1100. Dog Weather - Stephen Dunn

Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up.

The paper boy’s papers came apart

in the wind.

Now, nothing human moving.

Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart

in The Caine Mutiny 

My breath chalks the window,

gives me away to myself.

I like the intelligibility of old songs.

I prefer yesterday.

Cars pass, the asphalt’s on its back

smudged with skid. It’s potholed

and cracked; it’s no damn good.

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog

should be handcuffed

and searched for loneliness.

My hair is thinning.

I feel like tossing the wind a stick.

The promised snow has arrived,

heavy wet.

I remember the blizzard of…

People I don’t want to be

speak like that

I close my eyes and one

of my many unborn sons

makes a snowball

and lofts it at an unborn friend.

They’ve sent me an AAHP card.

I’m on their list.

I can be discounted now almost anywhere.

1099. Why - Wendell Berry

.

Why all the embarrassment

about being happy?

Sometimes I’m as happy 

as a sleeping dog,

and for the same reasons,

and for others.

1098. In Praise Of Dreams - Wislawa Szymborska

.

In my dreams

I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek

and not just with the living.

I drive a car

that does what I want it to.

I am gifted

and write mighty epics.

I hear voces

as clearly as any venerable saint.

My brilliance as a pianist

would stun you.

I fly the way we ought to,

i.e., on my own.

falling from the roof,

I tumble gently to the grass.

I’ve got no problem

breathing under water.

I can’t complain:

I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.

It’s gratifying that I can always

wake up before dying.

As soon as war breaks out,

I roll over on my other side.

I’m a child of my age,

but I don’t have to be.

A few years ago

I saw two suns

And the night before last a penguin,

clear as day.

1097. Sorrow Home - Margaret Walker

.

My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown

or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned

in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf,

mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know

me.

Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong

with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and

the spring growth of wild onion.

I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam heated flats

with music of El and subway in my ears, walled on

by steel and wood and brick far from the sky.

I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to

walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground.

Restless music in my heart and I am eager to be gone.

O southland sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and

blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and

the chain gangs keep me from my own?

1096. What Kind Of Times Are These - Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road brakes off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread but

  don’t be fooled,

this isn’t a Russian poem, this if not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—         

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s neccessary

to talk about trees. 

1095. Tree - Rumiko Kora

Translated by Miyuki Aoyama and Leza Lowitz

Within a tree

there is another tree that does not yet exist

now its branches tremble in the wind.

Within the blue sky

there is another blue sky that does not yet exist

now a bird flies across its horizon.

Within a body

there is another body that does not yet exist

now its shrine gathers new blood.

Within a city

there is another city that does not yet exist

now its plazas sway where I am heading

1094. I Am In Need Of Music - Elizabeth Bishop

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

1093. His Town - Stephen Dunn

The town was in the mists of chaos.

-A STUDENT’S TYPO

He wasn’t surprised. What town wasn’t?

Everywhere the mists of property, the mists

of language. Every Main Street he’d known

shrouded in itself. The mist-filled churches

and the mist-filled stores in strange collusion.

Nevertheless, this was where he chose to live.

Clarities, after all, were supposed to be hidden;

otherwise, no fun in the classroom or in the field.

Life? His neighbors preferred the movie versions,

loose ends tied up, mists of romance and thrill,

And sometimes he did, too.

Now and again he’d get underneath, see

snakes in among the flowers; hearts askew.

And friends from cities would report

they’d been places where the mists had risen.

You needed to look aslant, they said,

so dangerous would the real appear a first.

No safety in the universe. He’d stay put.

Besides, he liked to be in the mists of tall trees

and in the mists of what made him hungry for more.

He liked the mistiness of familiar boundaries

so he could let in, secretly, what he loved.

And the chaos? It favored no geography,

a perpetual rumbling beneath and above him

wherever he was. He had lived with it so long

it was simply the music he worked to, slept to

and woke with, in the mist of it all.

1092. After I Came Back From Iceland - Sheenagh Pugh

After I came back from Iceland,

I couldn’t stop talking. It was the light,

you see, the light and the air. I tried to put it

into poems, even, but you couldn’t write

the waterfall on White River, blinding

and glacial, nor the clean toy town

with the resplendent harbour for its glass.

