The Giant Book of Poetry
Page 48
Those too now lost.
In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,
and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,
my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only
in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.
One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.
Mark Halliday (b. 1949)
Get It Again1
In 1978 I write something about how
happiness and sorrow are intertwined
and I feel good, insightful, and it seems
this reflects some healthy growth of spirit,
some deep maturation—then
I leaf through an eleven-year-old notebook
and spot some paragraphs I wrote in 1967
on Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” which
seem to say some of it better, or
almost better, or as well though differently—
and the waves roll out, and the waves roll in.
In 1972 I often ate rye toast with peanut butter,
the toast on a blue saucer beside my typewriter,
I took huge bites
between paragraphs about love and change;
today it’s a green saucer, cream cheese, French bread,
but the motions are the same and in a month or so
when the air is colder I’ll be back to my autumn snack,
rye toast with peanut butter, an all-star since ’72 …
I turned around on sidewalks
to stare at some woman’s asses
plenty of times in the sixties and
what do you think will be different in the eighties?
In 1970, mourning an ended love, I listened
to a sailor’s song with a timeless refrain,
and felt better—that taste of transcendence
in the night air
and
and here it is in 1978, the night air, hello.
My journalist friend explains the challenge
of his new TV job: you work for a week
to get together one 5-minute feature,
and then
it’s gone—
vanished into gray-and-white memory,
a fading choreography of electric dots—
and you’re starting it all over,
every week that awesome energy demand:
to start over
In 1973 I played hundreds of games of catch
with a five-year-old boy named Brian.
Brian had trouble counting so we practiced
by counting the times we tossed the ball
without missing. When Brian missed
he was on the verge of despair for a moment
but I taught him to say
“Back to zero!” to give him a sense of
always another chance. I tried to make it sound
exciting to go back to zero, and eventually
our tone was exultant when we shouted in unison
after a bad toss or fumble
back to zero.
In 1977 I wrote a poem called “Repetition Rider”
and last winter I revised it three times
and I thought it was finished.
“It’s not like writing,” says my journalist friend,
“where your work is permanent—
no matter how obscure,
written work is durable … That’s why
it can grow—you can move beyond
what you’ve already said.”
Somewhere I read or heard something good
about what Shakespeare meant in Lear
when he wrote: “Ripeness is all.”
I hope it comes back to me.
I see myself riding
the San Francisco subway in 1974
scrawling something in my little red notebook
about “getting nowhere fast.”
I see Brian’s big brown eyes lit
with the adventure of starting over
and oblivious, for a moment,
of the extent to which he is
doomed by his disabilities.
And the waves
roll out, and the waves roll in.
This poem
could go on a long time,
but you’ve already understood it;
you got the point some time ago,
and you’ll get it again
Population1
Isn’t it nice that everyone has a grocery list
except the very poor you hear about occasionally
we all have a grocery list on the refrigerator door;
at any given time there are thirty million lists in America
that say BREAD. Isn’t it nice
not to be alone in this. Sometimes
you visit someone’s house for the first time
and you spot the list taped up on a kitchen cabinet
and you think Yes, we’re all in this together.
TOILET PAPER. No getting around it.
Nice to think of us all
unwrapping the new rolls at once,
forty thousand of us at any given moment.
Orgasm, of course,
being the most vivid example: imagine
an electrified map wired to every American bed:
those little lights popping
on both sides of the Great Divide,
popping to beat the band. But
we never beat the band: within an hour or a day
we’re horny again, or hungry, or burdened with waste.
But isn’t it nice to be not noticeably responsible,
acquitted eternally in the rituals of the tribe:
it’s only human! It’s only human and that’s not much.
So, aren’t you glad
we have such advanced farm machinery,
futuristic fertilizers, half a billion chickens
almost ready to die.
Here come the loaves of bread for us
thup, thup thup thup for all of us thup thup
except maybe the very poor
thup thup
and man all the cattle we can fatten up man,
there’s no stopping our steaks. And that’s why
we can make babies galore, baby:
let’s get on with it. Climb aboard.
Let’s be affirmative here, let’s be pro-life for God’s sake
how can life be wrong?
People need people and the happiest people are
surrounded with friendly flesh.
If you have ten kids they’ll be so sweet—
ten really sweet kids! Have twelve!
What if there were 48 pro baseball teams,
you could see a damn lot more games!
And in this fashion we get away
from tragedy. Because tragedy comes when someone
gets too special. Whereas,
if forty thousand kitchen counters
on any given Sunday night
have notes on them that say
I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE
I’M GONE, DON’T TRY TO FIND ME
you can feel how your note is
no big thing in America,
so, no horrible heartbreak,
it’s more like a TV episode,
you’ve seen this whole plot lots of times
and everybody gets by—
you feel better already—
everybody gets by
and it’s nice. It’s a people thing.
You’ve got to admit it’s nice.
Robert Hedin (b. 1949)
The Old Liberators1
Of all the people in the mornings at the mall,
it’s the old liberators I like best,
those veterans of the Bulge, Anzio, or Monte Cassino
I see lost in Automotive or back in Home Repair,
bored among the paints and power tools.
Or the really old ones, the ones who are going fast,
who keep dozing off in the little orchards
of shade under the distant skylights.
All around, from one bright rack to another,
their wives stride big as generals,
their handbags bulging like ripe fruit.
They are almost all gone now,
and with them they are taking the flak
and fire storms, the names of the old bombing runs.
Each day a little more of their memory goes out,
darkens the way a house darkens,
its rooms quietly filling with evening,
until nothing but the wind lifts the lace curtains,
the wind bearing through the empty rooms
the rich far off scent of gardens
where just now, this morning,
light is falling on the wild philodendrons.
