The Giant Book of Poetry

by William H. Roetzheim, Editor

  to attain divine wisdom in this life and the hereafter

  This is the last time the class will meet

  before we disperse to bring this good news to all people

  on earth;

  Nothing. When you are not present

  how could something significant occur?

  Everything. Contained in this classroom

  is a microcosm of human existence

  assembled for you to query and examine and ponder

  This is not the only place such an opportunity has been

  gathered

  but it was one place

  And you weren’t here.

  Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945)

  Electric Elegy1

  Translated from the Polish by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry,

  and C. K. Williams

  Farewell, German radio with your green eye

  and your bulky box,

  together almost composing

  a body and soul. (Your lamps glowed

  with a pink, salmony light, like Bergson’s

  deep self. )

  Through the thick fabric

  of the speaker (my ear glued to you as

  to the lattice of a confessional) Mussolini once whispered,

  Hitler shouted, Stalin calmly explained,

  Bierut hissed, Gomulka held endlessly forth.

  But no one, radio, will accuse you of treason;

  no, your only sin was obedience: absolute,

  tender faithfulness to the megahertz;

  whoever came was welcomed, whoever was sent

  was received.

  Of course I know only

  the songs of Schubert brought you the jade

  of true joy. To Chopin’s waltzes

  your electric heart throbbed delicately

  and firmly and the cloth over the speaker

  pulsated like the breasts of amorous girls

  in old novels.

  Not with the news, though,

  especially not Radio Free Europe or the BBC.

  Then your eye would grow nervous,

  the green pupil widen and shrink

  as though its atropine dose had been altered.

  Mad seagulls lived inside you, and Macbeth.

  At night, forlorn signals found shelter

  in your rooms, sailors cried out for help,

  the young comet cried, losing her head.

  Your old age was announced by a cracked voice,

  then rattles, coughing, and finally blindness

  (your eye faded), and total silence.

  Sleep peacefully, German radio,

  dream Schumann and don’t waken

  when the next dictator-rooster crows.

  Moment1

  translated from the Polish by Renata Gorczynski

  Clear moments are so short.

  There is much more darkness. More

  ocean than firm land. More

  shadow than form.

  Andrei Codrescu (b. 1946)

  Defense of the meek1

  the meek have taken

  jesus to mean

  their turn will come

  jesus was merely

  stating a fact the meek

  will inherit the earth

  there are more of them

  or he may have been mean

  and a Buddhist and meant

  the meek will return

  to the earth over

  and over until they get

  it right sometimes

  translation is on the side

  of the meek but never

  the commentary

  Two fragments from Three Types of Loss, Part 32…

  literal translations lose music while

  poetic translations lose the original

  …

  the day is a literal translation

  the night is a poetic translation

  …

  Larry Levis (1946 – 1996)

  The Poem You Asked For1

  My poem would eat nothing.

  I tried giving it water

  but it said no,

  worrying me.

  Day after day,

  I held it up to the light,

  turning it over,

  but it only pressed its lips

  more tightly together.

  It grew sullen, like a toad

  through with being teased.

  I offered it money,

  my clothes, my car with a full tank.

  But the poem stared at the floor.

  Finally I cupped it in

  my hands, and carried it gently

  out into the soft air, into the

  evening traffic, wondering how

  to end things between us.

  For now it had begun breathing,

  putting on more and

  more hard rings of flesh.

  And the poem demanded the food,

  it drank up all the water,

  beat me and took my money,

  tore the faded clothes

  off my back,

  said Shit,

  and walked slowly away,

  slicking its hair down.

  Said it was going

  over to your place.

  Brian Patten (b. 1946)

  Party Piece1

  He said:

  ’Let’s stay here

  now this place has emptied

  and make gentle pornography with one another,

  while the party goers go out

  and the dawn creeps in,

  like a stranger.

  Let us not hesitate

  over what we know

  or over how cold this place has become,

  but let’s unclip our minds

  and let tumble free

  the mad, mangled crocodile of love!

