running into a new year

I kind of can't believe it's already the end of April? But here we are: the last poem for this year! See y'all in Houston next year. ♥

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), "i am running into a new year," published in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (1987).

spill your wine

And for today, April 29:

Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me

the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.

Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.

That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it

tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.

—Ellen Bass, "Basket of Figs," from Mules of Love, 2002.

awake as a rumor of war

This poem is for yesterday, posted a little late because I went to see Fat Ham last night and got back late enough that I just went straight to bed instead of posting a poem. The play is fucking amazing—mistresscurvy and I saw it at the Public last fall and wanted to see it again on Broadway, and it really just absolutely fucking slays. Go see it if you can!

As some of you know, I am moving to Houston at the end of the year, which means this is probably my last year of posting poetry month poems from New York City (after thirteen! years!). Pending being back in New York during April(s) in the future, which seems reasonably likely. But it's definitely a change. I thought I was going to post a lot more NYC poems this year, actually, but there have only been a few; we'll see how the nostalgia treats me next year. In the meantime, though, a little New York poem for April 28. I'm pretty sure I read this one for the first time on the subway.

Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children sleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lie stretching into dawn,
unasked and unheeded.

—Maya Angelou (1928-2014), "Awaking in New York," from Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?, 1983.

splendid body

This was today's Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, which I get delivered to my inbox daily and which sometimes punches me in the gut and makes me revise my whole plan for the last few days of the month. I was going to post a completely different poem today, but here we are. No regrets.

The splendid body is meat, flexor
and flesh pumping, pulling, anti-
gravity maverick just standing
upright all over museums and
in line for the bus and in the laundry
aisle where it's just standing there
smelling all the detergent like
it's no big deal. So what if a couple
of its squishy parts are suspended
within, like beach-bungled jellyfish
in a shelved jar, not doing anything?
Nothing on this side of the quantum
tunnel is perfect. The splendid body,
though, is splendid in the way
it keeps its steamy blood in, no matter
how bad it blushes. And splendid
in how it opens its mouth and
these invisible vibrations come
rippling out—if you put your wrist
right up to it when that happens
it feels somewhat like the feet
of many bees. The splendid body
loves the juniper smell of gin, loves
the warmth of printer-fresh paper,
and the sound fallen leaves make
under the wheel of a turning car.
If you touch it between the legs,
the splendid body will quicken
like bubbles in a just-on teakettle.
It knows it can't exist forever, so
it's collecting as many flavors as it can—
saffron, rainwater, fish-skin, chive.
Do not distract it from its purpose,
which is to feel everything it can find.

—Rebecca Lindenberg, "The Splendid Body," originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 27, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

down to our roots

Can you guys believe we got all the way to April 26 without me posting Neruda? Yeah, me neither. For L, of course.

Amor, cuántos caminos hasta llegar a un beso,
qué soledad errante hasta tu compañía!
Siguen los trenes solos rodando con la lluvia.
En Taltal no amanece aún la primavera.

Pero tú y yo, amor mío, estamos juntos,
juntos desde la ropa a las raíces,
juntos de otoño, de agua, de caderas,
hasta ser sólo tú, sólo yo juntos.

Pensar que costó tantas piedras que lleva el río,
la desembocadura del agua de Boroa,
pensar que separados por trenes y naciones

tú y yo teníamos que simplemente amarnos,
con todos confundidos, con hombres y mujeres,
con la tierra que implanta y educa los claveles.


Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss,
what loneliness-in-motion, toward your company!
Rolling with the rain we follow the tracks alone.
In Taltal there is neither daybreak nor spring.

But you and I, love, we are together
from our clothes down to our roots:
together in the autumn, in water, in hips, until
we can be alone together—only you, only me.

To think of the effort, that the current carried
so many stones, the delta of Boroa water;
to think that you and I, divided by trains and nations,

we had only to love one another:
with all the confusions, the men and the women,
the earth that makes carnations rise, and makes them bloom.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), II from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

where the restless oceans pound

I was really going back and forth on whether I wanted to post sexy Audre Lorde or activist Audre Lorde or punch-you-in-the-face Audre Lorde, so I kind of went for sexy-activist-with-a-little-punching Audre Lorde. Which maybe is most Audre Lorde, now that I am thinking about it.

Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor
untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love
permanent as my errors
or my pride
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me
look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities
who am ageless and half-grown
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.

I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.

—Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "A Woman Speaks," from The Black Unicorn, 1978.

burning light

Every poem in Eavan Boland's The Historians is amazing, but this is the very first one in the collection and I read it and was like, "well, I guess I'm posting this one," and then I put like 15 more flags in the book for the future.

She loved silver, she loved gold,
my mother. She spoke about the influence
of metals, the congruence of atoms,
the art classes where she learned
these things: think of it
she would say as she told me
to gild any surface a master craftsman
had to meld gold with mercury,
had to heat both so one was volatile,
one was not
and to do it right
had to separate them and then
burn, burn, burn mercury
until it fled and left behind
a skin of light. The only thing, she added—
but what came after I forgot.

What she spent a lifetime forgetting
could be my subject:
the fenced-in small towns of Leinster,
the coastal villages where the language
of the sea was handed on,
phrases bruised by storms,
by shipwrecks. But isn't.
My subject is the part wishing plays in
the way villages are made
to vanish, in the way I learned
to separate memory from knowledge,
so one was volatile, one was not
and how I started writing,
burning light,
building heat until all at once
I was the fire glider
ready to lay radiance down,
ready to decorate it happened
with it never did when
all at once I remember what it was
she said: the only thing is
it is extremely dangerous.

—Eavan Boland (1944-2020), "The Fire Glider," poem I. from "The Historians," which is in turn from The Historians, 2020.

this blessed plot

Happy Shakespeare's alleged birthday! Here is a poem that is a little bit about Shakespeare, and also about some other things.

It occurred to me
on a flight from London to Barcelona
that Shakespeare could have written
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England
with more authority had he occupied
the window seat next to me
instead of this businessman from Frankfurt.

Of course, after a couple of drinks
and me loaning him an ear bud
he might become so preoccupied
with Miles Davis at the Blackhawk
at 36,000 feet over one realm or other to write a word.

I imagine he'd enjoy playing with my wristwatch,
the one with the tartan band,
and when he wasn't looking out the window
he would study the ice cubes in his rotating glass.

And he'd take a keen interest
in the various announcements from the flight deck
and the ministrations of the bowing attendants,

all of which would be sadly lost on me
having gotten used to rushing above the clouds
even though 99% of humanity has never been there.

Yet I am still fond of the snub-nosed engines,
the straining harmony of the twin jets,
and even the sensation of turbulence,
jostled about high above some blessed plot,

with the sound of crockery shifting in the galley,
the frenzied eyes of the nervous passengers
and the Bard reaches for my hand
as we roar with trembling wings
into the towering fortress of a thunderhead.

—Billy Collins, "The Bard in Flight," from The Rain in Portugal, 2016.

taste each moment

For my birthday, mistresscurvy got me a copy of Marge Piercy's What Are Big Girls Made Of?, which I did not already own (always a little bit of a risk with buying me poetry books, but please feel free to buy me poetry books literally any time, I love poetry books), although I knew some of the poems already from the big Piercy collection I did already own. When I re-encountered this poem at the end of the book, I was honestly shocked to realize I had not posted it before. I had to check a couple of times to make sure, because I really, really love this poem.

This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin; wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends'
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.

—Marge Piercy, "The art of blessing the day," from What Are Big Girls Made Of?, 1997, although my edition is Knopf, 2018.

ponytails

I stand corrected: there are good poems about soccer. eccentric_hat (who has exceptional taste in poetry) shared this one with me and it is so good that I need to post it today! But since it is quite short, and because I feel like it, I am posting a second poem, which is also short (and gay) and packs a punch.

girls' soccer practice:
they are running so hard
and shouting so strong with
ponytails ponytails ponytails
backlit and leaping
they are not afraid of you

—Jenna Jaco, "11/8/16," published in the Sweet Tree Review (Summer 2017, Volume 2, Issue III).

