April is National Poetry Month.
Jes' sayin'.
And playin'.

Mud, Apples, Milk

Of all things to miss, it's silly
to miss how cows drowse in mud.
They blink slow as toads.
Instead I should miss
light on the blond corn
or trails of gravel dust
that rose like kites and vanished.

But I don't miss that.
I miss how I could bring
bruised apples, press them
like smelling salts
to sleepy noses.
You had to let go
real fast or risk a finger
to the lick and snap.

I miss their udders too,
the mud fresh as wax
on the swollen skin.
Each day I broke the seals
with hot rags, and milk
flooded my palm-
a white creek down
the gully of my wrist.

  ~ Michael Walsh ~

She tells me be gentle, it's been a long time
Since she's felt this way
And I know in an instant it's worth all my while
I know in my heart she will stay

I am gentle with her, as she is with me
It seems like it's so heavensent
The things that we do and the will to be free
My change it seems, has not all been spent

She says she's afraid, and I can respect that
Because in truth I am scared too
It's a funny thing, like a drop of a hat
You'd know it if it weren't so true

As we move onto discussions of things that we've done
In our lives up to this point
We embrace night and day, two into one
My wounds she freely annoints

Believing in love, it is what has began
In two people making all the right moves
Retreating in shelter, we make no demands
Of each other which would lose us our grooves

-Tim Rawlings, March 29, 2010

The Coffins

Two days into the flood
they appear, moored against
a roof eave or bobbing caught
in the crowns of drowned trees.
Like fancy life boats
from an adventurer's flag ship,
brass plating and grips,
walnut sheen, scroll work,
they slip through the understory
on this brief, bad river.
What have they discovered
and come back to account?
Or is this the beginning
of the marvelous voyage
and they plan never to return?

 ~ Ted Kooser ~

 

Oh, stormy stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun's brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view-
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day's perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn,
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

 

Betrayal

They decide finally not to speak
of it, the one blemish in their otherwise
blameless marriage. It happened

as these things do, before the permanence
was set, before the children grew
complicated, before the quench

of loving one another became all
each of them wanted from this life.
Years later the bite

of not knowing (and not wanting
to know) still pierces the doer
as much as the one to whom it was done:

the threadbare lying, the insufferable longing,
the inimitable lack of touching, the undoing
undone.

 ~ Ted Kooser ~

 

EU president Herman Van Rompuy and his love of haiku

Our neighbors, the Pazzotis, live in a long
narrow canary-yellow house with Mrs. Pazzotti's old
father, their 2 daughters, their husbands, 4 kids,
a tortoise shell cat and a white poodle.
Their yard is my childhood dream: toys,
bicycles, tubs, bird cages, barbeques, planters, pails, tools
and garden sculptures: an orange squirrel eating a nut,
Mickey Mouse pushing a wheelbarrow, St. Joseph
carrying a lantern, his other blessing hand
broken at the wrist, and two tea-sipping toads
in an S-shaped love seat, smiling at each other
under a polka-dotted parasol.
On the yellow railing around the deck,
a procession of nine pinwheels. This May morning,
they thrash the air with each breeze like clumsy
angels nailed to their posts. On the garage wall
at the end of the yard an electric cord
shoots up to the roof. One half connects to a blue
neon insect electrocuter, the other half snakes to, then
disappears into a pedestal cemented on the cornice.
And there she stands, in plastic
beatitude-and six feet of it-the Madonna,
in her white robe and blue cape, arms
outstretched, blessing the Pazottis, their yard
and neighbors, lit from within day and night,
calling God's little insects to her shining light,
before sending them straight
to the zapper-tiny buzzing heretics
fried by the same power that lured them
to their last temptation.

 

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.

  ~ Kay Ryan ~

 

 Manbird wrote: 
Wow.

 Manbird wrote: 
Nice!

Honey

Luxury itself, thick as a Persian carpet,
honey fills the jar
with the concentrated sweetness
of countless thefts,
the blossoms bereft, the hive destitute.

Though my debts are heavy
honey would pay them all.
Honey heals, honey mends.
A spoon takes more than it can hold
without reproach. A knife plunges deep,
but does no injury.

Honey moves with intense deliberation.
Between one drop and the next
forty lean years pass in a distant desert.
What one generation labored for
another receives,
and yet another gives thanks. 

