when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Miller Williams (b. 1930)
Listen2
I threw a snowball across the backyard.
My dog ran after it to bring it back.
It broke as it fell, scattering snow over snow.
She stood confused, seeing and smelling nothing.
She searched in widening circles until I called her.
She looked at me and said as clearly in silence
as if she had spoken,
I know it’s here, I’ll find it,
went back to the center and started the circles again.
I called her two more times before she came
slowly, stopping once to look back.
That was this morning. I’m sure that she’s forgotten.
I’ve had some trouble putting it out of my mind.
Etheridge Knight (1931 – 1991)
The Idea of Ancestry1
Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grandfathers
(both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.
I have at one time or another been in love with my mother, 1
grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum), and 5 cousins.
I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece (she sends me letters in large
block print,
and her picture is the only one that smiles at me).
I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews, and 1
uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took off and caught a
freight (they say). He’s discussed each year when the family has a
reunion, he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space. My
father’s mother, who is 93 and who keeps the Family Bible with
everbyody’s birth dates (and death dates) in it, always mentions him.
There is no place in her Bible for “whereabouts unknown.”
The Warden Said to Me the Other Day1
The warden said to me the other day
(innocently, I think), “Say, Etheridge,
why come the black boys don’t run off
like the white boys do?”
I lowered my jaw and scratched my head
and said (innocently, I think), “Well, suh,
I ain’t for sure, but I reckon it’s cause
we ain’t got no wheres to run to.”
Tanikawa Shuntaro (b. 1931)
Translation by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura
A Rudimentary Explanation of an Ideal Poem2
Called by people a poet,
I usually stay completely away from
what is called poetry,
and this not just when I’m eating,
reading, or chattering idly,
but even when I’m thinking about poetry.
Poetry strikes something like lightning at night.
For that split second, I see, hear and smell,
through a crack in consciousness, the world that expands beyond
Unlike consciousness, poetry shines brightly,
and unlike a dream, it admits of no interpretation.
Though written with words,
poetry is not words themselves.
Sometimes I think it shameful to turn it into words.
At such times I just quietly let it go,
and then I feel I have lost something.
In a world lighted up by poetic lightning,
where everything has its place,
I feel completely relaxed
(perhaps for a thousandth of a second).
It’s as though I have become a single silent wildflower.
But of course the moment I have written this,
I’m far removed from poetry,
though called a poet.
from With Silence My Companion1
I know how worthless this poem will be
under the scrutiny of daylight
and yet I cannot now disown my words.
While others fill their baskets at market
I drink water from a cup on the table,
utterly idle.
I see through the trees, by the distant pool,
a white statue,
its genitals exposed.
It is I.
I am immersed
in the past
and have become a block of dumb stone
and not the Orpheus I hoped to be.
From My Father’s Death1
…
Death, coming in his sleep,
swept away with its gentle, quick hands
all the details of his life.
But there was no end of subjects for our idle talk,
while we talked away the brief hours of the night,
before the flowers withered on the altar.
Death is unknowable
and, being unknowable, lacks details,
which makes it resemble poetry.
Both death and poetry tend to sum up life,
but survivors enjoy the increasingly mysterious details
more than the summing up of life.
The Naif2
My toe tips look unusually far away.
Five toes lie coldly together
like five people strangers to one another.
There’s a telephone beside my bed
connected to the world,
but there’s no one I want to talk to.
Since I grew self-conscious my life has been
nothing but business,
business.
Neither of my parents taught me how to make small talk.
I’ve relied on versification
as my only guide for forty years.
Strange, but I feel most comfortable saying, “A poet,”
when people ask who I am.
Was I a poet when I abandoned that woman?
Am I, eating my favorite baked sweet potato, a poet?
Am I, grown bald, a poet?
There are countless middle-aged men of such kind
who are not poets
I’m but a naïve child
that has just chased the butterflies of beautiful words.
This child’s soul, approaching one-hundred,
remains innocent,
unaware that he has hurt people.
Poetry is
ridiculous.
Adrian Mitchell (b. 1932)
A Puppy Called Puberty1
It was like keeping a puppy in your underpants
a secret puppy you weren’t allowed to show to anyone
not even your best friend or your worst enemy.
you wanted to pat him, stroke him, cuddle him
all the time you weren’t supposed to touch him.