*

And if I cannot speak of my love—
if I do not speak about your hair, your lips, your eyes;
yet your face that I keep within my soul,
the sound of your voice that I keep within my brain,
the days of September that dawn in my dreams,
mold and color my words and phrases,
in whatever theme I get into, whatever idea I utter.

—C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), "December 1903," translated by Rae Dalven; this is one of Cavafy's unpublished poems.

what belongs to the day

Hey so how about that episode of Ted Lasso, like, holy shit, am I right? WHEW. Unfortunately there are no good poems about soccer, but here is some Walt Whitman.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

—Walt Whitman (1819-1892), "I Hear America Singing" from the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass; the original version appeared as number 20 in the section titled "Chants Democratic" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

answer

I unfortunately can't read this poem (or post it) in the original Chinese, but I love it in translation. Like a lot of the Li Bai poetry I've read, it's short and gorgeous. Unlike some of the Li Bai poetry I have read, it is not about drinking. Poetry can be about so many things!

You ask me why I stay up here
    alone on the green mountain.
I smile, but give no other answer—
    and yet, my heart's at leisure.

The peach blossom floats away on the stream,
    carried far by the water.
Here, apart from the human world,
    I have heaven and earth together.

—Li Bai (701-762), "Question and Answer on the Mountain," translated by Keith Holyoak, and in this case from Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu (Oyster River Press, 2007).

look at the time

One of the poetry collections I got from my wonderful Room of One's Own poetry subscription last year was Kiki Petrosino's Witch Wife (2017), which I actually posted the title poem from a couple of years ago. There are poems in the collection that aren't villanelles, but also I fucking love villanelles. Villanelles!

We'll have to hurry if we want to get started.
It's high time to consider beginning at all.
Time, at least, to think about starting

to start. After all, we've only just gotten up
& running, but now? We're almost too late.
We'll have to hurry. If we want to get started

we'll have to start now. We'll have to work
round the clock, round the clock, round the—
Well. Let's think about starting, at least. Though

it's tougher than ever. We can't even begin
to explain what it's like. To start with, we know
we should want to hurry. At least, we're starting

to want to. That's almost too tough to say
at the start. Still, we're sure we'll begin any moment.
It's time to get started we think. Let's consider

getting up & running. By then, it'll just sort of start
& we'll have begun. Zut alors! It's a plan & a party!
It's just—we should hurry. If we want to get started
we better begin. But it's tough. Just look at the time.

—Kiki Petrosino, "Ought" from Witch Wife, 2017. Huge mood, am I right?

for miles inland

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
    Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
    For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn't notice what a noise
    The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
    Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
    Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
    The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
    I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl—and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
    Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

—Philip Larkin (1922-1985), "The Whitsun Weddings" from The Whitsun Weddings, 1964. That last stanza, man, goddamn.

doing what she can to survive

For K, who loves Ada Limón just as much as I do, and also for the raccoon I saw sneaking behind a car in the parking lot next to my building yesterday.

I thought it was the neighbor's cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning's shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

—Ada Limón, "Give Me This," from The Hurting Kind, 2022, but originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2020.

hand on my stupid heart

I'm not making a habit of posting prose poetry on my birthday (two years in a row does not make a tradition, probably), but it is my birthday, and I love this poem so, so much.

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There's a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

—Cameron Awkward-Rich, "Meditations in an Emergency" from Dispatch, 2019. Shoutout to my guy Frank O'Hara.

practice my art

I took a couple of years off from posting John Donne, both because I have already posted many of my top Donne poems and because sometimes you need a break from your favorite poets. In the years since I left grad school in 2016, I've also moved away—in some ways—from my early modernist roots. But I will always love the metaphysical poets for their absolutely bonkers weirdness as much as for the occasionally sublime, so here's a deeply weird poem about oral sex.

