Friday, December 21, 2018

Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman by Anne Sexton


Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman
 
My daughter, at eleven
(almost twelve), is like a garden.
 
Oh, darling! Born in that sweet birthday suit
and having owned it and known it for so long,
now you must watch high noon enter –
noon, that ghost hour. 
Oh, funny little girl – this one under a blueberry sky,
this one! How can I say that I've known
just what you know and just where you are?
 
It's not a strange place, this odd home
where your face sits in my hand
so full of distance,
so full of its immediate fever.
The summer has seized you,
as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw
lemons as large as your desk-side globe –
that miniature map of the world –
and I could mention, too,
the market stalls of mushrooms
and garlic buds all engorged.
Or I think even of the orchard next door,
where the berries are done
and the apples are beginning to swell.
And once, with our first backyard,
I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans
we couldn't eat.
 
Oh, little girl,
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way.
You are too many to eat.
 
I hear
as in a dream
the conversation of the old wives
speaking of womanhood.
I remember that I heard nothing myself.
I was alone.
I waited like a target.
 
Let high noon enter –
the hour of the ghosts.
Once the Romans believed
that noon was the ghost hour,
and I can believe it, too,
under that startling sun,
and someday they will come to you,
someday, men bare to the waist, young Romans
at noon where they belong,
with ladders and hammers
while no one sleeps.
 
But before they enter
I will have said,
Your bones are lovely,
and before their strange hands
there was always this hand that formed.
 
Oh, darling, let your body in,
let it tie you in,
in comfort.
What I want to say, Linda,
is that women are born twice.
 
If I could have watched you grow
as a magical mother might,
if I could have seen through my magical transparent belly,
there would have been such a ripening within:
your embryo,
the seed taking on its own,
life clapping the bedpost,
bones from the pond,
thumbs and two mysterious eyes,
the awfully human head,
the heart jumping like a puppy,
the important lungs,
the becoming –
while it becomes! 
as it does now,
a world of its own,
a delicate place.
 
I say hello
to such shakes and knockings and high jinks,
such music, such sprouts,
such dancing-mad-bears of music,
such necessary sugar,
such goings-on!
 
Oh, little girl,
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way.
You are too many to eat.
 
What I want to say, Linda,
is that there is nothing in your body that lies.
All that is new is telling the truth.
I'm here, that somebody else,
an old tree in the background.
 
Darling,
stand still at your door,
sure of yourself, a white stone, a good stone –
as exceptional as laughter
you will strike fire,
that new thing!


Melancholia by Jenny Xie


Melancholia
 
The black dog approaches?
I pry open the crooked jaw.
 
Inside?
A heady odor, elemental.
 
And then?
I spin through my life again.
 
How so?
Slow and fast, fast and slow.
 
What follows?
Time, the oil of it.
 
What direction?
Solitude throws me off the scent.
 
And what lies ahead?
Even the future recoils, long as it is.
 
What points the finger?
All of my eye's mistakes.
 
And what were they?
Level.


Wednesday, December 19, 2018

I am reminded via email to resubmit my preferences for the schedule by Chen Chen


I am reminded via email to resubmit my preferences for the schedule
 
But really
I would prefer
to sit, drink water,
reread some Russians
a while longer 
—a luxury
perhaps, but why
should I, anyone,
call it that, why
should reading
what I want,
in a well-hydrated fashion,
always be what I’m
planning to finally
do, like hiking      
or biking, & now
that I think of it, reading
should make me, anyone,
breathe harder, then
easier, reach for cold,
cold water, & I
prefer my reading
that way, I prefer
Ivan Turgenev,
who makes me work for
not quite pleasure
no, some truer 
sweatier thing,
Turgenev,
who is just now, 
in my small room 
in West Texas, 
getting to the good part,
the very Russian part,
the last few pages   
of “The Singers” 
when the story
should be over,
Yakov the Turk
has sung with fervor,
meaning true
Russian spirit,
meaning he’s won
a kind of 19th century
Idol in the village
tavern, The End, but
Turgenev goes
on, the narrator walks
out, down a hill,
into a dark
enveloping mist, 
& he hears
from misty far away
some little boy 
calling out for
Antropka!
calling hoarsely,
darkly, 
Antropka-a-a!
then opens my breath
that voice
& all Monday-Wednesday-Fridays
all Tuesday-Thursdays    
are gone
I have arrived
in the village of
no day   none
& I am sitting
with the villagers  
who are each at once
young   old  
who have the coldest
water to give me  
& songs
I think I have sung   before
they sing
their underground
tree-root syllables
they give me silences
from their long
long   hair

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

The Beautiful Changes by Richard Wilbur


The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies 
On water; it glides 
So from the walker, it turns 
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes. 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   
As a mantis, arranged 
On a green leaf, grows 
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   
In such kind ways,   
Wishing ever to sunder 
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.


Monday, December 17, 2018

Simon the Good by Joyelle McSweeney


Simon the Good
 
I’m the matron-king of hell
In yoga pants and a disused bra for a laurel
& shatter the scene inside your simmering year
 
Like a ransom scene filmed through shattered transom
I smear in my glamour
I make as if
to justify the ways of God to man
That’s my ticket in
That’s why God lets me speak here
Crystostoma’d
on his couch
Even though I’m derived from Hell
Hellish Helenish Hellenic  
 
I’m the hanged man
in this version
pegged up
in mine pegged jeans
by mine ancles, an inversion
mine manacles are monocoles
I spit out the key
and squinny through the keyhole
back at the unquittable world  
 
In my rainment
of gummy sunglasses
and crows wings for epaulets
I delicately squawk from the edges of things
balance unsteadily on the bust of the goddess  
 
squawk:
Aeschelus Euphorion Aeschelus Euphorion  
 
&: I’m going to tell you something so bad that when you hear it
        you’re gonna know it’s true.  
 
Like all the worst stories
It comes from the heart
& it goes there too.  
 
Back here in St. Joseph County
a struck duck flies crown first into the asphalt and is stuck there
with its brains for adhesive
like someone licked the pavement and sealed it
a postalette
with its cartoon feet in the air and its Jeff Koon wings
that’s roadkill for you: realer than real
and the cars mill by with their wheels in reverse
heavy as chariots
in a dealership commercial
and I am walking my dog by the river
a matron from hell  
 
look on me and despise
I am like the river:
thick as beer and with a sudsy crown
there polyethylene bags drape the banks like herons
and a plastic jug rides a current with something like the determination
that creases mine own brow
as I attempt to burn my lunch off
the determination of garbage
riding for its drain
hey-nonny it’s spring
and everything wears a crown a
s it rides its thick doom to its noplace  
 
gently brushed
by pollen
by the wings of hymenoptera
like a helicoptera
performing its opera
all above Indiana
bearing the babes away
from their births to their berths
in the NICU in Indie-un-apple-us
Unapple us, moron God,
You’ve turned me Deophobic
the greasy tracks you leave all over the internet
the slicey DNA
in the scramblechondria
the torn jeans
panicked like space invaders
in an arcane video game
oh spittle-pink blossom
the tree don’t need nomore
shook down to slick the pavement like a payslip
you disused killer app  
 
each thought strikes my brain
like the spirals in a ham
pink pink for easter
sliced by something machinic
each thought zeros in
flies hapless and demented
festooned like a lawn dart
finds its bit of eye
spills its champagne
split of pain