Sending poetry to the world
sun, banjo,
a plaid shirt i particularly like
all make such exaggerated claims
while
gossiping on
hips like
a tart apple moonshine, this dance
stretches us thin into
sound waves, stretches us loud
into nights like a
plaid shirt
tossed to a river bank
hungry for a wild breeze with
a hint of cologne.
late hour, woozy with memories
that one adam says are ghosts.
how right he is, adams are vapor.
as are bens and jons
and young shadowy men
drinking too much,
driving too fast.
one adam wraps around a tree before i can tell him
anything, how i have a photo of him with birthday cake
poised waiting on his bottom lip for a sugary kiss
my god, we could have been anything by now
if we weren’t spread out across the sky, still waiting
on kisses from little girls like
dew-tipped grass in a morning chilly, ripe.
Another gem from Ted Kooser to pick up your Tuesday!!! Please let me know what you think in the comments. Also, for more poetry yumminess, follow @PoetryFound
American Life in Poetry: Column 442
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Tracy K. Smith won the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems, Life on Mars, from which I’ve
selected this week’s poem, which presents a payday in the way many of us at some time have
experienced it. The poet lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Good Life
When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.
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 Tracy K. Smith from her most recent book of poems, Life on Mars, Graywolf Press, 2011. Poem reprinted by permission of Tracy K. Smith 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.
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)
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