He only slept for five minutes at a time
then he’d suddenly perk up his head
in the middle of school medical inspection
and always on bus rides.
So you had to climb down from the upper d
eck
all bent double to smuggle the puppy off the bus
without the buxom conductress spotting
your wicked and ticketless stowaway.
Jumping up, wet-nosed, eagerly wagging—
he only stopped being a nuisance
when you were alone together
pretending to be doing your homework
but really gazing at each other
through hot and lazy daydreams.
Of those beautiful schoolgirls on the bus
with kittens bouncing in their sweaters.
Heberto Padilla (1932 – 2000)
Landscapes1
Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid and Andrew Hurley
You can see them everywhere in Cuba.
Green or red or yellow, flaking off from the water
and the sun, true landscapes of these times
of war.
The wind tugs at the Coca-Cola signs.
The clocks courtesy of Canada Dry are stopped
at the old time.
The neon signs, broken, crackle and splutter in the rain.
Esso’s is something like this
S O S
and above there are some crude letters
reading PATRIA O MUERTE.
Alden Nowlan (1933 – 1983)
An Exchange of Gifts2
As long as you read this poem
I will be writing it.
I am writing it here and now
before your eyes,
although you can’t see me.
Perhaps you’ll dismiss this
as a verbal trick,
the joke is you’re wrong;
the real trick
is your pretending
this is something
fixed and solid,
external to us both.
I tell you better:
I will keep on
writing this poem for you
even after I’m dead.
It’s Good To Be Here1
I’m in trouble, she said
to him. That was the first
time in history that anyone
had ever spoken of me.
It was 1932 when she
was just fourteen years old
and men like him
worked all day for
one stinking dollar.
There’s quinine, she said.
That’s bullshit, he told her.
Then she cried and then
for a long time neither of them
said anything at all and then
their voices kept rising until
they were screaming at each other
and then there was another long silence and then
they began to talk very quietly and at last he said
well, I guess we’ll just have to make the best of it.
While I lay curled up,
my heart beating,
in the darkness inside her.
Weakness2
Old mare whose eyes
are like cracked marbles,
drools blood in her mash,
shivers in her jute blanket.
My father hates weakness worse than hail;
in the morning
without haste
he will shoot her in the ear, once,
shovel her under in the north pasture.
Tonight
leaving the stables,
he stands his lantern on an over-turned water pail,
turns,
cursing her for a bad bargain,
and spreads his coat
carefully over her sick shoulders.
Richard Shelton (b. 1933)
The Bus to Veracruz1
The mail is slow here. If I died, I wouldn’t find out about it for a long time. Perhaps I am dead already. At any rate, I am living in the wrong tense of a foreign language and have almost no verbs and only a few nouns to prove I exist. When I need a word, I fumble among the nouns and find one, but so many are similar in size and color. I am apt to come up with caballo instead of caballero, or carne instead of casa. When that happens, I become confused and drop the words. They roll across the tile floor in all directions. Then I get down on my hands and knees and crawl through a forest of legs, reaching under tables and chairs to retrieve them. But I am no longer embarrassed about crawling around on the floor in public places. I have come to realize that I am invisible most of the time and have been since I crossed the border.
All the floors are tile. All the tiles are mottled with the same disquieting pattern in one of three muddy colors—shades of yellow, purple, or green. They make me think of dried vomit, desiccated liver, and scum on a pond. The floor of my room is dried vomit with a border of scum on a pond, and like most of the floors it has several tiles missing, which is a great blessing to me. These lacunae are oases in the desert where I can rest my eyes. The nausea from which I suffer so much of the time is not caused by the food or water, but by the floors. I know this because when I sit in the town square, which is covered with concrete of no particular color, the nausea subsides.
