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The Giant Book of Poetry

Page 48

by William H. Roetzheim, Editor


  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

 

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