At the Gate
My mother lies down in her bed to wait,
in a white robe, hair spread on the pillow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate.
My mother said she couldn’t rise, even late.
She says take her to a nursing home tomorrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.
She speaks to her aunt, to mater and pater.
She wants to fly to Ceylon to a bungalow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate.
Try to move your fingers, feet, shift your gait.
Try to straighten your legs, temple unfurrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.
Try, try, fall, try again. This is not fate.
This is obstinacy and wisdom not sorrow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate.
I will wait by the gate, Mummy, and tell fate,
that angel, to give us ‘til tomorrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate
Of Ithe author of this villanelle, Terence Winch has noted, 'Indran Amirthanayagam is one of the most remarkable figures roaming the contemporary poetic landscape. Like some of the poets he most admires—Cavafy, Neruda, Hikmet (all mentioned in the poem below)—he is a citizen of the world. Born into the Catholic Tamil community (a minority within a minority) of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960, he left with his family for England when he was eight, seeking refuge from his native land’s ongoing strife as well as care for an autistic brother. He lived in the U.K. for six years, attending grammar and primary school there. When he was fourteen, the family moved again, this time to Honolulu, where his father, also a poet, had been offered a job. In Hawaii, Indran was one year ahead of Barry Obama, whom he knew slightly, at Punahou School. In 1978, he left Hawaii for Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After getting his B.A. there, he moved to New York to become, like Lorca, “a poet in New York.” He picked up a master's at the Columbia School of Journalism and remained in New York until 1993, when he got a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, having become a U.S. citizen in the late ‘80s. >>> For more, click here. The poet was also the "pick of the week" in September 2021.
Drink of the Gods
Good bourbon (Four Roses),
Lemon juice,
One maraschino cherry, smashed
Creme de Cassis (1 teaspoon).
Studied psychology,
Went into marketing,
Then advertising.
That was my life in the novel
I meant to write in the first
full flush of joy
in being a poet, a boy
barely twenty years old,
tall, thin as a man who runs
and never stops, enjoying it, like Sisyphus.
Social Security
No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it’s not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safe-deposit box, because it
won’t be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.
At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It’s not safe here.
It’s not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.
It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of winged dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.
From The Paris Review no. 156 (Fall 2000)
Richard Howard chose this poem for "The Paris Review." Richard was the magazine's poetry editor for ten or eleven terrific years (1992-2003).
Since Way Back When
Way back in the last century
in 1992 when I was a mere 50
I slipped in between the clean
sheets of my bed and sighed:
Thank you, thank you. As I
always do, so grateful to not
be sleeping in the back seat
of my ’56 Pontiac on Mount
Ranier in ’64, or in the airport
lounge overnight in Puerto
Rico in 1974, or in the cheap
and rundown open-all-night
movie house on Skid Row in
Spokane in 1964, or in the dry
fountain in Washington Square
in 1959 when the buses would
wake us teenage Beats as they
drove through the arch to turn
around and go back uptown
on a Fifth Avenue that wasn’t
one way yet, or on an upper
concrete floor of a half built
office tower in San Francisco
when I was AWOL in the sum-
mer of ’62, or in a tough trans
woman’s bed in her loft in the
Philly of 1973 or in a cot or
bunk bed in the military in ’62
or 3 or 4, or wrapped in winter
coats and clothes huddled
around a tiny electric heater
with my two kids I was raising
on my own 'cause their mother
was in a coma that lasted six
years before she died and the
new landlord of the building in
not yet Tribeca the illegal-for-
living-in loft I was renting was
in had quintupled the rent I
refused to pay so was trying
to kick us out and had cut off
our heat to convince me to
leave and me and my kids
ended up on two different
friends foldout couches for
over six months in the Man-
hattan of 1980, or me on
another friend’s floor for
several weeks in the Santa
Monica of ’83, while my kids
stayed with my second wife
until I could get a place for
them and me, or yet another
friend’s floor in Iowa City in
the Fall of ’66, or in a patron’s
Brooklyn Heights apartment in
the Spring of ’66, or on side-
walks and park benches and
lawns, or subway seats back
in the 1950s when the fare was
a dime, or redeye flights and
trains, or passed out drunk or
high in the beds of strangers
in the DC and NYC of the 1970s
or on the floor of a farmhouse
in upstate New York in 1960
owned by the first black farmers
I’d ever met, or in a gray ’49
Chevy owned by a cohort of
black military buddies one of
whom was sleeping in it too
after we failed to find lodgings
that would accept us in the
segregated city of Atlanta in
1962, or in a jail cell or lock-
down barracks or beaches
or so much more to be
grateful for not sleeping in or
on that made me sigh that
Thank you, thank you that
time in 1992 when I was only
50 and the young ambitious
wannabe Hollywood player
who slipped in beside me
said, No wonder you never
became the big success
people predicted you’d be,
it’s 'cause you’re too easily
satisfied, like with just having
a bed of your own to sleep in.
