poems

James Wright - "Poems to a Brown Cricket"

1.

I woke,
Just about daybreak, and fell back
In a drowse.
A clean leaf from one of the new cedars
Has blown in through the open window.
How long ago a huge shadow of wings pondering and hovering
leaned down
To comfort my face.
I don’t care who loved me.
Somebody did, so I let myself alone.
I will stand watch for you, now.
I lay here awake a long time before I looked up
And found you sunning yourself asleep
In the Secret Life of Jakob Boehme
Left open on the desk.


2.

Our friends gave us their love
And this room to sleep in.
Outside now, not a sound.
Instead of rousing us out for breakfast,
Our friends love us and grant us our loneliness.
We shall waken again
When the courteous face of the old horse David
Appears at our window,
To snuffle and cough gently.
He, too, believes we may long for
One more dream of slow canters across the prairie
Before we come home to our strange bodies
And rise from the dead.



3.

As for me, I have been listening,
For an hour or so, now, to the scampering ghosts
Of Sioux ponies, down the long road
Toward South Dakota.
They just brought me home, leaning forward, by both hands
clinging
To the joists of the magnificent dappled feathers
Under their wings.


4.

As for you, I won’t press you to tell me
Where you have gone.
I know. I know how you love to edge down
The long trails of canyons.
At the bottom, along willow shores, you stand, waiting for twilight,
In the silence of deep grass.
You are safe there, guarded, for you know how the dark faces
Of the cliffs forbid easy plundering
Of their beautiful pueblos:
White cities concealed delicately in their chasms
As the new eggs of the mourning dove
In her ground nest,
That only the spirit hunters
Of the snow can find.

5.

Brown cricket, you are my friend’s name.
I will send back my shadow for your sake, to stand guard
On the solitude of the mourning dove’s young.
Here, I will stand by you, shadowless,
At the small golden door of your body till you wake
In a book that is shining.


Margaret Ray - "Garden State"

The world smells green & wet & today I
am in a postlapsarian good mood 
as I meander by the Raritan canal, 
no longer moving in a deadly torpor 
like a winter fly, but thinking once again 
(the warming weather) about sex in a good way, 
how all those smells you’re supposed to be ashamed of 
or wash away smell good once you know a thing or two, 
& it’s finally humid enough, this second day 
after the rains, it is spring in New Jersey, 
I itch my eyes freely & blink down on gnats 
that seem determined to die in my field of 
so-close-I-can’t-see-them, & people are out, 
look at all their beautiful bodies, so many 
ankles & knees, clicking whizz of bike wheels, 
car exhaust hanging in the thick air, 
helmets pressing sweaty hair to sticky foreheads, 
a racket of motors on the other side of these trees, 
early evening: the light just now is furtive, holy, 
this is no prologue but the thing itself, the mud 
& the grease & the grass & the wet asphalt 
on one of those steaming, streaming, sunlit evenings 
after a week of rain that brought out the frogs 
to cover the road up the hill. There they were. 
No one knew where they were going.

(from https://poets.org/poem/garden-state)

"Devotion: Rimbaud" - by Bruce Smith

To my brother: in his khaki habit like the one the missionaries wore
who were sent to the windy end of empire to serve and secure,
he turns in his cubicle, he rends a veil with his pencil,
he moves a decimal, he breaks and sets code like bone.
For the poor.

To my brother: in jail in his Wu Wear and absolutes—
everything’s a knife—there’s no such thing as silence
as John Cage said when there was irony and random
was a tunnel under the symphony of another century.
For the violated.

To Emma: that demon who was Linnaeus or Levi-Strauss
in another life, publishing the ideologies and taxonomies of smell—
fox, rot, scat, gall, goat, and once a rasher of bacon.
For the cherubim. For the kin.

To the debutant I was: a glistening fly in winter.
For the fevers of children.

To the man at 60: a turnip disinterred, a peasant in snow with bad shoes.
For the cult of the exaggerated girl.

To the rich: chattering dolphins in a sea of benzene.
For the afflicted.

Tonight, in the untowered downtown of Syracuse, the currency
hardens to the gray slugs the slot machine spits out and as the ghost
fish smell in the low haphazard heaven, I make this vow to look around. 
For the ones to my right and my left. 

Bruce Smith

“…The try to come to [and maybe failing] is what the poem does, and what language does as it fails in attempts to be more than itself or care for another thing.”

- Bruce Smith, from an email. Ars poetica in its own right. Read this one of his poems, from “Devotions.”