Who ever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
Love is a bear-whelp born: if we o'er lick
Our love, and force it new strange shapes to take,
We err, and of a lump a monster make.
Were not a calf a monster that were grown
Faced like a man, though better than his own?
Perfection is in unity: prefer
One woman first, and then one thing in her.
I, when I value gold, may think upon
The ductileness, the application,
The wholesomeness, the ingenuity,
From rust, from soil, from fire ever free;
But if I love it, 'tis because 'tis made
By our new nature (Use) the soul of trade.
    All these in women we might think upon
(If women had them) and yet love but one.
Can men more injure women than to say
They love them for that, by which they're not they?
Makes virtue woman? Must I cool my blood
Till I both be, and find one, wise and good?
May barren angels love so! But if we
Make love to woman, virtue is not she,
As beauty's not, nor wealth. He that strays thus
From her to hers, is more adulterous,
Then if he took her maid. Search every sphere
And firmament, our Cupid is not there;
He's an infernal god, and under ground
With Pluto dwells, where gold and fire abound;
Men to such gods their sacrificing coals
Did not in altars lay, but pits and holes.
Although we see celestial bodies move
Above the earth, the earth we till and love:
So we her airs contemplate, words and heart
And virtues, but we love the centrique part.
    Nor is the soul more worthy, or more fit,
For love, then this, as infinite as it.
But in attaining this desired place
How much they err, that set out at the face.
The hair a forest is of ambushes,
Of springs, snares, fetters and manacles;
The brow becalms us when 'tis smooth and plain,
And when 'tis wrinkled shipwrecks us again—
Smooth, 'tis a paradise, where we would have
Immortal stay, and wrinkled 'tis our grave.
The nose (like to the first meridian) runs
Not 'twixt an East and West, but 'twixt two suns;
It leaves a cheek, a rosy hemisphere,
On either side, and then directs us where
Upon the islands fortunate we fall,
(Not faint Canaries, but Ambrosial),
Her swelling lips; to which when we are come,
We anchor there, and think ourselves at home,
For they seem all: there Sirens' songs, and there
Wise Delphic Oracles do fill the ear;
There in a creek where chosen pearls do swell,
The remora, her cleaving tongue doth dwell.
These, and the glorious promontory, her chin,
O'erpassed, and the straight Hellespont between
The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts,
(Not of two lovers, but two loves the nests)
Succeeds a boundless sea, but yet thine eye
Some island moles may scattered there descry;
And sailing towards her India, in that way
Shall at her fair Atlantic navel stay;
Though thence the current be thy pilot made,
Yet ere thou be where thou wouldst be embayed
Thou shalt upon another forest set,
Where many shipwreck and no further get.
When thou art there, consider what this chase
Misspent by thy beginning at the face.
    Rather set out below; practice my art,
Some symmetry the foot hath with that part
Which thou dost seek, and is thy map for that,
Lovely enough to stop, but not stay at;
Least subject to disguise and change it is—
Men say the Devil never can change his.
It is the emblem that hath figured
Firmness; 'tis the first part that comes to bed.
Civility we see refined; the kiss
Which at the face began, transplanted is,
Since to the hand, since to the imperial knee,
Now at the papal foot delights to be:
If kings think that the nearer way, and do
Rise from the foot, lovers may do so too;
For as free spheres move faster far than can
Birds, whom the air resists, so may that man
Which goes this empty and ethereal way,
Then if at beauty's elements he stay.
Rich nature hath in women wisely made
Two purses, and their mouths aversely laid:
They then, which to the lower tribute owe
That way which that exchequer looks, must go:
He which doth not, his error is as great
As who by clyster gave the stomach meat.

—John Donne (1572-1631), "Elegy XVIII: Love's Progress," although there is, as is often the case with Donne, some dispute about the title; it could be "An Elegie on Loves Progress" or "Loves Progress" or "On Loves Progress." I made a bunch of choices about the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation that are not really consistent with anything except how I think it should read, so it's a good thing I'm not actually a textual editor. This poem ends with the truly incredible metaphor of a meat enema (that is what clyster means, I am sorry), which sure is a choice.

again and again

A little tiny Rilke for y'all tonight:

Again and again, even though we know love's landscape
and the little churchyard with its lamenting names
and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others
end: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again
among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), "Again and again, even though we know love's landscape," from Uncollected Poems, translated by Edward Snow (1996).

if you stay too long it will kill you

Sometimes I get poems stuck in my head, kind of like songs; today it's been this one. (I love this one.)