And play in I may have added.
-- Michael Lally
"Since Way Back When" is one of four new poems by Lally. Click here for the others, from Relegation Press. "Founded in 2012 by Dallas Hudgens, Relegation Books works to connect readers and writers on a smaller, more intimate scale, understanding that success isn't always measured by sales numbers."
It’s my fifth and last day of presenting some of my favorite poems by Joseph Harrison. I can’t represent all of his signature themes or inspirations, but one of them is flight: there’s a satire on the U.S. military called “Runaway Blimp;” another political poem about Afghan kites; a funny poem, “Air Larry,” in which a real-life Larry went up in a lawn chair attached to balloons but didn’t know how to get down. Another theme of Harrison’s is how difficult it is to talk about visual art. He’s rightly suspicious, as he shows in a villanelle called “The Ekphrastic Poet,” of words that aspire to explicate or even supplant wordless images. Nevertheless his response to an early fourteenth-century masterpiece beautifully survives the transition from picture to poem.
GIOTTO IN PADUA
The Arena Chapel
A blue so blue it seems the radiant day
Has entered the room without the glittering
Sunlight, so deep, so soft the flittering
Angels look real as birds as they loop away
Above these curves of rediscovered mass,
Delineated body taking form
Beneath these robes (ground: flatness was the norm),
Fresco by fresco, here. It came to pass:
Clear narrative with spare embellishment,
Space structured to give character its feeling
(Faux marble frieze, faux chamber, vaulted ceiling),
And dazzling emissaries, heaven-sent…
Van Eyck stood right here, Leonardo, too,
Titian and Rubens, Turner, Klee, and Proust
Took tracings for eventual mots justes
Washed in this essence, this original blue.
If you’ve been reading Harrison’s poems this week, you’re not surprised by the apt rhymes, like Proust / mots justes, or the expert use of meter. A departure you may notice from the method of some of his ballads and sonnets is that most of the lines here are enjambed, flowing from one line to another, and one stanza to the next, in a graceful sweeping motion. How appropriate this choice is for a “structured space” (a chapel, or a poem) in which the angels look “real as birds,” so much so that they “loop away.” I love the sonorous list of Harrison’s precursors in the chapel, the great painters (and one great ekphrastic writer, Proust) who also witnessed Giotto’s marvels. And I love the fact that for all its flying from one idea to another, the poem comes down to roost by beginning with “A blue so blue” and ending with “original blue.”
-- Mary Jo Salter
:"Giotto in Padua" is from Sometimes I Dream I Am Not Walt Whitman, Waywiser Press (2020).
Today’s poem by Joseph Harrison employs one of the oldest poetic forms, the ballad, to take on the tragic subject of an early death by a beloved contemporary.
OH
When Love herself came to me
Framed by the classroom door
Her presence shot straight through me,
My heart dropped to the floor.
Nothing phantasmal slew me.
What eyes and hair and skin
Could do they did to do me,|
Helpless and hopeless, in.
Oh, when her news came to me
—Ovarian, forty-four—
Her absence echoed through me,
Ringing my hollowed core.
Ballads usually rhyme ABXB (with X indicating an unrhymed end word) or ABAB, but those actual rhyme sounds tend to change from quatrain to quatrain. As we saw in Wednesday’s sonnet, where Harrison upped the ante by rhyming fourteen lines with a single rhyme sound, he won’t allow strong feeling to weaken his commitment to difficult form. Here, in a three-stanza poem, only the middle stanza has a unique pair of rhyme sounds; the first and third stanzas sonically agree. Looking again, we see there is only one occasion in the entire poem, the center rhyme of “skin” and “in,” which doesn’t rhyme with “to me” or “door.” What this insistent repetition creates, if I’m not being too fanciful, is a closed system which connotes the inevitability of death. Or here’s another possibility: every line that rhymes with “to me” or “door” indicates what we might call the normal, expected health of the poem; cancer enters with the one freak rhyme of skin/in.
