Category Archives: poem

"Another Waiting" another look at it

Circa 2010 – appropriate for today
 
Another Waiting
 
Tuesday, I’ve written of you before,

you’re the day that seems to always attract the rain.

Now, my thoughts race around in a fog— the move, the secret.
It’s always about cycles,
grow and change and move.
Die and live and die.

Tonight I can’t see your face in the dark. Reaching out,
I can’t find the curve of your jaw. I can’t feel
the jeans on your legs. I can’t see your wide eyes shining
in the light sneaking in through the cracked door.
But you are in my head nevertheless.

Tuesday, you seem to breathe more slowly today.
Your head is back; your mouth is gaped open.
The air is thick and hard to swallow. Today, you may
just close your eyes and give up.

Live and die and live. It is all a cycle. Tuesday may be gone, but
there is another waiting.

POST 600!!!!! Plus a poem by Kay Ryan

Wow!!! I can hardly believe it but we’ve reached post 600! Let’s throw a party 🙂
Need another reason to throw a party? I will have two poems in print (some of us still care about print) in the new EveryDayPoets Anthology 2. More on that book to come…

Now, let’s get back to poetry. Today’s poem is from Kay Ryan as featured on American Life in Poetry! Enjoy!

American Life in Poetry: Column 391
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Kay Ryan was our nation’s Poet Laureate at The Library of Congress for the 2008-2010 terms.
Her poetry is celebrated for its compression; she can get a great deal into a few words. Here’s an
example of a poem swift and accurate as a dart.

Pinhole

We say
pinhole.
A pin hole
of light. We
can’t imagine
how bright
more of it
could be,
the way
this much
defeats night.
It almost
isn’t fair,
whoever
poked this,
with such
a small act
to vanquish
blackness.

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 ©2011 by Kay Ryan, whose most recent book of poems is Odd Blocks, Selected and New Poems, Carcanet Press, 2011. Poem reprinted from Poetry, October 2011, by permission of Kay Ryan and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2012 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.

"Born at the Wrong Time"

wanted to take a look at one i posted back in the first days of this here blog 🙂 enjoy and have a great weekend. #readpoetry!

***
One summer, I saw a Texas-style Paul McCartney
in a dark mahogany leather coat
slurring to Bob Dylan’s “rainy day woman”
outside the full moon at a wrangler bonfire in
Colorado.

Last night, I saw a gray haired woman, four feet tall,
in full length tattered gown
swirling in her mess of beads
and her hands in the air like she was
summoning back
the 60’s.

I saw myself tripping on the old Baltimore cobblestones.
I saw myself drunk with Janis and having a grand old time.

Not Carl Sandburg’s Men

Our men crack Bohs,
trade tales slurring
to a pause; days spent
crawling over coal and salt hills
like Sisyphus.

If these had been
Carl Sandburg’s men,
their backs would be bronzed and
their spines made
elegant like Chicago corn.

But this is Baltimore.
Our bones are the Bay’s
murmurs; those
armed with intentions
are weak by pavement,

Oh Carl,
such danger here –
that hopelessness, even
doors stay off their hinges
too sore to do their work.

the me in gasoline

the me in gasoline on water is a rainbow
of potential sliding around, skimming the tops, spreading then
unraveling with every
exhale of the Bay
shape shifting like a scream
my perplexed smirk distorted then tortured
and mad in the only possible way

the slick bird above me
purple to orange to blue to barely discernible shine –   
oh shine on, you gull, shine on
free from such thin and colorful prisons as this.

Quietly Disappearing (To Mia)

Friend, I asked the great poets but for all their flowery words
They couldn’t capture your breathless manner of speaking.
I searched the sea and the ocean but they just kept repeating,
(Repeating) and I beseeched the birds but they just kept circling and
I was dizzy; a statue? too stiff, unfeeling.
Flowers? too trite with grieving – I went back pleading with the poets
“Write me a new constellation in the sky and call it Mia!” but they
Gave me cold cracked bells tolling, so unappealing–
More fitting – I on a marble stoop sitting, my beer streaming out,

Watching bubbles slowing, exhales burying a sidewalk steaming,
All… all… quietly disappearing.

untitled (quilts always warm)

you don’t have to remind me of that
orange and brown
soft knit afghan quilt that
matched nothing
in our house
but in theirs —

the olive green
and the hanging plates
and that day
laying on the hardwood waiting

no games, no pick up sticks
only a new jewelry box
and my reliable Alley cat
in a house creaking with grief

dismissed
gathering stones
in the drain pipe
that felt like a river bank
little sister in hand
knowing more than they knew –
quilts always warm.

(poem from Jan 2011)

Ursula (in Fells Point)

In Fells,
her hair in short braids and
shaved sides
popular on boys in the 80s,
she stands
in the humidity that wraps
around her baggy shorts,
rolled socks, under a street lamp
that drenches her tie dye Dead shirt—

She is singing
“will it go round in circles”
guitars follow “will it fly high like
a bird up in the sky”
and the drums inside
remind me of the late hour.

She looks pleased on the cobblestones.
Her Robert Johnson voice
sings this valedictory song
to no one in particular.

(poem from 2010 republished today!)