1070. From The Journals Of The Frog Prince - Susan Mitchell

 In March I dreamed of mud,

sheets of mud over the ballroom chairs and table.

rainbow slicks of mud under the throne.

In April I saw mud of clouds and mud of sun.

Now in May I find excuses to linger in the kitchen

for wafts of silt and ale,

cinnamon and river bottom,

tender scallion and sour underlog.

At night I cannot sleep.

I am listening for the dribble of mud

climbing the stairs to our bedroom

as if a child in a wet bathing suit ran

up them in the dark.

Last night I said, “Face it, you’re bored.

How many times can you live over

with the same excitement

that moment when the princess leans

into the well, her face a petal

falling to the surface of the water

as you rise like a bubble to her lips,

the golden ball bursting from your mouth?”

Remember how she hurled you against the wall,

your body cracking open,

skin shriveling to the bone,

the green pod of your heart splitting in two,

and her face imprinted with every moment

of your transformation?

I no longer tremble.

Night after night I lie beside her.

“Why is your forehead so cool and damp?” she asks.

Her breasts are soft and dry as flour.

The hand that brushes my head is feverish.

At her touch I long for wet leaves,

the slap of water against rocks.

“What are you thinking of” she asks.

How can I tell her

I am thinking the green skin

shoved like wet pants behind the Directoire desk?

Or tell her I am mortgaged to the hilt

of my sword, io the leek-green tip of my soul?

Someday I will drag her by her hair

to the river—and what? Drown her?

Show her the green flame of my self rising at her feet?

But here’s no more violence in her

than in a fence or a gate.

“What are you thinking of?” she whispers.

I am staring into the garden.

I am watching the moon

wind its trail of golden slime around the oak,

over the stone basin of the fountain.

How can I tell her

I am thinking that transformations are not forever?

1069. Bring Me The Sunflower - Eugenio Montale

Translated from the Italian by George Kay

Bring me the sunflower for me to transplant

to my own ground burnt by the spray of sea,

and show all day to the imaging blues

of sky that golden-faced anxiety.

Things hid in darkness lean towards the clear,

bodies consume themselves in a flowing

of shades: and they in varied music—showing

the chance of chances is to disappear.

So bring me the plant that takes you right

where the blond hazes shimmering rise

and life fumes to air as spirit does;

bring me the sunflower crazy with the light.

1068. The Promise We Live By - Simon J. Ortiz

On the West Coast, days of rainstorm wrestle
the Coast Range, their wet fury driven landward.
We never quite know what the sky promises,
and there is certain assurance in that fate.
It is for that we wait. We’ve already weathered
more than promises. They’ve passed us by.
So I’m not sure this morning when I step outside,
and suddenly it’s not winter anymore but some
warm mask that molds the contours of my face
with unbidden warmth. It’s almost unnatural
but I hope not, having already found reliable
the promise of loss. My expectation is unfulfilled.



Somewhere within the universe of the prairie hills
is a climate that is yet unnoticed, and from it
is welling a warm rupture of another sure season.
Believe it is not unusual, I urge myself
whose myths are always changing in the light.
So it’s this we arrive into daily, always
another season, warm or frigid, and it’s we
who wage weather within our furious spirits.



Tomorrow’s dawn is a promise that will fulfill.
Never mind if the sky does not quite agre

1067. Autobiographia Literaria - Frank O'Hara

 When I was a child

I played by myself in a

corner of the schoolyard

all alone.

I hated dolls and I

hated games, animals were

not friendly and birds

flew away.

If anyone was looking

for me I hid behind a

tree and cried out “I am

an Orphan.”

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

1066. Ode To Thaliarchus - Horace

Translated from the Latin by David Ferry

See Mount Soracte shining in the snow.

See how the laboring overladen trees

Can scarcely bear their burdens any longer.

See how the streams are frozen in the cold.

Bring in the wood and light the fire and open

The fourth-year vintage wine in the Sabine jars,

O Thaliarchus, as for everything else,

Forget tomorrow. Leave it up to the gods.