Another sound is essential to the poem’s emotional impact, and the clue comes in the very title, “Oh.” A surprise, or a lament, or both, are coming. The sound recurs at the beginning of stanza three: “Oh, when her news came to me/--Ovarian, forty-four…” Now the capitalized “O” of “ovarian” gains equal weight, as the clue to the poet’s misery. The word “cancer” need not be uttered, and the O in the “Love” of the first line returns to our memory. The two O’s in “forty-four” emphasize not only this new sound but also the other “or” sounds—door, floor, core. At the core of the words “core” and “hollowed” is an O, a hollowed core that is also a sigh.
-- Mary Jo Salter
"Oh" is from Shakespeare's Horse, Waywiser Press (2015)
Today I want to comment on the ingenuity of just one poem in Joseph Harrison’s crown of sonnets, “As If.” This one is the third in a series of… twenty-two sonnets! All of them speak of an unrealized love affair.
from "As If" (#3)
Look in my heart, what’s left of it, and write
The honest declarations that just might
Move you to love me, even for one night,
If I could only get the phrasing right?
If I could only get the phrasing right,
I’d hold your hand in candelabra light
And step by step ascend the spiral flight
Of marble stairs—or are they chrysolite?
Oh, I can never get the phrasing right!
There is no text, much less a copyright,
And all’s been said much better than I might.
I’ll sleep alone, like every other night.
Belaureled lovers hold their dreamgirls tight
And all I do is write.
The English majors among us will recognize in Harrison’s first line an adaptation of the first sonnet of Philip Sidney’s series of love poems, “Astrophil and Stella.” Sidney’s speaker is rationalizing and bemoaning his writer’s block when an impatient interjection on line fourteen chides him: “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’” And indeed, Harrison’s sonnet that directly precedes this one ends with these lines: “And I thought you were someone I could choose, //Not just be chosen by. ‘Fool,’ said my muse.” A rule of sonnet crowns is that the last line of a sonnet must recur as the first line of the next. Harrison has been clever in a different way: He has split Sidney’s final line in half, giving the first part as the conclusion to one Harrison sonnet and the second part to the beginning of the one that follows. In fact, with a switch of pronouns—“thy” to “my”—the poet establishes that he’s hoping his beloved will do the writing for him. Then Harrison tortures himself with another rule: he must write in an “A” rhyme scheme for fourteen lines in a row. Admittedly, he repeats himself with the phrase “If I could only get the phrasing right,” but that’s clever too, since we repeat ourselves when we’re trying to get out of a writing jam. Besides, the phrase is never really repeated verbatim, since its first iteration ends with a question mark, the next with a comma, and the last with an explanation mark. How fitting that the only rhyme sound Harrison employs is what goes with “write.” And of course the sonnet has to stop short of a full pentameter ending: “And all I do is write” suggests the poet really can’t complete his poem. Meanwhile, Harrison has aced it.
-- Mary Jo Salter
"As If", part 3 is from Someone Else's Name, Waywiser Press (2003)
Today’s poem by Joseph Harrison, the second of five favorites I’ve chosen, has a title that invites us to consider one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.
HAMLET
It’s quiet here. A stoic rectitude
Props up the weather-pummeled citizens,
Craggy yet almost cheerful. Uniform
Gray granite cottages, precipitous
And sturdy, make the most of things. The wind
Does all the talking hereabouts, and who
Would think to think about the universe?
Their certainties define them, not their doubts.
“Weather-pummeled”: yes, we say to ourselves, we’re in the rotten state of Denmark. It’s cold out there, and “The wind// Does all the talking hereabouts.” Clever, we think: Harrison must be referring to the early appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and the sentries’ questioning whether he’s really there and really speaking. Like that ghost, the poet speaks in iambic pentameter. “Precipitous”: that suggests the precipices of a high castle, as well as the danger Hamlet poses to Claudius, and vice-versa. Yet… when the poet asks “who// Would think to think about the universe?” we stop to question the implication. Hamlet does think about the universe, as does his friend Horatio; even pompous Polonius can claim credit for philosophizing.