You couldn’t write how the black lava shone,

nor how the outlines of the bright red roofs

cut the sky sharp as a knife: how breathing

was like drinking cold water. When I got back

to Heathrow and walked out into Reading,

I damn near choked on this warm gritty stuff

I called air; also on the conjecture 

that we’d all settle for second best

once we’d forgotten there was something more.

1091. I Go From The Woods - Wendell Berry

.

I go from the woods into the cleared fields:

A place no human made, a place unmade

By human greed, and to be made again.

Where centuries of leaves once built by dying

A deathless potency of light and stone

And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless

Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain.

The growth of fifty thousand years undone

In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock

And clay - a ‘new land’ , truly, that no race

Was ever native to, but hungry mice

And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns

And thistles sent by generosity

Of new beginning. No Eden, this was

A garden once, a good and perfect gift;

Its possible abundance stood in it

As it then stood. But now what it might be

Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives -

Thousands of years to make it what it was,

Beginning now, in our few troubled days.

1090. Landscape With Figures - Frank Ormsby

.

What haunts me is a farmhouse among trees

Seen from a bus window, a girl

With a a suitcase climbing a long hill

And a woman waiting.

The time the bus took to reach and pass

The lane’s entrance nothing was settled,

The girl still climbing and the woman still

On the long hill’s summit.

Men were not present. Neither in the fields

That sloped from hedges, nor beyond the wall

That marked the yard’s limits

Was there sign of hens, or hands working.

No sight that might have softened

On the eye the scene’s

Relentlessness.

Nothing had happened, yet the minute spoke

And the scene spoke and the silence,

And oppressed as air does, Loading

For a storm’s release.

All lanes and houses

Secretive in trees and gaunt hills’ jawlines

Turn my thoughts again

To that day’s journey and the thing I saw

And could not fathom. Struck with the same dread

I seem to share in sense, not detail,

What was heavy there:

Sadness of dim places, obscure lives,

Ends and beginnings,

Such extremities.

1089. Gorgon - Tony Hoagland

.

Now that you need your prescription glasses to see the stars

and now that the telemarketers know your preference to sexual positions

Now that corporations run the government

and move over land like giant cloud formations

Now that the human family has turned out to be a conspiracy against the planet

Now that it’s hard to cast stones

without hitting a cell phone tower that will show up later on your bill

Now that you know you are neither innocent, nor powerful,

not a character in a book;

You have arrived at the edge of the world

where the information wind howls incessantly

and you stand in your armor made of irony

with your sword of good intentions raised—

The world is a Gorgon.

It holds up its thousand ugly heads with their thousand writhing visages

Death or madness to look at too long

but your job is not to conquer it;

not to provide entertaining repartee,

not to revile yourself in shame.

Your job is to stay calm

Your job is to watch and take notes

To go on looking

Your job is to not be turned into stone.

1088. Spring-Watching - Hô Xuân Hong (1775- 1820)

.

Translated by John Balaban

A gentle spring evening arrives

airily, unclouded by worldly dust. 

Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.

We see heaven upside down in sad puddles.

Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied.

And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.

Where is Nirvana?

Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.

1087. Capriccio Italian - Stephen Dunn

.

From the mountain drifts down the finest mist

so fine you walk in it, letting it glaze

your hair, while boats on the lake bob and blur.

This is not your country, everything you see—

cobblestoned ancient streets, umbrella’d tables,

laundry hanging from the balconies of the poor—

appears meaningful.

Just off the piazza, a window display

of squib and rabbit and roasted pig.

No outsized dream sullen the friendly clerks.

If they’re unhappy you’re happy

a tradition helps them not to let it show.

You buy the most expensive tie you’re eyer bought,

silk and wide, blue with subtle, well-spaced dots.

You try on a flamboyant scarf. In the mirror

someone foolish stares back at you.

You take it anyhow.

You’re a woman’s man, and you’re womanless.

How absurd to think anyone can escape

being judged for what he doesn’t have.

Oh the chosen gloomy beauty of a tourist town—

you’ve always known

what lifts you up can get you down.