Once the gods have decided, the winds at sea

Will quiet down, and the sea will quiet down,

And these cypresses and old ash trees will shake

In the storm no longer. Take everything as it comes.

Put down your books for profit every new day

That Fortune allows you to have. While you’re still young,

And while morose old age is far away,

There’s love, there are parties, there’s dancing and there’s music,

There are young people out in the city squares together

As evening comes on, there are whispers of lovers, there’s laughter.

1065. Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam - Dan Vera

I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house.
It happened like this:

One day she took the train to Boston,
made her way to the darkened room,
put her name down in cursive script
and waited her turn.

When they read her name aloud
she made her way to the stage
straightened the papers in her hands —
pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills,
she closed her eyes for a minute,
took a breath,
and began.

From her mouth perfect words exploded,
intact formulas of light and darkness.
She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal
and described the skies like diadem.
Obscurely worded incantations filled the room
with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake.

The solitary words she handled
in her upstairs room with keen precision
came rumbling out to make the electric lights flicker.

40 members of the audience
were treated for hypertension.
20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads
had turned a Moses White.

Her second poem erased the memory of every cellphone
in the nightclub,
and by the fourth line of the sixth verse
the grandmother in the upstairs apartment
had been cured of her rheumatism.

The papers reported the power outages.

The area howpitals tazed their emergency generators

and sirens were heard to wail through the night.

Quietly she made her way to the exit,

walked to the terminal and rode back to Amherst

She naver left her room again

and never read such syllables aloud.

1064. Such Grace - James Laughlin

is in her step     such grace

goes in the movement of her

arms & shoulders as she walks

such grace in how she holds

her head     how graceful the

gestures of her hands     such

grace in the way she slightly

tilts her face toward me when

a smile is beginning there

and float in air of a dan-cer 

   

suspended flight of a

hummingbird     always she goes

in grace     there is such

grace in all her going.

1063. For Earth's Grandsons - Joy Harjo

Stand tall, no matter your heights, how dark your skin

Your spirit is all colors within

You are made of the finest woven light

From the iridescent love that formed your mothers, fathers

Your grandparents all the way back on the spiral road----

There is no end to this love

It has formed your bodies

Feeds your bright spirits

And no metter what happens in these times of breaking----

No matter dictators, the heartless, and liars

No matter----you are born of those

Who kept ceremonial embers burning in their hands

All through the miles of relntless exile

Those who sang the path through massacre

All the way to sunrise

You will make it through----

1062. Becoming Human - Simon J. Ortiz

We are given permission

by the responsibility we accept

and carry out. Nothing more,

nothing less

                        People are not born.

They are made when they become

human beings within ritual,

tradition, purpose, responsibility.

Therefore, as humans, this we do:

sun Father begins red

in the east.

Stand and be humble.

Red through trees,

moments changing each instant

into the next change,

each change tied to the next.

To be human is to have

a sense of being within self

Son, Red. Trees.

Our hearts' eyes seeing

inward and outward, accepting:

Stand and be humble.

The more names you have the more of a person you become.

That's what I've heard. I was telling Tom yesterday afternoon.

Values, education, social change, cultural corruption, what is and what isn't.

I have to dispute him at moments.

I tell him, the knowledge we derive from the education we get is our own.

Knowledge is determined by our cultural, spiritual, linguistic, political environment.

The knowledge from the community and context here cannot be anything but the people's own.

This is not Chicage, St. Louis, Dallas, or Rapid City. This is Rosebud, the Lakota homeland.

Our names are both Indian and American.

We have so many names now we don't know them all.

In a sense, we have become more of a people than ever before.

1061. Museum Piece - Richard Wilbur

The good gray guardians of art

Patrol the halls on spongy shoes

Impartially protetive though

Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse. 

Here dozes one against the wall

Disposed upon a funeral chair.

A Degas dancer pirouettes

Upon the parting of his hair.

See how she spins! The grace is there,

But strain as well is plain to see.