The poem’s final line makes us doubt everything we’ve been thinking: “Their certainties define them, not their doubts.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the quintessence of doubt. The poem cannot be primarily about him or his environment, we understand now, but about a village, a little town, a hamlet, where nothing is large scale! We see “gray granite cottages,” “almost cheerful,” for what they are, not castles, and the inhabitants of the hamlet as provincial, limited souls who are defined by all they’re (probably wrongly) certain about. People in the hamlet are the unheroic opposite of Hamlet. The shortness of this poem makes the title that it shares with Shakespeare’s longest play a wry comment in itself. Brevity is the soul of wit.
-- Mary Jo Salter
"Hamlet" is from Shakespeare's Horse by Joseph Harrison, Waywiser Press (2015).
Tomorrow's piece today: click here.
Liberties of the Imagination: 5 poems by Joseph Harrison, with commentary by Mary Jo Salter (pictured left).
Joseph Harrison (b.1957) has many admirers, but I’ve always felt that his works deserve a wider audience. Harrison, who lives in Baltimore, is the author of the forthcoming Collected Poems (2024). He is also the American editor of the Waywiser Press, founded in England by Philip Hoy. A signal goal of the press is to publish winners of the Anthony Hecht Prize, given for a distinguished first or second collection of poetry. Hecht, an important influence on Harrison, wrote an introduction for Harrison’s first book, Someone Else’s Name, published in 2003 J
As Hecht wrote, Harrison is “alive to the liberties and limits of form and imagination.” Liberties and limits—the alliterative phrase links the similar sounds of two words seemingly opposite in meaning. But as Harrison’s poems illustrate, the limits of form often make possible the liberties of imagination. Harrison is about as formal as contemporary poets come, a writer who delights not just in sonnets but longer perfections like sonnet crowns and sestinas. His meter is pitch-perfect, and rhyme, when he uses it, is almost always exact. That said, he uses such conventions to highlight unresolvable ambiguities, disparities, mysteries.
Someone Else’s Name was followed in 2008 by Identity Theft, whose similar title highlights one of Harrison’s themes: who am I? Am I the person others take me for? Love poems, and notably Harrison’s, often ask whether our true selves have been read properly by the loved one. It’s not only his love poems, though, that profit from biographical elements, and often the lives described or narrated are of other writers: Horace, Samuel Johnson, Dickens; most of all Shakespeare. In fact, Shakespeare’s Horse is the title of Harrison’s volume of 2015, and it was succeeded in 2020 by Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman, which includes deft homages to Whitman as well as Dickinson. The challenges of naming and of being named are as old as Adam, but Harrison continually does new things with the abstraction of identity and with how we name those conceptions.
To show at least some of what I mean, I’m going to write every day for five days a brief comment on one poem by Harrison among my favorites.
Let me start with the very first poem in Joseph Harrison’s first book. In retrospect, it’s highly characteristic of his poems to follow, diverse in manner as they are. It’s written in rhyme (couplets) and meter (iambic, though with lines of varying length). Consistent with Harrison’s lifelong devotion to Shakespeare, it mentions several of the Bard’s characters, and places us in woods that call up the Forest of Arden. I’ll say more after you read it.
ALL THAT’S LEFT
Will someone tell me, please,
Who carved these trees
With someone else’s name?
These woods won’t be the same,
For I thought, all along,
Mine was the only signature among
These pale textures of bark
Rising out of the dark
Underworld of the forest floor.
But who was here before?
Who chiseled each new line
On everything I thought was mine,
Initialing all these
Purely imaginary trees
Deep in the forest of my mind?
No Orlando, mad for Rosalind;
These cuttings, even when crude,
Speak only out of solitude,
The signs of a single heart
That gave its love to art
And wore that on its sleeve,
Having come to believe
It was the necessary sacrifice,
And paid the price.
If someone else could see
These careful lines, would he,
Underneath their curlicue and flair,
Hear the real pathos there,
The note of the ultimate cost
When feeling itself is lost
And all that’s left is the mark
Of absence against the dark?
I said at first that the poem is in couplets, but that’s a tricky assertion. The poem actually begins with a one-line stanza and ends with a one-line stanza. Furthermore, the first line, “Will someone tell me, please,” rhymes with the end word, “trees,” of the first line of the second stanza, at which point a rhyme for the next couplet—broken by the space between stanzas—is introduced and seems to be dropped. The rhymes are always immediately heard, yes, but the visual effect if you were only to read one rhyme-staggered stanza at a time would be that nothing rhymes. The stand-alone first and last lines of the poem also serve to illustrate the theme: the poet can only write if he can be alone with his imagination. Yet he learns as time passes that other poets (symbolized by those who write their “signature,” or their “lines,” on trees) have been here in the forest before him.