O California, don't you know the sun is only a god
if you learn to starve for him? I'm bored with the ocean

I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying for snow
I know, I'm strange, too much light makes me nervous

at least in this land where the trees always bear green.
I know something that doesn't die can’t be beautiful.

Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California?
The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror

all demanding to be the sun too, everything around you
is light & it's gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you

& it's so sad, you know? You're the only warm thing for miles
& the only thing that can't shine.

—Danez Smith, "I'm Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense," which is a killer fucking title. Originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 54, Issue 3, Summer 2015.

shadow and song

One more poem for today:

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here's the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

—Dorianne Laux, "Dark Charms," from The Book of Men, 2011. Dorianne Laux always gets me.

a god as my accomplice

I missed yesterday due to having a bunch of student meetings and then a migraine, but I did have a poem picked out, so: Happy (day after) Easter, here is some queer devotional poetry.

I want a god
as my accomplice
who spends nights
in houses
of ill repute
and gets up late
on Saturdays

a god
who whistles
through the streets
and trembles
before the lips
of his lover

a god
who waits in line
at the entrance
of movie houses
and likes to drink
café au lait

a god
who spits
blood from
tuberculosis and
doesn't even have
enough for bus fare

a god
knocked
unconscious
by the billy club
of a policeman
at a demonstration

a god
who pisses
out of fear
before the flaring
electrodes
of torture

a god
who hurts
to the last
bone and
bites the air
in pain

a jobless god
a striking god
a hungry god
a fugitive god
an exiled god
an enraged god

a god
who longs
from jail
for a change
in the order
of things

I want a
more godlike
god

—Francisco X. Alarcón (1954-2016), "Prayer," ("Oracion"), translated by Francisco Aragón, from From the Other Side of Night (Del otro lado de la noche), 2002.

stars are too twinkly

I haven't posted Shel Silverstein in years and years (actually, not since the very first year), but he came up in the poetry club discord server recently, and as an absolute classic of children's poetry, he's also one of the first poets I ever encountered. Plus, I am feeling this one today—a lot of things have been great today, actually, including going to Brooklyn for brunch to celebrate a friend's birthday—but I also locked myself out of my apartment doing laundry, and broke my shoe, and spent several hours on subways, and all things considered it hasn't been my best day.

Everything's wrong,
Days are too long,
Sunshine's too hot,
Wind is too strong.
Clouds are too fluffy,
Grass is too green,
Ground is too dusty,
Sheets are too clean.
Stars are too twinkly,
Moon is too high,
Water's too drippy,
Sand is too dry.
Rocks are too heavy,
Feathers too light,
Kids are too noisy,
Shoes are too tight.
Folks are too happy,
Singin' their songs.
Why can't they see it?
Everything's wrong!

—Shel Silverstein (1930-1999), "Mr. Grumpledump's Song," from Where the Sidewalk Ends, which was originally published in 1974, but in this case the poem is from the 2004 30th anniversary edition, by way of poets.org.

on this night

I did a mini-seder with friends tonight—we didn't do an actual seder, but we did have homemade matzo ball soup and matzo brei and other classic Passover delicacies (so many macaroons), and we briefly recited the ten plagues for N, our (beloved) token goy. So in the spirit of my evening, here is a poem for Passover.