Degas loved the two together.

Beauty joined to energy.

Edgar Degas purchased once

A fine El Greco, which he kept

Against the wall beside his bed

To hang his pants on while he slept.

1060. This Is Not A Poem - Joyce Carol Oates

in which the poet discovers
delicate white-parched bones
of a small creature

on a Great Lake shore

or the desiccated remains

of cruder roadkill

beside the rushing highway.

Nor is it a poem in which

a cracked mirror yields

a startled face,

or sere grasses hissing

like consonants

in a foreign language.

Family photo album

filled with yearning

strangers long deceased,

closet of beautiful

clothes of the dead.

Attic trunk, stone well,

or metonymic moon

time-travelling for wisdom

in the Paleolithic

age, in the Middle Kingdom

or Genesis

or the time of Basho. . . . 

Instead it is a slew

of words in search

of a container 

a sleek green stalk,

a transparent lung,

a single hair's curl,

a cooing of vowels

like doves.

1059. Abbott's Lagoon - Robert Hass

.

The first thing that is apt to raise your eyes

Above the dove-grey and silvery thickets

Of lupine and coyote bush and artichoke thistle

On the sandy, winding path from the parking lot

To the beach at Abbott’s Lagoon is the white flash

Of the marsh hawk’s rump as it skims low

Over the coastal scrub. White-crowned sparrows,

Loud in the lupine even in October, even

In the drizzly rain, startle and disappear.

The brush rabbits freeze, then bolt and disappear,

And the burbling songs and clucks of the quail

That you may not even have noticed you were noticing

Go mute and you are there in October and the rain,

And the hawk soars past, first hawk, then shadow

Of a hawk, not much shadow in the rain, low sun

Silvering through clouds a little to the west.

It’s almost sundown. And this is the new weather

At the beginning of the middle of the California fall

When a rain puts an end to the long sweet days

Of our September when the skies are clear, days mild,

and the roots of the plants have gripped down

Into the five-or six-month drought, have licked

All the moisture they are going to lick

From the summer fogs, and it is very good to be walking

Because you can almost hear the earth sigh

As it sucks up the rain, here where mid-October

Is the beginning of winter which is the beginning

Of a spring greening, as if the sound you are hearing

Is spring and winter lying down in one another’s arms

Under the hawk’s shadow among the coastal scrub,

Ocean in the distance and the faintest sound of surf

and a few egrets, bright whits, working the reeds

At the water’s edge in October in the rain.

1058. Am I Not Lucky - James Laughlin

 .

that you decided to love me

what if you decided to love

a cat or a dog or dresses

or even Paul Newman    Ive

never quite understood how

it happened     I was having my

life you yours and each

seemed content    we knew each

other slightly but only as

friends    then suddenly with-

out warning or expectation

you decided to love me (and

I you) & my life was changed

1057. Culture and the Universe - Simon J. Ortiz

 Culture and the Universe

BY SIMON J. ORTIZ

Two nights ago

in the canyon darkness,

only the half-moon and stars,

only mere men.

Prayer, faith, love,

existence.

                       We are measured

by vastness beyond ourselves.

Dark is light.

Stone is rising.

I don’t know

if humankind understands

culture: the act

of being human

is not easy knowledge.

With painted wooden sticks

and feathers, we journey

into the canyon toward stone,

a massive presence

in midwinter.

We stop.

                       Lean into me.

                       The universe

sings in quiet meditation.

We are wordless:

                       I am in you.

Without knowing why

culture needs our knowledge,

we are one self in the canyon.

                                                                    And the stone wall

I lean upon spins me

wordless and silent

to the reach of stars

and to the heavens within.

It’s not humankind after all

nor is it culture

that limits us.

It is the vastness

we do not enter.

It is the stars

we do not let own us.

1056. From Here To There - David Wagoner

.

Though you can see in the distance, outlined precisely

With speechless clarity, the place you must go,

The problem remains

Judging how far away you are and getting there safely.