Harrison’s rhyme scheme enacts that delay, that indebtedness to the past. In a further twist, lovers write their joined names on trees, but the poet gives his primary love to art itself. I take the last lines “all that’s left is the mark// Of absence against the dark” as deliberately ambiguous. “Absence” may mean that most poets never make a mark that endures, like Shakespeare’s. Or it may mean that the poet’s mark on a tree—on a poem, that is—only highlights his physical absence after death. Or maybe Harrison intends both readings. The “real pathos” for me is that he sets down in especially skillful lines the doubt of all poets as to whether they’ve made their mark.
-- Mary Jo Salter
"All That's Left" is from Someone Else's Name, Waywiser Press (2003). For tomorrow post today (part two), click here. For part 3, click here.
December 23, 2023
Dino Dozes
In old age Dean Martin ate dinner every Sunday night at the counter
of the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard.
While Dino dozes Jerry pulls new faces.
Skinny’s backstage and mentions that the place is
crawling with scouts. They need their act to click,
so Jerry hones the fine points of his schtick.
Luck is that part of art practice replaces.
But luck is Dino’s long suit. It embraces
his ease and swagger, looms like an oasis
before the average schmoes — they feel so slick
while Dino dozes.
Next thing you know, he’s in the world’s good graces.
And then he’s not. These days Dino retraces
his groggy steps. One, two — ain’t that a kick?
All gone. Not that he cared for it to stick.
What ghosts may rise the Hamlet’s Scotch erases
while Dino dozes.
-- Boris Dralyuk. (Photo of Dean and Jerry, circa 1950).
God holds you over the pit of hell,
as one holds a loathsome insect over the fire;
the last of the just rings the bell;
"I tell lies," said the liar,
a convict released because the question lacked an answer.
He did calisthenics after reveille. She said she had cancer,
but the beast was more in love with his desire
for her than with her beauty, and the camera was just a way to transfer
the self from the self you see when you look in the mirror.
God grew ashamed of his creation. That's what the gravestone
told the crone. Nevertheless she wants you to stay;
she wants you to pray; and if you do, if you pray,
if the dove returns after the storm has blown,
the cage door will stay open, and you'll never walk alone,
you'll never walk alone.
At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game:
Hiding the Skeleton, shall be its name.
Such play as this the devils might appal!
But here's the greater wonder; in that we,
Enamoured of an acting nought can tire,
Each other, like true hypocrites, admire;
Warm-lighted looks, Love's ephemerioe,
Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine.
We waken envy of our happy lot.
Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage-knot.
Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.
-- George Meredith
(painting: "The Death of Chatterton" by Henry Wallis, for which Meredith posed. It hangs in London's Tate Gallery.)
"Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid" [by Catherine Barnett]
Not wanting to be alone
in the messy cosmology
over which I at this late hour
have too much dominion,
I wander the all-night uptown Rite Aid
where the handsome new pharmacist,
come midnight, shows me to the door
and prescribes the moon,
which has often helped before.
Catherine Barnett is the author of three poetry collections, Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award in Poetry), The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets) and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. Her fourth collection, Solutions to the Problem of Bodies in Space, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2024. A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among many other places. She teaches in the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor.
from The Kenyon Review; photo credit: Farah Al Qasimi and Res
Neck
That isn’t done Grabbing your girlfriend’s neck
isn’t done I mean it is done by god
often enough but not when I’m the girl
or the friend I love you with all my soul
and all my I don’t know what else to say
my friendliness and my girlishness
but by god my friend do not grab my neck
Neck with me nestle your neck into mine
I’ve been watching the necks of the geese
my geese our geese flying over our heads
and I’ve said goose wander in my chamber
You goose don’t be a gander and don’t be
a geek Be a Greek be a pagan be
a lover of life of me of my neck
Grab my neck my shoulder or my breast
but sweetly if you must my sweet goose
or I’ll call the police Not that the Greeks
were any better at love than we are
always stabbing at their men and their gods
but my god better than the Romans
and their strikes at the neck their split necks
All they did was say do not do do not
do that and thwack off with their head
So if you ask me what Greek is I say
give me a Greek over a Roman
Oh romance romance it’s Greek to me
it was Greek to the Romans and to me
to my roaming heart and my Grecian
gods to my friends and my gods and you
you my silly goose and my strangler
– Sarah Arvio
published in The New Yorker and collected in Cry Back My Sea (Knopf, 2021).
