and had to start from scratch if we trod on a crack, now we make
strokes on paper like bartenders counting beers, four down
and one
across, so and so many days to go, will you, will you, will you come
out in the woods with me. Out there
a copper beech counts its leaves backwards and somewhere the sun is blabbing
away
in an old fountain.
You could
go crazy with all this counting, counting giro forms, counting girlfriends,
counting brown and yellow and blue cars, counting steps, but
digits deaden
the pain and shift it slightly
from the told to the telling. We do not count
on our fingers now,
most of it is done
in the head.

Poet of the Day: Ai (1947 - Present)

Conversation

by Ai

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

Dec. 14, 2009 Poet of the Day: Suheir Hammad (1973 - Present)

4:02 p.m.

by Suheir Hammad

poem supposed to be about
one minute and the lives of three women in it
writing it and up
the block a woman killed
by her husband

poem now about one minute
and the lives of four women
in it

haitian mother
she walks through
town carrying her son's
head—banging it against
her thigh calling out
creole come see, see what
they've done to my flesh
holds on to him grip tight
through hair wool
his head all that's
left of her

in tunisia
she folds pay up into stocking
washes his european semen
off her head
hands her heart to god
and this month's rent to mother
sings berber the gold
haired one favored me, rode
and ripped my flesh, i now
have food to eat

brooklyn lover
stumbles—streets ragged under sneakers
she carries her heart
banged up against
thighs crying ghetto
look, look what's been done with
my flesh, my trust, humanity,
somebody tell me
something good

Alphonso's Poetry Breakfast

So why a poetry blog? No reason other than I am bored and like a place to post some of my favorite poems each day. Call it an exercise in my right to add to the multitude of pointless blogs everywhere. So what will probably happen is starting tomorrow (assuming of course that I can remember today, tomorrow), I will post a single poem. And if anyone out there starts reading and happens to write poetry, send them to me and I will post them as well. Probably nothing will come of this, but what the hey. Its amusing for the moment. Oodles of toodles.