stay my friend let’s drink coffee! coffee!
mocha
latte!
espresso is so decisive
how it, with such tart precision,
pricks the senses up!
stay with me
tempt dreary hands with
a swirl of intent in a dreamy cloud of lengthening foam
if you look close
enough
i just know you’ll see your future
bright! bright!
you and i
share a secret
much like the duo
playing guitar in the barber shop
long after
everyone else has gone.
read an article today how the great writers lived in miserable raining dark places which forced them to look inward. good thing it rains tonight. maybe some art, somewhere, is safe. as for me, i just don’t know what to write anymore. i walked home in the rain on a Friday night clutching groceries and toilet paper, peering into windows where couples and families were eating together, where two were playing guitar to a freshly brushed floor, and i walked on. my sister – she questioned me – and i said, i may not know much but i do know alone. i do know it. and we, the blank page and i, settle in for a good chat as the moon snakes through the blinds …
(taken from the red journal. 1.11.13)
LOVED this poem. Enjoy my friends! And your mission today: pass on the joy of poetry to one other person. Let’s start a movement!
American Life in Poetry: Column 418
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Robert Morgan, who lives in Ithaca, New York, has long been one of my favorite American poets. He’s also a fine novelist and, recently, the biographer of Daniel Boone. His poems are often about customs and folklore, and this one is a good example.
Living Tree
and from this great height
stars shine above
and below.
those on a bridge (i know this logically, there must be a bridge)
are blurs of red and white in
such universal darkness.
i fly over you.
you – a pin prick of light,
a galaxy in and of yourself
many million miles away.
you call me weed,
growing between the bricks
below your suede, square feet
i am actually compulsive pushing,
insistent shoving
pest,
but long after you’re gone
(taking all your
small-minded robots with you)
i’ll remain. and i’ll reclaim
what was mine all along.
Age 92
92 and you
Bruise so fast, when catching
Your wife who
Dizzy and falling, desperately needed you.
And you were there.
You were there
During world wars,
During depression,
During the birth of two boys and one daughter,
Then seven grandchildren, now six, the
Loss imprinted
On the lines of your face.
This week is 92,
But you say, 38 ½ years have gone by
In a joke that is at least
Twice my age.
paper thin wings grow in fantastic colors
behind my shoulder blades.
eye spots deepen on the tops of each
and wink when i fly.
settling quietly on a leaf in a forest in old Russia
there is a sudden net upon me,
Nabokov! oh how he
drains my life, pins down my wings …
and with quiet precision,
i am immortal.
i am
a predator
beside a frozen lake
masquerading as an ocean
[we are all so phony]
slinking up to frozen fingers of light
lips licked in luscious anticipation
one ship one mile out is
my only witness
and it is too frozen in place
to stop me, or care.
Been saving this one for awhile~ hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
American Life in Poetry: Column 403
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Among the most ancient uses for language are descriptions of places, when a person has experienced something he or she wants to tell somebody else about. Some of these get condensed and transformed into poetry, and here’s a good example, by Susan Kolodny, a poet from the Bay Area of California.
Koi Pond, Oakland Museum
Our shadows bring them from the shadows:
a yolk-yellow one with a navy pattern
like a Japanese woodblock print of fish scales.
A fat 18-karat one splashed with gaudy purple
and a patch of gray. One with a gold head,
a body skim-milk-white, trailing ventral fins
like half-folded fans of lace.
A poppy-red, faintly disheveled one,
and one, compact, all indigo in faint green water.
They wear comical whiskers and gather beneath us
as we lean on the cement railing
in indecisive late-December light,
and because we do not feed them, they pass,
then they loop and circle back. Loop and circle. Loop.
“Look,” you say, “beneath them.” Beneath them,
like a subplot or a motive, is a school
of uniformly dark ones, smaller, unadorned,
perhaps another species, living in the shadow
of the gold, purple, yellow, indigo, and white,
seeking the mired roots and dusky grasses,
unliveried, the quieter beneath the quiet.
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 Susan Kolodny from her first book of poems, After the Firestorm, Mayapple Press, 2011. Poem first appeared in the New England Review, Vol. 18, no. 1, 1997. Reprinted by permission of Susan Kolodny 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.
a sudden chill –
i own nothing.
not even this love
or sweat
or all the piles of regret
i accumulate
or the quiet dust
i lay with
or the way we framed
our bedroom.
i take nothing with me
save this
one last thought –
your shadow leaving
is a distortion
of its former self.
Poetry by JC Snyder 