Mark Strand - "The Night, The Porch"

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing—
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

Jack Gilbert - What to Want

The room was like getting married.
A landfall and the setting forth.
A dearness and vessel. A small room
eight by twelve, filled by the narrow iron bed.
Six stories up, under the roof
and no elevator. A maid's room long ago.
In the old quarter, on the other hill
with the famous city stretched out
below. His window like an ocean.
The great bells of the cathedral counting
the hours all night while everyone slept.
After two years, he had come to
the beginning. Past the villa at Como,
past the police moving him from jail
to jail to hide him from the embassy.
His first woman gone back to Manhattan,
the friends gone back to weddings
or graduate school. He was finally alone.
Without money. A wind blowing through
where much of him used to be. No longer
the habit of himself. The blinding intensity
giving way to presence. The budding
amid the random passion. Mortality like
a cello inside him. Like rain in the dark.
Sin a promise. What interested him
most was who he was about to become.

- Jack Gilbert

If you've enjoyed the site...

Consider checking out my book of poems, NORTH AMERICAN STADIUMS (paperback version now available).

Published by Milkweed Editions (2018), the book is described by Booklist as “Exquisite…Chambers executes a magic that is perhaps unique to poetry: he conjures a moment from nothing, draws the reader inside, and disperses the spell with something as gentle as a shift in the wind direction, or a quiet revelation…A crackling first act by a promising new poet.” 

Thanks so much, and I hope you continue to enjoy the photos, poems, prose, and music here!

James Schuyler - "A blue towel"

went with us to the beach.
You drove the Green Bomb,
your panel truck. Sand
dunes and signs: “No parking
Between Signs.” “Prohibited
On This Beach…Hard Ball…
Intoxication…Bonfires…”
Mist, filterable sun.
Oh breakers, and leaping
spume! We spread the towel
where we could lie and watch
the fierce and molten wonder
of the water. You wore blue
trunks, and took off a
striped Roman shirt and kicked
off Gucci loafers (and you
think I’m hard on clothes).
We lay and watched and
smoked. I studied sand
and the sand-like freckles
on your back and, smaller
than small, one blackhead
(later removed). And thought
beach thoughts: after sex,
man is sad, some Roman said.
Did he mean, because the
pleasure’s over? It’s the
day after last night and I
am anything but sad. Quiet
content, a little tired: we
do go on so. Then we walked,
you in surf, I on scoured
sand, firm, and running to
escape the waves that almost
got my sneakers. Then we
walked back. Your trunks
were partly wet, as though
you’d pissed your pants. “I
think,” you said, “I’ll go
in after all.” Then there
you were, bobbing in breakers,
leaping high to ride their
great and breaking crested
curl. It scared me (a
lousy swimmer) just a
little. “That’s the way,"
you said when you came
out, “I like it. It’s
almost warm enough.” I saw
your chest and side be-
side me, pearled with
water drops. The mist
moved off. We sat and sunned
—it was late, no tan today—
and watched the repetitions
of the sea, each one
different from the last,
and saw how a log was
almost hurled ashore then
taken back, slipping north
along the shore. The flies
were something else. “These
insects are too much: let’s
go back.” The blue towel
and your trunks I hung out
on the line. You took a
shower. I made drinks. Quiet
ecstasy and sweet content,
why are not all days like
you? Happy with someone,
and that someone you, to-
gether on a blue towel
on sand beside the sea.

- James Schuyler

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, 

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. 

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

- Marie Howe

The end of the year

has always felt distinct to me,
the quiet of the week between Christmas and the new year.

Here’s a poem I’ve never published
that’s been on my mind—

Poem for the End of the Year

The year comes back, or won’t let go.
December in the quietest hours, Monday evening,
dark before its time. The letters arrive
in cold bundles: greetings, cards, late notes
from high school social chairs
all bringing the same news: the places we belonged to
grasp toward us from the past,
trapped in their time.

It’s good to think about those you haven’t
thought of in a while. I think down
into my childhood: Sierra Lurie
twirling in December
at the bluegrass gathering
in the cavernous tent. I watched her spin
amidst the candles,
though she hardly knew I existed.

Years later and there’s smoke
coming from the hospital grates,
a street of dead traffic lights,
a pale trail in the darkening sky.
You can feel how close it is to the solstice:
The trains moan from far away,
the thin cranes rise like scaffolding
for spaceships awaiting departure,
the shopkeepers in their empty stores
gaze through their phones,
lonely for anything.

I feel sometimes how unreal
the lives of strangers are.
I try to imagine their front doors,
their faces around a kitchen table,
the people that they love,
the beds in which they sleep.
I want their lives, in this way,
to become more knowable.  

