Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Thread by Dan Chiasson


Thread
 
I lack the rigor of a lightning bolt,
the weight of an anchor. I am
frayed where it would be highly useful—
and this I feel perpetually—to make a point.  
 
I think if I can concentrate I might turn sharp.
Only, I don't know how to concentrate—
I know only the look of someone concentrating,
indistinguishable from nearsightedness. 
 
It is hard for you to be near me,
my silly intensity shuffling
all the insignia of interiority.
Knowing me never made anyone a needle.


Sunday, August 18, 2019

Come Closer and Listen by Charles Simić


Come Closer and Listen
 
I was born—don’t know the hour—
Slapped on the ass
And handed over crying
To someone many years dead
In a country no longer on the map,
 
Where like a leaf on a tree,
The fair weather gone,
I twirled around and fell to the ground
With barely a sound
For the wind to carry me away
 
Blessed or cursed—who is to say?
I no longer fret about it,
Since I’ve heard people talk
Of a blind lady called Justice
Eager to hear everyone’s troubles,
But don’t know where to find her
 
And ask her the reason
The world treats me some days well,
Some days ill. Still, I’d never
Be the first to blame her,
Blind as she is, poor thing,
She does the best she can.


Saturday, August 17, 2019

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz by Matthew Olzmann


Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz
 
You whom I could not save,
Listen to me. 
 
Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
 
for children walking to school? 
Those same children
 
also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing
 
on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs
 
as they eat at McDonalds.
They shouldn’t have to stop
 
to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might
 
reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,
 
I had one student
who opened a door and died. 
 
It was the front
door to his house, but
 
it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written
 
any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old
 
and was aiming
at someone else. But
 
a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn't
 
distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,
 
and how was the bullet
supposed to know this
 
child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment
 
because his friend
was outside and screaming
 
for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who
 
opened a door and died? 
That’s wrong.
 
There were many. 
The classroom of grief
 
had far more seats
than the classroom for math
 
though every student
in the classroom for math
 
could count the names
of the dead. 
 
A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,
 
nor could the gun, because
“guns don't kill people,” they don't
 
have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose
 
or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t
 
have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how
 
we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be,
 
and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside
 
each of them. Today,
there’s another
 
shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school,
 
a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world
 
is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save,
 
you may open a door
 
and enter a meadow, or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be
 
mourned, then buried
in rhetoric. 
 
There will be
monuments of legislation,
 
little flowers made
from red tape. 

What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close
 
like a door above you. 
What should we do?
 
And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.


Friday, August 16, 2019

Steering Wheel by Jorie Graham


Steering Wheel
 
In the rear-view mirror I saw the veil of leaves
suctioned up by a change in current
and how they stayed up, for the allotted time,
in absolute fidelity to the force behind,
magenta, hovering, a thing that happens,
slowly upswirling above the driveway
I was preparing to back clear out of—
and three young pine trees at the end of that view
as if aghast with bristling stillness—
and the soft red updraft without hesitation
aswirl in the prickly enclosing midst—
and on the ratio I bent to press on,
a section with rising strings plugging in,
crisp with distinctions, of the earlier order.
Oh but I haven’t gotten it right.
You couldn’t say that it was matter.
I couldn’t say that it was sadness.
Then a hat from someone down the block
blown off, rolling—tossing—across the empty macadam,
an open mouth, with no face round it,
O and O and O and O—
“we have to regain the moral pleasure
of experiencing the distance between subject and object,”
—me now slowly backing up
the dusty driveway into the law
composed of updraft, downdraft, weight of these dried
                                                                    midwinter leaves,
light figured-in too, I’m sure, the weight of light,
and angle of vision, dust, gravity, solitude,
and the part of the law which is the world’s waiting,
and the part of the law which is my waiting,
and then the part which is my impatience—now; now?
 
though there are, there really are,
things in the world, you must believe me.


Thursday, August 15, 2019

The Poet Goes About Her Business by Linda Gregg


The Poet Goes About Her Business
 
Michele has become another dead little girl. An easy poem.
Instant Praxitelean. Instant seventy-five year old photograph
of my grandmother when she was a young woman with shadows
I imagine were blue around her eyes. The beauty of it.
Such guarded sweetness. What a greed of bruised gardenias.
Oh Christ, whose name rips silk, I have seen raw cypresses
so dark the mind comes to them without color.
Dark on the Greek hillside. Dark, volcanic, dry and stone.
Where the oldest women of the world are standing dressed in black
up in the branches of fig trees in the gorge
knocking with as much quickness as their weakness will allow.
Weakness which my heart must not confuse with tenderness.
And on the other side of the island a woman
walks up the path with a burden of leaves on her head,
guiding the goats with sounds she makes up,
and then makes up again. The other darkness is easy:
the men in the dreams who come in together to me with knives.
There are so many traps, and many look courageous.
The body goes into such raptures of obedience.
But the huge stones on the desert resemble
nobody’s mother. I remember the snake.
After its skin had been cut away, and it was dropped
it started to move across the clearing.
Making its beautiful waving motion.
It was all meat and bone. Pretty soon it was covered with dust.
It seemed to know exactly where it wanted to go.
Toward any dark trees.