  So they did,

  there among the woodbines and Guinness stains,

  and later he caught a bus and she a train

  and all there was between them then was rain.

  Maura Stanton (b. 1946)

  Living Apart1

  I leave our house, our town, familiar fields

  below me at take off when I fly to you

  deep in these shadowed mountains. Now at dawn

  I wake to the horse-clop of passing carriages

  as if I’d passed through time as well as space.

  Yesterday we saw an Amish farmer

  bearded and calm, stroking his horse’s mane

  under a flaming maple as he watched

  hang-gliders drifting down from Hyner View.

  We stopped to watch them, too. I was amazed

  to see men falling toward the scarlet treetops

  on out-spread wings. That’s when I grabbed your hand

  to tell myself we were alive and human

  not lost in hell which must resemble this—

  a place where souls from many centuries

  stand side by side, united but unhappy,

  to watch the angels fall from fiery mountains.

  Lorna Goodison (b. 1947)

  Birth Stone2

  The older women wise and tell Anna

  first time baby mother,

  “Hold a stone upon your head and follow

  a straight line go home.”

  For like how Anna was working in the

  field, grassweeder

  right up till the appointed hour

  that the baby was to come.

  Right up till the appointed hour

  when her clear heraldic water

  broke free and washed her down.

  Dry birth for you young mother;

  the distance between the field and home

  come in like the Gobi desert now.

  But your first baby must born abed.

  Put the woman stone on your head

  and walk through no man’s land

  go home. When you walk, the stone

  and not you yet, will bear down.

  Kaylin Haught (b. 1947)

  God
Says Yes to Me1

  I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

  and she said yes

  I asked her if it was okay to be short

  and she said it sure is

  I asked her if I could wear nail polish

  or not wear nail polish

  and she said honey

  she calls me that sometimes

  she said you can do just exactly

  what you want to

  Thanks God I said

  And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph

  my letters

  Sweetcakes God said

  who knows where she picked that up

  what I’m telling you is

  Yes Yes Yes

  Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947)

  Blackberries1

  They left my hands like a printer’s

  or thief’s before a police blotter

  & pulled me into early morning’s

  terrestrial sweetness, so thick

  the damp ground was consecrated

  where they fell among a garland of thorns.

  Although I could smell old lime-covered

  history, at ten I’d still hold out my hands

  & berries fell into them. Eating from one

  & filling a half gallon with the other,

  I ate the mythology & dreamt

  of pies & cobbler, almost

  needful as forgiveness. My bird dog Spot

  eyed blue jays & thrashers. The mud frogs

  in rich blackness, hid from daylight.

  An hour later, beside City Limits Road

  I balanced a gleaming can in each hand,

  limboed between worlds, repeating one dollar.

  The big blue car made me sweat.

  Wintertime crawled out of the windows.

  When I leaned closer I saw the boy

  & girl my age, in the wide back seat

  smirking, & it was then I remembered my fingers

  burning with thorns among berries too ripe to touch.

  Camouflaging the Chimera1

  We tied branches to our helmets.

  We painted our faces & rifles

  with mud from a riverbank,

  blades of grass hung from the pockets

  of our tiger suits. We wove

  ourselves into the terrain,

  content to be a hummingbird’s target.

  We hugged bamboo & leaned

  against a breeze off the river,

  slow-dragging with ghosts

  from Saigon to Bangkok,

  with women left in doorways

  reaching in from America.

  We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.

  In our way station of shadows

  rock apes tried to blow our cover

  throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons

  crawled our spines, changing from day

  to night: green to gold,

  gold to black. But we waited

  till the moon touched metal,

  till something almost broke

  inside us. VC struggled

  with the hillside, like black silk

  wrestling iron through grass.

  We weren’t there. The river ran

  through our bones. Small animals took refuge

  against our bodies; we held our breath,

  ready to spring the L-shaped

  ambush, as a world revolved

  under each man’s eyelid.

  Facing It1

  My black face fades,

  hiding inside the black granite.

  I said I wouldn’t,

  dammit: No tears.

  I’m stone. I’m flesh.

