Week Five

We’re in our final week, writers! Which isn’t to say our work is done. I understand you all have lives outside of poetry and have undoubtedly had to put yourselves and your outlet aside for a minute, to do things that need you immediately, but please come back and post and critique and respond and hurrah as much as possible. I intend to check in on this site every few days to see if any new writing has emerged.

I wanted to close out the string of workshops with writers who have taught me the ways of the non-reveal - masters of tone, their poetry allows an image to take the place of what begs to be overwritten (because there is such a thing as image over-saturation and/or over-explaining) and, instead, sort of carefully navigates through the muck with the kind of graceful ease that, I promise, doesn’t come naturally.

We have to work for every line, every word, every break. We have to make every image or sound or rhythm to earn its place in our writing. Did you know that ten-syllable lines are the easiest to memorize? Or that a line that contains only words that begin with consonants are not only easier in the mouth but have a harder rhythm that resonates with the listener? THIS is why I read every poem I write out loud. It has to sound as well as it looks. Poetry is MEANT to be sung.

Below are the poems that I believe have everything that makes a poem a masterpiece. Careful rhythm, striking consonants and the swift movements from line to line that make them feel like a dance when you read them. Some poems are waltzes, or blues or rock ‘n roll, others are punk rock songs or ballads...decide what you want your final poem to be like, and DO THAT.  And now, let’s open with a dirge:



WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

 In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.

The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.

When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.

If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.

Lions and lice don't waver in their course.

Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,

in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun

among the signs of bestiality

a clear conscience is Number One.

The Suicide’s Room

I'll bet you think the room was empty.
Wrong. There were three chairs with sturdy backs.
A lamp, good for fighting the dark.
A desk, and on the desk a wallet, some newspapers.
A carefree Buddha and a worried Christ.
Seven lucky elephants, a notebook in a drawer.
You think our addresses weren't in it?

No books, no pictures, no records, you guess?
Wrong. A comforting trumpet poised in black hands.
Saskia and her cordial little flower.
Joy the spark of gods.
Odysseus stretched on the shelf in life-giving sleep
after the labors of Book Five.
The moralists
with the golden syllables of their names
inscribed on finely tanned spines.
Next to them, the politicians braced their backs.

No way out? But what about the door?
No prospects? The window had other views.
His glasses
lay on the windowsill.
And one fly buzzed---that is, was still alive.

You think at least the note tell us something.
But what if I say there was no note---
and he had so many friends, but all of us fit neatly
inside the empty envelope propped up against a cup. 

x x x x 


 JACK GILBERT

Neglecting the Children

He wonders why he can’t remember the blossoming.

He can taste the brightness of the sour-cherry trees,

but not the clamoring whiteness. He was seven in

the first grade. He remembers two years later when

they were alone in those rich days. He and his sister

in what they called kindergarten.

They played every day on the towering

slate roofs. Barefoot. No one to see them on

those fine days. He remembers the fear

when they shot through the copper-sheeted

tunnels through the house. The fear

and joy and not getting hurt. Being tangled

high up in the mansion’s Bing cherry tree with

its luscious fruit. Remembers

the lavish blooming. Remembers the caves they

built in the cellar, in the masses of clothing and draperies.

Tunnels to each other’s kingdom with their stolen

jewelry and scarves. It was always summer, except for

the night when his father suddenly appeared. Bursting

in with crates of oranges or eggs, laughing in a way

that thrilled them. The snowy night behind him.

Who never brought two pounds of anything. The boy remembers

the drunkenness but not how he felt about it,

except for the Christmas when his father tried to embrace

the tree when he came home. Thousands of lights,

endless tinsel and ornaments. He does

not remember any of it except the crash as his father

went down. The end of something.

INFECTIOUS

I live with the sound my body is,

with the earth which is my daughter. 

And the clean separation which is my wife.

There is no one who can control us

because we live secretly under the ocean

of each day. Except for the music.

The memory of rainy afternoons

in San Francisco when I would play

all the slow sections of Mozart’s

piano concertos. And the sound

of the old Italian peasant who occasionally

came down from the mountain to play

a primitive kind of guttural bagpipe,

and sometimes sing with his broken voice

in the narrow lanes about the moon 

and the grief of lovers. That reedy sound

is stuck in me. Like the Japanese monk

who would come through the graveyard

at night striking two sticks together.

I can’t forget the pure sound I heard once

when a violin string snapped nearby 

in three o’clock’s perfect silence.

But I tell myself I’m safe. I remind myself

of the boy who discovered order in the piano

and ran upstairs to tell his little sister

that they didn’t have to be afraid anymore.

Cherishing What Isn’t

Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this

long life, along with the few others.

And the four I may have loved, or stopped short

of loving. I wander through these woods

making songs of you. Some of regret, some

of longing, and a terrible one of death. 

I carry the privacy of your bodies 

and hears in me. The shameful ardor

and the shameless intimacy the secret kinds

of happiness and the walled-up childhoods. 

I carol loudly of you among tree emptied

of winter and rejoice quietly in summer. 

A score of women if you count love both large

and small, real ones that were brief 

and those that lasted. Gentle love and some

almost like an animal with its prey.

What is left is what’s alive in me. The failing 

of your beauty and its remaining.

You are like countries in which my love 

took place. Like a bell in the trees

that makes your music in each wind that moves.

A music composed of what you have forgotten.

That will end in my ending.


x x x x 


Ai

Conversation

for Robert Lowell

We smile at each other

and I lean back against the wicker couch.   

How does it feel to be dead? I say.

You touch my knees with your blue fingers.   

And when you open your mouth,

a ball of yellow light falls to the floor   

and burns a hole through it.

Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.   

Did you ever, you start,

wear a certain kind of silk dress

and just by accident,

so inconsequential you barely notice it,   

your fingers graze that dress

and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,   

you see it too

and you realize how that image

is simply the extension of another image,   

that your own life

is a chain of words

that one day will snap.

Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,   

and beginning to rise heavenward

in their confirmation dresses,

like white helium balloons,

the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning,

and above all that,

that’s where I’m floating,   

and that’s what it’s like

only ten times clearer,

ten times more horrible.   

Could anyone alive survive it?

The Kid

My sister rubs the doll's face in mud, 

then climbs through the truck window. 

She ignores me as I walk around it, 

hitting the flat tires with an iron rod. 

The old man yells for me to help hitch the team, 

but I keep walking around the truck, hitting harder, 

until my mother calls. 

I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window, 

but it falls short. 

The old man's voice bounces off the air like a ball 

I can't lift my leg over.

I stand beside him, waiting, but he doesn't look up
and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open.
Mother runs toward us. I stand still,
get her across the spine as she bends over him.
I drop the rod and take the rifle from the house.
Roses are red, violets are blue,
one bullet for the black horse, two for the brown.
They're down quick. I spit, my tongue's bloody;
I've bitten it. I laugh, remember the one out back.
I catch her climbing from the truck, shoot.
The doll lands on the ground with her.
I pick it up, rock it in my arms.
Yeah. I'm Jack, Hogarth's son.
I'm nimble, I'm quick.
In the house, I put on the old man's best suit
and his patent leather shoes.
I pack my mother's satin nightgown
and my sister's doll in the suitcase.
Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway.
I'm fourteen. I'm a wind from nowhere.
I can break your heart.