The town is small, although larger than it would seem to a visitor—if there were any visitor—and remote. It has no landing field for even small planes, and the nearest railroad is almost one hundred kilometers to the east. The only bus goes to Veracruz. Often I stop at the bus terminal to ask about the bus to Veracruz. The floor of the bus terminal is scum on a pond with a border of desiccated liver, but there are many tiles missing. That terminal is always deserted except for Rafael and Esteban, sometimes sitting on the bench inside, sometimes lounging just outside the door. They are young, barefoot, and incredibly handsome. I buy them Cocas from the machine, and we have learned to communicate in our fashion. When I am with them, I am glad to be invisible, glad that they never look directly at me. I could not bear the soft velvet and vulnerability of those magnificent eyes.
“When does the bus leave for Veracruz? “ I ask them. I have practiced this many times and am sure I have the right tense. But the words rise to the ceiling, burst, and fall as confetti around us. A few pieces catch in their dark hair and reflect the light like jewels. Rafael rubs his foot on the floor. Esteban stares out the filthy window. Are they sad, I wonder, because they believe there is no bus to Veracruz or because they don’t know when it leaves?
“Is there a bus to Veracruz?” Suddenly they are happy again. Their hands fly like vivacious birds. “Si, hay! Por supeusto, Senor! Es verdad!” they believe, truly, in the bus to Veracruz. Again I ask them when it leaves. Silence and sadness. Rafael studies one of the tiles on the floor as if it contains the answer. Esteban turns back to the window. I buy them Cocas from the machine and go away.
Once a week I stop at the post office to get my mail from the ancient woman in the metal cage, and each week I receive one letter. Actually, the letters are not mine, and the ancient woman has probably known this for a long time, but we never speak of it and she continues to hand me the letters, smiling and nodding in her coquettish way, eager to please me. Her hair is braided with colored ribbons, and her large silver earrings jingle when she bobs her head, which she does with great enthusiasm when I appear. I could not estimate how old she is. Perhaps even she has forgotten. But she must have been a great beauty at one time. Now she sits all day in the metal cage in the post office, a friendly apparition whose bright red lipstick is all the more startling because she has no teeth.
The first time I entered the post office, it was merely on an impulse to please her. I was expecting no mail, since no one knew where I was. But each time I passed, I had seen her through the window, seated in her metal cage with no customers to break the monotony. She always smiled and nodded at me through the window, eager for any diversion. Finally one day I went in on the pretext of calling for my mail, although I knew there would be none. To avoid the confusion which my accent always causes, I wrote my name on a slip of paper and presented it to her. Her tiny hands darted among the pigeonholes, and to my astonishment
she presented me with a letter which was addressed to me in care of general delivery. She was so delighted with her success that I simply took the letter and went away, unwilling to disillusion her.
As soon as I opened the letter, the mystery was solved. My name is fairly common. The letter was intended for someone else with the same name. It was written on blue paper, in flawless Palmer Method script, and signed by a woman. It was undated and there was no return address. But it was in English, and I read it shamelessly, savoring each phrase. I rationalized by convincing myself that the mail was so slow the man to whom the letter had been written was probably already dead and could not object to my reading his mail. But I knew before I finished the letter that I would return to the post office later on the chance there might be others. She loved him. She thought he was still alive.
Since then I have received one letter each week, to the enormous delight of my ancient friend in the post office. I take the letters home and steam them open, careful to leave no marks on the delicate paper. They are always from the same woman, and I feel by now that I know her. Sometimes I dream about her, as if she were someone I knew in the past. She is blond and slender, no longer young but far from old. I can see her long, graceful fingers holding the pen as she writes, and sometimes she reaches up to brush a strand of hair away from her face. Even that slight gesture has the eloquence of a blessing.
When I have read each letter until I can remember it word for word, I reseal it. Then, after dark, I take it back to the post office by a circuitous route, avoiding anyone who might be on the street at that hour. The post office is always open, but the metal cage is closed and the ancient one is gone for the night. I drop the letter into the dead letter box and hurry away.
At first I had no curiosity about what happened to the letters after they left my hands. Then I began to wonder if they were destroyed or sent to some central office where, in an attempt to locate the sender and return them, someone might discover that they had been opened. Still later, the idea that some nameless official in a distant city might be reading them because almost unbearable to me. It was more and more difficult to remember that they were not my letters. I could not bear to think of anyone else reading her words, sensing her hesitations and tenderness. At last I decided to find out.
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 39
