Sending poetry to the world
a face
in a mirror
is a naked stranger
washing hair
slowly, slowly,
a mist creeps higher over
a glass door
it swallows up naked legs,
belly,
soapy strands,
clouds over blue eyes
like an evening storm gathering all summer day
clouds over
skin almost remembering how to be skin
[was it me? were we ever even there?]
stranger gone,
water washes soap
contentedly
into a drain
look how we became the stars themselves!
each hand waving to a sound
rocketing through our bones
rain fell
people sang
united
stadium a solar system
vocal chords straining and the only
fissure that of time:
youth-summer-black-white all orbiting an encore.
[from the Jay Z, Justin Timberlake concert last night in Baltimore – the song Forever Young, in tribute to Trayvon Martin, the entire stadium lit up with phones, the entire stadium singing along]
this is less a poem and more a few thoughts i have today. remembering the life of a fellow volleyball player. someone i knew only through association and friends yet i am deeply saddened over the loss of her to the world. when someone dies, you feel it too.
when someone dies, you feel it too.
your bones quake.
you remember with razor instinct
this skin is not
forever, this sky is such
ephemeral gift – how
wildly your cells
take for granted
“breathe in
breathe out”
each and every second.
you never noticed it before
or how your loved
ones seem so far away.
and then someone else just stops
and your breath catches,
you’re asleep, now Wake Up.
By the bay,
on cement cracked by weeds,
people sit like gulls fishing in dying daylight.
Fish bite, get taken, tossed, have one last
gulp and die.
Watch fish startled by air. Watch weeds bend beneath thin legs.
Watch gull-like people throw another line,
drown another beer,
unfazed.
Exceptional, must-read poem from Bruce Snider, as featured on American Life in Poetry. “the rusty nail he hammered catches me, leaves its stain…” brilliant.
American Life in Poetry: Column 435
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Perhaps there’s a kind of afterlife that is made up of our memories of a departed person, especially as these cling to that person’s belongings. Bruce Snider, who lives and teaches in California, suggests that here.
Afterlife
I wake to leafless vines and muddy fields,
patches of standing water. His pocketknife
waits in my dresser drawer, still able to gut fish.
I pick up his green shirt, put it on for the fourth day
in a row. Outside, the rusty nail he hammered
catches me, leaves its stain on everything.
The temperature drops, the whole shore
filling with him: his dented chew can, waders,
the cattails kinked, bowing their distress.
At the pier, I use his old pliers to ready the line:
fatheads, darters, a blood worm jig. Today, the lake’s
one truth is hardness. When the trout bite,
I pull the serviceable things glistening into air.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2012 by Bruce Snider from his most recent book of poems, Paradise, Indiana, Pleiades Press, 2012. Poem reprinted by permission of Bruce Snider and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
American Life in Poetry ©2006 The Poetry Foundation
Contact: alp@poetryfoundation.org
This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
like a beautiful snowflake or
how each grain of sand is ground down from ancient mountains into a tiny
fraction of itself, altogether unique,
my baby
blinks tiny eyelashes open and
for the first time breathes air instead of stars,
he cries.
i have dreamed of him. that
figure, those eyes, a simple road passed.
and i’ve dreamed of terrible storms,
terrible choices and love love love, lost.
never had. never known.
one love i have for certain, this song, Mona Lisas
and Mad Hatters. i now dream of nothing here at 30,000 ft.
heading back to Vegas.
outside this window, whitewash, a cosmic nothingness, a limbo…
i remember returning that day
to my dying grandmother, and the first flight, the first time
i looked at the world from this height. and the first time i jumped into it.
above the white
a steady blue
above it all, Elton John sings
“and I thank the Lord for the people I have found
I thank the Lord for the people I have found”
(from the red journal, 2013)
I saw a man with a dog as the
sky opened up and fell in love.
I ran to stay dry.
Rain didn’t last.
Such chance encounter dried
quickly on summer hot bricks.
Happy 4th of July everyone!! Can’t think of a more appropriate topic than horseshoes 🙂 Enjoy this pick from Ted Kooser.
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American Life in Poetry: Column 432
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
One of the most distinctive sounds in small-town America is the chiming of horseshoe pitching. A friend always carries a pair in the trunk of his car. He’ll stop at a park in some little town and start pitching, and soon, he says, others will hear that ringing and suddenly appear as if out of thin air. In this poem, X.J. Kennedy captures the fellowship of horseshoe pitchers.
Old Men Pitching Horseshoes
Back in a yard where ringers groove a ditch,
These four in shirtsleeves congregate to pitch
Dirt-burnished iron. With appraising eye,
One sizes up a peg, hoists and lets fly—
A clang resounds as though a smith had struck
Fire from a forge. His first blow, out of luck,
Rattles in circles. Hitching up his face,
He swings, and weight once more inhabits space,
Tumbles as gently as a new-laid egg.
Extended iron arms surround their peg
Like one come home to greet a long-lost brother.
Shouts from one outpost. Mutters from the other.
Now changing sides, each withered pitcher moves
As his considered dignity behooves
Down the worn path of earth where August flies
And sheaves of air in warm distortions rise,
To stand ground, fling, kick dust with all the force
Of shoes still hammered to a living horse.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2007 by X.J. Kennedy. Poem reprinted from In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, by permission of X.J. Kennedy and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
“A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief- the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say ‘patter’ intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.”
~ Vladimir Nabokov “Speak, Memory”
“Everyman’s Library” | Alfred A. Knopf | New York 1999
In this author’s opinion, one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever written to describe that first amazing poetic moment.
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