Distant objects often seem close at hand

When looked at grimly.

But between you and those broken hills (so sharply in focus

You have to believe in them with all your senses)

Lies a host of mirages:

Water put out like fire, the shimmer of flying islands,

The unbalancing act of mountains upside down

Passing through too much air,

Light shifts, fidgets, and veers in ways clearly beyond you,

Confusing its weights and measures with your own

Which are far simpler:

A man on foot can suffer only one guiding principle

Next to his shadow: One Damm Thing After Another,

Meaning his substance

In the shape of his footsoles against the unyielding ground.

When you take a step, whatever you ask to bear you

Is bearing your life:

Sound earth may rest on hollow earth, and stones too solid

To budge in one direction may be ready

To gather no moss

With you, end over end, in another. You’ve been foolhardy

Enough already to make this slewfooted journey

Through a place without pathways

Where looking back seems a disheartening as relearning

The whole mad lay of the land by heart

After an earthquake.

At last, watching your step, having shrugged off most illusions,

And stumbling close enough to rap your knuckles

Against the reality

Of those unlikely rocks you’ve stared at through thick and thin

Air and the dumb-shows of light, your hope should be,

As a hardened traveller,

Not to see your trembling hands passing through cloud-stuff, 

Some flimsy mock-up of a world spun out of vapor.

1055. On Taking the Measure of Your Book - Fran Claggett-Holland

For Michael Franco

there must be a way

to enter your poetry

the way your words turn

into meaning after meaning

into the depths of memory

into the silence of the beach

which of course is never silent

but it seems so when I an there alone

and then the birds come

over the dunes

the tiny sandpipers,

silent in sand

creating the rhythm

of your poem

and far out beyond my eyes

the great white pelicans

and as I watch them I see

how I must enter your poetry

wings folded against the wind

as I slice again and again

into the measure of your ocean

there where silence is translated

into language

1054. Franz Marc's Blue Horses - Mary Oliver

 Franz Marc’s Blue Horses - Mary Oliver

I step into the painting of the four blue horses. 

I am not even surprised that I can do this.

One of the horses walks toward me.

His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm

over his blue mane, not holding on, just 

commingling.

He allows me my pleasure.

Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.

I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses 

what war is.

They would either faint in horror, or simply

find it impossible to believe.

I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful

is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Now all four horses have come closer,

are bending their faces toward me

as if they have secrets to tell.

I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.

If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what

could they possibly say?

1053. The Panther - Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Robert Bly

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

From seeing and seeing the seeing has become so exhausted

it no longer sees anything anymore.

The world is made of bars, a hundred thousand

bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride

that slowly circles down to a single point

is like a dance of energy around a hub,

in which a great will stands stunned and numbed.

At times the curtains of the eye lift

without a sound—then a shape enters,

slips through the tightened silence fo the shoulders,

reaches the heart and dies.

1052. For Those Who Would Govern - Joy Harjo

 For Those Who Would Govern - Joy Harjo (A member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation

( I know this is not a poem but......)

First question: Can you first govern yourself?

Second question: What is the state of your own household?

Third question: Do you have a proven record of community service

and compassionate acts?

Fourth question: Do you know the history and laws of your principalities?

Fifth question: Do you follow sound principles? Look for fresh vision to lift all the inhabitants of the land, including animals, plants, 

elements, all who share this earth?

Sixth question: Are you owned by lawyers, bankers, insurance agents,

lobbyists, or other politicians, anyone else who would unfairly

profit by your decisions?

Seventh question: Do you have authority by the original keepers of

the lands, those who obey natural law and are in the service of 

the lands on which you stand.

1051. Singing Everything - Joy Harjo (A member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation)

 Singing Everything - Joy Harjo (A member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation)

Once there were songs for everything,

Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting,

For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep,

For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war.

For death (those are the heaviest songs and they

Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief)

Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and

Falling apart after falling in love songs.

The earth is leaning sideways

And a song is emerging from the floods

And fires. Urgent tendrils lift toward the sun.