Wan Chu, my adoring husband,
has returned from another trip
selling trinkets in the provinces.
He pulls off his lavender shirt
as I lay naked in our bed,
waiting for him. He tells me
I am the only woman he’ll ever love.
He may wander from one side of China
to the other, but his heart
will always stay with me.
His face glows in the lamplight
with the sincerity of a boy
when I lower the satin sheet
to let him see my breasts.
Outside, it begins to rain
on the cherry trees
he planted with our son,
and when he enters me with a sigh,
the storm begins in earnest,
shaking our little house.
Afterward, I stroke his back
until he falls asleep.
I’d love to stay awake all night
listening to the rain,
but I should sleep, too.
Tomorrow Wan Chu will be
a hundred miles away
and I will be awake all night
in the arms of Wang Chen,
the tailor from Ming Pao,
the tiny village downriver.
-- Richard Jones
from The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present
from the archive; posted previously on March 11, 2011
When Barbie Turns Sixty
Maybe she’ll join Jews for Jesus.
Or try Buddhism. She’ll downsize,
sell her Dreamhouse and pink Corvette,
toss out the boxed, closet-cluttering
cremains of her beloved pets
to make room for an elliptical.
She’ll diet. But first she must learn
how to open her mouth. She’s hoping
to finally get a vagina, even if it’s only
painted on, like her forty-first birthday
surprise when she woke up with a belly
button that wasn’t there the night before.
As the big Six-O approaches,
she’ll have the time to read a book
that is not one of her accessories.
She doesn’t want you to think she’s
just a chunk of plastic with no brain.
She’s not quite old enough to retire.
It seems like only yesterday she burned
her bra. Luckily, she saved her hippie
maxi-dress and taupe boho fringe bag
to sell someday on eBay. The horror!
The horror! if her clothes don’t fit.
With zaftig Curvy Barbie on the market,
and her Fashionista sisters, Tall and Petite,
garbed in eleven different shades of skin,
who will want the original blue-eyed
bombshell with the bubble hairdo,
pointy boobs, and stiletto-ready feet,
a freak with impossible proportions?
She’s heard the rumors about Barbies
being mutilated and shorn, decapitated,
thrown into blenders and microwaves;
and models that were recalled, epic fails
like Oreo-Fun Barbie and Teen Talk Barbie
who said she couldn’t handle math.
You can’t call a senior citizen a bimbo.
Looking ahead to her seventh decade,
a facelift might rekindle her on-again
off-again romantic relationship with
Ken or, if he’s unavailable, Blaine,
or that new dude with the man-bun.
After her diamond anniversary gala,
she’ll work on recovering the demure
sideways glance of her youth. She’s a survivor.
She’d like you to call her Barbara.
-- Jane Shore. First published in Salmagundi
Who better to usher in Halloween than Edgar Allan Poe, the master of horror, suspense, and the macabre. Does your lifelong fear of being buried alive originate with Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”? Do you ever lie awake imagining a heart is beating from beneath the floorboards? You have Poe to thank for your nightmares. He brilliantly locates our collective fears and animates them in the short stories and poems written over the course of his brief and mysterious life. His ballad “Annabel Lee” hovers over Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” whose protagonist’s first love is “Annabel Leigh.” (“When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel [Leigh] was no nymphet to me”). Then there’s “The Conqueror Worm,” an appropriately creepy poem that comes to us from beyond the grave. Poe describes a theater performance; the actors are “mimes,” the hero is a large worm that eats the actors. The curtain falls. Boo!
The Conqueror Worm
When pianos are not played,
they become very sad,
they collect silent notes.
Unplayed music floats –
invisible dust of overtones.
The dead are waiting expectantly:
so many keys – 88 – all untouched.
The day of silent music
sheds the signature of uncaptured Time.
(“What are you practicing now?”
my mother asks me quietly.
Her eyebrows raised. I shrug.)
from the archive; first posted 10/15/21
God has Pity on Kindergarten Children
God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first–aid station
covered with blood.
But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.
Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of charity
that Mother handed down to us
so that their happiness may protect us
now and on other days.
-- Yehuda Amichai
This is a grand and famous poem. Does anyone know whose translation I have reproduced here? This is not a quiz. I have found several versions, but in none of them are the translators credited.
-- DL
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