On this night
            I remember Nachshon
            who was not Moses who
                        walked into the Red Sea
                        and called for God
                                                    to meet him there
On this night
            I am only a body and you
                                                    are only a body
On this night
                        nothing is hidden
                        only the afikomen
On this night
                        God was here and I
                                                                I knew it

—Bev Yockelson, "The Trans Haggadah Companion," originally published in Poetry, February 2019.

blossoms begin

I've been doing a lot of spring things this week while the weather has been good, and today I went to the New York Botanical Gardens with a friend to see the daffodils and cherry blossoms. We also went to the orchid show, which wasn't part of the original plan (the original plan was mainly to go stare at Daffodil Hill and then get lunch at the cafe), but was a great addition. This is not a poem about cherry blossoms or daffodils or orchids, but I think it's thematically appropriate, and flowering trees are very important. (If you want daffodils, there's always Wordsworth.)

One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,

the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple

blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night

the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find

yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open

like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called

bumblebee stumbles in.

—Susan Kelly-DeWitt, "Apple Blossoms," from To a Small Moth (Poet's Corner Press, 2001).

page set afire

Today is April 5, which is the day on which I traditionally post poems about grief, and this is the one poem I have known I was going to post since I first read it last April. It was published in The New Yorker on April 18 last year, and someone that I cannot now remember (sorry, poetry club) linked me to it; I said, "oh holy fucking shit," and that is still how I feel. Warnings for grief, of course, as well as gun violence and Homer.

The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair.
The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don't have the virus, it's a bitch.
The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE.

My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been,
and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only
to the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assume, or inspire,

but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and let's cook tonight,
those are for you, Stephen. You won't come to me in my dreams,
so I must communicate by other avenues.

A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly's "Fifty Days at Iliam"
—a red bloom, the words "like a fire that consumes all before it"—
and asks: Have you seen this? It's at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

If I have, I can't remember, though I did visit
with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped
silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room

as guards jostled in, and I—though charged with keeping you
from trouble—joined the game, and the whole time we never laughed,
not till we were released into the grand air we couldn't touch and could.

You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys, buy kale and radishes,
in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son.
Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS.

I've studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine his hands.
Of course I would. Each finger, even.
To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what I am capable of.

If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen behind caution tape.
Homer's similes, I've been told, are holes cut in the cloth between the world of war
and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man kills his neighbor.

"Let Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son into my arms
and have satisfied my desire for grief"—this, my mind's new refrain
in the pharmacy queue, in the train's rattling frame.

The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert
"where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad."
It's nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability of reference:

The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire.
We see double.
You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash.

Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is "Boats at Sea." It's like how sometimes I forget you're gone.
But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes carry us nowhere.

And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me

plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're already dead.
How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam's ever?
I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.

—Elisa Gonzalez, "After My Brother's Death, I Reflect on the Iliad," originally published in The New Yorker, April 18, 2022 (online) and in the print edition of the April 25 & May 2, 2022 issue.

keep revel with me

I am a big fan of poems that are in conversation with other poems or poets. Some of those are collected under the poems in conversation tag, although my tagging system, like many other parts of my poetry organization, is not the most consistent or reliable. This poem is not only in conversation with John Keats (I posted a lot of Keats in the early years and then ran out of favorites, but I do go back to him often), it's also a spring poem, and this morning I took myself for a walk to get an iced latte and a bagel sandwich and sat outside on a park bench in the sunshine. And, last but not least, I love the Harlem Renaissance poets, especially as a New Yorker.

(For Carl Van Vechten)

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats;
There never was a spring like this;
It is an echo, that repeats
My last year's song and next year's bliss.
I know, in spite of all men say
Of Beauty, you have felt her most.
Yea, even in your grave her way
Is laid. Poor, troubled, lyric ghost,
Spring never was so fair and dear
As Beauty makes her seem this year.

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats,
I am as helpless in the toil
Of Spring as any lamb that bleats
To feel the solid earth recoil
Beneath his puny legs. Spring beats
Her tocsin call to those who love her,
And lo! the dogwood petals cover

Her breast with drifts of snow, and sleek
White gulls fly screaming to her, and hover
About her shoulders, and kiss her cheek,
While white and purple lilacs muster
A strength that bears them to a cluster
Of color and odor; for her sake
All things that slept are now awake.