  ~ Connie Wanek ~

Wanting To Die

Anne Sexton
 

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.

I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.

Then the most unnameable lust returns.

 

Even then I have nothing against life.

I know well the grass blades you mention

the furniture you have placed under the sun.

 

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

 

Twice I have so simply declared myself

have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,

have taken on his craft, his magic.

 

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,

warmer than oil or water,

I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

 

I did not think of my body at needle point.

Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.

Suicides have already betrayed the body.

 

Still-born, they don't always die,

but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet

that even children would look on and smile.

 

To thrust all that life under your tongue! —

that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say,

 

and yet she waits for me, year and year,

to so delicately undo an old would,

to empty my breath from its bad prison.

 

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,

raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,

leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

 

leaving the page of a book carelessly open,

something unsaid, the phone off the hook

and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

 stewliscious wrote: 
Oh, I get it. Just feeling a little lonely are we?

the boys i mean are not refined
they go with girls who buck and bite
they do not give a fuck for luck
they hump them thirteen times a night

one hangs a hat upon her tit
one carves a cross on her behind
they do not give a shit for wit
the boys i mean are not refined

they come with girls who bite and buck
who cannot read and cannot write
who laugh like they would fall apart
and masturbate with dynamite

the boys i mean are not refined
they cannot chat of that and this
they do not give a fart for art
they kill like you would take a piss

they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance

-ee cummings

 stewliscious wrote: 

Probably oughta jam that into one of the lyrics threads, Stew. Maybe the True Confessions thread. Got a good poem?

I love ya baby but all I can think about is
Kielbasa sausage, your butt cheeks is warm.
I check my dipstick, you need lubrication honey,
My kielbasa sausage has just got to perform.
Now get it on!

I see you walkin', but all I can think about is
Dianetics, your butt cheeks is warm.
I check my dipstick, you need lubrication honey,
My kielbasa sausage has just got to perform.
Now I've been set loose-ah,
I'm shooting my juice-ah,
Right in your caboose.
Now fuckin' get it on!
Now get it on.
Get it on!

Dianetics cure ya much better than Krishna,
Dianetics cure ya much better indeed,
And all you people here you're tremendous,
(Except the people in the middle),
And you're smokin' up a big-ass bowl of weed
With me, me and KG.
All right!
Oh yeah,
All right! Oh my God!
All the ladies in the house say yeah (yeah),
C'mon, you muthafucka say a prayer (prayer),
When ya fight, ya gotsta fight fair,
You muthafucka, ho, you muthafucka,
You know what time it is?
Tenacious D time, you muthafucka, go!
Fuck yeah!
Yeah, yeah!

-Tenacious D

Elegy for the Personal Letter
by Allison Joseph

I miss the rumpled corners of correspondence,
the ink blots and crossouts that show
someone lives on the other end, a person
whose hands make errors, leave traces.
I miss fine stationary, its raised elegant
lettering prominent on creamy shades of ivory
or pearl grey. I even miss hasty notes
dashed off on notebook paper, edges
ragged as their scribbled messages-
can't much write now-thinking of you.
When letters come now, they are formatted
by some distant computer, addressed
to Occupant or To the family living at-
meager greetings at best,
salutations made by committee.
Among the glossy catalogs
and one time only offers
the bills and invoices,
letters arrive so rarely now that I drop
all other mail to the floor when
an envelope arrives and the handwriting
is actual handwriting, the return address
somewhere I can locate on any map.
So seldom is it that letters come
That I stop everything else
to identify the scrawl that has come this far-
the twist and the whirl of the letters,
the loops of the numerals. I open
those envelopes first, forgetting
the claim of any other mail,
hoping for news I could not read
in any other way but this.

 

Green Pear Tree in September

On a hill overlooking the Rock River
my father's pear tree shimmers,
in perfect peace,
covered with hundreds of ripe pears
with pert tops, plump bottoms,
and long curved leaves.
Until the green-haloed tree
rose up and sang hello,
I had forgotten. . .
He planted it twelve years ago,
when he was seventy-three,
so that in September
he could stroll down
with the sound of the crickets
rising and falling around him,
and stand, naked to the waist,
slightly bent, sucking juice
from a ripe pear.

 ~ Ted Kooser ~