I speak to you earnestly from this cold late date
though my complaints seem vapid. I miss
my sister. I miss those I once knew. I’m lonely
for places I once existed in
inside the past.

Sierra’s father’s name is on all the city’s hospitals.
His daughter took her life. I think about that
sometimes: If she’d been given more
kindness. If the phone had rung that afternoon
as she sat on her bed and considered what to do. 

I have to imagine it. The dead don’t rise
like marionettes. The sky stays furrowed
and goes on forever. It is Monday night
in the empty kitchens. The line of gravestones
stick up in the dark like raised hands.

The Dancing

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a post-war Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop—in 1945— in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany— oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

— Gerald Stern

From The Inferno

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.


Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.

But when I reached the foot of a hill,
there where the valley ended
that had pierced my heart with fear,

looking up, I saw its shoulders
arrayed in the first light of the planet
that leads men straight, no matter what their road.

Then the fear that had endured
in the lake of my heart, all the night
I spent in such distress, was calmed.

And as one who, with laboring breath,
has escaped from the deep to the shore
turns and looks back at the perilous waters,

so my mind, still in flight,
turned back to look once more upon the pass
no mortal being ever left alive.

- Dante, trans. by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander

Homesteading

It would be easy if the spirit
was reasonable, was old.
But there is a stubborn gladness.
Summer air idling in the elms.
Silence hunting in the towering
storms of heaven. Thirty-two
swans in a København dusk.
The swan bleeding to death
slowly in a Greek kitchen.
A man leaves the makeshift
restaurant plotting his improvidence.
Something voiceless flies lovely
over an empty landscape.
He wanders on the way
to whoever he will become.
Passion leaves us single and safe.
The other fervor leaves us
at risk, in love, and alone.
Married sometimes forever.

- Jack Gilbert

If you're enjoying the site...

Consider checking out my book of poems, NORTH AMERICAN STADIUMS.

Published by Milkweed Editions (2018), the book is described by Booklist as “Exquisite…Chambers executes a magic that is perhaps unique to poetry: he conjures a moment from nothing, draws the reader inside, and disperses the spell with something as gentle as a shift in the wind direction, or a quiet revelation…A crackling first act by a promising new poet.” 

Thanks so much, and I hope you continue to enjoy the photos, poems, prose, and music here!

Devotion: The Burnt-Over Districts

Late fall in the villages of Pompey, Preble, Oran, Delphi Falls,

      churched

river and woods. In Homer and Ovid, the localities

      and principalities

of central New York, the hollows and corners of the

      burnt-over districts

visited by angels in the 1800's who led us to greatness: awakenings,

gold, portents and lies, heaven, women's suffrage, and bundling

with the other in the love beds while we waited for the lamb,

the dove, the velvet of the ten-point buck grunting through

      the underbrush

to rut. We learned in divine time a year's a day.

      We learned obedience

and had charismatic children. And now the boy's an angelic

eighteen days or six thousand years, as he leaves to serve.

He did what we told him: blocked for punts—no one likes to

      block for punts—

and when his friends crashed the truck in a ditch, he waited

      for the cops

and took the rap, nice kid, because he did the act of deliverance

      one does

in central New York and made the vows, pledged, testified,

      and swore

and participated in the sport greater than the coming of the dead,

and escorted the exaggerated girl to the prom where he

      was befuddled

with organza and tulle and he did not forget the corsage, an orchid

in a box he stared into: the white outer whorl and the inner whorl

and pouted purple lip. He butterflied the pollen with the lashes

      of his eyes.

The flower was his terror. He was not meant to be the

      indwelling beauty

of things and surely he was not meant to be the wind in Iraq

      with three others

in his division and become the abstract shape of a god formed from a blood clot.

I've seen the pictures, the vague shapes that ripple in the heat

until I was terrified. It looked like he still moved. Remember fall

in Delphi? All ardent and catastrophic and counter, elbows flailing,

he ran in the flat places scraped from the gold hills and valleys.

- Bruce Smith

 

Lantau

While sitting prostrate before the ivory feet of the great Buddha, I spilled almost an entire can of Diet Coke on the floor. I quickly tried to mop up the mess with my long hair. I peeked over my left shoulder: the short nun said nothing and averted her eyes; to my right the skinny old monk was consumed by a frightful irritation of his own. He was at once swatting and dodging two bombarding hornets that were fascinated by his newly shaved head. “I hope he’s not allergic.” I chuckled softly. And beyond us was the motherless Asian sea, glittering with the promise of eternity.

- Marilyn Chin