You’ve come far to feel this keenly low.

The pigeons coo their greedy songs.

You break off bits of bread and leave no trail.

At dusk, if the mist is gone, you plan to sit

with some grappa in a slender glass.

You’re sure the swallows won’t disappoint—

swoop and dive as they did the night before,

mindless, wit, wholly in control.

1086. Country Scene - Hô Xuân Hong (1775- 1820)

Translated by John Balaban

The waterfall plunges in mist.

Who can describe this desolate scene:

the long white river sliding through

the emerald shadows of the ancient canopy

…a shepherd’s horn echoing in the valley,

fishnets stretched to dry on sandy flats.

A bell is tolling, fading, fading

just like love. Only poetry lasts.

1085. A Message to Po Chu-I - W. S. Merwin

In that tenth winter of your exile

the cold never letting go of you

and your hunger aching inside you

day and night while you heard the voices

out of the starving mouths around you

old ones and infants and animals

those curtains of bones swaying on stilts

and you heard the faint cries of the birds

searching in the frozen mud for something

to swallow and you watched the migrants

trapped in the cold the great geese growing

weaker by the day until their wings

could barely lift them above the ground

so that a gang of boys could catch one

in a net and drag him to market

to be cooked and it was then that you

saw him in his own exile and you

paid for him and kept him until he

could fly again and you let him go

but then where could he go in the world

of your time with its wars everywhere

and the soldiers hungry the fires lit

the knives out twelve hundred years ago

I have been wanting to let you know

the goose is well he is here with me

you would recognize that old migrant

he has been with me for a long time

and is in no hurry to leave here

the wars are bigger now than ever

greed has reached numbers that you would not

believe and I will not tell you what

in done to geese before they kill them

now we are melting the very poles

of the earth but I have never known

where he would go after he leaves me

1084 - On Setting A Migrant Goose Free - Po Chu-I (Bay Juyl) (772-846)

Translated by David Hinton

Snows heavy at Hsan-yang this tenth-year winter,

river water spawns ice, tree branches break and fall,

and hungry birds flock east and west by the hundred,

a migrant goose crying starvation loudest among them.

Pecking through snow for grass, sleeping nights on ice,

its cold wings lumber slower and slower up into flight,

and soon it’s tangled in a river boy’s net, carried away

snug in his arms, and put for sale alive in the market.

Once a man of the north, I’m accused and exiled here.

Man and bird, though different, we’re both visitors,

and it hurts a visiting man to see a visiting bird’s pain,

so I pay the ransom and set you free. Goose, o soaring

goose, rising into clouds—where will you fly now?

Don’t fly northwest, that’s the last place you should go.

There in Huai-hsi, rebels still loose, there’s no peace,

just a million armored soldiers long massed for battle:

imperial and rebel armies grown old facing each other.

Starved and exhausted, they’d love to get hold of you,

those soldiers, The’d shoot you down and have a feast

then pluck your wings clean to feather their arrows.

1083. Frederick Douglass - Robert Hayden

.

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth, when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians;

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with loves grown out of his life, the loves

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

1082. What Kind of Times Are These - Adrienne Rich

.

There’s a place between two stands of trees whee the grass grows

  uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled,

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light —

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

1081. Vegetarian Physics - David Clewell

.

The tofu that’s shown up overnight in this house is frightening.

proof of the Law of Conservation: matter that simply cannot be

created or destroyed. Matter older than Newton,

who knew better than to taste it. Older than Lao-tzu,

who thought about it but finally chose harmonious non-interference.

I’d like to be philosophical too, see it as one kind of pale

inscrutable wisdom among the hot dogs, the cold chicken,

the leftover deviled eggs, but I’m talking curled

soybean milk. And I don’t have that kind of energy.

I’d rather not be part of the precariously metaphorical

wedding of modern physics and the ancient Eastern mysteries.

But still: whoever stashed the tofu in my Frigidaire

had better come back for it soon, I’m not Einstein

but I’m smart enough to know a bad idea when I see it

taking up space, biding its time.

Like so much that demands our imperfect attention

amid the particle roar of the world, going nowhere, fast.