  My clouded reflection eyes me

  like a bird of prey, the profile of night

  slanted against morning. I turn

  this way—the stone lets me go.

  I turn that way—I’m inside

  the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

  again, depending on the light

  to make a difference.

  I go down the 58,022 names,

  half-expecting to find

  my own in letters like smoke.

  I touch the name Andrew Johnson;

  I see the booby trap’s white flash.

  Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse

  but when she walks away

  the names stay on the wall.

  Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s

  wings cutting across my stare.

  The sky. A plane in the sky.

  A white vet’s image floats

  closer to me, then his pale eyes

  look through mine. I’m a window.

  He’s lost his right arm

  inside the stone. In the black mirror

  a woman’s trying to erase names:

  no, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

  Ode to the Maggot1

  Brother of the blowfly

  and godhead, you work magic

  over battlefields,

  in slabs of bad pork

  and flophouses. Yes, you

  go to the root of all things.

  You are sound & mathematical.

  Jesus, Christ, you’re merciless

  with the truth. Ontological & lustrous,

  you cast spells on beggars & kings

  behind the stone door of Caesar’s tomb

  or split trench in a field of ragweed.

  No decree or creed can outlaw you

  as you take every living thing apart. Little

  master of earth, no one gets to heaven

  without going through you first.

  Heather McHugh (b. 1948)

  What He thought2

  We were supposed to do a job in Italy

  and, full of our feeling for

  ourselves (our sense of being

  Poets from America) we went

  from Rome to Fano, met

  the Mayor, mulled a couple

  matters over. The Italian literati seemed

  bewildered by the language of America: they asked us

  what does “flat drink” mean? and the mysterious

  “cheap date” (no explanation lessened

  this one’s mystery). Among Italian writers we

  could recognize our counterparts: the academic,

  the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,

  the brazen and the glib. And there was one

  administrator (The Conservative), in suit

  of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide

  with measured pace and uninflected tone

  narrated sights and histories

  the hired van hauled us past.

  Of all he was most politic—

  and least poetic—so

  it seemed. Our last

  few days in Rome

  I found a book of poems this

  unprepossessing one had written: it was there

  in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)

  where it must have been abandoned by

  the German visitor (was there a bus of them? ) to whom

  he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn’t

  read Italian either, so I put the book

  back in the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

  were due to leave

  tomorrow. For our parting evening then

  our host chose something in a family restaurant,

  and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,

  sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make

  our mark, one of us asked

  “What’s poetry?

  Is it the fruits and vegetables

  and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

  or the statue there?” Because I was

  the glib one, I identified the answer

  instantly, I didn’t have to think—“The truth

  is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that

  was easy. That was easiest

  to say. What followed taught me something

&nb
sp; about difficulty,

  for our underestimated host spoke out

  all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

  The statue represents

  Giordano Bruno, brought

  to be burned in the public square

  because of his offence against authority,

  which was to say

  the Church. His crime was his belief

  the universe does not revolve around

  the human being: God is no

  fixed point or central government

  but rather is poured in waves, through

  all things: all things

  move. “If God is not the soul itself,

  he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world.” Such was

  his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

  they feared he might incite the crowd (the man

  was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors

  placed upon his face

  an iron mask

  in which he could not speak.

  That is how they burned him.

  That is how he died,

  without a word,

  in front of everyone. And poetry—

  (we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to

  the man in gray; he went on softly)—poetry

  is what he thought, but did not say.

  Agha Shahid Ali (1949 – 2001)

  The Dacca Gauzes1

  … for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca

  gauzes.

  —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Those transparent Dacca gauzes

  known as woven air, running

  water, evening dew:

  a dead art now, dead over

  a hundred years. “No one

  now knows,” my grandmother says,

  “what it was to wear

  or touch that cloth.” She wore

  it once, an heirloom sari from

  her mother’s dowry, proved

  genuine when it was pulled, all

  six yards, through a ring.

  Years later when it tore,

  many handkerchiefs embroidered

  with gold-thread paisleys

  were distributed among

  the nieces and. daughters-in-law.