Poem of the Day XVI

September Twelfth, 2001
by X. J. Kennedy from The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2001

Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands,

aren't us. I wake beside you,
stretch, scratch, taste the air,
the incredible joy of coffee
and the morning light.

Alive, we open eyelids
on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting
in a boiling pot.

© 2002 X. J. Kennedy

Poem of the Day XV

Nirvana
by Charles Bukowski from Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader

not much chance,
completely cut loose from
purpose,
he was a young man
riding a bus
through North Carolina
on the way to somewhere
and it began to snow
and the bus stopped
at a little cafe
in the hills
and the passengers
entered.
he sat at the counter
with the others,
he ordered and the
food arrived.
the meal was
particularly
good
and the
coffee.
the waitress was
unlike the women
he had
known.
she was unaffected,
there was a natural
humor which came
from her.
the fry cook said
crazy things.
the dishwasher
in back,
laughed, a good
clean
pleasant
laugh.
the young man watched
the snow through the
windows.
he wanted to stay
in that cafe
forever.
the curious feelings
wam through him
that everything
was
beautiful
there,
that it would always
stay beautiful
there.
then the bus driver
told the passengers
that it was time
to board.
the young man
thought, I'll just sit
here, I'll just stay
here.
but then
he rose and followed
the others into the
bus.
he found his seat
and looked at the cafe
through the bus
window.
then the bus moved
off, down a curve,
downward, out of
the hills.
the young man
looked straight
forward.
he heard the other
passengers
speaking
of other things,
or they were
reading
or
attempting to
sleep.
they had not
noticed
the
magic.
the young man
put his head to
one side,
closed his
eyes,
pretended to
sleep.
there was nothing
else to do-
just to listen to the
sound of the
engine,
the sound of the
tires
in the
snow.

© Charles Bukowski

Poem of the Day XIV

The Invention of Fractions
by Jessica Goodfellow from A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland

God himself made the whole numbers: everything else
is the work of man.

—Leopold Kronnecker

God created the whole numbers:
the first born, the seventh seal,
Ten Commandments etched in stone,
the Twelve Tribes of Israel —
Ten we've already lost —
forty days and forty nights,
Saul's ten thousand and David's ten thousand.
'Be of one heart and one mind' —
the whole numbers, the counting numbers.

It took humankind to need less than this;
to invent fractions, percentages, decimals.
Only humankind could need the concepts
of splintering and dividing,
of things lost or broken,
of settling for the part instead of the whole.

Only humankind could find the whole numbers,
infinite as they are, to be wanting;
though given a limitless supply,
we still had no way
to measure what we keep
in our many-chambered hearts.

© Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series

Poem of the Day XIII

Thanks, Robert Frost
by David Ray from Music of Time: Selected and New Poems

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

© The Backwaters Press

Poem of the Day XII

from John Donne's Divine meditations

15
Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blessed,
And still begetting, (for he ne'er begun)
Hath deigned to choose thee by adoption,
Coheir to' his glory, 'and Sabbath's endless rest;
And as a robbed man, which by search doth find
His stol'n stuff sold, must lose or buy it again:
The Son of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom he had made, and Satan stol'n, to unbind.
'Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

~

"But the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.'" ~Luke 2:10-11

"Glory to God in the highest,

and on earth peace to men on

whom his favor rests."

~

Merry Christmas!

Poem of the Day XI

Minnesota Thanksgiving
by John Berryman from Collected Poems: 1937 to 1971

For that free Grace bringing us past great risks
& thro' great griefs surviving to this feast
sober & still, with the children unborn and born,
among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt
and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude.

We praise our ancestors who delivered us here
within warm walls all safe, aware of music,
likely toward ample & attractive meat
with whatever accompaniment
Kate in her kind ingenuity has seen fit to devise,

and we hope--across the most strange year to come--
continually to do them and You not sufficient honour
but such as we become able to devise
out of decent or joyful conscience & thanksgiving.
Yippee!
Bless then, as Thou wilt, this wilderness board.

© 1989 Kate Donahue Berryman

Poem of the Day X

Dawn Revisted
by Rita Dove from On the Bus with Rosa Parks

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits--
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.

© 1999 by Rita Dove

Poem of the Day IX

Riveted
by Robyn Sarah from A Day's Grace

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end--riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

© The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc

Poem of the Day VIII

Autumn
by Rainer Maria Rilke from The Book of Images

The leaves are falling, falling as from far,
as though above were withering farthest gardens;
they fall with a denying attitude.