Joyce Sutphen (b. 1949)
Living in the Body1
Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will
not keep on for days at a time, but will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.
Body is a thing you have to carry
from one day into the next. Always the
same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same
skin when you look in the mirror, and the
same creaky knee when you get up from the
floor and the same wrist under the watchband.
The changes you can make are small and
costly—better to leave it as it is.
Body is a thing that you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it, others who were once like you,
living inside their pile of bones and
flesh, smiling at you, loving you,
leaning in the doorway, talking to you
for hours and then one day they
are gone. No forwarding address.
Bruce Weigl (b. 1949)
What Saves Us1
We are wrapped around each other in
the back of my father’s car parked
in the empty lot of the high school
of our failures, the sweat on her neck
like oil. The next morning I would leave
for the war and I thought I had something
coming for that, I thought to myself
that I would not die never having
been inside her long body. I pulled
her skirt above her waist like an umbrella
inside out by the storm. I pulled
her cotton panties up as high as
she could stand. I was on fire. Heaven
was in sight. We were drowning on our
tongues and I tried to tear my pants off
when she stopped so suddenly
we were surrounded only by my shuddering
and by the school bells grinding in the
empty halls. She reached to find something,
a silver crucifix on a silver
chain, the tiny savior’s head hanging
and stakes through his hands and his feet.
She put it around my neck and held
me so long the black wings of my heart
were calmed. We are not always right
about what we think will save us.
I thought that dragging the angel down would
save me, but instead I carried the crucifix
in my pocket and rubbed it on my
face and lips nights the rockets roared in.
People die sometimes so near you
you feel them struggling to cross over,
the deep untangling, of one body from another.
Claribel Alegria (b. 1950)
Documentary1
Come, be my camera.
Let’s photograph the ant heap
the queen ant
extruding sacks of coffee,
my country.
It’s the harvest.
Focus on the sleeping family
cluttering the ditch.
Now, among trees:
rapid,
dark-skinned fingers
stained with honey.
Shift to a long shot:
the file of ant men
trudging down the ravine
with sacks of coffee.
A contrast:
girls in colored skirts
laugh and chatter,
filling their baskets
with berries.
Focus down.
A close-up of the pregnant mother
dozing in the hammock.
Hard focus on the flies
spattering her face.
Cut.
The terrace of polished mosaics
protected from the sun.
Maids in white aprons
nourish the ladies
who play canasta,
celebrate invasions
and feel sorry for Cuba.
Izalco sleeps
beneath the volcano’s eye.
A subterranean growl
makes the village tremble.
Trucks and oxcarts
laden with sacks
screech down the slopes.
Besides coffee
they plant angels
in my country.
A chorus of children
and women
with the small white coffin
move politely aside
as the harvest passes by.
The riverside women,
naked to the waist,
wash clothing.
The truck drivers
exchange jocular obscenities
for insults.
In Panchimalco,
waiting for the oxcart to pass by,
a peasant
with hands bound behind him
by the thumbs
and his escort of soldiers
blinks at the airplane:
a huge bee
bulging with coffee growers
and tourists.
The truck stops in the market place.
A panorama of iguanas,
chickens,
strips of meat,
wicker baskets,
piles of nances,
nisperos,
oranges,
zunzas,
zapotes,
cheeses,
bananas,
dogs, pupusas, jocotes,
acrid odors,
taffy candies,
urine puddles, tamarinds.
The virginal coffee
dances in the mill house.
They strip her,
rape her,
lay her out on the patio
to doze in the sun.
The dark storage sheds
glimmer.
The golden coffee
sparkles with malaria,
blood,
illiteracy,
tuberculosis,
misery.
A truck roars
out of the warehouse.
It bellows uphill
drowning out the lesson:
A for alcoholism,
B for battalions,
C for corruption,
D for dictatorship,
E for exploitation,
F for the feudal power
of fourteen families
and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
My etcetera country,
my wounded countr
y,
my child,
my tears,
my obsession.
Charles Bernstein (b. 1950)
Of Time and the Line1
George Burns likes to insist that he always
takes the straight lines; the cigar in his mouth
is a way of leaving space between the
lines for a laugh. He weaves lines together
by means of a picaresque narrative;
not so Hennie Youngman, whose lines are
strictly paratactic. My father pushed a
line of ladies’ dresses—not down the street
in a pushcart but upstairs in a fact’ry
office. My mother has been more concerned
with her hemline, Chairman Mao put forward
Maoist lines, but that’s been abandoned
(mostly) for the East-West line of malarkey
so popular in these parts. The prestige
of the iambic line has recently
suffered decline, since it’s no longer so
clear who “I” am, much less who you are. When
making a line, better be double sure
what you’re lining in & what you’re lining
out & which side of the line you’re on; the
world is made up so (Adam didn’t so much
name as delineate). Every poem’s got
a prosodic lining, some of which will
unzip for summer wear. The lines of an
imaginary are inscribed on the
social flesh by the knifepoint of history.
Nowadays, you can often spot a work
of poetry by whether it’s in lines
or no; if it’s in prose, there’s a good chance
it’s a poem. While there is no lesson in
the line more useful than that of the picket line,
the line that has caused the most adversity
is the bloodline. In Russia
everyone is worried about long lines;
back in the USA, it’s strictly soup-
lines. “Take a chisel to write,” but for an
actor a line’s got to be cued. Or, as
they say in math, it takes two lines to make
an angle but only one lime to make
a Margarita.
Jorie Graham (b. 1950)
Salmon1
I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered,
driving deeper and deeper
into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,
and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river,
and a blue river traveling