You must be friends with silence to hear.

The songs of the guardians of silence are the most powerful—

They are the most rare.

1050. For The Conjunction Of Two Planets - Adrienne Rich

.

We smile at astrological hopes

And leave the sky to expert men

Who do not reckon horoscopes

But painfully extend their ken

In mathematical debate

With slide and photographic plate.

And yet, protest it if we will,

Some corner of the mind retains

The medieval man, who still

Keeps watch upon those starry skeins

And drives us out of doors at night

To gaze at anagrams of light.

Whatever register or law

Is drawn in digits for these two,

Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,

Wardens of brilliance, as they do

Their dual circuit of the west—

The brightest planet and her guest.

Is any light so proudly thrust

From darkness on our lifted faces.

A sign of something we can trust,

Or is it that in starry places

We see the things we long to see

In fiery iconography?

1049. Books And Thoughts - Walter Rinder

.

books and thoughts clean the mind

of restrictions built by time

through the pages we discover

all the feelings held from each other

we read the words, think the thoughts

the author expresses to be taught

books to me are like a friend

whose knowledge helps my hurts to mend

1048. Arrivals - David Whyte

.

Imagine the confines of a long grey corridor

just before immigration at Washington Dulles

airport. Imagine two Ethiopian women amid

a sea of familiar international plastic blandness

entering America for the first time. Think of

their undulating multi-colored turbans raised

atop graceful heads, transforming us, 

a grey line of travelers behind them, into followers

and mendicants, mere drab, impatient, moneyed

and perplexed attendants to their bright,

excited, chattering arrival..

Imagine a sharp plexi-glass turn left and suddenly

before them, in biblical astonishment, like a vertical

Red Sea churning, like the waters barring Moses from

The Promised Land, like Jacob standing before his ladder,

a moving escalator, a mode of rising, a form of ascension,

a way to go up they’d never seen before, its steel gray

movement, an interlocking on and up invitation

that brought them and everyone behind them,

to a bemused, complete, and utter standstill.

So that you saw it for the first time as they saw it

and for what it was, a grated river of lifting steel,

in involuntary, moving ascension into who knows what.

An incredible surprise. And you knew even through

your tiredness, why it made them raise their hands

to their mouths, why it made them low breathy

screams of surprise and delighted terror. You saw it

as they saw it, a staircase of invisible interlocking

beckoning hands asking them to rise up

independent of their history, their legs or their wills.

And we stopped as we knew we had to now

and watched the first delighted be-turbaned

woman put a sandaled foot on the flat grey

plain at the foot of the moving stair and

straightway withdraw it with a strangled scream,

leaving her sandal to ascend strangely without her

into heaven, into America, into her new life.

Then, holding her friend away, who tried to grab

her, to save her, to hold her back, who pointed

and shouted, telling her not to risk herself,

not to be foolish, she silently watched her shoe,

that willful child, running ahead, its sole intent

to enter the country oblivious to visas and immigration,

above the need for a job, uncaring of healthcare,

pointing toward some horizon she had never dreamt,

intent on leaving only its winged footprint

for her to follow, like a comet’s tail, like an omen

of necessity, like a signaled courage, like an uncaring

invitation, to make her entrance with soul and style.

Because she looked up at this orphaned, onward

messenger with her eyes a-blaze, threw off the panicked

clamoring arms of her friend, raised her chin

to noble profile, and with all that other hurrying

clamor of the world behind her, with a busy,

unknowing, corporate crowd at her back and questions

beginning to be asked out loud, she lifted her arms,

to queenly unbidden grace, strode on the the ascending

heaven bound steel like a newly struck film star,

singing the old, high pitched song her children

would hear when she told the story again.

And as her friend below sang,

applauded , danced on the spot

and undulated her companion’s arrival,

we stood there behind her,

transfixed, travel weary,

and crammed into the corridor

like extras from some

miraculous scene in the Bible.

While

she ascended,

her arms straight out,

wide eyed and singing.

Into America.