And you and I, shall we lie still,
John Keats, while Beauty summons us?
Somehow I feel your sensitive will
Is pulsing up some tremulous
Sap road of a maple tree, whose leaves
Grow music as they grow, since your
Wild voice is in them, a harp that grieves
For life that opens death's dark door.
Though dust, your fingers still can push
The Vision Splendid to a birth,
Though now they work as grass in the hush
Of the night on the broad sweet page of the earth.

"John Keats is dead," they say, but I
Who hear your full insistent cry
In bud and blossom, leaf and tree,
Know John Keats still writes poetry.

And while my head is earthward bowed
To read new life sprung from your shroud,
Folks seeing me must think it strange
That merely spring should so derange
My mind. They do not know that you,
John Keats, keep revel with me, too.

—Countee Cullen (1903-1946), "To John Keats, Poet. At Spring Time," Spring 1924. The poem title actually has an asterisk at the end and an asterisk-marked footnote with the date (Spring 1924), which I enjoy a lot, personally. Love a footnote.

some trees make it look so easy

One of the best things about doing National Poetry Month for as long as I have been—which is like, an absurd amount of time at this point—is that I spend the rest of the year collecting poetry. I'm not that organized about it, though, which is how I have ended up with a bunch of random screenshots on my phone that I finally put in a folder, and stacks of poetry books in both ebook and hardcopy (only some of which I have actually read), and a "poetry" bookmarks folder and a "poetry" dropbox folder and, you know, maybe I should stop talking about this before I dig myself any deeper. The point is, I save stuff I like and hope that someday (usually in April) I will find it again. I got this one from the poetryisnotaluxury instagram, which is an absolute gift.

Can we talk about the moon
tonight? Low & full
in the baby-blue sky. A friend
at my door, the sound
of her laugh & well-loved
heart. I want to be held
up like that. I need a poem
about happiness I haven't
written yet, an ode
to the ducks in my neighbours'
pool, another for the pink
magnolias of spring—some trees
make it look so easy: Yes,
I can hold all this beauty up.

—Kyla Jamieson, "I Need a Poem," from Body Count, 2020.

there is only one question

I went out for a walk this evening, and while I was walking through the park during golden hour, looking at the spring flowers and enjoying both the gorgeous weather and being out of my house for the first time in a week, I thought, "today is a Mary Oliver day." But the truth is that I try to live every day of my life as though it's a Mary Oliver day.

Somewhere
    a black bear
        has just risen from sleep
            and is staring

down the mountain.
    All night
        in the brisk and shallow restlessness
            of early spring

I think of her,
    her four black fists
        flicking the gravel,
            her tongue

like a red fire
    touching the grass,
        the cold water.
            There is only one question;

how to love this world.
    I think of her
        rising
            like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
    the silence
        of the trees.
            Whatever else

my life is
    with its poems
        and its music
            and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
    coming
        down the mountain,
            breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
    her white teeth,
        her wordlessness,
            her perfect love.

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "Spring," from House of Light, 1990.

that april

Today is April 1, and I am woefully underprepared for National Poetry Month. I've been sick for a week and was supposed to be in Houston with Lucy this weekend, so I feel a little bit like time has gotten away from me. But it's still April, and that means poetry. As always, there will be one poem per day (ish) between now and April 30.

To kick us off, here in 2023: Emily.

Dear March - Come in -
How glad I am -
I hoped for you before -
Put down your Hat -
You must have walked -
How out of Breath you are -
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest -
Did you leave Nature well -
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me -
I have so much to tell -

I got your Letter, and the Birds -
The Maples never knew that you were coming -
I declare - how Red their Faces grew -
But March, forgive me -
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue -
There was no Purple suitable -
You took it all with you -

Who knocks? That April -
Lock the Door -
I will not be pursued -
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied -
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come

That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame -

—Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), "Dear March - Come in -" (1310). I always feel like I'm posting unfinished poems with Dickinson, which is pretty fair from an editorial standpoint. I take my Dickinson from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. by R. W. Franklin, which is a reading edition and thus has no notes, but the editorial history of Dickinson is absolutely fucking fascinating, and there's a brief summary here.