ALONE ON CHRISTMAS EVE IN JAPAN Not wanting to lose it all for poetry. Wanting to live the living. All this year looking on the graveyard below my apartment. Holding myself tenderly in this marred body. Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness wise people speak of, or the modulation that is the […]
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American Poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon What is the best we leave behind? Certainly love and form and ourselves. Surely those. But it is the mornings that are hard to relinquish, and music and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty piazzas in small towns flooded with sun. What we are busy […]
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Each Thing Measured by the Same Sun Nothing to tell. Nothing to desire. A silence that is not unhappy. Who will guess I am not backing away? I am pleased every morning because the stones are cold, then warm in the sun. Sometimes wet. One, two, three days in a row. Easy to say yes […]
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Poetry Reading I’m curled into a ball like a dog that is cold. Who will tell me why I was born, why this monstrosity called life. The telephone rings. I have to give a poetry reading. I enter. A hundred people, a hundred pairs of eyes. They look, they wait. I know for what. I […]
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November 21, 2017 – 10:16 pm
COURAGE And now you know that it won’t turn out as it should that what you did was not enough, that ignorance, old evil, is enforced and willed, and loved, that it is used to manufacture madness, that it is the aphrodisiac of power the crutch of lassitude, you an ordinary heart, just functional, […]
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November 21, 2017 – 6:34 pm
The Abnormal Is Not Courage The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers. A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace. And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question the bravery. Say it’s not courage. Call it passion. Would say courage isn’t that. […]
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November 21, 2017 – 3:53 pm
World of Made and Unmade from Section III * * * How will you spend your courage, her life asks my life No courage spent of bloodshot/gunshot/taproot/eye. How will you spend your courage, how will you spend your life. Bloodshot, gunshot, taproot, eye— and the mind on its slow push through the world— * * […]
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September 2, 2017 – 10:49 pm
The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon What is the best we leave behind? Certainly love and form and ourselves. Surely those. But it is the mornings that are hard to relinquish, and music and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty piazzas in small towns flooded with sun. What we are busy with doesn’t make us groan […]
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TODAY I WAS HAPPY, SO I MADE THIS POEM As the plump squirrel scampers Across the roof of the corncrib, The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness, And I see that it is impossible to die. Each moment of time is a mountain. An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven, Crying […]
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January 16, 2016 – 8:18 pm
Oh, I Said My subject is the soul Difficult to talk about, Since it is invisible, Silent and often absent. Even when it shows itself In the eyes of a child Or a dog without a home, I’m at a loss for words. Charles Simic (1938 – ) from THE LUNATIC, HarperCollins Publishers, 2015 Earlier […]
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