And night by night, down into solitude,
the heavy earth falls far from every star.

We are all falling. This hand's falling too--
all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

And yet there's One whose gently-holding hands
this universal falling can't fall through.

© 1977 by New Directions Publishing

Poem of the Day VII

Illumination
by R.T. Smith from Split the Lark

As if some monk bored
in the cold scriptorium
had let his quill

wander from the morning
Gospel, two tendrils
of wisteria

have scrolled
their green fervour
into the weave of a wicker

deck chair to whisper
with each spiral,
every sweet leaf

and dew sparkle,
Brother, come
with us, come home.

© RT Smith, 1999

Poem of the Day VI

Dostoevsky
by Charles Bukowski from Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems

against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it woulnd't have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.

© 1997 by Linda Lee Bukowski

A Poem for September 11

For the Falling Man
by Annie Farnsworth from Bodies of Water, Bodies of Light

I see you again and again
tumbling out of the sky,
in your slate-grey suit and pressed white shirt.
At first I thought you were debris
from the explosion, maybe gray plaster wall
or fuselage but then I realized
that people were leaping.
I know who you are, I know
there's more to you than just this image
on the news, this ragdoll plummeting—
I know you were someone's lover, husband, daddy.
Last night you read stories
to your children, tucked them in, then curled into sleep
next to your wife. Perhaps there was small
sleepy talk of the future. Then,
before your morning coffee had cooled
you'd come to this; a choice between fire
or falling.
How feeble these words, billowing
in this aftermath, how ineffectual
this utterance of sorrow. We can see plainly
it's hopeless, even as the words trail from our mouths
—but we can't help ourselves—how I wish
we could trade them for something
that could really have caught you.

© Annie Farnsworth

Poem of the Day V

Happiness
by Raymond Carver from All of Us: the Collected Poems

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
they wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
they are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

© 1985 by Raymond Carver

Poem of the Day IV

Things
Lisel Mueller from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm and eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

© Louisiana State University Press

Poem of the Day III

I Go Back to the House for a Book
Billy Collins from Picnic, Lightning

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.

He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

© University of Pittsburgh Press

Poem of the Day II

Kansas, 1973
~Floyd Skloot from The End of Dreams

My daughter nestled in a plastic seat
is nodding beside me as though in full
agreement with the logic of her dream.
I am glad for her sake the road is straight.
But the dark shimmer of a summer road
where hope and disappointment repeat
themselves all across Kansas like a dull
chorus makes the westward journey seem
itself a dream. She breathes in one great
gulp, taking deep the blazing air, and stops
my heart until she sighs the breath away.
The sun is stuck directly overhead.

I thought it would never end. The drive,
the heat, my child beside me, the bright day
itself, that fathering time in my life.
We were going nowhere and never would,
as in a dream, or in the space between
time and memory. I saw nothing but sky
beyond the horizon of still treetops
and nothing changing down the road ahead.

© Louisiana State University Press

Poem of the Day I

Thoreau and the Crickets
~David Wagoner

He found them bedded in ice, in the frozen puddles
Among reeds and clumps of sedges in the marsh:
House and field crickets lying near the surface
On their sides or upside down, their brittle hind legs
Cocked as if to jump as free as fiddlers
In the final rain before winter. The ice
Had clarified the brown and green shades
Of their chitin and magnified
The thickened radiant veins of the forewings
On which they'd made their music
Those nights when he'd listened, half asleep,
To their creaking, their wise old saws
That told him over and over they were with him
And of him down to the vibrant depths
Of his eardrums and canals and the foundation
Of his house on earth. With his heels and hands
he broke the puddles around them carefully,
Cracking them loose and filling his coat pockets
With fragments like clear glass, holding them hard
As fossils in shale. he would take them home
And learn from them, examine their lost lives
With scales and ruler, tweezers and microscope
He would bring them back to order and pay homage
To all they'd been and left undone. He strode
Briskly and happily through the crusted lanes
And slipped through the paths of town, delighted
To be alive all winter, to be ready
And able to warm their spirits with his own,
But on his doorstep, reaching into his coat,
he lifted out, dripping with snow-melt,
Two hands full of wriggling, resurrected crickets
Crawling over each other, waving and flexing
Antennae and stiff legs to search his palms
For another springtime. For a while, he held them
And watched them wriggle drunkenly
And scrabble in half-death for what they imagined
He had to give, then put them gently
Again into his pockets and carried them
Back through the snow and ice to their cold beds.

from Ploughshares